Verses 1-8
The Method of Divine Procedure
Where was the prophet when the word of the Lord came unto him? He was in a good hearing place. He was "shut up in the court of the prison." He was shut up unjustly, and therefore it was no prison to him, but a sanctuary, with God's altar visibly in it, and God himself irradiating the altar with a light above the brightness of the sun. How hardly shall they that have riches hear the gospel! Their ears are already filled; their attention is already occupied; their hearts are fat to grossness. What keen ears poverty has! What eyes the blind man has! inner eyes, eyes of expectation. How the man with those inner eyes looks for the Healer, the Son of David! His poor blind bodily eyes are rolling without seeing the sun, or any of the sun's creations of beauty, but his inward eyes are keeping steadfast watch, for he says within himself, At any moment the Opener of the eyes of the blind may draw nigh. We should have had no world worth living in but for the prison, the darkness, the trouble, the blindness, the sorrow, which have constituted such precious elements in our lot. There would have been no poetry written if there had been no sorrow. The poetry of what we call joy is flippant, frivolous, a jingle of words, without soul, without agony, without that shadow of melancholy which makes even joy itself a higher gladness. No man who comes into God's house with a sense of prosperity and comfort and self-sufficiency can hear any gospel. It was not made for him; he is a blind man going to a place that is constituted into a sanctuary of colour and beauty. The wonder is why he went to the place; some motive must have operated within him that was unworthy of the occasion. God never spread a feast for the rich; whenever a rich man came near him he frowned at him; he said he could not enter with his bags of gold in his hands, he must lay them down and then come in. Jeremiah heard more in the prison than he ever heard in the palace. God knows where his children are.
There are a thousand prisons in life. We must riot narrow words into their lowest meanings, but enlarge them into their broadest significance. He is in prison who is in trouble, who is in fear, who is in conscious penitence without having received the complete assurance of pardon; he is in prison who has sold his liberty, is lying under condemnation, secret or open; and he is in prison who has lost his first love, his early enthusiasm that was loaded with dew like a flower in the morning. Whatever our prison is, God knows it, can find us, can send a word of his own directly to us, and can make us forget outward circumstances in inward content and peace and joy. Jeremiah was in prison a second time. Fools never learn wisdom; for the people who had shut up Jeremiah before had found that you cannot really imprison a good man. His influence increases by the opposition which is hurled against him; goodness turns hostility into nutrition. Who can put a prophet of the Lord into such a prison as Jeremiah was thought to be occupying? You can put his body there, but his soul is swinging around the horizon, and his heart is already among the singing angels, and the all-blessing, all-condescending God. Why live in the body? Why subject ourselves to any possibility of slavery? Why lay such clutching hands upon anything that it would be a sorrow to part with it? A great man, having lost all that he had in the world, said: "The money is gone, but the treasure abides." Jeremiah might say: "The liberty of the body is gone for a moment, but I can pierce my way through all doors and bars and walls, though they be as rocks, and I can be enjoying communion with God on the top of the mountains." You cannot imprison the soul. But a man may lose the liberty of his spirit; he may sell himself to the enemy; when he gives up the keys of his soul he is already in perdition. Let no man say that he cannot hear God's word because he is in prison, in darkness, in trouble, because he is in great fear. The word of the Lord to you is, Fear God, and have no other fear; look up, and hope steadfastly in God. The gaoler thinks he has laid you under his lock and key: poor fool! his lock and key are straw, and smoke, and spider's web. If that soul be with God, no matter where the body is.
Who is it that permits his servants to go to prison? By what name does he call himself? What is the descriptive clause in this great trust-deed of the Church?
"Thus saith the Lord the Maker thereof, the Lord that formed it, to establish it; The Lord is his name" ( Jer 33:2 ).
How often do we say, Why does God permit this and that to occur, when it is so painful, humiliating, and distressful altogether? We had better not ask the question, for we could not understand the answer. Life is not a measurable quantity. No man can tell when life began; none can calculate when life will end; and all through it is a mystery of pulsation, of joy and agony, of trouble that falls towards despair, and gladness that aspires towards the celestial rest. It is all for our good; we do not know it, and we cannot see it, and we are not yet prepared to believe it; all history, however, is on one side, and that is on the side of the vindication of divine providence. Man after man rises from the boiling flood, saying: It was good for me that I was afflicted; I never understood human life until I was plunged into this sorrow; I lived a poor, little, narrow, selfish life, because I lived within the area of my own pharisaic respectability, and never knew what it was to be almost scorched to death at the very mouth of the pit of hell. Commend me to a man who has made mistakes, fallen seven times a day, and hurt himself in every muscle and in every pulsation, and who, out of it all, has come a chastened and sanctified man: how soft his speech, how kind his look, how like a touch of almightiness the out-putting of his hand! We need such men in society. We can do without the Pharisee: we cannot do without the publican's prayer.
Who distresses us? God. Who comes in the night-time and takes away from us everything we have in the house? God. Who turns our purposes upside down, and blows them away like smoke in a high wind? God. It is the Lord; let him do what seemeth good in his sight. But "take not thy Holy Spirit from us." That is the only withdrawment that can make a man for ever poor. If we imagine that this world is a complete little place in itself, having four corners of its own, and that within those four corners the game or trick of life begins, continues, and ends, then it will be impossible for us to be other than downcast, moping, melancholy; but if we believe that this little earth is part of a great household of worlds, that there are filaments connecting all the spaces with one centre, ligaments of light and most sensitive, though invisible life, binding into one unity the whole scheme and purpose of God, then we shall have a sky over our earth, a sky with a sovereign sun all day, and stars struggling to tell us their secret music by night. What is the kind of world we live in? Is it a world of God's forming or a world of our own imagining? Are the stars held by a hand equal to the occasion, or may they at any moment fall down and crush the under worlds? Let us live in a universe that is centralised by the throne of the living God, and then whatever happens will be to our profit, not immediately and visibly always, but in the end invariably and constantly. Let all history start up from its grave and declare this with thunder voice, if it fall back again into its sleep. Such a testimony will awaken the world and cheer the Church. Let it be known then, now and evermore, that it is the Lord that allows his prophets to go to prison, that sits and looks at gaolers locking them up, and that comes down at the right moment to liberate them and give their word boundless enlargement.
On what conditions does the Lord grant fuller revelations of himself? The answer is in the third verse:
"Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not." ( Jer 33:3 )
He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. The condition is, "Call unto me": recognise my existence, rely upon me, lift up thy voice in prayer, pray without ceasing; do not pray to thyself, for thou art an empty fountain, but pray to me, for it is in answer to prayer that I enlarge and brighten my revelations to mankind. What is this calling unto God? Is it a verbal exercise? Is it a mere act of exclamation? Nothing can be further from the meaning. It is a call that issues from the heart; it is the call of need, it is the cry of pain, it is the agony of desire, it is enclosure with God in profound and loving communion. If we have received no answers, it is because we have offered no prayers. "Ye have not because ye ask not, or because ye ask amiss," you have been praying obliquely instead of directly; you have been vexing yourselves with circumlocution when your words ought to have been direct appeals, sharp, short, urgent appeals to Heaven: to such appeals God sends down richness of dew, wealth of blessing, morning brighter than noonday. God will show his people "great and mighty things." For "mighty" the margin reads "hidden": the change is not for the better. "Great and mighty things": when does God show his children little and impotent visions? The words great and mighty, noble and glorious, belong to the administration of God. There is nothing little. The bird in the heavens upon its trembling wing is only little to us, it is not little to God. He counts the drops of dew, he puts our tears into his bottle, he numbers our sighs, and as for our groans, he distinguishes one from the other; these are not little things to him, they are only little to our ignorance, and folly, and superficiality. We have betaken ourselves to the foolish exercise of measuring things, and setting them down in inches and in feet, in furlongs and in acres, in leagues and in miles; but God looks at souls, faces, lives, destinies, and the least child in the world he rocks to sleep, and wakes in the morning, as if he had not else to do; it is the stoop of Fatherhood, it is the mystery of the Cross. As to these continual revelations, they ought to be possible. God is infinite and eternal, man is finite and transient in all his earthly relationships; it would be strange if God had told man everything he has to tell him, it would be the miracle of miracles that God had exhausted himself in one effort, it would be incredible that the eternal God had crushed into the moment which we call time every thought that makes him God. Greater things than these shall ye do; when he, the Paraclete, is come, he will guide you into all truth; grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; add to your faith, until you scaffold yourselves up into brotherly love and charity, for from that pinnacle the next step is right into heaven.
There is a sense in which revelation is final, and there is also a sense in which revelation is progressive. The root is final, viewed from one point, and yet it is ever increasing, viewed from another. What flowers there are by intermixture and inter-blending; what colours yet lie to be discovered by the eyes of art; what mysteries there are even in occasions and instances which we think are exhausted. There is an originality of combination, as well as an originality of creation. He who can readapt is, in a sense, a creator. That is what is left for human genius under divine direction to do not to write a new Bible, not to build a new Golgotha, but to search into hidden meanings and seize the vaster aspects and larger implications of facts, that they may become helpers to a truer conception of the majesty and love of God. Enlarging revelation, in this sense, is essential to the continued vitality and power of the Church. When the Church becomes a mechanical repeater of its own dogmas it ceases to have power. There is a genius of absorption, there is an inspiration which belongs to the appropriation of commonplaces, and a turning of these commonplaces into the very bread and water of life. Herein the Bible stands apart from all other books. It can be read many times, and at the close of the last perusal it asks the guests to come again, for the feast has but begun. There are men to whom no revelation can be granted; there are rooms in our dwelling-places the sun cannot get at. The sun is larger than any house we can build, yet the smallest building we can put up may shut out the sun. An eyelid can exclude the noontide. The question is, Are we in need of further revelation? Do we call for it? We may call for it speculatively, and no answer will be given; we may ask for it for the sake of mere intellectual delectation, and the heavens will be dumb and frowning: but if we try to outgrow God, then we shall know what God is in reality; he challenges the sacred rivalry, he appeals to our emulation to follow him and study him, and try to comprehend him; and then how like a horizon he is, for we think we can touch him in yonder top, but having climbed the steep the horizon is still beyond. To cleverness God has nothing to say; to vanity he is scornfully inhospitable; but to the broken heart, to the contrite spirit and the willing mind, to filial, tender, devout obedience, he will give himself in infinite and continual donation: "To this man will I look, for I see my own image in him, my own purpose is vitalised in his experience the man who is of a humble and contrite heart, and who trembleth at my word, not in servility, but in rapture and wonder at its grandeur and tenderness."
Why does God hide his face? Will he tell us the explanation of the cloud in which his countenance is enveloped? Even this condescension shall not be larger than the love of God. In this very paragraph God tells the reason why he hides his face. It is the unchangeable reason. This moral action that proceeds through the Bible never changes. Men can wrestle with the history of the Bible, and prove their futile cleverness in the rearrangement of things which need not be re-arranged; but they find everywhere that the knife of criticism comes upon the nerve of immoral purpose; and there, if criticism be reverent, it begins to pray. What is the Lord's account of his having retired from his people, and from the city of his choice?
"For all whose wickedness I have hid my face from this city" ( Jer 33:5 ).
Nothing but wickedness can drive him away. He never left any man's house, saying, This place is too poor for me; he never gave up any blind man, saying, I only enjoy the companionship of those who can behold and admire the wonders of nature; he never dropped a little child because it was too heavy a burden for him to carry; he never abandoned the sick-chamber because he loved sunnier places, where flowers bloomed and birds sang. He would never partake of the meal of wickedness, he would never sup with the devil. Here comes the greatest cloud of mystery that ever settled upon human life. Here it would be easy to be indignant, reproachful, and disastrously critical upon one another; but let the strongest man forbear, let the mightiest brother amongst us prove his brotherhood by his forbearance; let those who are little and mean use their critical hatchets presently, blessed be God, they will lop off their own hands. Every man must enter into this cloud, and find his own confession-chamber within its darkness. Have I been wicked? After what manner has my wickedness run? Have I been unjust, oppressive, untrue, selfish? Have I turned away from God secretly whilst yet spreading still more broadly to the public gaze the banner of a nominal profession? Have I kept back the wages from the hireling? Am I carrying money to which I have no right in honesty? Have I been indolent, unfaithful, dishonourable? Have I kept the word of promise to the ear, and broken it to the heart? Why this darkness? Why this cloud that will not lift? Why these eyes that cannot see? Why this hell-pool that bubbles at my feet? God be merciful to me a sinner!
Do not let us reproach one another. You can see where I might have been wise: perhaps, in some moment of more or less unconscious vanity, I may imagine I can see where you might have been wise. We need no such criticism. It is the play of bad men; it is the trick of wicked spirits. Every man knows his own heart, and is carrying a burden of sin, and has to put up with a spectre that looks at him through the darkness of night. Let him that is without sin cast the first stone; let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. We have seen many such fall, and no man has pitied the critic when he fell. But will God be overthrown by wickedness? Never! "Where sin aboundeth, grace doth much more abound." Grammar cannot explain that text; you cannot parse it into its true significance; the heart must feel it by a sudden inspiration. God's "much more" is a line that angels cannot measure. We must forecast the future as God sees it. There are prophecies in the New Testament as well as in the Old, and all these prophecies set Christ upon the uppermost seat. The outlook of the New Testament is an outlook of brightness for the nations. They shall come from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God; all nations shall call the Redeemer blessed; he shall reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet; the last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death. None rose in the old dispensation to struggle with that monster; he was accepted as a necessity, his action had been reduced to a law of nature: but the Lion of the tribe of Judah will wrestle with Death and overthrow him. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death; he shall be dashed to pieces like a potter's vessel. So wickedness shall not overbear and destroy the goodness of God. The Lord Jesus Christ has undertaken to deal with sin. He fights sin with a Cross, he fights death with death, but with death that involves resurrection. Viewed in one aspect, the history of the world is the history of a tragedy; the catastrophe of it is a pit and a second death: but viewed from the Cross of Christ, life leads to life, and the higher life to life higher still, and the highest life dies into immortality. Take great views of God's government; do not be puzzled and persecuted by changing details, but get such a grasp of life as will enable you to command details into life, each occupying its own point in an infinite series; and through that process you will find rest, dawning heaven, assured immortality.
Will God undertake to pass from wickedness to goodness? Can he work any miracles here? Why, it is within the darkness of wickedness that God works his greatest miracles.
"Behold, I will bring it health and cure, and I will cure them, and will reveal unto them the abundance of peace and truth" ( Jer 33:6 ).
There are no greater words in all human language than "health," "cure," "peace," "truth." There is nothing here about gem and gold and stones hiding the shadows of night within the glories of midday; but here is health, here is cure, here is peace, here is truth, and these are the gifts of God. "I will bring it." He is as a man who has gone to bring something for the comfort of his household. There is no figure suggestive of humility that God does not adopt to represent the action of his omniscience, the condescension of his pity. This is a sovereign act, this is the mystery of grace, this is the kingdom of God, that the King himself should serve, should go on an errand to bring health, and cure, and peace, and truth. This is the voice of the Son of God: I go to prepare a place for you; I go to prepare, to make ready against the time of your coming: and, see, if there be aught wrong in the house, the blame will be mine; if there be aught wanting in the palace, blame me: I go to prepare a place for you; if the roof be not tempest-proof, blame me for the destroying flood; if there be not light enough in the palace, blame me for not making sufficient arrangements for the flooding of the house with glory; if the pillow of your rest has a thorn in it, charge the existence of that thorn upon my cruelty: I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go away I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there may ye be also. God will "bring," Christ will "prepare," the Holy Spirit will "lead," and thus the whole Trinity may be said to be engaged in the service of man.
A grand evangelical declaration succeeds and closes this preliminary statement:
"And I will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned against me; and I will pardon all their iniquities, whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against me" ( Jer 33:8 ).
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