Verses 1-23
Heart Idols
"Then came " So some event had taken place before, and the incident now about to be related is to be read in connection with preceding circumstances. A wall had been built of which the Lord God disapproved. It was a wrong wall altogether wrong in the foundations, wrong in the structure, wrong because it was daubed with untempered mortar: the Lord therefore sent a strong wind to rend it, and he caused an overflowing shower to fall upon it in his anger, and great hailstones expressed the fury divine against this unholy and unstable erection. The Lord having accomplished his wrath upon the wall, and upon them that daubed it with untempered mortar, proceeded to address the false prophetesses, women that sewed pillows to all armholes, and made kerchiefs upon the head of every statue to hunt souls. They sought to live by lying to the people of Israel; so the Lord said he was against the women and against their pillows, wherewith they hunted souls to make them fly; and he said he would tear the pillows from their arms, and let the souls go through; their kerchiefs also would he tear, and he would deliver his people out of their hand, that they should be no more in the hand of the false prophetesses to be hunted: and by this deliverance would God make himself known once more to be the only living and true God. Such were the preceding events. These events were open, concrete, palpable; every one who passed by could see what was being done, every ear could hear the furious hailstones as they came down in judgment, and every one could see pillow and kerchief torn from the base women who had undertaken to hunt human souls. But that was not enough God does not content himself with outer judgment; then would his daily providence be enough to instruct the sons of men and turn them to considerateness and to piety. But the Lord cannot succeed thus. Judgment can do but little. Hell has played but a poor part in the conversion of men; it has always been burning there, and the smoke of its torment has ascended for ever and ever; yet in the midst of that hot smoke have men done their evil deeds and defied the God of judgment. Punishment is hardly ever reformative; it is simple penalty, pain for offence, loss for trespass, shame because of violence: now a higher judgment seat is erected, another process of criticism is about to be conducted. The Lord is now going to search the heart, to turn out the corners of the inmost recesses of the mind, the idol and favourite sin. He will proceed to do a spiritual work; he will lay aside his hammer with which he has broken the wall, and no more will he tear and rend the garments which cover falsehood: he will enter the heart, he will name the idols one by one which occupy that secret sanctuary; he will name them, he will bring them forth to judgment, and he will conduct that most penetrating of all criticism, the judgment of the thought and motive and purpose of man. It is well it should be so. We expected fury about an ill-built wall; men themselves cannot tolerate any edifice that is tottering; when a pillar leans men go to the other side of the way, for it may fall: we want in our God eyesight from which nothing can be hidden, judgment that looks the soul through and through, from the burning of whose vision no secret can be successfully and permanently withheld.
What we want we find here. Who are these men? "Then came certain of the elders of Israel unto me" came to be judged, came to sit down to be looked over, looked through, weighed, measured, and adjudged. No office can save men from divine criticism. The Lord takes nothing for granted. He does not say, This man clothed in official pomp must be good because his robes are good. No robe is good that covers a traitor's heart; the heart spoils the pomp. How unsparing the criticism! Even elders must be judged. How comforting is this thought, though terrible in some aspects! It were well that our judges should be judged, else who can tell to what extremes of folly they might go, hounded on by ambition, or stung to further issues by envy and malice? The judge is nobody in the sight of God; he is a man who is himself to be judged: he must hold himself with the loftiness of modesty it he would be truly dignified; he must remember that he has a Judge in heaven if he would read the law aright, and distribute sentences with righteousness. The pastor cannot escape, or the teacher, or the head of the house, or the senior member of the firm, or the magistrate, or the prime minister, or the king crowned and throned: judgment shall begin at the house of God, and no man there shall live upon his certificates. Life shall only be guaranteed to the pure in heart How impossible it is to escape! If it had been a matter of the wall we should have expected judgment; if the penalty had been confined to pillow and kerchief, used by Israelitish women after the fashion of pagan sorceresses, we should have had large liberty to serve the devil in: but now the Judge thunders at the heart-door, and says from without that he is coming in. Nor can we hinder him; he will burn down the portal if we will not open it; into the heart he must come; the heart is the man!
How improbable are some defections. Who would not say that the elders would be good men, simply because they are elders? If they had not been good they would not have been promoted to office; the very fact that they are in the pulpit, in the presidential chair, in the seat of honour, that they wear the purple of authority, is proof enough of their excellence. No: the Lord will not have it thus. The higher the office the greater the responsibility; the larger the privileges the greater the sin if they are outraged; the more brilliant the genius the more infamous the mischief if that genius be perverted. The able man, the man of faculty and education, can do more sin in one moment than a poor uneducated soul can do in a lifetime. Elevation aggravates sin. Expectations founded on reason will turn into burning fires when they are disappointed by the men whose office has excited them. How strong the Bible is in reason and justice! It is no respecter of persons. It will behead a king as soon as a peasant if the king be evil-minded, and there will be a ring in the hatchet that takes off his head that will indicate an accent of peculiar disapprobation. Kings ought to be better than their subjects: consider their advantages, their education, their elevation; they should live in an atmosphere of self-restraint and spiritual thoughtfulness. Who would not have faith in a book thus marked by broadest justice? This Book favours none. It is a standard which never lowers; its balances are made of fine gold, and never vary; the hand that holds them never tilts the scale one way or the other. We shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. That being so, let us be quiet, strong in confidence, bright in hope; for the Judge of all the earth will do right. Let not the poor man envy the rich, as if God favoured him. Better not read life from the outside and make rough criticism and judgment upon it, for in reality we know nothing about its secret, and its expansion, and its issue: at best we can read but accidents and surfaces, and ill-spelling it is and bad reading, full of stumbling and hesitation and lack of music. Let God read the account and demand the balance.
The place of the disease indicates its fatal character "in their heart." This is heart-disease. Men almost whisper when they indicate that some friend is suffering from disease of the heart; there is hopelessness in the tone: great allowance should be made, they say, for a man who is suffering from heart-disease; he must not be startled or excited or suddenly pounced upon; his wishes must be gratified, they must as far as possible even be anticipated; and any little impatience he may show must be looked at charitably, because he is suffering from heart-disease. The talk is humane, the considerateness is full of affection, the conditions imposed are suggested by reason. Is there not a higher disease of the heart? Is it true that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked? Is it true that the heart delights in concealment? Is it true that the heart has offered a bribe to secrecy to hold its lips for ever? Is not every man, did he but know it, suffering from heart-disease? What is the meaning of this disease of the heart, this idolatry in the inmost soul? When a moral disease is of the heart it means that the disease is liked, enjoyed, gloated over; it is wine drunk behind the door, it is a feast of fat things eaten in secrecy; every mouthful so sweet, so good, so rich. When a disease is of the heart in a moral and spiritual sense it means that it is consented to; it is voluntary, it is personal, it is desired; there would be a sense of loss without it. Sometimes men are forced into uncongenial circumstances, and they express their reluctance and their annoyance by many a gesture and many a tone; but when the disease is of the heart it has secured the consent of the will, and the judgment has been bribed to nod a kind of tacit approval: the whole conscience has been put under narcotic or opiate, and is no longer the sharp, pungent, unsparing, wakeful critic that God meant it to be when he set it in the centre of human thought and human action. Disease of this kind, too, is most difficult of eradication. It is not in the skin, or it might be cut out; it is not in the limb, or it might be amputated, and the knife might anticipate mortification: the evil is in the heart; no knife can touch it, no persuasion can get at it; nothing can be done with it but one thing only a miracle of the Holy Ghost can overcome that difficulty and turn that disease into health. "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." If a man does not know his own heart he cannot be religious; he cannot begin to understand what is meant by the demands of Christ; the Cross will be a foolishness and a mockery and nothing but a sham in his estimation. Let him once know his own heart, how much of the serpent there is in him and of the beast of prey, and how thinly skinned over he is, and that sometimes he is only the bent and crooked and twisted shape of a man, that in reality he has the heart or an evil beast within him; let him see what a murderer he is, and a liar and a thief, then you can make upon him some spiritual impression. The respectable man can never receive the gospel. How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven! riches of any kind, not of money only, but of self-conceit, and self-respect, and self-idolatry, and self-confidence, how hardly shall they press into a gate so strait as that which is set in front of the kingdom of heaven.
Are we chargeable with heart-idolatry? We have no idols of a visible kind it may be, yet we may be the veriest pagans in our hearts. Is there aught of irony so piteous, in some aspects so comical, in every aspect so detestable, as the irony of Christian England when in annual piety it listens deprecatingly to the stories of idols worshipped by savage men in faraway climes? The ill-shaped idols are held up, and excite the laughter, the pity, or the scorn of Christian England. Christian England is full of idols; but Christian England has not courage in all cases to shake them and display them. We pity the man who would sell his little idol-god for a rupee, and all the time we are selling our convictions for a handful of barter. We say, How distressing that poor human nature should fall down before stock or stone and worship it! and we, inflated pagans, worship a golden calf, a tinsel crown, a sounding name, a crafty policy. The man who would sell his convictions is a more consummate idolater than all the poor thick-lipped savages that ever lifted up their expectant eyes to some little god of their own formation. This is heart-disease! The man who will keep silence in the presence of wrong is an idolater, is a pagan; he worships self-ease, self-indulgence. The man who will stand by and see the weak struck down without at least protesting against the tyranny, or who will accept a bribe for his silence, has sold, not an ivory god, but a living, bleeding Christ.
Are we chargeable with heart-idolatry? Certainly we are. No man can escape this accusation. It is subtle, far-reaching, all but ineradicable. If we do not face such difficulties our piety is a stucco that will peel off in the wet weather, and leave the ghastly moral ugliness exposed to public scorn. Doubt may be an idol used to diminish responsibility. We can become intellectual doubters on occasion; we begin to wonder if the Bible is really inspired: as who should say dear souls! that if we could only be convinced intellectually of the inspiration of the Bible we should be the whitest babes ever nursed by the mother-creation. What liars we are! We are only standing back because we wonder if the Hebrew text is not exceedingly corrupt, in some of the minor prophets. We do not care one iota about the prophets, minor or major; only we wish to hide ourselves behind a doubt that we may shirk a responsibility. We had better tell the truth to ourselves sometimes; mayhap we can only tell it in the dark, but we should not let the dark night pass without the soul issuing from itself some dark messages of impeachment and accusation. Others, again, may have in the heart an idol called Ignorance, kept there for the purpose of diminishing service: we will not go into the dark places of the city, then we need not attend to the cries which are said to be arising there from overborne and hopeless humanity; we will keep on the broad thoroughfare, where the gaslight is plentiful; we shall see the surface and outer shape of things, and then retire to rest, saying that, say what fanatics may, there is really a good deal of solid happiness in the city. The ghost is three steps down the side street; turn to the left, take the first turning to the right, climb up the stairs that will hardly bear you, and there you will see how much happiness there is in the city. "If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it?" Canst thou escape his criticism? Can you eat your fat dinner and know that gaunt hunger is not half a league off, but is behind a wall? You owe your appetite to that wall, to that concealment. Keep your money, multiply it tenfold, put it out at exorbitant usury, pile it up; but think not you have postponed the day of criticism: the poor will do without us as they always have done until they come up a thousand strong as witnesses and accusers.
Have we not an idol in the heart we call Orthodoxy, which we keep there in order to enlarge moral licence? Is there not an intellectual orthodoxy and a spiritual heterodoxy often united in the same man? Are we not the victims of phrases? Who can bear to be called heterodox? Even a man who does not understand the word thinks there must be something wrong about it. How possible it is to be orthodox in words, and heterodox in spirit; how possible to preach the gospel without feeling it: alas, then, we do not preach the gospel, we preach about it. There is an infinite difference between preaching the gospel and preaching about the gospel. No man can preach the gospel whose heart is hard: his genius is in his sympathy; the splendour of his gift is in the richness of his kindness and pity for the souls of men. It is intolerable that some persons should set themselves up as the custodians of orthodoxy: blessed be God, there is a hell for them! The men who are hindering the truth, and crucifying the Son of God afresh, are the men who are boasting orthodoxy without being orthodox in heart, soul, spirit, motive. For them let torment be eternal! Poor sinners, wayfarers, wanderers, who never heard about orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but who want forgiveness and hope and a new life, they shall come in thousand upon thousand; the scribe and the Pharisee, and the man who lives on the sale of his orthodoxy, shall be thrust out into darkness utter.
Is there nothing but judgment in this passage? Does the paragraph include nothing besides penalty, threatening, denunciation? Even in this paragraph there is an evangelical word. "Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God; Repent." When did the Lord ever conclude a discourse without some evangelical tone in it? We have seen him step from his chariot of thunder that he might put his arms around some poor sinner and say, Come home ere the sun set, for we will wait for thee in night's darkest hour, and receive thee when they who would be ashamed of thee are lost in slumber. The Bible is terrific in denunciation, awful beyond all other books in its denunciation of sin and its threatening of perdition; yet through it, and through it again, and ruling it, is a spirit of clemency and pity and mercy and hope, yea, across hell's burning mouth there lies the shadow of the Cross.
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