Jeremiah 3:1-25

Contending Emotions

Jeremiah 3:0

We often speak about contending emotions. We do not know certainly whether the love or the wrath will overcome at the last. We burn with anger, and then we are melted with pity; we denounce and repel, and then in some sudden inspiration not human we hold out the sceptre and bid the alien return. We need not go beyond the range of our own consciousness to verify all this marvellous play of emotion. We are not the same in the evening we were in the morning: sometimes we sleep off our anger and awake radiant with benignity; then the sudden thought of ill-usage returns, and we frown again, and our forehead is clothed with denser clouds. Such is the panorama of emotion its marvellous colour, its changing energy, its variant tone. All this we find on the widest scale in the Book of God. How God's method changes! He will destroy, and yet he will not hurt; he offers men great blessing, and on their ill-behaviour he suspends, if not withdraws, the offer; he is clothed with judgment, yet his mercy abideth for ever. Here we find the harmony of contraries. All this is needful, in order that our own consciousness may be covered and satisfied by the revelation of God's person and government. We understand all the action and interaction: when God is angry and when he is grieved; when he sorrows and when he beams with complacency upon those who have returned in humbleness to seek his pardon and to kiss his hand. We need not travel the whole Biblical space in illustration and confirmation of this, for we have here, as in a little Bible, all the ups and downs, all the dark thunder and all the vivid lightning, all the tender music, all the wrestling love, all thunder-crowned Sinai, and all blood-besprinkled Calvary, within the few lines which constitute the parable cf this chapter. A wonderful structure is the Bible: sometimes it runs itself altogether into one little chapter, so that we may see its whole purpose at a glance; now it bewilders; now it is too profound for us, and we dare not plunge into its mysterious depths; and now it is higher than heaven, what can we do? and now it is brighter than the white flame of midday, who can look at its dazzling glory? and then it tabernacles itself in some brief sentences, attempers itself, atmospheres itself, and comes within our own condition, so that we may look at it whilst it looks at us, and study it, and reply to its appeals, and make acquaintance with its mystery of judgment and its mystery of gospel. To this chapter we may come with the high expectation of finding in it the whole gamut of divine emotion.

God tells us why there are difficulties in our culture and experience of nature. The sentence is a bold one, and he would be a bold man who would read it today loudly. Yet so must we read it:

"Therefore the showers have been withholden" ( Jer 3:3 ).

Some men smile at the fanatical notion that God so interferes in nature as to express moral disapprobation or moral regard: but who are they that smile? what have they done for the world? There is nothing so easy as to smile with a kind of benignant contempt not the bitter scorn which great subjects might elicit from great scorners, but a sort of modified and semi-benignant contempt, as should say, The poor creatures! how little they know of the constitution of the universe, the laws of nature, the economy of time and space, and the general condition of things! All this reproach ought to have an effect upon us; but what effect? Because some man has smiled at our piety, is our piety therefore not worth entertaining, preserving, and extending? First, who is the man? What will he do for us in the great crisis? If he should turn out to be wrong, will he stand in our place and bear the issue bravely like a vicarious hero? What if his smile be turned against himself, and God should laugh at his calamity and mock when his fear cometh? Men who can smile at deep convictions are never to be trusted. A man who can smile at a pagan idolater, when that idolater is really and truly expressing his soul's uppermost temper in relation to the idol which he worships, is not a religious man; he, too, is a mocker: he may mock from a different level, but the same mockery is in him, and he does not understand human nature when religiously fired, elevated, inflamed, ennobled. There does not seem to be such a violation of reason in this declaration as might at first sight appear. If God is immanent in the universe, not a deity immeasurable distances away from his creation; if he is in it, part of it; if without him it could not hold together for a moment, there is nothing unreasonable in the thought that he should sometimes show resentment at the spirit of evil, indicate some emotion at least in the presence of ingratitude. We do the same ourselves. Parents sometimes give children to feel that the penalty of ill-behaviour is the withdrawment of a privilege, the abbreviation of a holiday, the suspension of a pleasure, Put it in what way we may, we still have under all the external appearance the reality of our being so identified with the life of the house that we cannot allow evil behaviour, evil temper, ingratitude to pass without showing that it is undesirable, unwelcome, improper. Sometimes by deprivation God inflicts punishment upon those who turn away from him. In this case the penalty was one of deprivation the showers had been withholden. Sometimes the penalty is positive, and there are too many showers. God drowns the world that denies him. He does not withhold the showers for want of water; the deluge is always ready: the river of God is full of water. It may be unscientific and ignorant to think that God interferes with nature, but it stands to our highest reason as a probable truth. If he made it, he may interfere with it; if he constructed it, he may sometimes wind it up, visit it, operate upon it, assert his eternal proprietorship. If the great landlord allows us to walk through his fields freely and joyously, he may sometime, say, once in twenty-one years, put up a fence or a boundary, which being interpreted means, This path is mine, not yours; the boundary will be taken down again tomorrow, but it is here today to signify that you have acquired no rights by constant use. It is not an unnatural intervention, nor do we see that it is an unreasonable intervention, on the part of God, if we deny him, neglect him, scorn him, operate wholly against the spirit of his holiness, that he should now and again withhold the shower, or send such deluges upon the earth as shall wash away our seed and make a desert of our garden.

God penetrates the most skilfully contrived disguises:

"Wilt thou not from this time cry unto me, My father, thou art the guide of my youth?" ( Jer 3:4 ).

Yet God proclaims the great Gospel. Here we see the contending emotion:

"Go and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, Return, thou backsliding Israel" ( Jer 3:12 ).

Men will never be brought back by force. God never arrests a man, and by some constabulary energy fixes him in heaven. That would be no heaven to such a man. We are not in heaven unless we are heavenly. God has no heaven for us if we are not godly. Men themselves must act. Here is a mystery of will and necessity, divine sovereignty and human volition; and great battles may be fought around these theological terms to no effect. We must recognise the real philosophy of things, the actual sense of life, the innermost motive and pulse of being; then we shall understand how it is that men cannot return, and yet they can return, that they can only return by the attraction of a welcome, and that the attraction is itself an assistance to their upward home-going emotion. If we cannot explain it in words, we have felt it in the deepest places of the heart.

God reveals his character; he says, "I am merciful,... and I will not keep anger for ever" ( Jer 3:12 ). How could he? Sweet are these words! No man ever made them or put them together about any other god. Have you in all the history of mythology or idolatry found such a description of any hand-made deity? We might almost say it of the dear, beneficent sun: he does seem to be merciful; he who could burn us with light, kisses the tiny flower as if it were a little child; he who pours so much light upon the earth that it runs off, so to say, at the edges to water with glory under-worlds and other spaces, never hurts the earth with a dart of fire. But all this mercy is ascribed to the Living God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; and he will continue to reveal his mercy until he consummates the revelation in the Cross of Calvary, the death, the atonement, of his own Son.

God never varies the essential conditions of pardon "Only acknowledge thine iniquity" ( Jer 3:13 ). That is New Testament speech: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins." But we must acknowledge, and we must acknowledge fully; we must keep back nothing. How difficult actually to empty the heart! We can confess a great deal, but we keep back the blackest word; we can confess all things in general terms, but to detail our sin, to write out a bill of particulars, to hand to God the diary of the heart, who could do it? Blessed be God, we have not to hand that diary to one another. If we have done wrong to any man, to that man we are bound to confess the wrong we have done; but we are not bound to tell priest or friend or dearest brother all we have done: we are to say to God, "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight." We believe in confession, but not in confession to any fellow-sinner, who may even have exceeded ourselves in the enormity of iniquity. If you have done wrong to man, woman, or child, go and say so; without that there can be no forgiveness. Having done wrong to God, enter thou into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the door tell him all, and say that this very telling of it all means trust and love: thou couldst not whisper it in the ear of judgment, thou venturest to whisper it in the ear of mercy.

Prayer

Almighty God, our joy is in thy greatness, and not in our own resources. Thou wilt wonderfully beautify thy church in the days to come; we know not with what adornment thou shalt adorn thy bride. Behold, all things are at thy disposal, and thou wilt spare nothing that Zion may be glorified, and that the work of the Son of man may be completed in victory. Thou hast ever held out an alluring prospect to thy church; there has always been better wine to drink; there has always been some higher height to scale whence could be had a clearer and further view of things, lighted up with undreamed-of glory. In this prospect we serve; we say that what is now round about us cannot be the end of things; all that we see must be but a beginning, an opening gate, a dawning opportunity, a momentary glimpse, whatsoever signifies that which is significant; but the end who can tell? We rest in thy word; we are strengthened by thy promise; we are quieted by thy grace; we say, Let the Lord work as he will, and in the end he will justify his ways to men. Thou hast given us great words to live upon, yea, exceeding great and precious promises with which to nourish the soul. Lord, evermore give us this bread. Make the Cross our meeting-place, for there the angels are, there heaven begins because Christ died for the sons of men, and there is sealed the pardon of a believing world. For that Cross how can we thank thee? It meets all our necessities, it answers all the cry and pain of the afflicted soul; in that Cross is the balm of healing; otherwhere that balm cannot be found. May we live at the Cross, and live for the Cross; then the crown is assured, and all heaven shall welcome those who have loved the Son of God. Thy Holy Spirit thou wilt not withhold; he will work miracles in our life day by day, he will open our eyes that we may see, and our ears that we may hear, and every night shall hear the astounding tale of increase of light and multiplication of comfort. Let thy word be precious to us as water is to men who are in wildernesses; let thy promises lure us as bread draws men towards it who have known the gnawing of hunger; thus may we declare plainly that we hunger and thirst after righteousness, that the wells of the earth cannot satisfy our thirst, and that all the provisions of time are too small for the holy desire thou hast enkindled within us. Son of man, Son of God, God the Son, we throw our crowns at thy feet, for thou didst give them; we say. Not unto us, but unto thyself, be every ray of glory, world without end. King of kings, Lord of lords, only Potentate, reign over us, and put down all other rule. Amen.