Verses 1-66
Profitable Discipline
Taking the opening of the chapter along with this portion, we seem to find a good deal of inconsistency, and in fact positive contradiction. Spiritual experience must be looked at as a whole. It is not right to fix attention either upon this side or upon that, to the exclusion and the forgetfulness of the other. One side is very dark and full of sadness, sharply inclined towards despair; the other is brighter than the summer morning, tuneful, sunned with all the lustre of saintly hope: so we must take the night with the morning, if we would have the complete day. Jeremiah had rare power in sounding the depths of disciplinary sorrow. He walked familiarly through the chambers of dark dispensations: life was often to Jeremiah little better than a thunder-gloom: hence he often had to find his way by fitful gleams of lightning rather than by the clear and steady shining of the sun. It does us good now and then to talk to such a man. The soul cannot always live in laughter; the man who has seen much sorrow, and turned it to a right use, will help us more in all that is deepest and truest in our nature than the man who has always lived mirthfully, and who does not know what it is to have sorrow, a black and exacting guest, tenanting and tormenting his soul. He is not a man who has never had a trial or a sorrow. He knows little who has not received a great deal cf his learning through the dimness of his tears. We do not read the deepest of God's words, and the tenderest of his messages, when there is no cloud in the sky, when the morning is bright and blue and lustrous, and there is no intercepting cloud. God often lowers his voice to a whisper when the heartbroken feel that the clouds are very many and the way crooked and extremely perilous. When Jeremiah does laugh his joy will be rich and full; when he does sing he will fill heaven and earth with his resounding joy. No man can be truly joyful who has not been deeply, heart-brokenly sorrowful. It should be pointed out that depression is not an exclusively religious state. It might be supposed from a great deal that one hears that not until we become religious do we become depressed; not until we love and follow God do we know what is meant by heart-sinking and stealthy walking in perilous places. This is a mistake from beginning to end. We may find depression in all the conditions of life that are healthy. Sometimes the painter cannot paint with his soul: his hand has lost its cunning, because his spirit has lost the key of mystery and has no vision of the invisible. Sometimes the poet cannot sing: he cannot read the parable of nature, nor construe the language of the fretted shadows, nor detain the sweet spirit which baptises the dreaming soul at the font of God. To painter and poet the world often becomes dark at noontide; beauty retires and music ceases, when painter and poet would give half their living to retain those twin angels in their heart's confidence. The fact is that religious spirits are most depressed simply because they are most exalted. Where we find the highest mountains we find the deepest valleys. In proportion to the range and spirituality of the world in which a man lives will be the pensiveness and gloom of his occasional hours. If the poet droops when his harp does not respond to his touch, how must the soul faint when God hides himself? If the timid child moans because his chamber-light has gone out, with what bitterness of complaint should we speak if the sun were extinguished? If men say they are never depressed, that they are always in high spirits, it is probably because they never were really in high spirits at all not knowing the difference between the soul's rapture, mental and spiritual ecstasy, and merely animal excitement. What can the barn-door fowl know of the experiences of a disabled eagle? The man who is breaking stones on the highway may never be depressed, but his elder stone-breaking brother, who moulds marble into angels, may often sigh for a clearer light and a daintier touch. So everything depends upon the world we live in; and, depend upon it, there is something wrong with a man somewhere if he be always in the same high key. No year that God ever made was made from beginning to end of July, This is a very wonderful strain of talk on the part of the lamenting Jeremiah. Gather together lines out of his third chapter, and put them into couplets; and see what very startling and pathetic contrasts may be made out of his complaint. Let us hear Jeremiah:
Here are two men having a little talk about a district of country through which they have passed. The speech of one of them is this: "It is a poor, desolate, barren land; I never wish to go through that district of country again: it is so featureless, wanting undulation and variety, and that brokenness of line which delights an artistic eye, defective in colouring too, it is altogether a poor, wretched piece of country. I do not care ever to retrace my steps over it." The other man's speech is this: "I do not know a piece of lovelier country anywhere; the undulation is so easy, the lines are so beautifully broken up, there is such pleasing variety, you have all the features that can enter into a piece of beautiful landscape on a small scale, not to be romantic, I do not know any lovelier expanse of English scenery." "Why!" you say, "the fact is that both these statements cannot be true, either the one man or the other is mistaken: they contradict each other flatly, and therefore both their statements cannot be true." A third man puts this question: "When did you go through that district?" "Why, sir," the first man says, "I went through it in November, one of the foggiest, murkiest days that I ever found in the English climate." "When did you go through the district?" is the inquiry put to the second man; and he says: "I went through it about midsummer, and a lovelier day I think never shone upon the island." Now we begin to see a little, at least, as to how the discrepancy came. A great deal depends upon atmosphere. The mountains are there in the night-time, but you cannot see them. The rich, verdant, flowery meads are there at midnight, but you cannot light up the landscape with your little candle. You must have the medium as well as the object. A great deal depends upon the clearness of the atmosphere as to whether we appreciate this object or that in natural scenery. So it is with souls. A great many of us seem to have such long winters, short days, with poor artificial light, and such murky, gloomy, dispiriting weather, with cruel fogs. Others of us have more sunshine, more summer weather in the soul. But what we want to understand is this that religion, right relations with God, a true standing before the Almighty, does not depend upon this feeling or upon that; it is not a question of climate, atmosphere, air, spirits: it is a question of fact. The question is not, How do you feel today? but, Where are you standing? are you on the rock? The rock will not change; the climate will. Be right in your foundation, and the season of rejoicing will come round again. So many people are occupied with the question of mere experience of feeling that they are apt to forget that the primary question, the vital question, is the soul's relation to God at the foot of the Cross. Where there is an established standing upon the Rock of Ages, the foundation laid in Zion, there will be carefulness of judgment, patience of waiting, in relation to all climatic annoyances and all the atmospheric variations of the soul's feeling. He who is right in his principles will come right in his feelings. He who lays hold of God by the truth that is in Christ Jesus will patiently, quietly, and successfully wait for the incoming of the dazzling glory of the sun. I wish to speak with discrimination, with judgment, perhaps with severity, but only with the severity of truth, about this question of depression and feeling. There is a depression which admits of explanation. Here is a man who in the time of trial succumbed; he spoke the coward's word when he ought to have been resolute. He was timid, not with modesty, but with cowardice. Here is a man who has been rolling iniquity under his tongue as a sweet morsel, rolling that iniquity under his tongue in the very act of singing hymns and uttering the words of formal prayer. Here is a man who has some evil purpose in his heart, luxuriating over prospects on which God's disapprobation rests like an immovable frown. He has been planning forbidden enjoyment, scheming pleasures at the expense of conviction, conscience, righteousness, and Christian standing, and he comes to church in a depressed state of mind. Thank God! If that man could be as joyful as the pure little child-heart in Christ's kingdom, then God hath forgotten to be Judge, and there is no righteousness in his law. The question therefore is: Can our depression be traced to moral causes? Have I been keeping false weights and balances? Have I been clever at the expense of virtue and righteousness? Have I been untrue to my vows, faithless to my professions? Then I have no right to expect anything but depression, and if I were not depressed there would be something wrong in the moral government of the world. Yes, and a man may be depressed though he may be showing at the time great animal exultation; but there is a ring about honest excitement and true joy which is not to be mistaken by practised ears. Many a man seeks to drown his conscience and to dismiss his depression by overstrained religious excitement, and he cannot do it. The ghost is there! He hangs up a veil before the spectre, and says, "Now it is gone, I shall be at ease." He takes up the veil. Behold! there it is grim, grizzly, ghastly, with judgment written upon every lineament. And it is well that a man cannot dismiss these memories, these presences, that ought to be to him terrible as the light, awful as the judgment of God.
Taking Jeremiah's experiences as a whole, what do we find that sanctified sorrow had wrought in him? In the first place it gave him a true view or divine government Jeremiah was brought to understand two things about the government of God. He was brought to understand that God's government is tender. The word tenderness we do not very well connect with the word government. When we think of government, we think of something severe, stern, inflexible, unyielding, imperial, majestic, magnificent, dominating. But that is only half a truth so far as the government of God is concerned. What words do you suppose Jeremiah connected with the government of God? Why these two beautiful words, each a piece of music, "Mercies," "Compassions." A man can only get into that view of government by living the deepest possible life. We are always jealous when we find sentiment entering into governmental relations and governmental decisions. But here is God, Almighty God, and all tender, ruling with infinite majesty, stooping with more than motherly grace. God's government is not composed of huge, unsympathetic, tearless strength. A God all strength would be a monster. A God throned on ivory, ruling the universe with a sceptre of mere power, could never establish himself in the confidence and love and trust of his creatures. We might fear him, but when we got together in some corner where his face was excluded for a moment, we should turn round upon him with many execrations! Man cannot be ruled and governed by mere power, fear, overwhelming, dominating, crushing strength and force. So we find David saying, "Power belongeth unto God: unto thee also, O Lord, belongeth mercy." Power in the hands of mercy, Omnipotence impregnated by all the tenderness of pity. "This is the God we adore, our faithful, unchangeable Friend." That preaching would be untrue, one-sided, misleading, which dwelt entirely upon the regal, majestic aspect of God. That is the true exposition of divine nature which opens up the fatherliness, motherliness, mercifulness, and compassion of God's great heart.
This discipline wrought in Jeremiah the conviction that God's government was minute. Speaking of God's mercies he says, "They are new every morning." Morning mercies daily bread. This is what we find in the Old Testament, and in the New; but the Old Testament saints seemed only to be able to get from one morning to another, just the clock once round, and then they wanted more. New every morning! A beautiful word in the Old Testament is that, and we get in the New Testament What? Daily bread, new every week, new every year? No. "Give us this day our daily bread." That is it. God shutting us up within a day and training us a moment at a time. The Psalmist said, "Thy mercies have been ever of old." And another singer said, "Thy mercies are new every morning." Is there no contradiction there? Ever of old every morning! Time is old: every morning is new. Existence comprises a long, long succession of years, but no year ever had an old May given to it, or an old June thrown into it. Thy mercies have been ever of old, and they have been new every morning. Old as duration, new as morning; old as human existence, new as the coming summer. These are all inconsistencies that mark our life. Age and infirmity, the Ancient of Days, the Child of Bethlehem; the root out of the dry ground, the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley; the despised and rejected of men, but the desire of all nations. And you cannot grasp the contradictions and inconsistencies till you have been closeted long with God and got to know something of the mysteriousness of his dear heart.
Jeremiah having given this view of the divine government, gives two notions about human discipline as regulated by God the Judge and God the Father. He tells us two things about discipline. He tells us, in the first place, the goodness of waiting: it is good for a man to wait. It does one good to have a lesson of that sort from a grey-headed and wrinkled-browed man, to have a word from a man who has come cut of very dangerous and terrible places. One wishes to get near him the very first moment, and say, "Well, what is it? what have you to say to us now?" And Jeremiah coming up, crushed, sorrowful, heart-wrinkled, pained, says to the young people who are at the door, "Do not enter yet. It is good, my children, to wait." That is the lesson to us. We do not like to wait: impatient because incomplete. Observe you: wait for God. I am not called upon to wait because somebody has put a great waggon across the road; I might get that out of the way. But if God had set an angel there, I must make distinctions. There is a waiting that is indolence; there is a waiting that is sheer faithlessness; there is a waiting that comes of weakness. This is the true waiting, wanting to get on, resolute about progress, and yet having a notion that God is just before us teaching patience. A determination to go, yet a willingness to stand still, that is the mystery of true waiting.
Jeremiah tells us this second thing about the divine government. It is good for a man to bear the yoke. Ephraim like a bullock bemoaned himself; the yoke was very heavy on the shoulder; he was as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke, and he chafed sorely under it, complained and moaned; but by and by the yoke was worn with ease. And then God came and said, "Ephraim is my dear child." God puts yokes upon us, heavy yokes upon our necks; sometimes he binds our hands in manacles, and our feet in fetters, shuts us up and feeds us on bread of affliction and water of affliction; then we say, "This cannot be good for us." But it is. Commend me to the man who has been through deep waters, through very dark places, through treacherous, serpent-haunted roads, and who has yet come out with a cheerful heart, mellow, chastened, subdued, and who speaks tenderly of the mercy of God through it all. And that man I may trust with my heart's life. If he speak not words which to my natural taste are best and sweetest and most to be coveted, yet under all his instruction there is a divine mystery, a fatherly tenderness; and it is better to yield to the remonstrance and instruction of such a man than be driven with great urgency and made impatient by a creature who never knew what it was to have a heart torn in two and the prospects of his life clouded and smitten.
Some of us have given way to an abuse of divine discipline, and so we get worse and worse. A right acceptance of God's schooling, God's rod, God's judgment, and God's mercy, mingled together, will cause us to become learned in divine wisdom, tender in divine feeling, gentle and charitable in all social judgment; good men whilst we are here, and always waiting, even in the midst of our most diligent service, to be called up into the more fully revealed presence and the still more cloudless light. May all our discipline be to that end! Amen.
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