Jeremiah, Priest and Prophet

Eremiah has always a fascination to Christian hearts, because of the close similarity that exists between his life and that of Jesus Christ. Each of them was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”; each came to his own, and his own received him not; each passed through hours of rejection, desolation, and forsakenness. And in Jeremiah we may see, beaten out into detail, experiences which, in our Lord, are but lightly touched on by the evangelists.

It is by no means an easy task to discern the true order of Jeremiah’s prophecies. The clew to their present arrangement seems lost. Probably the chapters are grouped more according to subject than to chronology, those touching on the same topic being grouped together. In this book I have endeavored, as far as possible, to follow the chronological sequence.

If I had been writing a history of the last days of the monarchy of Judah, these pages would have been much extended; but I have refrained from this, wishing only to tell so much of the general story as was needful to elucidate the part Jeremiah was called to play.

It will more than serve my purpose if I shall be able to make the personality of this great man more familiar to the general Christian public. For some reason there is a great amount of ignorance of the life and times of Jeremiah, which contrasts remarkably with the veneration with which the Jews have always regarded him.. But amid the names that shine as stars in the hemisphere of Old Testament Scripture, there is not one more brilliant than his.

There is an especial message in the ministry of Jeremiah for those who are compelled to stand alone, who fall into the ground to die, who fill up what is behind of the sufferings of Christ, and through death arise to bear fruit in the great world of men, which they passionately love.

«‘ We know — things that we cannot say;
We soar — where we could never map our flight;
We see — flashes and colorings too quick and bright
For any hand to paint. We hear — Strange, far-off mental music, all too sweet,
Too great for any earthly instrument;
Gone, if we strive to bring it near.”
F. R. HAVERGAL,

OF the days of David and Solomon may be compared to spring and summer in the history of the kingdom of Israel, it was late autumn when our story opens. The influence of the spiritual revival under Hezekiah and Isaiah, which had for a brief interval arrested the process of decline, had spent itself; and not even the reforms of the good King Josiah, which affected rather the surface than the heart of the people, could avail to avert inevitable

judgment. The northern tribes were captive on the plains of Mesopotamia, whence, in the dawn of history, their race had sprung. And Judah, unwarned by the fate of her sister Israel, was rapidly pursuing the same path, to be presently involved in a similar catastrophe. King and court, princes and people, prophets and priests, were infected with the abominable vices for committing which the Canaanites had been expelled from the Promised Land centuries before.

- Every high hill had its thick grove of green trees, within whose shadow the idolatrous rites and abominable license of nature-worship were freely practiced. The face of the country was thickly covered with temples erected for the worship of Baal and Astarte, and all the host of heaven, and with lewd idols. In the cities, the black-robed chemarim, the priests of these unhallowed practices, flitted to and fro in strange contrast to the white-stoled priests of Jehovah. The people were taught to consider vice as part of their religion, and to frequent houses dedicated to impurity. All kinds of evil throve unchecked. The poor were plundered, the innocent falsely accused; wicked men lay in wait to catch men; theft and murder, adultery and idolatry, like spores of corruption, filled the fetid air and flourished on the tainted soil (ii. 20, 27, 34; v. 7, 8, 26; ix-:2),

But it was in Jerusalem that these evils came to a head. In the streets of the Holy City the children were taught to gather wood, while the fathers kindled the fire, and the women kneaded dough to make cakes for Astarte, “the queen of heaven,” and to pour out drink-offerings unto other gods. The Temple, with so many sacred associations, was the headquarters of Baal-worship; its courts were desecrated by monstrous images and symbols, and its precincts were the abode of infamous men and women. It seemed as though the king of Sodom had dispossessed Melchizedek in his ancient home. Below the Temple battlements, deep down in the Valley of Hinnom, scenes were constantly witnessed that recalled the darkest cruelties of heathendom. There was the high place of Tophet, which derived its name from the clamor of the drums that drowned the cries of the babes flung into the fires. It was an awful combination. ‘The Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord!” was the cry of. the heartless formalist, while below the sacred shrine such scenes of devilry were rife. Ah me! would that it had been the last time in the world’s history when the profession of true religion had been accompanied by the license of vice and the service of the devil!

In such a Sodom God’s voice must be heard. The Judge of all the earth must warn the ungodly of a certain retribution, only to be averted by swift repentance. The Good Shepherd must seek his wayward sheep. Better believe that there is no God than think that he could be speechless in the presence of sins that frustrated his election and long education of Israel and threatened to terminate its very existence as a people.

Yet if God speak, it must be through the yielded lips of man. For if his voice struck the ear of sinful man directly, it would either paralyze him with dread, or seem indistinct, like the mutterings of thunder. Therefore in every age the Divine Spirit has gone through the world seeking for the prepared lip of elect souls through which to utter himself. He seeks such to-day. Men are still the vehicles of his communications to men. To us, as to Ezekiel, the Divine Spirit says, “Son of man, thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me.”

In the call of Jeremiah we may discover the sort of man whom God chooses as the medium for his speech. And our discovery will greatly startle us. We shall find the heavenly treasure in a simple earthen vessel: not in the metropolis, but in the poor village of Anathoth, three miles to the north; not in an elder, but in a youth; not among the high and noble, but in the family of an undistinguished priest; not in a man mighty as Elijah, eloquent as Isaiah, or seraphic as Ezekiel; but in one who was timid and shrinking, conscious of his helplessness, yearning for a sympathy and love he was never to know. Such was the chosen organ through which the word of the Lord came to that corrupt and degenerate age.

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