Jeremiah 50:4-5 In those days, and in that time, said the LORD, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together… "With their faces thitherward," those words seem to me to convey a special message to us, to prescribe to us a certain attitude, to suggest to us what is possible in a day like our own. For there are so many matters in which we find ourselves in captivity. We are forced to acquiesce in evil conditions which long years have left as our inheritance. Ancient ideals have broken up in Church and State, old homes lie waste and desolate, and from them we have wandered far. They are but as lost dreams. God's purpose was once in them, but sin was strong and stubborn, and it was fruitless work for Him to repeat forgivenesses which never availed, and to prolong His mercy. And at last the Word of God was given to let the judgments fall, and things were allowed to take their course. God's earlier purpose was suspended and broken off, and the story of man and the story of Christ's Church takes on a new development; it passes over into strange and troubled situations, and the Divine will sanctions the change, and admits of trouble. God sets to work under the conditions of the exile in captivity. Not that the sacred purpose is abandoned, but that God proposes now to reach its fulfilment by the road of surrender, by the way of captivity, through the discipline of defeat. Just as in the Gospel the blindness of the man who was sightless from his birth, though in itself a curse due to some original sin, was, as it were, cut off by the action of God from its connection with sin, and there accepted as a pitiful fact, and was turned into a new call upon the goodness of God, and became the motive for a fresh exhibition of His compassion, and an exhibition that opened out unsuspected depths of glory in the love of God for sorrowful man, so even the miserable plight of a divided Christendom gives us a deeper insight into the immeasurable patience, tolerance and burden and pity of the Divine heart than we ever could have guessed before our misery evoked it. We might have thought that His wrath would have been so hot against the Church which was divided against itself that He would have abandoned it to its proper penalty. But no, though a father and mother may forsake, though a woman might forsake her sucking child, yet will He never forsake us. He will follow us down wherever we are into our Babylons; He will put to profit disastrous situations. Babylon is but an interval and a discipline. Our Christendom must be again united, a prayer of Christ for its unity is still within it and behind it. That prayer for ever lives as a witness to the mind of God and to the end for which He is ever working. We may never forget it, we may never consider it to be the abandoned ideal. Whatever God works in us during the dismal course is still so done as to lead back the formative purpose which created the Church to be one Godhead. Though we cannot see how it would be possible, and though we can know nothing positive and practical towards its realisation, though we are hedged in by harsh, unyielding circumstances, and though it is our plain duty to learn all that God has to teach us through that harsh circumstance in which He has placed us, yet still the prophet's voice cries to us to remember, even in impossible things, to look in the direction of the unforgotten vision, to turn our faces thitherward. Turn our faces thitherward! We cannot see our Zion; it is far, far away. We cannot hope to distinguish with our eyes the whole Church of earth become again what Christ meant it to be. Alas! we die in exile from our home. We shall lay our bones in Babylon. East and west and north and south we shall see only divided brothers until our eyes close in death. But before we die, the prophet says, we can at least turn those eyes thitherward. Towards the direction in which peace lies we can ever send out hearts of prayer and longings. Not always shall Christian hate Christian, not always shall altar be divided from altar, not for ever shall east, west, and north be sundered from the south. Once again we shall all understand one another's speech, and a new Pentecost will blot out the light of Babel. What it will be like, that recovered unity, we cannot guess; it will be in some form new and strange, as was the recovered life of Israel round the rebuilt Zion. How utterly unlike was unity and the dispersion after the captivity to the earlier unity of the compact kingdom. That walled little kingdom would never come back again, but the larger spiritual union that held the dispersion together round Jerusalem was far more intense and real than was the superficial coherence of the twelve tribes and the one kingdom. We cannot forecast the changed conditions under which the Church will find herself once more at one. But still through faith, in spite of the darkness, we can look out for the dawn of a new day, we can watch the visions for ever shining, we can snatch at all that makes in that way; we can hope and believe against facts, and hope against hope, and never fail to be found praying for the peace of Jerusalem, with our faces at least turned thitherward. With our faces turned thitherward! Is not that the word by which those who held fast, who perhaps for no fault of their own that they could detect, find themselves caught in the wilderness of doubt? Doubt! It has come upon them like an enemy in the night, it has laid siege, it has encompassed them about within and without. As we have each of us so often to feel the pressure of the world's vast sorrows, so we may have the full pressure of the world's doubt, not, indeed, that we can enter into the cloud with a light heart, wilfully and carelessly, merely to follow the fashion. But if the doubt be real, it can only be dealt with by facing it and probing it to the end. It then passes the first stage of depression and anxiety and loss and damage. While the trial continues that must be, it must be miserable to be robbed of your. gladness, to be blind to the vision, to feel far from home, to find no longer joy m going up to the temple of Zion with the multitudes on the holy day, to wander as a lonely shepherd amongst the hills, to have nothing you can follow, no kindly light about your feet. But though this trouble be allowed to fall, you have still one duty, to remember Zion, to ask the way thither, and to turn your face thitherward. Believe me, God has not forgotten or deserted you because He has led you down to Babylon, and given you over to the Chaldees. You will come out of it a far stronger man than you went in, if only you will trust with all the might of your soul that it is He who has led you to suffer this deprivation, that there is no care for the pain that you have but to be faithful to the purpose which for the time denies you the sight of your Jerusalem, and that there is a real effectual will still at work for you and upon you even where God most surely hides it from your eyes, and always you must be saying this is not the end. Death, doubt, cannot be the final stage of the soul, doubt — though it seems so drearily long while it lasts — can only be a period, an interval, for a "time, a time, and half a time." Hold to that, poor blind heart; be not afraid. There shall yet come the day when the Lord will turn again the captivity of Zion; then it will all be like a dream; then will your mouth be filled with laughter, your tongue with joy. (Canon Scott Holland.) Parallel Verses KJV: In those days, and in that time, saith the LORD, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and weeping: they shall go, and seek the LORD their God. |
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