Jeremiah 9:2 Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people… (with Jeremiah 14:8, 9): — In all the fellowship of, the prophets Jeremiah is by far the most unwilling and reluctant. If Isaiah's watchword was "Here am I — send me," Jeremiah's might have been, "I would be anywhere else but here — let me go." It was out of this besetting mood of his that the prayer rose which I have taken as the first of my texts, "Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my people and go from them." That is not a prayer for solitude. It is some wayside caravanserai or hotel which Jeremiah longs for; and there he would have been far less alone than in his unshared home at Jerusalem. No, it is not a prayer for solitude, but a prayer to be set where a man can enjoy all the interest of life without having any of its responsibility. Oh, to have no other work in life than to watch the street from the balcony window, than to feel the interest and glitter of life, and achieve your duty towards your fellows, by a kindliness and a courtesy that are never put to the strain of prolonged acquaintance! But our prayers often outrun themselves in the very utterance; and Jeremiah's wish, too, carried within it its own denial Look at the words, "That I might leave my people." Emphasise the last two — "My people." They are the answer to Jeremiah's prayer. God had not sent him to earth to be as separate from the life of men as a musing man is from the river flowing past his feet; God had sent him, not to watch life from a balcony, but leaping down to share it; not to live in an inn where a man is not even responsible for the housekeeping, but has only his way to pay. God had begotten Jeremiah into a nation. He had made him a citizen. He had given him a patriot's lot, with the patriot's conscience and heart. So he stayed on where he was in Jerusalem, and the world may have lost certain studies in human life in the great caravanserai of the Lebanon or Arabian desert roads, for wherever he went Jeremiah would not have kept his brain and pen idle. We may even have lost a book, something between Job and Ecclesiastes, but we have gained the book of Jeremiah, the book of the citizen-prophet, and who, because he was a citizen-prophet, and not a caravanserai one, was also a citizen-priest, the first man who entered into the true meaning of vicarious suffering, and therefore stands out clear from all the shadows of the Old Testament — so clear a symbol of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Look now at the main elements of Jeremiah's experience as he thus stood to his post of prophet and priest at Jerusalem. I take these elements to be mainly three. 1. The first was the reality of sin. A prophet has got to begin there, or he had better not begin at all. And he has got to begin there not in order to satisfy some dogma or another, but because the facts are there. There is a kind of preaching about sin far too prevalent in our day, which treats of it doctrinally and not practically, which lays its strength to proving to a man that he must be a sinner, instead of touching his conscience with the knowledge that he is one. But Jeremiah laid his finger on the actual plague spots of the people. He was very definite with these. But there was another note which Jeremiah sounded equally with that on the reality of sin. 2. It was the note of the swiftness and irretrievableness of time where character and salvation are concerned. Live with men in the city, grow old with the same individuals and groups, and learn things — how inexorable habit is; how irrecoverable are the chances of youth; how short and swift is the summer granted to each man's character to ripen in; learn how even the Gospel of the grace of God is just like the sybil of old coming back each time: you have forced him to return with less power of promise and persuasion; and how even repentance — that great freedom of man, that joy of God and the angels — has its times and its places, which, being missed, are not found again, though we seek them with tears. Upon these thoughts the roll of Jeremiah's prophecy rises every now and again with a great sob. What distinguished Jeremiah from all the prophets who had gone before him was that he did not stand on the banks while all Israel rushed rapidly past him irretrievably to ruin, but that he was with the people, taking their reproach as his reproach, and sharing the penalty of their sins. 3. This suffering for the sins of others, being the sin-bearer as well as the conscience of his people, is the third element of Jeremiah's experience. How did he come to it? It is interesting to watch, for in God's providence he was the first forerunner of Christ in this path. Well, first of all he loved his people; he had a very rich, tender heart, and he loved his people with the whole of it. And then God gave him a conscience about them, that conscience of their sin, and of the penalty to which it was leading. It was in the meeting of such a heart and such a conscience that Jeremiah knew how one man can suffer for others. Oh! it is a terrible fate to be the conscience of those you love, to be their only conscience, to feel their sins as you know they do not feel them themselves, and to be aware of the inevitable judgment to which they are so indifferent. Jeremiah often wondered at it. It perplexed him. After clearly stating the causes why God should smite Israel, he would suddenly turn round in his sympathy with the doomed people, and exclaim, like a beaten animal looking up in the face of his master, "Why hast Thou smitten me?" And again, that strange prayer of his, "O Lord, Thou hast deceived me, and I am deceived. Thou art stronger than I." What can we answer to the perplexed prophet except this, that if a man have the Divine gift of a pure conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there comes with such gifts the necessary, the inevitable, obligation of suffering. The physical results of Israel's sin Jeremiah did not bear for the people. He bore these with the people in the most heroic and self-denying patience, but he did not do so for or instead of his people. But the spiritual distress, the keener conscience, the agony of estrangement from God, the knowledge of His wrath upon sin — these Jeremiah did bear instead of the dull impenitent Israel. And is it too much to say that it was for his sake that in the end Israel was saved from utter extinction? Now, with this knowledge of what Jeremiah came through, look at his second prayer. The two chief words are exactly the same as before a "wayfaring man": and "Oh that I were in a lodge of wayfaring men"; and the verb "to spend the night," is the same word as the noun "lodge" or "inn" of wayfaring men — literally a place to pass the night. Jeremiah's second prayer, therefore, is just this, that God would be to the people what Jeremiah himself had tried to be. (Prof. G. A. Smith.) Parallel Verses KJV: Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people, and go from them! for they be all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men. |
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