Jeremiah 32:42
For this is what the LORD says: Just as I have brought all this great disaster on this people, so I will bring on them all the good I have promised them.
Sermons
Evil the Measure of GoodD. Young Jeremiah 32:42
The Ratio of Sorrow and JoyS. Conway Jeremiah 32:42
The Religion, of the PromiseW. R. Huntington, D. D.Jeremiah 32:42
A Story of God's Sustaining GraceS. Conway Jeremiah 32:1-44














I. THERE IS SUCH RATIO. Sorrow and joy are not flung down at haphazard into this world at the caprice of the Ruler of all, and irrespective one of the other, only that for the mass of men the sorrow is far greater and more pervading than the joy. But the relations between these two it is the glory of Scripture and of the gospel especially to reveal.

II. SCRIPTURE TEACHES IT. Here in this verse; cf. also Psalm 90., "Make us glad according to the days," etc.; Job 2:10, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not also receive evil?" parable of Dives and Lazarus: "Thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented" (Luke 16.).

III. NATURE ILLUSTRATES IT. It is said that on the Scotch lakes the depth of the lake is almost always the same as the height of the surrounding hills. And is it not the same with the great depths of ocean and the lofty mountains of the world? They have long, long winter in the Northern climes, but when the light does come back, the day so stretches out that you can read by the light of the midnight sun. And if we look into the faces of men, those indices of the soul within, it will be found that the looks of sorrow and of joy are about equally distributed. God is not a partial, unjust Father, petting one and neglecting others of his children. Sometimes we think so, but a larger survey will lead to truer thought.

IV. IT IS A TRUTH FULL OF COMFORT. For it teaches:

1. That if sorrow be sent, joy is not far off. "If I had been a little child among the Israelites, I think I should have known, when father set the bitter herbs upon the table, that the lamb was roasting somewhere, and would be set out too - 'With bitter herbs shall ye eat it' - and so if there be bitter herbs, the dainty dish is near" (Spurgeon).

2. That the two come from the same hand. If there be a designed proportion then, not two independent minds are at work, but one only; ratio and proportion ever argue unity of mind. There is not an evil god who hurls sorrow upon men, and another a gracious God who sends only joy. That was the old Manichaean heresy, which is not dead yet. But the truth is that there is a likeness, a proportion between the good which God sends upon his people and the evil he has brought upon them. From one hand both come. But -

V. THE RATIO IS NOT EQUAL FOR THE CHILD OF GOD. "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." The proportion of the evil we suffer to the good we shall enjoy is not that of equals, but that of the very little to the infinitely great.

VI. THE RELATIONSHIP ALSO IS THAT OF MOTHER AND CHILD. Sorrow is the mother of joy. Cf. our Lord's own metaphor: "A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." Cf, also above: "Our light affliction... worketh for us," etc., so that joy is begotten of sorrow.

VII. BUT THIS CAN ONLY BE FOR THE CHILD OF GOD. Therefore -

"Help, Lord, that we may come
To thy saints' happy home,
Where a thousand years
As one day appears
;

Nor go
Where one day appears
As a thousand years
For wee!" C.

All the good that I have promised.
(with Numbers 10:29): — Obeying a true instinct, the Church of Christ has from the beginning understood the whole story of the transfer of the chosen people from the land of bondage to the land of promise as possessing, over and above its historical value, the preciousness of a divinely-planned allegory. For us, to-day, just as really as for them in days of old, the stimulus continues to be simply this — a promise. Heaven cannot be demonstrated. We merely take God's Word for it. Not enough, in our times, is said — soberly and intelligently said, I mean — about heaven. Very "many people have the feeling that the old-fashioned heaven of their childhood's thoughts and hopes has been explained away by the progress ex discovery. It seems to them as if heaven were pushed farther and farther off, just in proportion as the telescope penetrates farther and farther into space. The gates of pearl recede with the enlargement of the object-glass, and the search for tee Paradise of God, like that for the earthly Eden, seems to become more hopeless, the more accurate our knowledge of the map. The primitive Christians found it comparatively easy to think of heaven as a place just above the stars. To us, who have learned to think of the sun itself as but a star seen near at hand, and of the stars as suns, such localisation of the dwelling-place of the Most Highest is far from easy. Another, and a very different reason for keeping heaven, as it were, in the background, holding the mention of it in reserve, comes from those who believe that there is such a danger as that of cheapening and vulgarising sacred things by too much fluency in talking about them. It cannot be denied that there is a certain amount of reason for this fastidiousness, some strength in this protest. An indulgent rhetoric may throw open the gates with a freedom so careless as to make us wonder why there should be any gates at all; and lips to which the common prose speech of the real heaven would perhaps come hard, were they compelled to try it, can sing of "Jerusalem the Golden," and of the Paradise for which "tis weary waiting here" with a glibness at which possibly the angels stand aghast. This is a second reason, a very different reason from the first, but still a reason, for observing reticence about heaven. And yet, m the face of both of these reasons, I think it is a sad pity, our hearing so little as we do about the hope of heaven as a motive power in human life. For after all that has been said, or can be said, these two facts remain indisputable; they stare us in the face: first, that this life of ours, however we may account for it, does bear a certain resemblance to a journey, in that the one is a movement through time, as the other is a movement through space; secondly, that any journey which lacks a destination is, and must of necessity be a dismal thing. Human nature being what it is, we need the attractive power of something to look forward to, as we say, to keep our strength and courage up to the living standard. Christians are men with a hope, men who have been called to inherit a blessing. Nor is the Old Testament lacking in this element of promise. It runs through the whole Bible. What book anywhere can you point to so forward-looking as that Book? As we watch the worthies of many generations pass in long procession onwards, from the day when the promise was first given of the One who should come and bruise the serpent's head, down to the day when the aged Simeon in the Temple took the Child Jesus into his arms and blessed Him, we seem to see upon every forehead a glow of light. These men have a hope. They are looking for something, and they look as those look who expect in due time to find. If this be true of the general tone of the Old Testament Scriptures, doubly, trebly is it true of the New Testament. The coming of Christ has only quickened and made more intense in us that instinct of hope which the old prophecies of His coming first inspired. For when He came, He brought in larger hopes, and opened to us far-reaching vistas of promise, such as had never been dreamed of before. A solemn joy pervades the atmosphere in which apostle and evangelist move before our eyes. They are as men who, in the face of the wreck of earthly hopes, have yet no inclination to tears, because there has been opened to them a vision of things unseen, and granted to them a foretaste of the peace eternal. "The glory that shall be revealed"; "the things eye hath not seen," prepared for those who love God; "the house not made with hands," waiting for occupancy; "the crown of righteousness, laid up" — you remember how prominent a place these hold in the persuasive oratory of St. Paul. The complaint that the progress of human knowledge has made it difficult to think and speak of heaven as believing men used to think and speak of it, is a complaint to which we ought to return for a few moments; for, from our leaving it as we did, the impression may have been conveyed to some minds that the difficulty is insuperable. Let me observe, then, that while there is a certain grain of reasonableness in this argument for silence with respect to heaven and the things of heaven, there is by no means so much weight to be attached to it as many people seem to suppose. For after all, when we come to think of it, this changed conception of what heaven may be like is not traceable so much to any marvellous revolution that has come over the whole character of human thought since you and I were children, as it is to the changes which have taken place in our own several minds, and which necessarily take place in every mind in its progress from infancy to maturity. The really serious blow at old-time notions upon the subject was dealt long before any of us were born, when the truth was established beyond serious doubts that this planet is not the centre about which all else in the universe revolves. But the explanation of our personal sense of grievance at being robbed of the heaven we were used to believe in is to be sought in the familiar saying, "When I was a child, I spake as a child," &c. We instinctively, and without knowing it, project this childish way of looking at things upon the whole thinking world that was contemporary with our childhood, and infer from the change that has come over our own mind that corresponding change has been going on in the mind of the world at large. This fallacy is the more easily fallen into, because it is a fact that, if we go back far enough in the history of thought, we do find even the mature minds seeing things much as we ourselves saw them in our early childhood. But let me try to strike closer home and meet the difficulty in a more direct and helpful way. I do it by asking whether we ought not to feel ashamed of ourselves, thus to talk about having been robbed of the promise simply because the Father of heaven has been showing us, lust as fast as our poor minds could bear the strain, to how immeasurable an area the Fatherhood extends. Instead of repining because we cannot dwarf God's universe so as to make it fit perfectly the smallness of our notions, let us turn all our energies to seeking to enlarge the capacity of our faith so that it shall be able to hold more. What all this means is, that we are to believe better things of God, not worse things. It may turn out, — who can tell? — that heaven lies nearer to us than even in our childhood we ever ventured to suppose; that it is not only nearer than the sky, but nearer than the clouds. The reality of heaven, happily, is not dependent on the ability of our five senses to discover its whereabouts. Doubtless a sixth or seventh sense might speedily reveal much, very much of which the five we now have take no notice. Be this as it may, the reasonableness of our believing in Christ's promise, that in the world whither He went He would prepare a place for us, is in nowise impugned by anything that the busy wit of man has yet found out, or is likely to find out. There is no period of life from which we can afford to spare the presence of this heavenly hope. We need it in youth, to give point and purpose and direction to the newly launched life. We need it in middle life to help us cover patiently that long stretch which parts youth from old age — the time of the fading out of illusions in the dry light of experience; the time when we discover the extent of our personal range, and the narrow limit of our possible achievement. Above all shall we find such a hope the staff of old age, should the pilgrimage last so long. But let us not imagine that we can postpone believing until then. Faith is a habit of the soul, and old men would be the first to warn us against the notion that it is a habit that may be acquired in a day. Those of us who are wise will take up the matter now, at whatever point of age the word may happen to have found us.

(W. R. Huntington, D. D.).

People
Adam, Anathoth, Babylonians, Baruch, Ben, Benjamin, Hanameel, Jeremiah, Maaseiah, Molech, Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadrezzar, Neriah, Shallum, Zedekiah
Places
Anathoth, Babylon, Egypt, Horse Gate, Jerusalem, Negeb, Shephelah, Valley of Hinnom
Topics
Bring, Bringing, Calamity, Disaster, Evil, Promise, Promised, Promising, Prosperity, Says, Speaking, Spoken, Thus
Outline
1. Jeremiah, being imprisoned by Zedekiah for his prophecy,
6. buys Hanameel's field.
13. Baruch must preserve the evidences, as tokens of the people's return.
16. Jeremiah in his prayer complains to God.
26. God confirms the captivity for their sins;
36. and promises a gracious return.

Dictionary of Bible Themes
Jeremiah 32:41

     1070   God, joy of
     5013   heart, divine
     5830   delight
     5844   emotions

Jeremiah 32:36-41

     8442   good works

Jeremiah 32:40-41

     6667   grace, in OT
     8334   reverence, and God's nature

Library
October 27. "Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all Flesh; is There Anything Too Hard for Me?" (Jer. xxxii. 27. )
"Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is there anything too hard for Me?" (Jer. xxxii. 27.) Cyrus, the King, was compelled to fulfil the vision of Jeremiah, by making a decree, the instant the prophecy had foretold, declaring that Jehovah had bidden him rebuild Jerusalem and invite her captives to return to their native home. So Jeremiah's faith was vindicated and Jehovah's prophecy gloriously fulfilled, as faith ever will be honored. Oh, for the faith, that in the dark present and the darker
Rev. A. B. Simpson—Days of Heaven Upon Earth

Perseverance in Holiness
May the King himself come near and feast his saints to-day! May the Comforter who convinced of sin now come to cheer us with the promise! We noticed concerning the fig tree, that it was confirmed in its barrenness: it had borne no fruit, though it made large professions of doing so, and it was made to abide as it was. Let us consider another form of confirmation: not the curse of continuance in the rooted habit of evil; but the blessing of perseverance in a settled way of grace. May the Lord show
Charles Haddon Spurgeon—Spurgeon's Sermons Volume 35: 1889

The Everlasting Covenant of the Spirit
"They shall be My people, and l will be their God. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me."--JER. xxxii. 38, 40. "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye
Andrew Murray—The Two Covenants

Why all Things Work for Good
1. The grand reason why all things work for good, is the near and dear interest which God has in His people. The Lord has made a covenant with them. "They shall be my people, and I will be their God" (Jer. xxxii. 38). By virtue of this compact, all things do, and must work, for good to them. "I am God, even thy God" (Psalm l. 7). This word, Thy God,' is the sweetest word in the Bible, it implies the best relations; and it is impossible there should be these relations between God and His people, and
Thomas Watson—A Divine Cordial

Discourse on Spiritual Food and True Discipleship. Peter's Confession.
(at the Synagogue in Capernaum.) ^D John VI. 22-71. ^d 22 On the morrow [the morrow after Jesus fed the five thousand] the multitude that stood on the other side of the sea [on the east side, opposite Capernaum] saw that there was no other boat there, save one, and that Jesus went not with his disciples into the boat, but that his disciples went away alone 23 (howbeit there came boats from Tiberias nigh unto the place where they ate the bread after that the Lord had given thanks): 24 when the multitude
J. W. McGarvey—The Four-Fold Gospel

Fifteenth Day for Schools and Colleges
WHAT TO PRAY.--For Schools and Colleges "As for Me, this is My covenant with them, saith the Lord: My Spirit that is upon thee, and My words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the LoThe future of the Church and the world depends, to an extent we little conceive, on the education of the day. The Church may be seeking to evangelise the heathen, and be giving up her own children to secular
Andrew Murray—The Ministry of Intercession

The End
'1. And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he, and all his host, against Jerusalem, and pitched against it; and they built forts against it round about. 2. And the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king Zedekiah. 3. And on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine prevailed in the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land. 4. And the city was broken up, and all the
Alexander Maclaren—Expositions of Holy Scripture

Entering the Covenant: with all the Heart
"And they entered into the covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart, and all their soul."--2 CHRON. xv. 12 (see xxxiv. 31, and 2 Kings xxiii. 3). "The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul."--DEUT. xxx. 6. "And I will give them an heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God: for they shall turn to Me with their whole heart."--JER. xxiv. 7 (see xxix. 13).
Andrew Murray—The Two Covenants

Sanctification.
I. I will remind you of some points that have been settled in this course of study. 1. The true intent and meaning of the law of God has been, as I trust, ascertained in the lectures on moral government. Let this point if need be, be examined by reference to those lectures. 2. We have also seen, in those lectures, what is not, and what is implied in entire obedience to the moral law. 3. In those lectures, and also in the lectures on justification and repentance, it has been shown that nothing is
Charles Grandison Finney—Systematic Theology

Concerning Peaceableness
Blessed are the peacemakers. Matthew 5:9 This is the seventh step of the golden ladder which leads to blessedness. The name of peace is sweet, and the work of peace is a blessed work. Blessed are the peacemakers'. Observe the connection. The Scripture links these two together, pureness of heart and peaceableness of spirit. The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable' (James 3:17). Follow peace and holiness' (Hebrews 12:14). And here Christ joins them together pure in heart, and peacemakers',
Thomas Watson—The Beatitudes: An Exposition of Matthew 5:1-12

Perseverance
'Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.' I Pet 1:1. The fifth and last fruit of sanctification, is perseverance in grace. The heavenly inheritance is kept for the saints, and they are kept to the inheritance. I Pet 1:1. The apostle asserts a saint's stability and permanence in grace. The saint's perseverance is much opposed by Papists and Arminians; but it is not the less true because it is opposed. A Christian's main comfort depends upon this doctrine of perseverance. Take
Thomas Watson—A Body of Divinity

Jeremiah
The interest of the book of Jeremiah is unique. On the one hand, it is our most reliable and elaborate source for the long period of history which it covers; on the other, it presents us with prophecy in its most intensely human phase, manifesting itself through a strangely attractive personality that was subject to like doubts and passions with ourselves. At his call, in 626 B.C., he was young and inexperienced, i. 6, so that he cannot have been born earlier than 650. The political and religious
John Edgar McFadyen—Introduction to the Old Testament

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