Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922. George Adam Smith
“Lie we low in our shame, 25
Our dishonour enshroud us!
“For to our God191 have we sinned,
“[We and our sires from our youth]
[pg 103]
Up to this day!
“Nor have heeded the voice
Of the Lord our God.”
[Israel, if thou wilt return, IV. 1
Return to Me,
And thy loathly things put from thy mouth
Nor stray from My face.192
If in truth thou swear by the life of the Lord, 2
Honest and straight,
Then the nations shall bless them by Him
And in Him shall they glory.]193
3. Thus saith the Lord to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of194 Jerusalem:
Fallow up your fallow-ground,195
And sow not on thorns!
To your God196 circumcise ye, 4
Off from your heart with the foreskin!
[O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem]
Lest My fury break out like fire,
And burn with none to quench!
[Because of the ill of your doings.]
[pg 104]
From his call the Prophet went forth, as we saw, with a heavy sense of the responsibility and the power of the single soul, so far as he himself was concerned; and while we study his ministry we shall find him coming to feel the same for each of his fellow-men. But in these his earliest utterances he follows his predecessors, and especially Hosea, in addressing his people as a whole, and treating Israel as a moral unit from the beginning of her history to the moment of his charge to her. He continues the figures which Hosea had used. Long ago in Egypt God chose Israel for His child, for His bride, and led her through the desert to a fair and fruitful land of her own. Then her love was true. The term used for it, ḥeṣedh, is more than an affection; it is loyalty to a relation. To translate it but kindness or mercy, as is usually done, is wrong—troth is our nearest word.
I remember the troth of thy youth,
Thy love as a bride,
Thy following Me through the desert,
The land unsown.
Upon the unsown land there were no rival gods. But in fertile Canaan the nation encountered innumerable local deities, the Baalîm, husbands of the land, begetters of its fruits and lords of its waters. We conceive how tempting these Baalîm were both to the superstitious [pg 105] prudence of tribes strange to agriculture and anxious to conciliate the traditional powers thereof; and to the people's passions through the sensuous rites and feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time—on the one hand the nation's trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts in the rural life which he is addressing in order to describe it.
The cardinal sin of the people, the source of all their woes is religious,
Is not this being done thee
For thy leaving of Me?
This was so, not only because He was their ancestral God—though such an apostasy was unheard of among the nations—but because He was such a God and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both with grace and with might, while the gods they went after had neither character nor efficiency—mere breaths, mere bubbles!
[pg 106]
The nerve of the faith of the prophets was this memory—that their God was love and in love had wrought for His people. The frequent expression of this by the prophets and by Deuteronomy, the prophetic edition of the Law, is the answer to those abstractions to which some academic moderns have sought to reduce the Object of Israel's religion—such as, “a tendency not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” The God of Israel was Righteous and demanded righteousness from men; but to begin with He was Love which sought their love in return. First the Exodus then Sinai; first Redemption then Law; first Love then Discipline. Through His Deeds and His Word by the prophets He had made all this clear and very plain.
What wrong found your fathers in Me,
That so far they broke from Me?
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say My folk, “We are off,
To meet Thee no more.”
Jeremiah has prefaced this Divine challenge with a passionate exclamation in prose—O Generation—you!—look at the Word of the Lord!—which (as I have said) I like to think was added to his earlier verses when he dictated these to Baruch. Cannot you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by the stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with [pg 107] which his people from their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early innocence and the present corruption of Israel.
A noble vine did I plant thee,
Wholly true seed,
How could'st thou change to a corrupt,
A wildling grape?
The sense of their terrible guilt governs him, and of their indifference to it, saying we are clean, to which he answers:—
Yea though thou scour thee with nitre
And heap to thee lye,
Ingrained is thy guilt before Me—
Rede of the Lord.
Yet the fervency with which he pleads the Divine Love reveals a heart of hunger, if hardly of hope, for his nation's repentance. Indeed apart from his own love for them he could not have followed Hosea so closely as he does at this stage of his career, without feeling some possibility of their recovery from even this, their awful worst; and his ear strains for a sign of it. Like Hosea he hears what sounds like the surge of a national repentance197—was it when Judah listened to the [pg 108] pleadings and warnings of the discovered Book of the Law and all the people stood to the Covenant? But he does not say whether he found this sincere or whether it was merely a shallow stir of the feelings. Probably he suspected the latter, for in answer to it he gives not God's gracious acceptance, but a stern call to a deeper repentance and to a thorough trenching of their hearts.
Fallow up the fallow-ground,
Sow not on thorns!
To your God198 circumcise ye,
Off from your heart with the foreskin!
Lest My wrath break out like the fire,
And burn with none to quench.199
Jeremiah has been called the blackest of pessimists, and among his best-known sayings some seem to justify the charge:—
Can the Ethiop change his skin,
Or the leopard his spots?
Then also may ye do good,
Who are wont to do evil.200
And again,
False above all is the heart,
And