Isaiah 66

66: 1 THUS saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: what manner of house will ye build unto me? and what place shall be my rest? For all these things hath mine hand made, and so all these things came to be, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembleth at my word. He that killeth an ox is as he that slayeth a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as he that breaketh a dog’s neck; he that offereth an oblation, as he that offereth swine’s blood; he that burneth frankincense, as he that blesseth an idol: yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations; I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear; but they did that which was evil in mine eyes, and chose that wherein I delighted not. 5 Hear the word of the LORD, ye that tremble at his word: Your brethren that hate you, that cast you out for my name’s sake, have said, Let the LORD be glorified, that we may see your joy; but they shall be ashamed. A voice of tumult from the city, a voice from the temple, a voice of the LORD that rendereth recompence to his enemies. Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child. Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? shall a nation be brought forth at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the LORD: shall I that cause to bring forth shut the womb? saith thy God. 10 Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all ye that love her: rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn over her: that ye may suck and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations; that ye may milk out, and be delighted with the abundance of her glory. For thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream, and ye shall suck thereof; ye shall be borne upon the side, and shall be dandled upon the knees. As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. And ye shall see it, and your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like the tender grass: and the hand of the LORD shall be known toward his servants, and he will have indignation against his enemies. For, behold, the LORD will come with fire, and his chariots shall be like the whirlwind; to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire will the LORD plead, and by his sword, with all flesh: and the slain of the LORD shall be many. They that sanctify themselves and purify themselves to go unto the gardens, behind one in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse; they shall come to an end together, saith the LORD. For I know their works and their thoughts: the time cometh, that I will gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come, and shall see my glory. And I will set a sign among them, and I will send such as escape of them unto the nations, to Tarshish, Pul and Lud, that draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations. And they shall bring all your brethren out of all the nations for an offering unto the LORD, upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith the LORD, as the children of Israel bring their offering in a clean vessel into the house of the LORD. And of them also will I take for priests and for Levites, saith the LORD. For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, saith the LORD, so shall your seed and your name remain. And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the LORD. And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.

Chap. 66. This chapter winds up the prophetic discourse with an express prediction of the change of dispensations, and a description of the difference between them. Jehovah will no longer dwell in temples made with hands (verse 1). Every sincere and humble heart shall be His residence (verse 2). The ancient sacrifices, though divinely instituted, will henceforth be as hateful as the rites of idolatry (verse 3). They who still cling to the abrogated ritual will be fearfully but righteously requited (verse 4). The true Israel cast out by these deluded sinners shall erelong be glorified, and the carnal Israel fearfully rewarded (verses 5, 6). The ancient Zion may already be seen travailing with a new and glorious dispensation (verses 7-9). They who mourned for her seeming desolation now rejoice in her abundance and her honor (verses 10-14). At the same time the carnal Israel shall be destroyed, as apostates and idolaters (verses 14-17). The place which they once occupied shall now be filled by the elect from all nations (verse 18). To gather these, a remnant of the ancient Israel shall go forth among the Gentiles (verse 19). They shall come from every quarter and by every method of conveyance (verse 20). They shall be admitted to the sacerdotal honors of the chosen people (verse 21). This new dispensation is not to be temporary, like the one before it, but shall last forever (verse 22). While the spiritual Israel is thus replenished from all nations, the apostate Israel shall perish by a lingering decay (verses 23, 24). A.

As to its course of thought, this concluding chapter is remarkably in harmony with the general scope of the later prophecies (chaps. 40-66), and especially so with the portion (chaps. 49-65), all its topics clustering round the transition point from the Mosaic to the Christian dispensation as their natural centre. Here is the temple made with hands, giving place to the spiritual temple—every living Christian’s heart (verses 1, 2); ritual sacrifices no longer required, but henceforth abominable (verse 3); retribution upon men who choose their own ways of worship and of life, and not God’s (verses 3, 4); the believing and humble remnant of the ancient people, scorned and outcast by their brethren, but beloved of God (verse 5); retribution upon their enemies (verse 6). The true Zion, almost without travail pains, gives birth to the Gospel Church and the new glories of Christ’s kingdom (verses 7-9); in which all Zion’s true friends may well rejoice exceedingly, for her consolations in the accession of the Gentiles will be great and enduring (verses 10-14). The Lord’s hand uplifted to bless Zion reveals itself also in judgment on her foes (verses 15-17). Again the prophet recurs to the spread of the Gospel far abroad and to the new constitution of the Gospel kingdom (verses 18-23), but closes (verse 24) with the hopeless doom of God’s persistent enemies. H. C.

1. Thus saith the Lord.** The same weighty preface is used once more, as in 65:8, 13, and still earlier (43:14, 16; 44:6, 24; 45:1, 11, 14; 48:17; 49:7, 8, 22; 50:1; 56:1), to introduce this crown and topstone of the whole. The prophecy began (1:10-15) by denouncing the sin of formal worship, with especial reference to the time of Ahaz. And here a similar warning and reproof is repeated at the very close. Through all the intervening centuries this has been the one grand snare and temptation of the Jewish people. Birks.

The question asks not so much for its locality as for its quality. What house, what temple worthy of My infinite greatness and glory, can ye ever build for Me? The original justifies this sense and the scope of thought in the passage requires it. All critics agree that the language disapproves the work of building a temple for the great God. This is the natural import of the question, and is confirmed by the context in which God first declares that instead of dwelling any more in earthly temples, He dwells with the humble, contrite heart (verse 2), and in which (verse 3) He expresses His abhorrence henceforth of animal sacrifices, without which there would be no earthly temple. It is remarkable that the prophetic eye, resting upon the covenant people at the era of Messiah’s advent and earthly life, saw them rebuilding His earthly temple. It was the great religious enterprise of that age. At the date when our Lord entered upon His public ministry, it had been forty-six years in building (John 2:19, 20). H. C.

It may be asked why this truth did not forbid the erection of the Temple at first, as well as its gorgeous reconstruction in the time of Christ. The answer is, that it was necessary for a temporary purpose, but when this temporary purpose was accomplished it became not only useless, but unlawful. Henceforth the worship was to be a spiritual worship, the Church universally diffused, and the material sanctuary no longer an earthly residence for God, but a convenient place of meeting for His people. A.

2. Understanding by “all those things” the heavens and the earth—i.e., the created universe, the Lord in this verse declares, My hand made them all, and so, consequently, they came into being. They all owe their existence wholly and exclusively to My creative hand. In the sublime language of the Psalmist, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. For He spake, and it was; He commanded, and it stood fast” (Ps. 33 : 6, 9). Yet though I have built this beautiful earth, and those more grandly magnificent heavens, and though no earthly temple, however vast in its proportions and however gorgeous in its adornments, is worthy to be My abode; yet to this man will I look with special regard, even to him who is truly humble, contrite of heart for sin, solicitous to know My word and do My will. H. C.

3. Each ceremonial sacrifice is here identified with some kindred act, most impure and hateful under the Levitical law. (Cf. Ex. 13 : 13.) The sin of their formalism is shown to be increased by the eager zeal with which they pursued these self-righteous and unprofitable services. Birks.

The text discloses the general doctrine that sacrifice is hateful in the sight of God if offered in a wicked spirit, but with a special reference to those who still adhered to the old sacrifices after the great sacrifice for sin was come and had been offered once for all. Thus understood this verse extends to sacrifices that which the foregoing verses said of the Temple, after the change of dispensations. A.—The form of statement strongly implies the utter discontinuance of the entire sacrificial system. It goes down together with the material temple, both having done their work; each having its inherent liabilities to evil; each therefore is promptly set aside when in the fulness of time the world was ripe for the better dispensation.

4. Their persistent adherence to the Mosaic ritual and their scornful rejection of a spiritual (not carnal) Messiah and of His Gospel, had not been done ignorantly, and without ample light as to God’s will, for through long ages God had called them by His prophets and they would not hear. H. C.—God will make their sin their punishment; they shall be hurried into ruin by their own delusions. God will “bring their fears upon them,” will bring upon them that which shall be a terror to them, that which they themselves have been afraid of, and thought to escape by sinful shifts. Unbelieving hearts and unpurified, unpacified consciences need no more to make them miserable than to have “their own fears brought” upon them. H.

5. Last clause, read “but it is they that shall be put to shame.” Am. Com.

These wicked Jews appear now as persecutors of the few out of their nation who had espoused the name of Christ. The latter are adaddressed, “Ye that reverence God’s word; your brethren [of the Jews] who have hated you” (the New Testament shows how bitterly) “and have cast you out” (of their synagogues and communion) “for My name’s sake, have said” (as men who assume to be very religious and to have God on their side in these malignant persecutions); “God will be glorified.” They claimed to think that in persecuting the followers of Christ they were doing God service and promoting His glory. This description of the bigoted, persecuting Jews of the early Christian age is wonderfully true to history.

6. The meaning here is that God is heard going forth from His city and Temple to visit fearful retribution on the guilty Jews, His enemies. It can scarcely be doubted that the passage refers specially to the Roman armies, sent of God in His providence to destroy the doomed city and people. H. C.

7-9. A figure for the whole eventful crisis of the change of dispensations, and the consequent change in the condition of the Church. This indestructible ideal person, when she might have seemed to be reduced to nothing by the defection of the natural Israel, is vastly and suddenly augmented by the introduction of the Gentiles, a succession of events which is here most appropriately represented as the birth of a male child without the pains of childbirth. A.—This passage corresponds substantially in thought with chap. 49 : 18-23, saying that Zion there is assumed to be the joyful mother of countless hosts of Gentile children; while here, the whole ingathering of the Gospel age, the entire results of preaching the Gospel to the wide world, are thought of collectively as one male child. Hath the like been ever heard of before—a nation born with one birth-pang? for ere Zion had travailed, she brought forth her children! Yet this is only what should be expected from the glorious God! Would He not most assuredly finish what He had begun, and carry through to a full and sublime success what His own wisdom and love had planned and predicted?

10,11. Jerusalem is now a happy mother rejoicing that a son is born to her, a birth which really means a nation (verse 8), a new and world including Zion.

12. Her peace in the sense of spiritual prosperity shall be with the deep and mighty flow of a great river, this Hebrew word being used for the largest class of rivers. The “flowing stream” should rather be overflowing; one which in its freshets breaks over all its banks. The conversion and ingathering of the Gentiles will be on no stinted scale, but with mighty sweep and magnificent results. The incoming Gentiles seem here to be incorporated into the Zion family and welcomed to this prolific and rejoicing mother of nations.

13. The Hebrew reads, “As a man” (nor merely as “one”) “whom His mother comforteth;” as if the Divine speaker would honor the idea of a mother comforting her son even in his mature years, and of a son enjoying such comfort none the less for his years of manhood. H. C.—The in Jerusalem suggests the only means by which these blessings are to be secured—viz., a union of affection and of interest with the Israel of God, to whom alone they are promised. A.

“As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” What a depth is there in that love which God chooses as an image of His own! and yet the love of a mother’s heart is but a drop from that illimitable ocean into which our sins, though great as mountains, once cast are lost forever—buried out of sight. I believe that His love as far exceeds a mother’s, when it is deepest and strongest, as does the strength of His almighty arm that of the infant which hangs helpless on her breast. Guthrie.

“As one whom his mother comforteth, so the Lord comforteth His people.” It is in the dark and boisterous night of sorrow or apprehension that the Saviour reveals Himself nigh. And one of the first things He does is to explain the subject-matter of the grief—to show its real nature and amount. “It is but a light affliction. It lasts but for a moment. It is a false alarm. It is only the rain-drift on the window—wait till the day dawns and shadows flee away. Wait till morning, and you will see the whole extent of it.” And then the next thing that He does is to teach some useful lesson. And during those quiet hours, when the heart is soft, the Saviour’s lessons sink deep. And last of all, besides consolation under the trial and peaceful fruits that follow it, by this comforting visit, the Saviour unspeakably endears Himself to that soul. Paul and Silas never knew Christ so well, nor loved Him so much, as after that night which He and they passed together in the Macedonian prison. And the souls on which the Lord Jesus has taken the deepest hold are those whose great tribulations have thrown them most frequently and most entirely into His own society. Hamilton.

We should never see the glorious Divine promises nor realize the precious joys and hopes of Christian faith if the shadow of sorrow never deepened about us. The child never fully understands the sweetness and gentleness of the mother’s love until the child is sick or suffering; and we can never experience the blessedness of being drawn close to God’s heart and comforted by Him, “as one whom his mother comforteth,” if we do not have pain or grief. So it is a blessed thing to mourn, just to have God comfort us. H. C. T.

14. The last half of the verse puts in vivid contrast the revelations of God’s power for salvation to His friends and destruction upon His enemies. “The hand of the Lord made known” for good is a revelation of His power to save. The last clause should be translated, “But He is indignant toward His enemies,” the original word being a verb and not a noun. At this point the discourse turns to speak of God’s indignation against the wicked and its fruits in righteous retribution. H. C.

15-24. These verses, like the pillar of cloud and fire, have a dark side toward the enemies of God’s kingdom and all that are rebels against His crown and a bright side toward His faithful loyal subjects. H.

15. The whole verse represents Jehovah, considered in relation to His enemies, as a consuming fire (De. 4:24; Heb. 12:29; cf. 2 Thess. 1:8).

16. A clue to the primary application of the verse is afforded by our Saviour’s words in Matt. 24:22, where in speaking of the speedy destruction of Jerusalem He says that excepting the elect no flesh should be saved—i.e., no portion of the Jewish race but those who were ordained to everlasting life through faith in Him. This application of Isaiah’s prophecy agrees exactly with the view already taken of the whole preceding context as relating to that great decisive crisis in the history of the Church and of the world, the dissolution of the old economy and the inauguration of the new. According to this view of the passage, what is here said of fire, sword and slaughter was fulfilled not only as a figurative prophecy of general destruction, but in its strictest sense in the terrific carnage which attended the extinction of the Jewish state, and of which, more emphatically than of any other event outwardly resembling it, it might be said that many were the slain of Jehovah. A.

17. The class primarily described here must be identical with those who appear in chap. 65:3, 4—i.e., the unbelieving, apostate Jews, whose wickedness is described in terms borrowed from the odious idol worship of the prophet’s own time. It will be noticed that these descriptions have in common the following leading points—viz., the sacrificing in gardens; the eating of swine’s flesh and of things abominable. H. C.

18. As we have seen that the crimes described in the foregoing verses are not those of the heathen, but of the apostate Jews, whose deeds and thoughts must therefore be intended in the first clause, the explanation most in harmony with this immediate context, as well as with the whole drift of the prophecy thus far, is that which makes the verse before us a distinct prediction of the calling of the Gentiles, both to witness the infliction of God’s vengeance on the Jews, and to supply their places in His Church or chosen people. It is perhaps to the language of this prophecy that Christ Himself alludes in Matt. 24 : 31. (Cf. also John 5 : 25.)

19. The whole may be paraphrased as follows: Such being their character, I will cast them off and gather the nations to take their place; for which end I will send forth the survivors of the nation, the elect for whose sake these days shall be shortened when all besides them perish, to declare My glory in the regions where My name has never yet been heard. Thus understood, the passage is exactly descriptive of the preaching of the Gospel at the beginning of the new dispensation. All the first preachers were escaped Jews, plucked as brands from the burning, saved from that perverse generation (Acts 2 : 40). The sign will then denote the whole miraculous display of Divine power, in bringing the old dispensation to a close and introducing the new, including the destruction of the unbelieving Jews on the one hand, and on the other all those signs and wonders and divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost (Heb. 2 : 4), which Paul calls the signs of an apostle (2 Cor. 12 : 12), and which Christ Himself had promised should follow them that believed (Mark 16 : 17). All these were signs placed among them—i.e., among the Jews, to the greater condemnation of the unbelievers, and to the salvation of such as should be saved. A.

This verse stands distinguished among Hebrew prophecies in that it drops or rather oversteps the usual restraints of the Jewish costume, and speaks of Christian missionary labors in New Testament and Gospel terms. Christ’s servants really “go abroad into all the world to preach the Gospel to every creature!” The nations designated here are named as specimens, and signify the actual extent to which the Gospel should be preached. Tarshish carries the mind to Southwestern Europe; Pul and Lud to Africa, where Lud is manifestly located by Jeremiah (46 : 9); Tubal to Northern Asia (Ezek. 27 : 13; 32 : 26; 38 : 2, 3 and 39 : 1). Javan is the Hebrew word for Greece. The “isles afar off”—all the distant countries beyond sea. In general, all those who had never before “heard My fame;” a term which probably means here, as in chap. 53 : 1, the Gospel message, even as “My glory” refers specially to the manifestations of Divine mercy in the Gospel of salvation. H. C.

20. The survivors sent forth to the nations are described as bringing back the converts to the true religion as an offering to Jehovah. Their return for this purpose is described as easy, swift and even splendid, all the choicest methods of conveyance used in ancient times being here combined to express that idea. A.

The ingathering of Gentile converts is put here naturally in Jewish costume. Under that ancient system, proselytes must needs come up to Jerusalem to worship, and indeed must come there to espouse the name of Jehovah and be formally inducted into the Jewish Church. This prophecy pertains to the Christian age. A prophet, writing for the people of his own times, must use terms intelligible to them. The spirit of this prophecy authorizes us to substitute for horses and dromedaries rail-cars and steamships, and also to assume that the transportation will be outward rather than inward; missionaries going forth into all the world, and not the nations themselves coming in to some great central Jerusalem. H. C.

21. The most natural interpretation seems to be as follows: The mass of the Jewish people was to be cast off from all connection with the Church; but the elect who should escape were to be sent among the nations and to bring them for an offering to Jehovah, as the priests and Levites offered the oblation at Jerusalem. But this agency was not to be confined to the Jews who were first entrusted with it; not only of them, but also of the Gentiles themselves, priest and Levites should be chosen to offer this oblation—i.e., to complete the vocation of the Gentiles. Should the context be supposed to require a still more general meaning, it may be that the sacerdotal mediation of the ancient Israel between Jehovah and the other nations, which was symbolized by the Levitical and Aaronic priesthood, was to cease with the necessity that brought it into being, and to leave the Divine presence as accessible to one race as another. A.

22. For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I am making (or about to make), are standing (or about to stand) before me, saith Jehovah, so shall stand your name and your seed. The promise is addressed to Israel as a church, from which the natural descendants of Jacob for the most part have been cut off, and the object of this verse is to assure the Church that notwithstanding this excision it should still continue to exist, not only as a church, but as the Church, the identical body which was clothed in the forms of the old dispensation and which still survives when they are worn out and rejected. The grand error incident to a change of dispensations was the very one which has perverted and obscured the meaning of these prophecies, the error of confounding the two Israels whom Paul so carefully distinguishes, and of supposing that the promises given to the Church when externally identified with one race are continued to that race even after their excision from the Church. It was to counteract this very error that the verse before us was recorded, in which God’s people, comprehending a remnant of the natural Israel and a vast accession from the Gentiles, are assured that God regards them as His own chosen people, not a new one, but the same that was of old, and that the very object of the great revolution here and elsewhere represented as a new creation was to secure their perpetuity and constant recognition as His people. Since then He creates new heavens and a new earth for this very purpose, that purpose cannot be defeated while these heavens and that earth endure. A.—These “new heavens and earth” can be no other than those which are described more fully (chap. 65: 17-25)—i.e., the new religious constitution; the Christian, Messianic age. As this is to be permanent, so shall Christians themselves as a race, a “seed,” a constant succession of fathers and sons, generation after generation, remain before God. H. C.

23. The new moons and the Sabbaths are mentioned, because, under the law, though the yearly feasts were to be celebrated at Jerusalem, yet the new moons and the Sabbaths were religiously observed all the country over in the “schools of the prophets” first, and afterward “in the synagogues” (2 K. 4: 23; Amos 8: 5; Acts 15: 21), according to the model of which Christian assemblies seem to be performed. Where the Lord’s day is weekly sanctified, and the Lord’s supper monthly celebrated, and both duly attended on, there this promise is fulfilled, there the Christian new moons and Sabbaths are observed. See here, that God is to be worshipped in solemn assemblies, that it is the duty of all, as they have opportunity, to wait upon God in those assemblies. H.

And from one Sabbath to another. There can be no permanent worship of God and no permanent religion on earth without a Sabbath; and hence it was, that while the observance of the feasts of tabernacles, and of the passover, and of the new moons made a part of the Hebrew ritual—enjoined by the ceremonial law—the law respecting the Sabbaths was incorporated with the Ten Commandments as of moral and perpetual obligation; and it will be literally true that all the race shall yet be brought to worship God on the return of that holy day. It was instituted in Paradise; and as one design of the plan of redemption is to bring man back to the state in which he was in Paradise, so one effect of the true religion everywhere will be and is, to make men reverence the Sabbath of the Lord. Every successful effort to propagate the true religion is a successful effort to extend the practice of observing that holy day; and just as certain as it is that Christianity will be spread around the world, so certain will it be that the holy Sabbath will be observed in all lands. Barnes.

23,24. The whole prophecy closes with a solemn contrast between the blessings to the righteous and the shame and misery of the rebellious and profane. Earth, redeemed from the curse, will become the scene of holy and perpetual worship. The destruction of the sinners, that solemn contrast in a scene where righteousness and peace are to prevail, shall only deepen in upon “all flesh” the impression of God’s holiness and majesty. In some mysterious way the sentence on the profane shall be visible to the Jews and Gentiles who have been spared, the blissful and holy inhabitants of “the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

The words of this last verse are borrowed by our Lord to announce the irreversible doom of the unfaithful. Birks.

24. “Going forth” is going out from the city of Jerusalem to gain a full and nearer view of the great valley of Hinnom, where the slain of the Lord that were “many” (verse 16) were piled in mountain masses, the worms feeding on their carcasses and the fires perpetually burning, yet never utterly consuming them. They are objects of abhorrence to all flesh, impressing a wholesome fear (so the word implies) of the life they lived as leading to and ending in such a death, and a wholesome horror of their sins as richly deserving a doom so fearful. It cannot be doubted that this verse alludes to Tophet as described in this prophet (chap. 30: 33) and yet more fully (Jer. 7: 30-34 and 19 : 6-15). To these views of Tophet, the valley of Hinnom, our Lord alludes (Mark 9 : 44, 46, 48), drawing from it the very terms in which He describes the scenes of the future punishment of the wicked. So it comes to pass naturally and legitimately that the judgments of God on guilty nations in the present world furnish not only the great principles which underlie all punishment of the wicked, but also the very terms which designate their place of torment, and the illustrations which represent the horrors of their doom. H. C.

The grand theme of these prophecies, as we have seen, is the relation of God’s people to Himself and to the world, and in the latter stages of its history, to that race with which it was once outwardly identical. The great catastrophe with which the vision closes is the change of dispensations, comprehending the final abolition of the ceremonial law and its concomitants, the introduction of a spiritual worship and the consequent diffusion of the Church, its vast enlargement by the introduction of all Gentile converts to complete equality of privilege and honor with the believing Jews, and the excision of the unbelieving Jews from all connection with the Church or chosen people, which they once imagined to have no existence independent of themselves. The contrast between these two bodies, the rejected Jews and their believing brethren forming one great mass with the believing Gentiles, is continued to the end, and presented for the last time in these two concluding verses, where the whole is condensed into a single vivid spectacle, of which the central figure is Jerusalem and its walls the dividing line between the two contrasted objects. Within is the true Israel, without the false. Within, a great congregation, even “all flesh,” come from the east and the west, and the north and the south, while the natural children of the kingdom are cast out (Matt. 8 : 12). The end of the former is left to be imagined or inferred from other prophecies, but that of the latter is described or suggested in a way more terrible than all description. In the valley of the son of Hinnom, under the very brow of Zion and Moriah, where the children were once sacrificed to Moloch, and where purifying fires were afterward kept ever burning, the apostate Israel is finally exhibited, no longer living, but committed to the flames of Tophet. To render our conception more intense the worm is added to the flame, and both are represented as undying. That the contrast hitherto maintained may not be forgotten even in this closing scene, the men within the walls may be seen by the light of those funereal fires coming forth and gazing at the ghastly scene, not with delight, as some interpreters pretend, but, as the text expressly says, with horror. Thus the verse becomes descriptive of the final doom of the ungodly, without any deviation from its proper sense, or any supposition of a mere allusion or accommodation in the use of the same figures by our Lord Himself in reference to future torments. All that is requisite to reconcile and even to identify the two descriptions is the consideration that the state of ruin here described is final and continuous, however it may be divided, in the case of individuals, between the present life and that which is to come. Hell is of both worlds, so that in the same essential sense although in different degrees it may be said both of him who is still living, but accursed, and of him who perished centuries ago, that his worm dieth not and his fire is not quenched. A.

The Doctrine of Eternal Judgment.

The importance of the doctrine of eternal judgment may be inferred from the prominent place it holds in the messages of God from first to last. It is involved in the first promise and warning in Paradise; it marks the close of Isaiah’s message of glorious hope and Gospel promise. It forms the close of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and of the prophecies of Daniel, Hosea and Micah, of Zechariah and Haggai. It gives their tone to the closing sentences of the Sermon on the Mount, and forms the main topic of two of the chief discourses of Christ in the Gospels, and of the Second Epistle of Peter and that of Jude, and it is revealed with especial prominence from first to last in the visions of the apocalypse. Next to the glorious revelation of God Himself and the great work of redemption, it forms the third main feature in the whole scheme of revelation.

The revealed message of Scripture on judgment to come includes as a main feature, that from the days of Paradise to the return of Christ, the whole human race has been placed under an economy of redeeming love. “That God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself;” that every child of man is called upon to repent and turn to God, invited and earnestly entreated to accept the offered gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus; that there is no fatal secret decree of reprobation by which any are positively shut out from a share in the blessing; that the invitations of God are sincere, earnest and real, and not in pretence only, as unbelieving hearts are prone to suspect, is assured by a threefold pledge of Divine love. First, the oath and promise of God the Father, “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked should turn from his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways.” Again, by the tears and lamentation of the Incarnate Son over guilty Jerusalem, “when He came near and beheld the city and wept over it, O that thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes!” And thirdly and lastly, by the parting message and invitation of the Holy and Eternal Spirit. “The Spirit and the Bride say Come; and let him that heareth say Come; and let him that is athirst come, and whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.” This invitation of Divine love, most clearly revealed in the Gospel, is also given, though more dimly, in that goodness of God shown in all His works, by which He “leadeth men to repentance,” and the apostle assures us that even while He suffered the nations to walk in their own ways, “He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave them rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness;” and His judgment on all we are further assured will be according to the light they have received. Birks.

Remorse is the natural vengeance of sin upon a sinner. It is legitimate; it is just. We are never wronged in the vengeance of remorse. God has not wronged us in making us susceptible of such suffering; conscience does not wrong us in inflicting it; the holy universe does not wrong us in approving it. Phelps.—The conscious knowledge of having done wrong; of having had a spirit from God, pure with high aspirations, and of having dulled its delicacy and degraded its desires; of having quenched a light brighter than the sun’s; of having done to another an injury that through time and through eternity never can be undone; the knowledge that every chance of excellence and every opportunity of good has been lost forever—this is the maddening remorse; this is wrath to come. F. W. Robertson.

None of the fathers had a deeper sense of the Divine love than Chrysostom, “the preacher of mercy,” yet none asserted more emphatically the awful doctrine of eternal perdition. In his fifth homily he speaks of the bonds that are not loosed; in the eleventh, of the endless darkness, the deathless punishments; and in the twenty-third we read, “The penalties then to be inflicted are not such as to come to an end and be concluded, but the punishment is eternal. For as the punishments of this world are concluded with the present life, so those of the next world continue perpetually.” And further on in the same homily, he insists that after death the most vehement regrets are vain, as in the case of the rich man in the parable, whose lamentations were fruitless because he had neglected the time in which he ought to have secured the Divine mercy. W. Bright.

“What else shall God do with guilt but punish it?” Shall He give repentance and then forgive? But that is the very thing He has been offering from the first. Never will man or devil see the moment when he cannot repent if he would. But that is the very thing from which the incorrigible sinner recoils. He will have none of that. Repentance means submission. Better hell than that. Such is the relentless choice of the doomed one. Doomed because self-doomed. Doomed by the fearful omnipotence of his own free-will. Nothing else which it is in God’s power to offer does he spurn from him with such concentration of obdurate and vindictive resolve. His whole being revolts from it with the intensity, at last, of ages of accumulated and malign passion.

Such is sin; once chosen and implanted and indurated in the very nature of man, by a life of abused probation, in which the grace of God has been scorned and the blood of Christ outraged. Once more, then, the question comes back unanswered: “What else shall God do with it?” Through all eternity, that is the question which infinite benevolence will ask of an awe-struck yet satisfied and adoring universe: “What else shall God do with it?” Phelps.

This is the consummation of the series of bright visions that passed before the mind of Isaiah. This is an appropriate termination of this succession of wonderful revelations. Where could it more appropriately terminate than in the consummation of all things—in the final triumph of the true religion, and in the complete and final destruction of all the enemies of God? The vision stretches on to the judgment, and is closed by a contemplation of those scenes which commence there, but which never end. The Church is triumphant. Its conflicts cease. Its foes are slain. Its Redeemer is revealed; and its everlasting happiness is founded on a basis which can never be shaken. Barnes.

So ends this wonderful prophetic scene. The kingdom of Messiah triumphant; His foes prostrate to rise no more. The nations gathered by missionary labor come home to the bosom of Zion, and rejoice in her consolations; but God’s enemies, balked in every endeavor and meeting their doom of utter discomfiture, are shut up to shame and everlasting contempt—the objects of wholesome abhorrence, impressing on all beholders a salutary fear and dread of sin, and thus conducing to augment the moral forces which will forever sustain the throne of God and preserve His reverent worshippers in unswerving and ever-growing allegiance, homage and love. Such are the grand, momentous results of the Gospel scheme in our world—a world fearfully cursed indeed by sin, but more gloriously saved by grace—saved by the Son of God made incarnate to suffer and die, yet raised again to live and reign sublimely victorious in the latter end. H. C.

JEREMIAH, who is the principal prophet in the second or Babylonian period of prophecy, lived in the reigns of Josiah, Shallum, Jehoiakim, Jeconiah, and Zedekiah. His long career began in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah (B.C. 629), and continued till the eleventh year of Zedekiah (B.C. 586), when Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. 1: 2, 3), though he continued to prophesy even after that event. He is described as “the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth,” a town not three miles distant from Jerusalem. His personal history is closely united with that of the times in which he lived. After the destruction of Jerusalem, he continued for a time in the city; but he was afterward carried, against his will, into Egypt, along with his faithful friend and amanuensis, Baruch. There, in the city of Tahpanhes, we have the last clear glimpses of the prophet’s life. After this all is uncertain. P. S.

Historical Sketch of the Period. It was not long before Jeremiah was born that the life and work of the great Isaiah came to an end; the apostasy and subsequent repentance of Manasseh, in whose reign Isaiah was murdered, must have been still fresh in the memory of men in the early years of Jeremiah. King Esarhaddon of Nineveh avenged the great disaster of Sennacherib, his father, before Jerusalem in the days of Isaiah when Hezekiah reigned, by taking the holy city and by leading captive her king, Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, to Babylon. Manasseh was subsequently released, and consented as a vassal king to Nineveh to hold Judah. Assurbanipal succeeded Esarhaddon, his father, B.C. 668. The Ninevite king resided principally in Babylon, which was already showing signs of dissatisfaction with the Ninevite rule. He was evidently a strong sovereign, and completely broke the Egyptian power by dividing Egypt into twelve petty kingdoms. During his reign Judah remained a tributary to Nineveh. In the seventeenth year of the reign of this Assurbanipal, king of Nineveh, Psametichus restored the broken unity of Egypt, and once more united the whole land. Egypt now, for a season, disputed the sovereignty of the Eastern world with Nineveh. When this restoration of Egypt to the position of a great power took place, Manasseh was in the twenty-fourth year of his reign, and from this time gradually grew up that strong inclination in Judah to court the friendship of Egypt, which eventually proved its ruin. Politically, the great work of Jeremiah’s life was to combat this fatal policy. Manasseh was succeeded by Amon, and Amon by the good king Josiah. During Josiah’s reign Jeremiah exercised great influence. This prince lost his life fighting against Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo. Four years after its victory at Megiddo, the Egyptian power was totally destroyed at Carchemish by a new power which had lately risen on the ruins of the old Ninevite dominion.

The power of Nineveh had been for some time declining, partly owing to a great invasion of Scythians, partly to the discontent of Babylon—a discontent which ended in Babylon asserting its independence. The Eastern world, two years after the battle of Megiddo, in which Josiah lost his life, was astonished at learning that Nineveh, so long the Queen City of the East, had fallen before the armies of Cyaxares the Mede and Nabopolassar, king of the recently freed Babylon. The ruin of Nineveh was complete. Two years later the son of Nabopolassar, the famous Nebuchadnezzar, broke the Egyptian power at Carchemish. The great Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar was temporarily stayed in his career of conquest by his father’s death and the need of his presence at Babylon in order to consolidate his power. Egypt and her vassal States became now subject to Babylon. Among these latter was Judah and her king, Jehoiakim, who succeeded Josiah.

After three years Jehoiakim rebelled against the authority of Babylon; Nebuchadnezzar in person took the field against his rebellious vassal. Jerusalem was invested and soon fell. Her king was put to death, and a few months later Jehoiachin—who succeeded his father in the sovereignty—was, with the flower of the people, carried captive to Babylon. A remnant was left in Judah, and Zedekiah reigned as their king. Again Egypt became their snare. Something like a revival of the Egyptian power had taken place under Pharaoh Hophra; the Jews left under King Zedekiah in Judah, turning against their mighty Babylonian master, sought to strengthen themselves by an alliance with Egypt, against the advice of Jeremiah, who had remained with Zedekiah in Judah. The Chaldean vengeance did not tarry long; again was Jerusalem besieged, again captured. Then the Temple was burned, the king was blinded, the best of the poor remnant of the people left by Nebuchadnezzar were carried into Babylonia. Gedaliah, a friend of Jeremiah, was appointed governor of the now desolate and almost deserted land.

Gedaliah was shortly after murdered by some self-styled patriot Jews, who, after their deed of blood, fled, carrying Jeremiah, an unwilling captive, with them to the city of Tahpanhes, in Egypt. Here we lose sight of the aged and desolate prophet. Spence.

The life of Jeremiah as prophet, and that of Josiah as king, ran parallel eighteen years, when Josiah fell at Megiddo in battle with Pharaoh Necho of Egypt. We may well suppose that this was the first great sorrow of the prophet’s life. He mourned for his fallen king as one mourneth for a dear and honored personal friend and for a great public benefactor. (See 2 Chron. 35: 25.) How much he knew beforehand of the graceless sons of this good king who would be candidates for the vacant throne does not appear. He had abundant and sad occasion to know them in future years. While Josiah lived, Jeremiah does not appear at all in the history as given in the books of Kings and Chronicles, nor does his own book of prophecies show him to have been prominent during Josiah’s life. Only a small portion of his recorded prophecies bear date in the reign of Josiah—viz., chap. 1, and another message beginning chap. 3: 6, and ending perhaps with the sixth chapter. There can be no doubt, however, that he sympathized deeply with this great reformation, which commenced vigorously just one year before his call as a prophet, and which seems to have culminated in a very extraordinary passover five years later (2 Chron. 35: 1-19). It was everything in this reformation to press the conscience of the people with the great and solid truths of religion, and to urge them to thorough self-searching and to radical repentance of all sins of the heart as well as of the life. In this line of effort, we shall see that the messages sent of the Lord by Jeremiah during this period were admirably well adapted for effect, and if duly heeded, would have been most wholesome in their influence. After the death of Josiah, our prophet soon began to have new experiences. Previously he had been amply protected in his person and powerfully sustained by the king and his court. Subsequently there came a new order of things. Four kings fill the period between Josiah’s death (n.c. 611) and the fall of the kingdom (n.c. 588). Three of them were sons of Josiah, and one his grandson; but not one of them bears any other record than that of “doing evil in the sight of the Lord.” Of the four sons of Josiah, the eldest, Johanan, probably died either before or with his father. He does not appear later. His third son, Jehoahaz, was put on the throne first, and by the people, probably because he stood higher in their esteem than Jehoiakim, the second in age. He represented the Chaldean party, following the policy of his father, who fell in an attempt to withstand the Egyptian king, then on his march against the Chaldeans. Pharaoh Necho, returning from his northern expedition, deposed the young king of Judah after a reign of but three months, and took him captive to Egypt, where he died. Necho placed his elder brother, Jehoiakim, on the throne, where he reigned eleven years—one of the meanest and wickedest kings that ever disgraced that throne. A very considerable portion of Jeremiah’s prophecies fall within this reign—many of them about his fourth year, when the first serious invasion by the Chaldean forces occurred and the first large deportation of captives. Jehoiakim represented the Egyptian party; was always averse to Jeremiah’s exhortations from the Lord to yield to the Chaldean power, and hence stood opposed to the prophet on political as well as religious grounds. Consequently he permitted and even instigated a rancorous persecution against Jeremiah, from which the latter more than once barely escaped with his life. This was the prophet’s time of sternest trial. After a reign of eleven years, Jehoiakim was taken in chains to Babylon, and his son Jehoiachin (otherwise called Jeconiah and Coniah) was enthroned in his stead. Three months of wicked misrule and of treachery against the Chaldean king ended his reign, and he went a prisoner to Babylon, where he was imprisoned at least thirty-seven years. After him came Zedekiah, yet another and the youngest son of the good Josiah, but doing only evil against the Lord throughout his reign of eleven years. He was weak as well as wicked, and perhaps the less wicked in the sight of God for his weakness. He would have protected Jeremiah more if he had dared, or if he had been manly enough to assert his rights as king. He lived to see the great city seized by the Chaldeans, the nation ruined, and his sons slain. His own eyes were then put out and himself taken in chains to Babylon, to die dishonored there. Jeremiah delivered to him many messages from the Lord; suffered severe persecution during his reign; made earnest but unavailing efforts to withstand the growing corruption of both court and people, and to induce repentance toward God, or at least quiet submission to the inevitable and divinely ordained supremacy of the Chaldeans, but was baffled in every endeavor. Such is the disheartening story of Jeremiah’s labors and protests during these twenty-three years from the death of Josiah to the utter overthrow of the city and kingdom. Within his public life fall the dates of Zephaniah and Habakkuk; the former within the reign of Josiah; the latter apparently in the first years of Jehoiakim, shortly before the first invasion from the fierce and terrible Chaldeans. Jeremiah survived the fall of the city and kingdom. His sympathies went with the better part of the people into their exile in Babylon, but he neither accompanied nor followed them in person. Twice he wrote them in a very encouraging and friendly strain, but either through his own convictions of duty, or through the special direction of the Lord, he cast in his lot with the poor remnant who remained a short time in the land, and ultimately, against his earnest protest, went to Egypt to perish there. Nebuchadnezzar befriended him in a most decided manner, and if he had gone to Babylon, his lot would apparently have been as pleasant as that of a captive with his captive brethren well could be; but Jeremiah manifestly sought not his own, but the things of his great Master. Hence, in the footsteps of the greater “Man of sorrows,” he followed the remnant who had no shepherd and no heart to heed one, and filled out his remaining days among an ungrateful, disobedient, and unappreciative people. Beyond this exile to Egypt and these thankless labors to call back to God the lowest, weakest, and wickedest portion of the Jewish people, we hear of him no more. There are some lessons of great interest and value to be found in the life and spirit of this prophet. It is God’s way to raise up His own instruments and adapt them for the work He gives them to do. Jeremiah was an illustration of this Divine policy. We note how He yielded to the pressure of God’s hand upon him (2:7, 9); how step by step he moved on into peril and darkness thickening fearfully in his path; how “he endured as seeing Him who is invisible;” how he never so quailed before his enemies as to withhold one of the stern words God gave him to say; how we rarely hear the slightest murmur from his lips; how when human frailty seemed too much for present grace, the Lord kindly gave more grace; how he filled out the very last days of a prophetic life, which overran forty years, with suffering, daring, witnessing, beseeching, and weeping—almost evermore—with apparently fruitless endeavor, and with no consolations known to us save those of a clear conscience and an approving God. His heart never became misanthropic—never had the least touch of the malign element. He never ceased to love with the love of sympathy and pity the wickedest and vilest of those whose sins the Lord sent him to denounce. There is a wonderful record for us in those tears! Would to God that all His ministering servants kept their own spirit in a sympathy with Christ’s as near, warm, and effective as did this prophet of Anathoth! H. C.

In the time of Isaiah two courses were open for Israel. Either to let itself go down the steep descent which opened under its feet, or to strengthen its hold upon the tableland above. A century and a half later, in the time of Jeremiah, this alternative was no longer open. Israel had already descended far down the fatal slope, and was on the point of falling over the precipice. The people were giving themselves up to idolatry with an ardor akin to madness. Never has this strange worship better deserved the name of “possession on a great scale,” which has been bestowed upon it with so much reason. All the divinities of the East, Baal, Astarte, Moloch, Thammuz, seem to have agreed to meet in Jerusalem; the Temple had become a pantheon. The three last kings were among the very worst that the little State ever had. Under Jehoiakim, the Chaldean conqueror, Nebuchadnezzar, appears for the first time in the Holy Land, and Judah becomes tributary to him. A little later, Jehoiachin, his successor, is himself taken captive with the best part of his people. Finally, under Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar strikes the last blow; Jerusalem is destroyed, together with the Temple.

Such are the circumstances in the midst of which Jeremiah was called to exercise the prophetic ministry. Never was heavier burden laid upon the shoulders of mortal man. A man of tender, loving, yielding, deeply impressible spirit, Jeremiah intensely loved his country. He would have given all he had to see Judah flourishing, Jerusalem prosperous; and, lo, we see him compelled by his destiny to announce to his fellow-citizens nothing but misfortune. His office was like that of the minister obliged to accompany a criminal to the scaffold. He induces Israel and its king to submit to the decree of the Divine justice. He depicts the uselessness, danger and sin of resistance. At the sound of these strange words his hearers spring upon him with indignation and rage; they accuse him of connivance with the enemies of his country. King Jehoiakim tears up the collection of his first discourses, and throws the shreds into the fire.

The fiery patriots seize the prophet, and throw him to the bottom of a well without water. He passes whole days and nights in this horrible prison. But what are his physical sufferings compared with the moral torment he endures in seeing himself treated as the enemy of his country—he who lives and suffers only for love of her? Can one be surprised, if now and then sinking under the burden, he is tempted, like Job, to curse the day of his birth?

But these are only transitory moments of weakness. Soon faith regains the ascendant, and with the same courage with which he had dared to preach to his people submission to the foreign conqueror, he now endeavors to animate them once more with hope, and boldly proclaims the deliverance that shall come. One day, while the Chaldean army still holds Jerusalem in siege, Jeremiah buys, by a legal act, for himself and his descendants, the field on which the army of the Chaldeans is encamped, thus giving to Israel, at the very moment when he announced its coming destruction, a public pledge of his belief in its future restoration. Another time he announces that after seventy years, when Israel shall have expiated all the Sabbaths and all the sabbatical years they had profaned, this people shall return from the strange land and re-enter the land of their fathers. Nay more, he sees the justice of God, now so merciless to them and under whose blows he had counselled them to bow down, ready soon to rise up in favor of the guilty but repentant nation and to pronounce its absolution. And in the strength of this courageous faith, he is not afraid to give to the Messiah that name which defies all present misfortunes: the Lord our Righteousness.

This is because, upon the ruins of the old covenant, henceforth broken through the faithlessness of Israel, Jeremiah sees another arising, founded upon a higher contract, more excellent both in its nature and its duration than that of Sinai. Here is the culminating point not only of the prophecy of Jeremiah, but of that of the whole Old Testament; the marvellous prediction of the abolition of that very covenant to which the prophecy itself belongs, and of the coming in of a totally different order of things, resting upon a new basis (Jer. 31: 31-34).

We do not think history contains another instance of a religion which, while claiming to be Divine, yet proclaims its own insufficiency, and announces a new one which will bestow upon humanity more excellent gifts. This is that miracle of self-abnegation which is repeated later on in time, in the personal relation of John the Baptist to Jesus Christ.

The renewing of hearts by the Holy Spirit—that renewal which is the fruit of the forgiveness of sins and the spring of an obedience free and filial, which the law never had the power to produce—this is the basis of the new covenant, announced by Jeremiah, which should one day be established between Jehovah and mankind. These foundations, so distinctly indicated six centuries beforehand, were really laid in the two days, Good Friday and Pentecost; they are these—reconciliation through the blood of the Lamb and renewal of the heart by the Holy Spirit. Here we discover in the prophet an intuition, the purest and most spiritual, of the kingdom of God upon earth. Here we see the noble hopes with which God sustained him and the whole nation at the moment when they were witnessing the downfall of the visible theocracy.

Accordingly, when, after a long siege, the enemy effected an entrance into Jerusalem, Jeremiah was able to contemplate with resignation the destruction of the city which he loved, the burning of the Temple in which he had so often officiated as a priest. The conqueror treated him with respect; he gave him the choice of either accompanying him to Babylon or remaining in the land of his fathers. Jeremiah had no hesitation in preferring his own desolated country to the splendor of the foreign capital. It was at this time, no doubt, that he composed those fine elegies which are collected in the Book of Lamentations. Then, faithful to the last to his thankless mission, he followed without delay the remainder of his people into Egypt, whither, after the assassination of the Chaldean governor, the remnant of the Israelites fled for shelter from the vengeance which they feared. According to Jewish tradition, Jeremiah perished in Egypt, a victim to the hatred drawn down upon him by the warnings which he was never weary of uttering to these senseless people.

Succeeding ages have done justice to Jeremiah. The more his contemporaries humiliated and ill-treated him, the more has posterity exalted and glorified him, to such a degree that in the time of Jesus, as we see in the New Testament, he was known by the name simply of the prophet. And this was but right. If the picture which he has drawn of the new covenant is the culminating point of prophecy, is not his own personal fate the most complete type of that of the Messiah? Is not his conflict with the excited patriots and false prophets of his time the prelude to that of Jesus with those Pharisees and zealots who over-excited the carnal hopes of Israel, and were preparing for them the most terrible of delusions? Jeremiah is certainly, more than any other before John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Man of Sorrows.

God as the Righteous One—that is the dominant idea of his ministry. To bow beneath the hand of God when He chastises, and then to wait upon Him as alone having power to absolve the nation on their repentance—this, indeed, was the very message which Israel needed at the time when Jeremiah was given to them as their counsellor and their guide. We have just seen with what unconquerable fidelity this naturally gentle and tender heart succeeded in fulfilling this office; God, when He called him, had “touched his mouth with His hand.” Godet.

Jeremiah’s mission was to interpret and to immortalize in literature the failure of the experiment of a visible, genuine, holy empire. It was Jeremiah’s to feel all the sublimity and glory of the legislation of Moses, of the conquests of Joshua, of the constitutions of Samuel, of the royalty of David, and Solomon, and Josiah, and then to see all this overwhelmed in darkness because the Jewish people were basely false to themselves and to their God. Jeremiah’s life work was to pass through and to understand and to feel the saddest and most shameful of all earthly tragedies before that of Calvary—viz., the fall of the Jewish kingdom and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. It was his function to preserve for us these dreadful experiences in all their minutiae of guilt and ignominy.

We may compare Jeremiah in detail with the greatest men in Hebrew history, and always to his advantage. We may take the darkest hour in the life of Moses, or of Joshua, or of Samuel, or of Elijah, or of Paul, and we shall find that Jeremiah had a similar experience, only tenfold darker. The prayer of Moses was heard, and the people were pardoned. Jeremiah had a different experience. He was bidden, “Pray not thou for this people, neither lift up cry nor prayer for them, neither make intercession to Me: for I will not hear thee.” God said: “Though Moses and Samuel stood before Me, yet My mind could not be toward this people: cast them out of My sight and let them go forth.” If Moses is majestic in the strength and victory of his intercession, much more is Jeremiah majestic, going forth uncomforted to his long and dreadful work among his doomed fellow-countrymen, for whom he was not even allowed to pray. Elijah fled away before the threats of Jezebel into the desert, sat down under a juniper-tree and prayed for death. Jeremiah was not permitted to flee away. Firm at his post where Elijah had not had courage to stand, Jeremiah stood to the bitter end. Paul wrote in one of his letters: “I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart.” But this was only a part of Paul’s experience. He had the privilege of going far away from unready Jerusalem to do a work of magnificent constructiveness among the Gentiles, where multitudes of converts became his joy and his crown. Jeremiah, through his long ministry, had only the great sorrow and unceasing pain in his heart, and nothing else. His duty was to stay year after year in Jerusalem, rejected, threatened, set in the stocks, cast into the miry dungeon, repeating over and over a fearful message to unwilling ears, with never the joy of a single success.

Thus neither Moses, nor Elijah, nor Paul was ever subjected to a tithe of what Jeremiah endured. As a sufferer he stands next to our Lord Himself. Why should we attribute His distress to morbid predisposition to melancholy? If he shrank from the stern task assigned him, Moses and Isaiah had done the same. If he yielded to discouragement in defeat, Joshua had done the same. If he longed for a lodge in the wilderness, the bold Elijah had sought the same. If he cursed the day of his birth, Job, the great example of patience, had done the same. If he wept over Jerusalem, so did our Lord. That Jeremiah preserved the sweetness of his affections, and the loyalty of his piety, and the boldness of his official testimony to the end argues a pre-eminently strong, ardent, high-spirited, heroic nature.

Jeremiah was a patriot whose duty it was to discourage national hopes and counsel submission to a foreign foe. It was never his privilege to arouse the national spirit, to fire the hearts of the soldiers of Israel, to call up the mighty enthusiasm which had borne to victory the armies of the Lord of Hosts in the glorious days of Joshua, and Gideon, and David. Though a patriot, he seemed to his fellow-citizens a traitor, without faith in his country or sympathy for her defenders.

As a prophet, Jeremiah had not the satisfaction of reforming, inspiring or leading in anything. He found the whole nation gross, idolatrous, unchaste, false, dishonest, murderous, wilful, obstinate. Sodom and Gomorrah alone could furnish a parallel. And Jeremiah’s work was to predict to these people invasion, famine, pestilence, drought, defeat, captivity, despair, the sack of the city and the destruction of the Temple. No other prophet ever had such a task. “I beheld the earth,” said Jeremiah, “and, lo, it was waste and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved to and fro. I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful field was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the Lord and before His fierce anger.” With such a grim message Jeremiah stood through his long ministry like an iron pillar, like a brazen wall, in antagonism to the kings, and the princes, and the priests, and the prophets, and the people. Yet, naturally, he had the gentle, sympathetic heart of a child. There were prophets enough at that day, high in public esteem, whose smooth eloquence found ready applause. Jeremiah stood alone, not that he was naturally polemical or uncompromising, not for any reason in himself, but because the others were all wrong, and he was under a Divine necessity to stand where he did. Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms was not more heroically loyal to truth. Jeremiah stood like Abdiel, as Milton has pictured him among the rebellious angels.

Yet Jeremiah did not meet scorn with “retorted scorn,” as Milton makes Abdiel; he met it with tears.

Jeremiah was a lonely man. He had no home into which he might run out of the storms of public life, as into a little sunny harbor of peace. This was by Divine command. The consolation of wife and children was denied him. “Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons and daughters in this place.” As Jeremiah walked along the streets of Jerusalem and looked into the bright faces of the children, he knew that each of those children was destined for a death of horror. Thus, as a man, Jeremiah must shut up his heart and repress all his tenderest affections; as a citizen, he must live in the midst of the murderous treachery of his nearest neighbors; as a patriot, he must stand helpless in sight of the slow destruction of his country; as a prophet, he must warn in vain, and with his unavailing remonstrances add to the guilt of the unrestrainable; and this was so, that all time might through him feel the doom of incorrigible national sin. Behold this grand figure standing there in the solitude of his grief over the ruins of the noblest experiment of ancient times. There he stands, comparing the Divine ideal of a visible kingdom of God on earth with the reality, comparing the possibilities and hopes of the past with the facts of the present and the certainties of the future. In him we see the dignity of unselfish grief. In him we see the manliness of tears. Looking at him, we see that the broadest, truest, strongest, bravest, may for that very reason be the saddest. Ballantine.

Their programme was simple. Their central theme was the coming supremacy of the Chaldean nation: and this at a time when nothing was feared from Babylon, and Nebuchadnezzar was unknown, when Egypt was ascendant and Pharaoh-necho the terror of Judah. He foretold the overthrow of the Jewish nation by this power from “the north;” defined the term of the Chaldean ascendency and Judah’s captivity, and predicted the emancipation of Judah and restoration of Jerusalem when the seventy years had expired.

Their design was threefold. It was: To forewarn the Jews of impending doom on account of national pollution and apostasy. To invite them to repentance, promising immediate Divine forgiveness and ultimate redemption from Babylon. To assure the godly among them by predictions of Messiah’s gracious advent, and the spiritual blessings incident to His reign.

Their verification. During Jeremiah’s life, his predictions fulfilled in: The captivity of Jehoiakim and his queen-mother (22:24-26). The death of Hananiah, the deceitful prophet, at the time foretold (28:15-17). The inglorious end and shameful burial of Jehoiakim (22:18,

19 : 36 : 30). The fate of Zedekiah (22 : 2, 3). The invasion of Judah by the king of Babylon, and Jewish captivity (20 : 4, etc.). The rifling of the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar (27 : 19-22). The destruction of Jerusalem by fire (21 : 10 ; 32 : 29 ; 37 : 8-10). The Chaldean subjugation of Egypt (43 : 10-12 ; 44 : 29, 30), and supremacy over surrounding nations (27 : 1-8). After the prophet’s decease : The termination of the Babylonish captivity after seventy years (25 : 11 ; see Dan. 9 : 2). The return of the Jews to their own country (29 : 10-14). The downfall and desolation of Babylon, and date of the event (25 : 12). The advent of Messiah (23 : 3-8 ; 31 : 31-34 ; 33 : 6-9). Anon.

The absence of any chronological order in the present structure of the collection of Jeremiah’s prophecies is obvious at the first glance. In the present order we have two great divisions : 1. Chaps. 1-45. Prophecies delivered at various times, directed mainly to Judah, or connected with Jeremiah’s personal history. 2. Chaps. 46-51. Prophecies connected with other nations. Chap. 52, taken largely, though not entirely, from 2 K. 25, may be taken either as a supplement to the prophecy or as an introduction to the Lamentations. Looking more closely into each of these divisions, we have the following sections :

1. Chaps. 1-21. Containing probably the substance of ’the book’ of 36 : 32, and including prophecies from the thirteenth year of Josiah to the fourth of Jehoiakim ; 1 : 3, however, indicates a later revision, and the whole of chap. 1 may possibly have been added on the prophet’s retrospect of his whole work from this its first beginning ; chap. 21 belongs to a later period, but has probably found its place here as connected, by the recurrence of the name Pashur, with chap. 20.

2. Chaps. 22-25. Shorter prophecies, delivered at different times, against the kings of Judah and the false prophets ; 25 : 13, 14 evidently marks the conclusion of a series of prophecies ; and that which follows, 25 : 15-38, the germ of the fuller predictions in 46-49, has been placed here as a kind of completion to the prophecy of the seventy years and the subsequent fall of Babylon.

3. Chaps. 26-28. The two great prophecies of the fall of Jerusalem, and the history connected with them. Chap. 26 belongs to the earlier, chaps. 27 and 28 to the later period of the prophet’s work. Jehoiakim, in 27 : 1, is evidently (cf. verse 3) a mistake for Zedekiah.

4. Chaps. 29-31. The message of comfort for the exiles in Babylon.

5. Chaps. 32-44. The history of the last two years before the capture of Jerusalem, and of Jeremiah’s work in them and in the period that followed. The position of chap. 45, unconnected with anything before or after it, may be accounted for on the hypothesis that Baruch desired to place on record so memorable a passage in his own life, and inserted it where the direct narrative of his master’s life ended. The same explanation applies in part to chap. 36.

6. Chaps. 46-51. The prophecies against foreign nations, ending with the great prediction against Babylon.

7. The supplementary narrative of chap. 52. The Book of Lamentations contains the utterance of Jeremiah’s sorrow upon the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. It consists of five chapters, each of which, however, is a separate poem, complete in itself, and having a distinct subject, but brought at the same time under a plan which includes them all. The book has supplied thousands with the fullest utterance for their sorrows in the critical periods of national or individual suffering. We may well believe that it soothed the weary years of the Babylonian exile. On the ninth day of the month of Ab (July-August), the Lamentations of Jeremiah were read, year by year, with fasting and weeping, to commemorate the misery out of which the people had been delivered. It enters largely into the order of the Latin Church for the services of Passion week. P. S.

The Book of Jeremiah is commonly regarded as very puzzling, by reason of the imperfections of its text, its confused chronological order and the great differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew. But if we suppose these peculiarities to be due to the lack of editing, rather than to false editing, it is not difficult to frame a hypothesis that will account, in general, for the form in which the book now stands, in the Hebrew. Suppose that Jeremiah, late in his life, or some disciple of his, soon after his death, planned an edition of his works, and for that purpose got together and began to classify, a collection of papers—the same papers now found in the Book of Jeremiah. Entering upon his work, he finds the bulkiest paper in the collection to be a rough sketch of the earlier discourses of the prophet ; it is divided by titles into six parts, and each part is a sketch of several separate prophecies ; in length, the prophecy sketches vary from a few lines each to a pretty full report ; at first, they are separated by formal sub-titles, but farther on the work is more negligently done, both in this