Jeremiah 1

Jeremiah 1:1-19

THE TWICE-BORN PROPHET THE DUAL OF Jeremiah 1:1-19. IN beginning the study of this Book it is essential that we make ourselves at once acquainted with the author. Practically every man and woman in so-called Christian lands knows that Jeremiah was a Prophet, and one of the major Prophets. But as to the particulars of his life only those who make this Book a special study are familiar. However, the Book itself properly introduces the Prophet. He was “Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin” (Jeremiah 1:1).Now Anathoth was of the Sacerdotal City, only three Roman miles distant from Jerusalem.So much, then, for the birth and location of this man. Before we have finished the study of this volume we will discover that his birth was a matter of great joy (Jeremiah 20:15). The phrase is “Making him very glad”. In all probability lie was a direct answer to prayer; and the language of this morning’s text would indicate that he was pledged for service to God by his parents before he was born.The chapter as a whole will give us further information concerning his life and character; while the Book itself will reveal his accomplishments.In this chapter we have presented in clear, and somewhat complete manner, His Dual Genealogy: His Utter Diffidence: and His Personal Visions.HIS DUAL He was a twice-born man. We have already heard of his father’s joy at his first birth. Doubtless that priest of God rejoiced even more in his second birth, for while the birth of the flesh is important, the birth of the spirit is more essential still. The first birth may be merely to a life of sin to which the flesh itself tempts; the second birth is not only unto salvation but anticipates blessed service.We are not told in which year the first birth took place; but we are informed concerning the second: “For the Word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign” (Jeremiah 1:2). Then “the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah”.Harold Begbie has a book on “Twice Born Men”. In the introduction to the same he tells us that Prof.

James teaches the student of psychology to expect something exceptional and eccentric in men who have suffered a profound spiritual experience. He contrasts such men with the ordinary religious believer “who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan; his religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.”He declares that it profits us little to study this second-hand religious life, and says,“We must search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.

These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as: a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.”Certainly Jeremiah belonged to that company. His experience was definite and would compare with many a modern call; even to the very hour when the Lord came to him and gave him an overwhelming revelation of His love, and accomplished in him a conviction never to be shaken.The circumstance that one is definitely intended for this office from his birth does not abrogate this necessity. John the Baptist heard the voice of God and received His direct commission, resulting in his ministry. And notwithstanding the circumstance that Jeremiah before he was formed in the belly and before he came forth from the womb was set apart of God for the sacred office of Prophet, still God had to add to that Divine decision the human consciousness of a call.His conversion and call came together. It has been so with thousands of the greatest prophets of the centuries. Doubtless one reason why so many men, now in the ministry, drift away from their theological moorings, accept current false philosophies and teach the same, is due to the circumstance that they have not heard definitely a call from Heaven and are not in the ministry by Divine appointment.Jeremiah was a predestined Prophet.

It is not unusual for God to make prophets after that manner. John the Baptist was of that sort.

Samuel of the Old Testament after the same order. Moses seems to have been elected from his infancy for his leadership. John G. Paton, the great missionary to the New Hebrides, in his Autobiography, gives us an explanation that would fit many an instance of pre-destined birth.He says: “My father had a strong desire to be a minister of the Gospel; but when he finally saw that God’s will had marked out for him another lot, he reconciled himself by entering with his own soul into the solemn vow that if God gave him sons he would consecrate them unreservedly to the ministry of Christ, if the Lord saw fit to accept the offering, and open up the way. It may be enough here to say that he lived to see three of us entering upon and not unblessed in the holy office— myself, the eldest born, my brother Walter, several years my junior, and my brother James, the youngest of eleven, the Benjamin of the flock.”When I read those words I was reminded of my own history. My dear father felt called to the ministry and to his dying day never escaped the conviction of disobedience to the Divine Voice.

But owing to his lack of education and the large family looking to him for support at the time of his conversion and this conviction, he feared, for financial reasons, to entertain the same; and went to his death a farmer. But it was a way of sorrow and of conscious disobedience.He, like Paton, sought to make restitution by constant prayer that God would put his sons into the ministry.

Three of us entered the same, my brother older than myself and my youngest brother. Owing to an injury to his vision my oldest brother dropped out, but Rev. Walter and myself abide to this day, and it is the conviction of both of us that we are in the ministry to take the place my father might have occupied had he seen his way clear to enter the same.So much for the dual genealogy of Jeremiah.Now go back into the text and you will discover another characteristic, namely,HIS NATURAL “Then said I, Ah! Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (Jeremiah 1:6). That was his answer when God called him to the ministry, “Behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child”.His first plea, then, was his extreme youth; the second, his consequential inability as a spokesman, his lack of eloquence; and through this speech he revealed his natural timidity.Those things are not barriers to God. The reasons are not far to seek. First of all, God wants you. He always wanted you, and He always will want you.Every time I think of my youthful ministry, I marvel at it. Absolutely, I do. I can’t quite make it out.

I can’t imagine myself at twenty-one years of age standing, Sunday after Sunday, before the crowds of people who had come to hear a lad of that age talk. I don’t know why they wanted to hear me; so shallow was my experience, comparatively speaking, and so comparatively poor my information; and yet, week after week, I saw the house of God filled with people who had come to hear what the lad had to say.God wants you, and there is hardly a minister on the earth who ever amounted to much who didn’t begin his ministry while yet a boy.Charles Spurgeon, when seventeen to eighteen years of age, was preaching to tens of thousands of people.

They could hardly find a house big enough to hold the crowds.The first-born in the Old Testament was especially to be dedicated to God. Not only was that true of the lamb, the firstling of the flock, but it was also true of the family, the firstling of that flock also.You will recall how when David’s call came by the Prophet Samuel, David couldn’t comprehend it, and his brothers still less. Such a stripling in the Divine service! And yet such was the Divine will, as history abundantly proved; and I have showed you that not only young men, but boys back there in the days before they reached their teens, were the subject of Divine choice.Consequently the plea of youth did not get by in the instance of Jeremiah. Youth was what God wanted then. Youth is what God wants at this moment. If it were not for the yielding of youth and consecration of youth, the future of the Church would be black indeed.Now we find another thing—he argued his lack of eloquence.“Behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (Jeremiah 1:6). He meant just that! He didn’t have a fluent tongue. He spake with difficulty.Moses doubtless was a stutterer. When God called Moses to become the leader of Israel, he excused himself—“I cannot speak”. God said, “Now * * go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say”.God responded to Jeremiah very much after the same manner. The fact is, we don’t have to have eloquence with which to begin. That is not the first essential. I have known a good many young preachers who were eloquent who never amounted to much in later life.

So have you! That is not the first essential.Sometime since I read a little clipping in which the story was told of a man who went up to one of the towers on a railroad, and saw three or four men there working the levers which threw the switches and let the trains come in. He watched them for some time, and then said to the man in charge,“It must take very keen, intelligent fellows to accomplish this, when life itself is risked. They must be men of good minds;” to which the master of ceremonies replied, “No; the first requisite here is not intelligence. It is faithfulness. A man must do what he is told to do.”God’s engineering first requires faithfulness.

When Moses yielded himself faithfully, God took care of his tongue, and when Jeremiah is faithful, God will take care of his tongue. Inability to speak is not an adequate excuse.I saw this morning, for the first time in my life, the history of the Blarney stone.

It is said that when the Castle of Blarney was built, Cormac McCarthy, the leader in construction, chanced one day to save a queer old woman who had dropped into the Blarney river which flows hard by the castle, and she, in her gratitude, said to him, “I am going to make you a great gift.”“What is that?” he asked.“The gift of speech.”“How so?”“Climb to the top of the castle, and kiss a certain stone, and the gift of eloquence will be given.”He took her seriously; climbed up the several stories and kissed the stone. When he came down, the gift of speech had been imparted to him, and he was able to persuade his fellows to almost any act.Now that is like a good deal else that comes out of Ireland, one of their little superstitions. It is a bit like St. Patrick who is said to have banished all the snakes; and snakes never existed there.However, it has its illustrative point. It is not the kiss of the Blarney stone that makes for eloquence, but contact with God. Men with no eloquence may be made men with the tongue of a Moses, and when did oratory ever exceed what that stutterer was finally able to speak.He revealed a shrinking timidity.

He was afraid, but God said, “Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee”.It is historically true that whenever we find a man with courage, he has had likely an experience sometime, somewhere, with the Lord, and his courage has come out of that fact.During his forty long years on the desert, Moses met God again and again. John the Baptist had his experience in the wilderness, in the backside of the desert also.

Jesus Christ Himself went to the wilderness to endure temptation, and also to have His counsels with the Father. The man, therefore, who has courage is the man who has met God, and who has discovered the secret and source of strength.It is a remarkable thing, and yet a fact, that the most courageous men in the world didn’t begin after that manner. Most of them began timidly. Moses is one of them, and this man Jeremiah is another. It is a common experience. They began timidly.There were five of us boys who grew up, husky enough to take care of ourselves. My oldest brother, as a boy, was such a coward that I was ashamed of him. But after he became a man, he had more courage than any of the rest of us.Some years ago I bought a beautiful bird dog.

He was the biggest coward I ever saw. He would follow Mrs. Riley in the carriage, and everytime a little feist would go after him, he would fall on his back and stick his feet in the air, quivering from head to foot. In the process of time some dog, not content with that, bit into him, and this bird dog, impelled by nature, discovered for the first time that his teeth were for fighting as well as eating. He began to fight, and in a few years he was the fiercest fighter I ever knew. He discovered a source of strength that he didn’t know existed.When a man gets into touch with God, he discovers there an unfailing source.So God says to him, Now you go! Be not afraid!Be courageous! I will be with thee, and the enemy shall flee before thy face!This brings me to my last point, namely,HIS VISIONS Jeremiah saw two things: he saw the sign of the almond tree which bears its fruit quickly. God interpreted that for him, “I will hasten My Word to perform it”.Then he saw the pot boiling, with its mouth to the north, and the Lord interpreted that, “Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land”.It has been .so already. It will be so again in the last days. Right at the present moment Russia is fulfilling part of that prophecy; for out of Russia the evils of this hour are pouring themselves over the whole earth, until, in our city, police have to stop the infamous Communism that is coursing through Russia and even seeking to conquer every land on the face of the earth, and it is making many modernist preachers—propagandists. Out of the north these things shalt come yea; they are coming.Two or three things, then, from these visions! The objects of nature are suggestive.Jesus Christ constantly appealed to nature.

Every now and then some wiseacre comes out and tells us that we ought to accept science. Who ever thought of doing anything else?

There isn’t an intelligent fundamentalist on the face of God’s earth who doesn’t believe in science. We praise God for nature. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge”. Every flower that blooms in the field is an expression of Divine favor; the aroma that goes forth from it and seems to sweeten the very atmosphere, is nothing other than the breath of God. The stars that twinkle at night speak of his own shining countenance, even though He may seem to some as distant. All nature is vocal to the man who believes the morning stars are singing still. Nature is as much the work of God as is this Book.We have no objection to science! No!

No! Our objection is that they take the wretched philosophy of Darwinism and palm it off as a science. There is nothing scientific about it. That is the thing we are condemning. We have never been against nature’s ways. Jesus Christ turned to them constantly. The flower, the lily of the valley, was a beautiful illustration to Him. The birds which hung under the eaves of buildings and in the branches of the trees—to them He referred.

The rocks, the vines, the sheep-fold, the flocks were all full of spiritual suggestions to the Son of God, typifying even His own great work in the world. We have no objection to bringing from nature symbols of spiritual truth.So Jeremiah was seeing visions of nature; but through them he had a great spiritual conception of what would shortly come to pass, and thenHE TO THE DIVINE The door can suggest to you the way into Heaven. The vine suggests to you the fruitful Son of God. There are marvelous things in nature’s ways if you will but look after them.He was encouraged for the coming conflict.“And, they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee”. How badly we need that, and how constantly, for our own encouragement.Jesus Christ wouldn’t have sent out His disciples to the uttermost parts of the earth to face famine and sword and all conceivable opposition, and martyrdom, without encouraging them, “Lo, I am with you alway”.This morning, whatever task you may face, however difficult it may be, however hard the path; draw not back. Life is not a thing of ease. God never promised us we should be exempt from hardship, difficulty, and trial. On the contrary, He promised to be “with us” through them all, and to make us victors against them all. That is all any man who knows God ought to desire or even covet.This hymn expresses exactly the spirit of true discipleship of Jesus Christ. “Am I a soldier of the Cross, A follow’r of the Lamb? And shall I fear to own His cause, Or blush to speak His Name?

“Must I be carried to the skies On flow’ry beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sailed through bloody seas?

“Are there no foes for me to face? Must I not stem the flood? Is this vile world a friend to grace, To help me on to God?

“Sure I must fight, if I would reign; Increase my courage, Lord; I’ll bear the toil, endure the pain, Supported by Thy Word.” I tell you, that hymn is worth-while. It has in it the ring of enthusiasm; the conviction, the daring and courage that belong to Christianity itself; consequently, it ought to be the sentiment of every soul of us. Jeremiah; we salute you! Oh, Prophet of God, lead on! By His grace we will follow!