Jeremiah 23
RileyJeremiah 23:5-8
THE COMING KING Jeremiah 23:5-8 in his “Great Stone Face” has given us a meaningful allegory. One must look upon that wonder of the White Mountains in order to appreciate Hawthorne’s picture. Of all the suggestive and even strange appearances that take form in mountain scenery, the great stone face is by far the most realistic. It is little wonder that the state is willing to expend many thousands of dollars to steady one brow of that face, which by sheer weight is about to break away, for as it appears now, and did appear in Hawthorne’s day, no imagination whatever is needed to outline a noble countenance, that, like a massive Abraham Lincoln, looks out over the beautiful valleys that stretch away toward the sea. You will recall that Hawthorne’s idyl springs from the imagination that this face symbolizes “a man to come” in whose makeup strength and sweetness should so combine as to render him the idol of the community—the sage of the centuries. And you will also recall that even then, in the community itself, the lad was growing in whose features the mountain should finally find its reflection; and in whose nature the community-dream should be perfectly realized.Our text gives us the original of this ideal. It presents, however, no limited mountain-likeness, nor yet a mere local dream. The Face discoverable in it, as long delineated by inspired Prophets, was the expectation of the centuries. It is little wonder then, that the Prophet introduces his statement with the word “BEHOLD”! And it is less a marvel that he expects the attention of the world, for he deals with a world-need, with a world interest, and with an age-long conception.But let us hear what the Prophet saith!A “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth”. This sentence anticipated the Babe of Bethlehem. Jeremiah is not crying “Behold” because he counts himself the first man to see this vision afar; but he is joining his voice with that of other Prophets who have pointed to the same day, the same transcendent event, and the same incomparable Person.Isaiah, the mighty Prophet, the inspired evangel of Old Testament truth, the man whose lips had been “touched with a live coal from off the altar”, the man who had seen God “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up” His train “filling the temple”, had cried out in kindred language, in anticipation of the same Advent, “BEHOLD, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, and shall call His Name Immanuel”. That was “the sign” that in this Son the world would have a Saviour.It is quite popular now to deny the Virgin Birth, and some can even veil that denial with the eloquence of a Gunsaulus, calling the madonna “that bright and new conception of woman recreated and recreating, a conception of Christianity glorified in a light produced from the romance of imagination and limned against a background built of the accumulated shadows in the flight of sixty centuries. * * Truly have the millions touched through a superstition the bands of a great truth; earth’s Madonna is woman made Divine in inspiration and work through Christ.”But with whatever features of rhetoric the denial of the Virgin Birth is garlanded, it is a death stab at Christianity itself and makes the whole New Testament story a volume of fiction and fraud, presents the pitiful sight of Apostles either self-deceived or deceiving, makes the blessed Mary to be a common prostitute, slanders the angel Gabriel who is supposed to have given the great annunciation, and blackens alike the character of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Ghost.Daniel Webster was capable of a better logic! In a letter from his hand, condensed by Prof. Sanborn of Dartmouth, he said, “The Gospel is either true history, or it is a consummate fraud; it is either a reality, or an imposition. Christ was what He professed to be, or He was an impostor.
There is no other alternative. His spotless life in His earnest enforcement of the truth, His suffering in its defense, forbid us to suppose that He was suffering from an illusion of a heated brain.
Every act of His pure and holy life shows that He was the author of truth, the advocate of truth, the earnest defender of truth, and the uncompromising sufferer for truth. Now, considering the purity of His doctrines, the simplicity of His life and the sublimity of His death, is it possible that He would have died for an illusion?”When He came in His first and earthly estate He was kingly in character; when He returns in glory He will come as the crowned One. “At the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in Heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10-12).Consider, the judgment of the world’s brainiest men and tell me if when He returns He will not come as King?Napoleon said, “I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ is not a man. Everything about Him amazes me. His spirit overwhelms me and His will confuses me. There is no possible comparison between Him and any other being in the world. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I founded empires, but upon what did the creation of our dominions rest—on force!
Jesus Christ founded His empire alone upon love, and at this hour millions would die for Him.”Alfred Tennyson, when asked what he thought of Jesus Christ, said, “What the sun is to that flower Jesus Christ is to my soul; He is the Sun of my soul.”His kingship belongs to His Divine character! The time of His reign is with the Father’s appointment; the certainty of it is in the inspired promises.This reign will be a righteous reign.
And He “shall execute judgment and justice in the earth”.How marvelously the speech of inspired Prophets harmonizes! Listen to Isaiah: “Of the increase of His government and peace there shall he no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever” (Isaiah 9:7).The minor Prophets breathe the notes of the major. Hear Daniel: “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy” (Daniel 9:24).There are those who have lived under the hallucination that by the law of evolution everything was improving and that by and by righteousness would naturally obtain in the earth, and its arrival should be called “the Kingdom of God”.All such philosophers are being either disillusioned by these evil days, or their dementia demonstrated. We have indulged in legislation, sanitation, eugenics, companionate marriage, and birth control, and we have marveled at the mechanical advances of the century, and boasted that man was going to be the lord of all creation; and we have even set up as a sort of new religion, Humanism, which is the worship of the composite man.But while we are about the business of world-improving, sin and crime of every sort is making prodigious progress, and today the nations of the earth are wrapped in a darkness that deepens; and even the prophets of yesterday’s optimism are beginning to fear the issue of time and are now questioning the philosophy by which they have maintained their own position.But, into this darkness the promises of God penetrate, and we can see, even now, in faint outline, that Kingdom which is to come; the Kingdom that God Himself shall set up in the last day; the Kingdom over which His Son shall reign solitary and alone; the Kingdom in which the law shall be executed in righteousness; the Kingdom from which war shall fade forever, and under which prosperity shall be the universal portion; the Kingdom which shall at last witness the will of God, “done in earth, as it is in Heaven”.R. F. Horton, in one of his books says: “The Kingdom of God comes to earth just in proportion as the rebellious will of men acknowledge the will of God.” Every student of prophecy knows that that will not take place until Christ Himself is come to His throne, until every eye beholds Him, and every will recognizes His supremacy, and every knee bows to His authority, and every tongue confesses to His glory.“There is a great day coming”! But according to this text that day will be associated with other desirable results:ISRAEL’S Israel, God’s chosen people, shall yet be saved.Once in a while we meet a man who makes the boast that he has never failed to carry out his plans, to execute his purposes. Such a man must have kept his plans within most reasonable limits and his purposes within easy accomplishment.But if there is a God at all, His plans cannot fail, nor His purposes perish; and according to this text, when the Lord shall come, “Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely”.Possibly of the thousands of promises recorded in sacred Writ, there are more of them that relate to the redemption of Israel than to any other solitary subject. As far back as the Pentateuch, when God had declared His purpose to drive Israel to the ends of the earth, He promised that, when they should repent, He would “turn their captivity” and have compassion upon them, and gather them from all the nations whither He had scattered them. Jeremiah writes: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch”.Micah says, “Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which Thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old” (Micah 7:20).Isaiah shouts, Oh, ye of Israel, Ye “shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers. But ye shall be named the Priests of the Lord: men shall call you the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves” (Isaiah 61:4-6).Hosea says: “For the Children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim: afterward shall the Children of Israel return, and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days” (Hosea 3:4-5).Ezekiel declares: “Behold, I will take the Children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land: and I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all: * * And David My servant shall be king over them * *.
And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob My servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children * * for ever: and My servant David shall be their prince for ever” (Ezekiel 37:21-25).Amos says: “I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God” (Amos 9:15).But why multiply promises more since their name is legion! Let us look now to see if God is moving in the fulfilment of His holy Word.You are all familiar with the fact that the most stirring incident of the war of 1914-18, the late world-war was the surrender of Jerusalem under the expressed promise that it and its land should be opened to the return of its ancient people, and since the day when Allenby walked with uncovered head, conqueror, through its streets, Sir Herbert Samuels, the Jew, has administered that land.You are also familiar with the fact that Rabbi Leon Magnes—how significant the title—the great Lion—has already established a Hebrew University at Jerusalem.
When he came to Los Angeles, while on a visit to the States, he was met by more than a thousand Jews with an enthusiasm that even exceeded that which scientists gave to Einstein on his first visit to America.This University, like many other products of the late war, was the thought and proposal of Lord Balfour, who pledged the delivery of that land to its Divinely promised owners; and the Zionist movement, a movement of Jews back to Palestine, has followed the line of prophecy most rapidly since the surrender of Jerusalem fourteen years ago. Before the war was dreamed, and even before the slightest appearance of their return, thirty millions of dollars were pledged by Jews to that object and since the war ended thousands of them have already found their way to the fatherland in the fulfilment of God’s plan and promises.Little wonder that Sir A. T. Davis, late director of education in Wales, wrote:“There is nothing in all history to parallel the restoration of Palestine. The eyes of all students of prophecy are on Palestine, for it is the central sign of the Coming of Christ. The Scriptures clearly state that before Christ comes the Jew must be back in Palestine, and as already seen they are on the way.“Daniel, five hundred years before Christ, informed the world that Rome, not London, was to make the final seven years’ agreement which is to be broken ‘in the midst of the week”.“That prophecy is also looming now that Mussolini declares, ‘Rome is a universal city, dear to the whole world.
It is destiny that Rome again takes her place as the directress of the civilization of all western Europe’.”In 1885 there were scarcely five thousand miserably poor Jews in the land of Promise but sometime since, Dr. Weizmann declared:“In seven years we have brought 100,000 Jews to the country.
They have formed sixty new colonies and nine-tenths of the business of Jerusalem is in the hands of the Jews. A friend residing in Palestine gives these interesting figures regarding Tel-Aviv (near Jaffa), said to be the only entirely Jewish city in the world. It started to be built twenty-three years ago; in 1920 it had a population of only five hundred, today it has 50,000; and it is estimated that fifty-million dollars has been invested in building it.”In 1931 Ernest Gordon, the son of our great Baptist leader A. J. Gordon, wrote:“The largest land purchases in Palestine by Zionists has been consummated recently, a sufficient reply to those who think that the Arab-Jewish clash of 1929 has anything more than passing significance. The cost of this tract of 290,000 Dunans of land in the valley of Jezreel has been $4,500,000, made in an immediate last payment. Permission to purchase had to be obtained from the Grand Mufti at Jerusalem and the Moslem Council.”All of which looks to the fulfilment of Amo 9:15 “I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I hate given them, saith the Lord thy God”.And again, as Zechariah wrote: “I will bring them, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, in truth and in righteousness” (Zechariah 8:8).And yet again, “O mountains of Israel, * * ye shall be tilled and sown, * * the cities shall be inhabited and the wastes shall be builded” (Ezekiel 36:8-10).Christ shall be owned and honored of them.“This is His Name whereby He shall be called, THE LORD OUR ”. Have you not been impressed with the proposed council at Jerusalem, suggested by Jewish leaders, and appointed for the purpose of discovering who Christ was, and especially who was responsible for His crucifixion, the arrangements for which meeting are now going forward?Perhaps never since Christ was crucified has the Jewish mind been so divested of prejudice as to render possible even the discussion of these subjects as it is at this present moment. Their study of the Old Testament prophecies has convinced many of the orthodox among them that they might have made a mistake; while the boasted liberty of thought on the part of even their modernist leaders has led to an approach to these great and century long questions.What is the explanation of this? There is but one, It was the capitol of the people of promise and is destined to be the capitol of the world when the final promise of the Second Coming of Christ as the King of Glory is fulfilled.The old Jacobic spirit has not perished from the flesh of Israel. It is not an unusual thing to find a convert from Israel to Christianity, who is still out to deceive and to secure profit from the flocks of Laban. But when we meet a genuine Jewish convert to Christ we may see in him a sample of God’s plan for Israel, when once he is truly converted.A. J.
Gordon relates a personal experience in connection with the Moody campaign at the World’s Fair in 1894. He says,“We found ourselves at our lodgings in a room next to a Russian guest.
During the evening, strains of subdued evening chant in Hebrew was heard. We enquired who our neighbor next us was, to learn that it was one Joseph Robinowitz of Russia. To our surprise, we were adjacent to the man we would have crossed the ocean to see, and only a sliding door between us. Introduction followed; and then three weeks of study and communion together concerning the things of the Kingdom, the memory of which will not soon depart.It seemed to us, as we talked day after day with him and heard him pour out his soul in prayer, that we never before witnessed such ardor of affection for Jesus, and such absorbing devotion to His Person and glory. We shall not soon forget the radiance that would come into his face as he expounded the Messianic Psalms at our morning or evening worship, and how, as here and there, he caught a glimpse of the suffering or glorified Christ, he would suddenly lift his hands and his eyes to Heaven in a burst of admiration, exclaiming, with Thomas after he had seen the nail-prints, “My Lord and my God”!Do you know, he said one day, what questioning and controversies the Jews have kept up over Zechariah 12:10, “They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced”. They will not admit that it is Jehovah whom they pierced.
Hence the dispute about the whom; but do you notice that this Aleph, Tav? Do you wonder, then, that I was filled with awe and astonishment, when I opened to Revelation 1:7-8, and read these words of Zechariah, now quoted by John, “Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him” and then heard the glorified Lord saying, “I am Alpha and Omega”?
Jesus seemed to say to me, “Do you doubt who it is whom you pierced? I am the Aleph Tav, the Alpha Omega; Jehovah, the Almighty.”“Nothing could be more thrilling and pathetic than to hear this latter-day Prophet of Israel dilate on the blessedness and glory of his nation when it shall at last be brought back into favor and fellowship with God. The Gentile nations cannot come to their highest blessing till then, nor can our rejected and crucified Messiah see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied till His kinsmen according to the flesh shall own and accept Him. This is the Name whereby He shall be called by them, “The Lord our righteousness”.THE HOME-COMING OF GOD’S OWNJer_23:7-8 present the home-coming of God’s own:“Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that they shall no more say, The Lord liveth, which brought up the Children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; “But, The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the House of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land”. Their past experience is a proof of the love. They used to sing of it, “The Lord liveth, which brought up the Children of Israel out of the land of Egypt”.To this day they have not wholly forgotten that evidence of Divine love. Long after the event the Psalmist made it the subject of his song. Turn to the 105th Psalm and you will see him calling upon the people to give themselves unto the Lord, to make known His acts unto the people, to sing unto Him, to sing psalms of praise; to talk of all His wondrous works. In that Psalm he rehearses their history in going into Egypt, and shows His favor upon them while there, while in the 106th Psalm he tells of their deliverance out of it and God’s salvation at the Red Sea; of His care and keeping in the Wilderness, of His pardon of their idolatry in the matter of the golden calf, of His compassion at Baelpeor: of His repeated deliverances from the just judgment against their sins, and the multiplied occasions of praise that God had brought unto them.George Lorimer, in his “Argument for Christianity” truthfully insists that in spite of man’s sin, God’s graciousness is repeatedly proven; and in view of the many manifestations of the same, he comes to this conclusion: “As we look backward and comprehensively grasp all that has fallen out, both of good and bad, and observe their bearing and results, we are constrained to recognize a guiding intelligence that is not of earth and a benevolence that has never failed to bring light out of darkness. Why then should we, who have been thus taught, falter in our faith or yield to the dismay of doubt? Though we see Him not, we have sufficient reason for trust; and though error may for the time being seem to prevail against truth, and the hearts of His children fail with fear, unless the centuries have lied to us He will yet remember the Kingdom of His dear Son, will enlarge its borders, establish its authority, and bring forth its righteousness as the noonday.”“Careless seems the Great Avenger: History’s pages but record One death struggle in the darkness ’twixt false systems and the Word. Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.” History will yet record greater examples of God’s love. They shall not forever continue to say, “The Lord liveth, which brought up the Children of Israel out of the land of Egypt” but will be enabled to say “The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the House of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land”.In other words the mercies of the past will be exceeded by the multiplied favors of the future.A. W. Archibald, in his volume “The Trend of the Centuries” speaking of the dealings of God, tells us the glory of the chosen people had passed when, as they were scattered everywhere, every important city contained a synagogue. Thus were furnished points of contact, centers at which Christianity, which was of Judaic origin (for salvation is of the Jews) could take root.Uhlhorn, in his “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism”, well says of the advantage arising from the Jewish dispersion, that the Gospel thus found “channels everywhere cut, a network of canals extending over the whole Roman empire, and was able to diffuse itself rapidly in every direction.” “An American would stand little chance of moving the German as a nation, or the French, or the Italians, but let groups of Americans be located in every considerable city of Germany, France and Italy, while all in those countries understood and could speak the English tongue, and the prospect would be infinitely better. There would be place to rest the lever, and with such a single vantage-point Archimedes declared that he could move the world.
Exactly this condition of things existed at the coming of the Messiah. There were Messianic centers not a few but many, wherever there were little settlements of Jews, who, as we learn from both sacred and profane sources, were in an expectant mood.”How marvelous then is the opportunity of evangelism in connection with the Second Coming of Christ, for scarce a village in the world but has its Jew and the prophecy is of Christ that when He shall come the second time, “It shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you”. He is coming! He hath said it! Coming soon to claim His own, And the time is fast approaching When we’ll gather round His throne.
We shall then sing forth our praises To the Lamb once crucified, Gladly bow the knee before Him Who in our place once died.
No more sorrow, no more trial, Every tear He wiped away; When our Lord at last shall lead us To the land of endless day!
Meanwhile, just a little longer Must we work, and watch, and pray, Then we’ll hear the shout of triumph Ushering in that glorious day!