Jeremiah 29
RileyJeremiah 29:1-32
THE RIGHT TOWARD Jeremiah 28:1 to Jeremiah 29:32THE profession of the ministry involves the consideration and treatment of most important subjects. There are occasions, however, when he feels the weight of his profession and knows that the crisis hour is on and yearns to so deliver his soul as to stir, inspire and instruct those who hear him. Three such occasions have influenced pulpit-custom throughout the length and breadth of Christendom: Christmas Sunday, Easter Sunday, and Thanksgiving Thursday make heavy drafts upon the minister’s mind and spirit; yea, even upon his body. The Virgin Birth of Christ and His Resurrection from the grave are the focii of His Deity. To fix positively these points is to make certain the circle of Christian truth.But there are other occasions when the call of the Master demands not only one’s best thought, one highest endeavor, but also the selection and treatment of such Scriptures as shall stir and profit the people who have elected to wait upon that particular pulpit.Thanksgiving is such an hour as this, because it brings an opportunity to realize the goodness of God, and an obligation to put that realization into the form of praise.The members of this congregation will doubtless admit that the pastor has attempted to make those first Sundays in March, that mark the accumulating anniversaries of our relation as Pastor and people, the occasion of deeply felt and far-reaching influence.The Sunday also that inaugurates the New Year is not to be meanly thought of, nor superficially employed! A year is a considerable section of a human life. If we successfully run the gauntlet of youthful diseases and dangers, we are still supposed to have assurance of only about seventy of them, and are the subjects of congratulation and of increasing pride if we pass far beyond eighty.It is little wonder, therefore, that Moses should have prayed, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom”; for the man or woman who numbers the days will value the year.I speak, therefore, this morning not with a view to mere immediate results, but with an eye upon the year 1932; and I bring a subject that is particularly opportune.There have been few periods in American history when the consideration of this theme,“The Right Attitude Toward Adversity” was more pertinent than now.We are not only passing through what men call a time of financial depression, but the world itself is being chilled to its marrow by the cold waters of adversity that come not alone in shortage of cash receipts, but also appear in those far more dangerous features of social confusion, increasing crime, general lawlessness, and moral atrophy.The consequence is that the biggest and most burning question of the day is this, “What does the future hold for us?” And yet, while that question looms, it is in no sense new; it is as old as the ages, and was the exact question that gave rise to the inspired history found in these two chapters, Jeremiah 28, 29.With some painstaking, therefore, let us look diligently into them to discover, if possible, the way through the darkness, the way into light.In seeking to extract the secrets of these two chapters I shall employ three key phrases: The Speech of the Uninspired; The Response of the Inspired; and The Uses of Adversity.THE SPEECH OF THE Bible study demands that those who engage in it be broad awake. The sleepy student may easily mistake its meaning.
For instance, we are told here that “It came to pass the same year, in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah” that Hananiah, the son of Azur the Prophet, spake, saying, “Thus speaketh the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, saying”, etc.Immediately the intelligent student senses a deception. Hananiah is not a prophet of God; he is a false prophet instead. All the features of the false prophet are found in him.First of all, he professes to speak as from God.“Thus speaketh the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, saying”. You will search in vain to find any Divine commission for this man, or any Divine communication to him.On more than one occasion Jesus warned against “the false prophet”; and He gave us criterions by which to measure them. The false prophet has characterized every century. He lived in Moses’ day, and to some degree duplicated, in appearance at least, the marvelous works that God wrought at Moses’ hand.He lived in Daniel’s day and performed the function of a spirit medium, professing especially to be expert in interpreting dreams and fortune telling. He lived in Jeremiah’s day. The Lord said to Jeremiah, “The prophets * * prophesy falsely in My Name; I have not sent them”.The twentieth century has its full quota of the same; men who are in the ministry, but admit that they entered it at the option of their own judgment; men who deny the great essentials of the Christian faith,—repudiating the Virgin Birth, the Miracle Working, the voluntary and sacrificial Death of Christ, His Conquest against the grave, and His Ascension to the right hand of the Father. And yet, like Hananiah, they claim to know and declare the will and Word of God.
It is a wretched affrontery; it is a bold defiance of God to His face; it is only a flaunting of a personal opinion, and the attempt to add weight to the same by attributing their words to the Divine One.In the next place he presents a very pleasing prospect. “I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon”. If there is one mark of the false prophet that is more unmistakable than another, it is his eternal custom of telling people palatable things.What good news—the yoke of Babylon broken!
What pleasing prospect—two years and every Israelite back in his own land! That was indeed a winsome proclamation! We can imagine the huzzahs of the croud! We can readily understand that Hananiah would be in uniform demand as an after-dinner speaker. Every commercial club in town would invite him, and the leading politicians would send him word to come and sit in, and counsel with them, and the throngs would seek the place of his public appearances.We have had a man in Minneapolis who, in recent years, has been telling the people who attend upon his ministry that humanity was God, and multitudes of them accepted the announcement with joy, pleased with the oratory with which the deception was phrased. It is one evidence of our fall that we so delight in flattery, one proof of our degradation that we hail, with pleasure, the ideas that cater to the flesh.A few years ago a popular pastor in a supposedly evangelical pulpit, concluding the same for a professorship in a Chicago Theological Seminary, gave as his parting counsel to the congregation that had already too long followed his pulpit advices this:“I have not pled with you to believe in God; I have not asked you to bring your sins to be forgiven, primarily.
I have not asked you to believe in the reality of the spiritual world; I have asked you to believe in yourselves, in the divinity of man, in the greatness of the human soul. Those who can see the infinite reach of themselves can see God; can assure themselves that the spiritual world is open to them.
Men are what they are because of the fatal disbelief in their own divinity!”What a subtle appeal to human pride!And yet one would search every true Prophet of the Old Testament in vain for such a sentiment; but the moment he quit the true Prophets, and gave audience to those of the Hananiah sort, he would detect a kindred note. In fact, he would be listening to the same satanic lullaby intended by the prophet himself to please the people, and employed by the adversary to induce in them sound sleep.But still further, This prophet voiced a most politic appeal.“I will bring again to this place, Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah” (Jeremiah 28:4). Jeconiah had been a popular king, but had gone as a captive into Babylonian slavery. It would be difficult to imagine any announcement that would be hailed with more pleasure. The Jewish people would prize the lips that uttered it and suppose that, in the man who promised it, they had found the benefactor of their race.But what is more cruel than to excite expectations that can never be realized, and to build up hopes that hard history must dash to the ground?THE OF THE “Then the Prophet Jeremiah said”. This is God’s man; we will do well to hear now! Mark you, he is speaking, first of all, to the self-appointed prophet Hananiah, and doing it “in the presence of the priests”, and “in the presence of ah the people that stood in the House of the Lord”. And this is what he said,“Amen: the Lord do so: the Lord perform thy words which thou hast prophesied, to bring again the vessels of the Lord’s House, and all that is carried away captive, from Babylon into this place. “Nevertheless hear thou now this Word that I speak in thine ears, and in the ears of all the people; “The Prophets that have been before me and before thee of old prophesied both against many countries, and against great kingdoms, of war, and of evil, and of pestilence”. That is the province of the true Prophet! How glad he would be if the pleasing thing could come to pass; how glad he would be for God’s people if they were to be immediately recipients of the Divine favor; how glad he would be if God’s man would, within a few weeks, come back to the throne.At this point the true Prophet is often misunderstood! God’s man has to affirm evil whether he desires it or not; if it be God’s Word, even though it be to make himself unpopular with the people.No man ever lived who loved as Christ loved; no man ever lived who loathed disease as Christ loathed it. He saw in it the very devil’s work and declared of its every feature that it was the product of demonism. No man ever lived who desired for the people good as Christ desired it for them. When He saw them hungry He created fish and bread.
When He saw them cold He begged His own brethren not to keep two coats, but to pass on one to their needy fellows.And yet Christ was the very Man who, because He was God’s Prophet and could not lie, had to say to His own beloved people, “Ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: * * nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
Then shall they deliver you up to he afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for thy Name’s sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold”.How pathetic! Every word of it burned His lips; every thought of it bled His heart, and He, as God’s Prophet, and in the interest of the men that He loved and the women for whom He was ready to lay down His life, He must tell the truth and speak no lie.What Hananiah had said, Jeremiah desired more than Hananiah a thousandfold, and that is why Jeremiah responded, “Amen: the Lord do so”.But, knowing as Jeremiah did know, that the false prophet had made a political appeal, he dared a very sensible suggestion, namely this,Time will distinguish the false from the true. Wait and see, was his counsel; if the word of the prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known, that the Lord has truly sent him.Time is necessarily a Divine test of prophecy; and time is also the eternal saviour of truth and the victorious enemy of falsehood.We are told that Michael Angelo was passing around one day through the studio criticizing the work of his young artists and seeking thereby to correct their faults and perfect their technique.
He came upon a work that one of them had just finished and that had been created for a committee who proposed to place the same in the public square. Upon inspection Angelo found it had grave defects.
He pointed them out to his young friend, but the exultant artist resented the criticism, and even charged his master with envy, imagining the perfection of his art had excited jealousy in the great soul.Angelo, listening until he had finished, quietly remarked, “Very well; the light of the public square will test it.”How true! “The light of the public square”—every prophet’s word is to be tested by that Light, and as time moves on if it be true, it will be found that prophecy was the mould of history and the people will accept him as true; but if it be discovered that he cried “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” that he promised prosperity when adversity was at hand, and declared God well-pleased with the people when their sins demanded His righteous wrath, time will tell. Time will show who has stood for and with the truth; time will vindicate truth’s advocates; time will uncover the falsehood; time will establish the truth.People have a custom of saying that error can run the world around while truth is getting on her boots. But it is a certainty that when truth gets them on, she will take the straight path and finally arrive.The true Prophet declared the coming of darker days. Hananiah spake saying, “I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years”.The Lord put it into Jeremiah’s lips to respond: “Go and tell Hananiah, saying, Thus saith the Lord: Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron. “For thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him” (Jeremiah 28:13-14). The Prophet who plainly declares the Divine procedure is not necessarily a Prophet of evil. There are conditions under which people are better for an iron yoke upon their necks than with no yoke at all, even as the tamed ox, accustomed to bear the yoke daily, becomes thereby a far better servant of his owner than is the unbroken steer who ranges the forests at will, or feeds on pastures green.The truth is that the dark days are commonly the best days. A few years ago many men multiplied fortunes. They forgot their ill-favored fellows; they despised the principle of fraternal obligation; they passed by the sick, wounded and impoverished, with averted face. Their eyes were upon one thing only, and that was the ever-rising heap of gold. They builded them mansions; they hired them servants; they invested thousands in magnificent cars and beautiful yachts, in summer cabins and winter havens.
And in it all they forgot God and when the crash is on, it comes about as in a letter of yesterday, saying of a personal friend, wife of one of these, “She is leaving her mansion for a humble home. Through the systematic robbery of a banker, her husband has lost three millions of dollars, and it looks as though the family would be reduced to poverty.”Doubtless to them that seems like the very sentence of doom. But who knows but it may be the beginning of the best days of their human history; and if it bring him to regard God, to sympathize with his fellows, and to serve his Lord, it will be. Christ once said, “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter”.“Some day all doubt and mystery will be made clear: The threatening clouds which now we see will disappear, Some day what seems a punishment, or loss, or pain, Will prove to be God’s blessing sent for very gain— Some day our weary feet will rest in sweet content, And we will know how we are blest by what was sent, And looking back with clearer eyes o’er life’s short span, Will see with wondering, glad surprise God’s perfect plan, And knowing that the way we went was God’s own way, Will understand His wise intent.” This leads up, then, to the climax of this study:THE USES OF We doubt if a sounder philosophy has ever been spoken by the lips of man than Jeremiah here uttered.His speech involves three suggestions:Make the most of a bad matter!“Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; “Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; “Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished” (Jeremiah 29:4-6). Mark you, God is here speaking to His own people! He does not tell them to create a rebellion, to kill the king of Babylon, to crush Babylonish sovereignty, and to strike for freedom. On the other hand, He says, “You are in for it; your sins necessitate your condition; now make the most of it!”The best way in the world for a slave to be free is to make himself so useful that his master will appreciate him and show him constant favors.Build; plan; make the most of the present situation. It is sound counsel. My contention is that you cannot enslave a serviceable man; you cannot crush a creator; you cannot bemean the man of God.You can sell Joseph into Egypt; you can send Joseph into prison; you can temporarily discredit his good name; but you cannot keep Joseph down; his very honor will vindicate itself; his ability will be in demand, and his slavery will eventuate in sovereignty.When people, therefore, come to me with their complaints that they have never had an opportunity; they have never been appreciated; their abilities have never been recognized, I know full well where the evil lies. It is not with Babylon, bad as its slave-making and slave-holding principle is; it is with sinful Israel instead.
It is not with society; it is with the indigent or incompetent individual.We are told that water will rise to its level; and we know that if there be any considerable pressure of it, it will even tear its way through mountains in order to illustrate that principle of its existence. It is largely so with men.
Give me a man who can make the most of a bad matter, and I will show you one who, when opportunities of good come, will amaze his fellows and amass a fortune.Oliver Cromwell said, “I bless God I have been enured to difficulties, and I never found God failing when I trusted in Him.”Newspapers are full of predictions of business improvement. They blaze with the promises of brighter days. In the language of Jeremiah we say “Amen: the Lord do so”. But whether Hananiah’s predictions prove true, or the Jeremiah announcement of yet darker days to come should be demonstrated by time, this principle certainly is of the Lord, “make the most of the situation!”To me at least, one of the greatest poems ever penned is James Russell Lowell’s, “The Present Crisis”. There is not a verse of it but, at sometime, fits the human situation, and Lowell said:“Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light. “Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.” Be assured you build with and for your brethren.“Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace”. There are some men who always want to change location. If they are in Minneapolis they would like to get into Chicago; if, in Chicago, they want to go to New York; if in New York, Seattle looks attractive; when once there, Los Angeles excites their longing.Such men have an idea that by searching they will finally find a satisfactory town. In my judgment, this text tells us exactly how to discover such. Help to create it, accept the city of which you are a resident, and seek its peace, and pray to the Lord for it, for in its prosperity and in its peace you shall find your own.Many years ago when New York was a miserable burg on Manhattan Island, a few Episcopalian men got together and organized Trinity Church. They selected for it a central and extensive site. They were doubtless regarded as benefactors of the village, and even, when their first modest buildings arose, as contributors to the possible future town.
And such they were indeed!But, all unintentionally, while they were building for the burg, they were building for themselves, and their successors an unthinkable fortune; for in New York’s prosperity Trinity prospered until it became the wealthiest corporation in the world.Those of us who belong to this generation have made sacrifices to create, at the center of this city, one of the most sightly and capacious of sanctuaries and educational plants known to America. Our task has not been a light one. In fact, it has lain, for lo nigh twenty years since first we began to acquire property in its interest, heavily upon the hearts and purses of those who have been most profoundly interested.When we come up to such a day as is this; when $15,000 more is demanded to meet our contract with money-lenders, we may wince under the weight of it, and even in the language of the martyrs of Revelation, cry, “How long, O Lord”! but the enheartening thought remains, and should ever be our adequate inspiration, that in building for this city such a center of Gospel preaching, and such schools for training the youth, we are contributing not alone to beautiful Minneapolis, and there our contribution is great; but we are also honoring and blessing ourselves, and providing for the future of our children and our successors in church-membership and educational work, benedictions beyond all the silver that her citizens carry in bags, and all the gold that her few dominating banks hold in their vaults.There are some of us whose hair has silvered while we wrought that these great buildings might be realized; some, whose shoulders have bent under the load; but I am sure that such are not complaining, and I am assured that certain of them feel concerning this whole enterprise as the unknown author expressed:“An old man going a lonely way, Came at the evening, cold and gray, To a chasm, vast and deep and wide. The old man crossed in the twilight dim; The sullen stream held no fears for him; But when he was safe on the other side, He builded a bridge to span the tide. “‘Old man, said a fellow-pilgrim near, ‘You are wasting your time while building here. You never again will pass this way: Your journey is done at the close of day. You have safely crossed to the other side; Why build you a bridge at eventide. “The builder lifted his old gray head; ‘Good friend, in the way I’ve come,’ he said, ‘There followeth after me today A youth whose feet must pass this way. This stream, which has been as nought to me, To the fair-haired youth might a pitfall be, He, too, must cross in the twilight dim; And so I am building the bridge for him.’” The last thing that Jeremiah sets before us is this thought: Trust God for the coming days!“For thus saith the Lord, That after seventy years he accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform My good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. “Then shall ye call upon Me, and ye shall go and pray unto Me, and I will hearken unto you. “And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall Search for Me with all your heart. “And I will be found of you, saith the Lord: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the Lord; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive” (Jeremiah 29:10-14). In looking back over the years I have a comfortable certainty of mind, that not one leading man of those who have made up the burden-bearers in the First Baptist Church ever undertook the task of these great buildings without a proper appreciation of its weight. You knew that we were putting our shoulders under no light load; you expected from the first that many of us would stagger before the task was finished, and you perfectly knew that some would fall, not to rise again; and others would desert their places, releasing their own shoulders at the expense of the bruised and bleeding ones of their brethren. But with all of that, full before us, we dared to undertake, and at the end of two decades of endeavor and seven years of the heaviest lifting, we are not tempted, even, to give up the task, and only the ignoble regret the endeavor.With our eyes lifted aloft we still trust and toil on, knowing full well that in our Heavenly Father we have a never-failing source of strength.W. Robertson Nichol, in one of his dissertations, tells us that the truest men work, not for reward, and scarcely straighten their backs from toil to admire the products of their endeavor; but press on, motived only by the will and desire of serving God; and then he says, “Such lives must draw, not from the shallow streams of life, but from the deep fountains that flow out of the throne.”Some of my brethren have said that we would not meet the $15,000 due against these buildings the coming week. If we do not, somebody will be to blame! How appropriate now the question, “Lord, is it I?”Instead of thinking so much upon our inability, and attempting to excuse our failure on that ground, would it not be better to get the view that the canny Scotch servant finally secured?For this story Campbell Morgan is my authority: “Some years ago, in Scotland, a Scotch lord gave to his old servant Donald, a little farm. He called him in one day and said:“‘Donald, I am going to give you that farm, that you may work it for yourself, and spend the rest of your days there upon your own property.” “Donald, with all the canniness that characterises a Scotchman, looked up into the face of his lord, and said to him:“It is nae gude to gie me the farm; I have nae capital to stock it.”“His lordship looked at him, and said: ‘Oh, Donald, I think I can manage to stock it also.”“And Donald said: ‘Oh, well; if it is you and me for it, I think we will manage!’”God with us all things are possible.