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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 409. Jeremiah's Career
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There is a tragic interest attaching to the life and times of Jeremiah. The circumstances of the age, the person of the prophet, the character of his message, all combine to demand our sympathetic study. Who can watch unmoved, even at the distance of twenty-five centuries, the death-agony of a nation, and that nation the chosen people of God? Who can fail to be deeply touched by the story of the prophet's life-long martyrdom, ended not improbably by a martyr's death-that story with its frank confessions of human weakness, and its unrivalled testimony to the reality of God-given strength? Who can ponder without awe the record of human hardness and obstinacy, insensible alike to the pleadings of love and to the denunciations of wrath? Who can trace without wonder and reverence the irresistible advance of God's purpose through and in spite of man's opposition to His will, bringing life out of death, and shaping a new order out of the dissolution of the old?
Again, the interest of the Book of Jeremiah itself is unique. On the one hand, it is our most reliable and elaborate source for the long period of history which it covers; on the other, it presents us with prophecy in its most intensely human phase, manifesting itself through a strangely attractive personality that was subject to like doubts and passions with ourselves.