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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 413. Jeremiah's Character
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Jeremiah's Character
Literature
Davidson, A. B., Old Testament Prophecy (1903), 424.
Driver, S. R., Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1913), 247.
Driver, S. R., The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah (1906).
Edghill, E. A., The Evidential Value of Prophecy (1906), 105, 324.
Erbt, W., Jeremia und seine Zeit (1902).
Gillies, J. R., Jeremiah: The Man and his Message (1907).
Horne, C. S., in Biblical Character Sketches (1896), 92.
Kirkpatrick, A. F., The Doctrine of the Prophets (1892), 286.
Knudson, A. C., The Beacon Lights of Prophecy (1914), 165.
McClure, J. G. K., Living for the Best (1903), 87.
McFadyen, J. E., Introduction to the Old Testament (1905), 140.
Matheson, G., The Representative Men of the Bible, ii. (1903) 288.
Maurice, F. D., The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament (1892), 388, 406, 426.
Meyer, F. B., Jeremiah: Priest and Prophet.
Orelli, C. von, Old Testament Prophecy (1885), 329.
Ottley, R. L., Aspects of the Old Testament (1897), 312.
Peake, A. S., Jeremiah and Lamentations (Century Bible) (1910).
Ramsay, A., Studies in Jeremiah (1905).
Robson, J., Jeremiah the Prophet (Bible Class Primers).
Sanders, F. K., and Kent, C. F., The Messages of the Earlier Prophets (1899), 201.
Streane, A. W., Jeremiah together with the Lamentations (Cambridge Bible) (1913).
Westcott, B. F., Peterborough Sermons (1904), 279.
Westphal and Du Pontet, The Law and the Prophets (1910), 312.
Whyte, A., Bible Characters: Ahithophel to Nehemiah (1899), 151.
Woods, F. H., and Powell, F. E., The Hebrew Prophets, ii. (1910) 39.
Dictionary of the Bible, ii. (1899) 568 (A. B. Davidson).
Dictionary of the Bible, ii. (Single-volume, 1909) (G. G. Findlay).
Encyclopœdia Biblica, ii. (1901), col. 2366 (N. Schmidt).
Expositor, 5th Ser., i. (1895) 66, 108, 309; ii. (1895) 118, 199, 278, 356 (J. Stalker); 6th Ser., ix. (1904) 186 (M. Kaufmann).
Expository Times, xiii. (1902) 71 (B. Duhm); xv. (1904) 461 (D. M. Tod); xviii. (1907) 296, 412 (G. G. Findlay).
Interpreter, ix. (1913) 271 (L. W. Grensted).
Jewish Encyclopedia, vii. (1904) 96 (V. Ryssel).
Methodist Recorder, Feb. 18, 1915 (A. Hoyle).
Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, viii. (1900) 646 (F. Buhl).
For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt.- Jer_8:21.
He cannot limit himself to reproducing “the word of the Lord”; his individual nature is too strong for him, and asserts its right of expression. His life was a constant alternation between the action of the “burning fire” of revelation, and the reaction of human sensibilities. Truly has it been observed that “Jeremiah has a kind of feminine tenderness and susceptibility; strength was to be educed out of a spirit which was inclined to be timid and shrinking”; and again, that “he was a loving, priestly spirit, who felt the unbelief and sin of his nation as a heavy, overwhelming burden.” Who does not remember these touching words?-
“Is there no balm in Gilead? is there no physician there?
Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?
Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears,
That I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!” (Jer_8:22; Jer_9:1).
And again:
“Let mine eyes run down with tears night and day,
And let them not cease:
For the virgin daughter of my people is broken with a great breach,
With a very grievous blow” (Jer_14:17).
In this respect Jeremiah marks an epoch in the history of prophecy. Isaiah and the prophets of his generation are fully absorbed in their message, and allow no space for the exhibition of personal feeling. In Jeremiah, on the other hand, the element of human feeling is constantly overpowering the prophetic. But let not Jeremiah be disparaged, and let not those triumph over him who are gifted with greater power of self-repression. Self-repression does not always imply the absence of selfishness. Jeremiah's demonstrativeness is called forth, not by purely personal troubles, but by those of God's people. The words of Jesus, “Ye would not,” and “But now they are hid from thine eyes,” might, as Delitzsch remarks, be placed as mottoes to the Book of Jeremiah.
We shall speak of the character of Jeremiah under the following leading traits-
(i.) His Loneliness; (ii.) His Introspection; (iii.) His Despondency; (iv.) His Anger; (v.) His Sense of Destiny; (vi.) His Likeness to Christ.
Of kinsmen according to the spirit he had but few none indeed-such was the penalty of genius-in the full sense of the term. It was his fate to be shut out from those joys for which his appreciation was so keen and for which he seemed so fitted by nature. He felt his isolation, his exclusion from the common life of his fellows, its innocent pleasures, its grateful relaxations. With a mind turned in upon itself or its relations with God, turned outward on the inevitable fate of his people and the sin to which it was due, he brooded in solitude. His spirit was always tense, strung to a high pitch; he and his vocation had become one.
How far away we are from each other. Two walls of flesh between me and the nearest person on earth! Even the eyes mysterious. I look, and see two little pictures of my outward self, when all I long for is the image of the other soul at those windows; and then, we may reduce our bodies to the same pace, sit, walk, run evenly together, but how seldom will the mind run in couples! My neighbour's mind has wings, and reaches the goal before I have so much as seen it, or mine is half-way to another goal by mistake, while my neighbour is labouring to explain where it is that he wants to go to.1 [Note: Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge (1915), 226.]
2. Warm-hearted as he was, Jeremiah was not content, as Isaiah had once been, to withdraw himself into the society of a small circle of sympathetic disciples. Indeed it is not certain that he had any such disciples. To the professional time-serving prophets of his day he stood in direct antagonism, and his doleful temperament would hardly have attracted the more sanguine and youthful spirits. In fact, so far as we can gather, Baruch seems to have been in the end his only faithful and constant adherent. His feelings of solitude and isolation caused him frequently to take refuge in religious meditation, which, with an absence of reserve that often characterizes deeply sensitive natures, he has preserved in his book. In this respect and in his self-analysis, he reminds us more than once of St. Paul, and they are of great interest from a psychological point of view. Here, too, Jeremiah distinguishes very clearly between the workings of his natural self and the voice of God within him. So much is this the case that in more than one instance they assume the form of a dialogue between himself and Jehovah.
Man in himself is the loneliest being in the world. The wall of his separate personality shuts him off, as to his interior self, in an awful isolation from all the millions that surround him. His neighbours may look in at his windows, may come into his guest-chamber, but they penetrate never the cell where he sits alone. He is like the island continent of Australia, whose boundaries are rimmed with ports and cities, but whose vast interior lies silent, uninhabited. Yet assuredly this loneliness is no mischance, no accident of his being. It is an insulation from the outward, to secure the uninterrupted play of his spiritual contacts. For the trained soul knows itself as not alone. It knows a perpetual, invisible companionship. It has a speech which it cannot translate to its neighbour. In the glare of the day, in the hum of the crowd, in the silent watches of the night, it talks with the Unseen, it has converse with its Friend. Its past, its present, its future; its trials, temptations, defeats; its joys, its griefs, all enter into that constant colloquy. Lamartine, in Les Confidences, speaks of a certain walk in the garden of their French home, where his mother spent always a certain hour of the day-upon which neither husband nor children ever intruded-where she paced, her hands clasped, her eyes lifted to heaven, her lips moving to unuttered words. It was the sacred hour of her speech with God; an hour from which she returned refreshed and renewed. Poor souls, that have not such a Beulah-land to walk in! Poor souls that have, in their inner territory, no such mountain height from which to look down upon their world, to look up to their Father in heaven!1 [Note: J. Brierley, Religion and To-Day, 66.]
3. It was his loneliness that forced Jeremiah more and more upon God. In his relations with God he displays what a more timid reverence would feel to be a daring familiarity. But his awe was none the less deep, nor did he think too meanly of his privilege to stand in the council of God. He enters with intimate sympathy into His relations with Israel, the wounded love, the burning indignation, the readiness to forgive. And he in turn lays bare his soul to God. Startled at the disclosure of the evil possibilities of his own heart, deceitful and desperately sick, he prays the skilled Physician of Souls, who knows his malady through and through, to heal him. Or when his lot becomes too bitter, and he can endure it no longer, he turns upon God now with plaintive expostulation, now even with fierce resentment. And God shows him scant sympathy, rather He rebukes him for faltering and bids him brace himself for trials still more severe, rising above his human weakness in the faith that the Divine promise of protection would be fulfilled.
It is a great hour in any man's life when he is obliged to stand up alone and state his case or defend his cause. What an hour that was in Paul's history when before the Roman officials “no man stood with him,” but, dependent as he was on sympathy and fellowship, he stood alone! It is when a man is absolutely left alone, in danger or disgrace, that the deepest test of his character is reached. That is the reason why the night-time, which seems to say to us “You are alone with God,” has its impressiveness and why the death hour has a similar impressiveness.1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Living for the Best, 93.]
Oh, at the eagle's height
To lie i' the sweet of the sun,
While veil after veil takes flight
And God and the world are one.
Oh, the night on the steep!
All that his eyes saw dim
Grows light in the dusky deep,
And God is alone with him.2 [Note: A. E., Collected Poems, 136.]
In some ways the preacher of to-day has a task more trying than the prophet. The prophets were statesmen in the Kingdom of God. It was the destinies of the nation that they charged themselves with. Of course this involved the destinies of individuals, but only indirectly. The modern preacher has before him, no doubt, a congregation; but it is the destinies, the eternal destinies, of the individuals in it that are laid on him. He has to counsel and speak to minds-minds which may be perplexed, or despondent, or anxious; or it may be, on the other hand, thoughtless; to guide each, to speak to each, in the right way; to find the truth, the thought, the consideration that will just be that needed by each mind to lead it to life. Anyone, thinking seriously of such a responsibility, may well exclaim, “Ah, Lord God! I cannot speak.”1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, The Called of God, 213.]
It is easy to fall into ill-natured gossip about others, and these wise pilgrims [Christian and Faithful] avoid that danger by turning the talk upon themselves. It is the instinct which has created the class-meetings of Methodism, and the pre-communion gatherings of “the men” in the Highlands of Scotland. No doubt this, too, has it dangers. Introspection, besides an inherent tendency towards morbidness, is apt on the one hand to foster vanity and self-importance, and on the other hand to exaggerate experience and lead to fiction. Worse than any other danger is its tendency to violate the sanctities of the individual life. All our deeper spiritual experience is essentially solitary, and by talking of it we are apt to cheapen it, and so to vulgarise our souls. Yet now and again, when it is done in the confidence of an intimate friendship, with simplicity and without parade, it may be a precious and valuable exercise.1 [Note: J. Kelman, The Road, i. 164.]
In an unaccountably silly passage in his Life of Erasmus, Froude actually prints it that “Erasmus like all men of real genius, had a light and elastic nature.” That senseless and impossible passage came back to my mind as I read this melancholy book of this man of real genius. And this also came to my mind out of North's Plutarch: “Aristotle has a place where he says that the wisest men be ever melancholy, as Socrates, Plato, and Hercules were.” And I have read somewhere also on this matter that “merely to say man is to say melancholy.” I wish it were. At any rate, to say “man endued by nature with sufficient sensibility, and then by grace with sufficient spiritual sympathy,” is to say the most profoundly melancholy of men. “O hear me,” says the profoundly intellectual and equally spiritual Jacob Behmen in a comforting passage, “Hear me, for I know well myself what melancholy is! I also have lodged all my days in the melancholy inn!”1 [Note: A. Whyte.]
2. At times he seems to have well-nigh despaired not only of success but of life itself. “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth!… every one of them doth curse me.” Immediately afterwards he contrasts the joy in which, inspired no doubt by the promises given him, he had entered upon the prophetic office with the disheartening reception that awaited him. Such is the bitterness of his sufferings that on one occasion we find him relating his efforts to keep silence. “And if I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in mine heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain.”
Jeremiah was a mental sufferer-his affliction came from within. What was the nature of this mental suffering? The pain of the mind may have as many different sources as the pain of the body. Every feeling of the heart has its own special pain-pride, humility, anger, envy, love. What is Jeremiah's source of mental unrest? It came from the keenness of his intellectual sympathy. Intellectual sympathy is the power to put yourself in the place of another-to feel another's experience as if it were your own. Men possess the power in vastly varying degrees. In some it seems almost absent-there are those who say, “Am I my brother's keeper?” In others it is so strong that it appears to absorb the personal life-to leave no room for the individual wants. It reaches its climax in the Son of Man, in whom the identity between the sufferer and the spectator is so pronounced that He can say of the calamities of life, “Inasmuch as they did it unto the least of my brethren they have done it unto me.”2 [Note: G. Matheson.]
3. Jeremiah is “the man of sorrows” of the Old Testament; and in not a few respects he strikingly resembles the Man of Sorrows of the New. Both were without honour in their own country and in their own house; for, as the people of Nazareth attempted to cast Jesus down from the hill on which their city was built, so the men of Anathoth plotted against Jeremiah's life; and, as he says, even his brethren and the house of his father dealt treacherously with him. Both were opposed by the representatives of religion in their day-Jeremiah by the priests and prophets, Jesus by the Pharisees and scribes. Both wept over the city of Jerusalem with passionate love, and the zeal of God's house did eat them up; yet both were considered traitors to their country and blasphemers of the Temple; both were scourged; and, if tradition is true, both were put to death by their own countrymen.
There is a melancholy that enervates, but there is one also that tempers fine souls to keenness and action. It is easy to discriminate the weak sentimentality of Sterne from true, noble pathos that does not nurse its tears, but wipes them away that it may see to help. Jesus wept, but what succour followed! The life of Lazarus was the result in one case, His own death as a ransom in the other.1 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 125.]
The characteristic features in Jeremiah's individuality are a passionate intensity and stern veracity mingled with pathetic, almost feminine, tenderness, a capacity for indignant invective, with occasional fits of diffidence and self-distrust which make him, as a “human document,” one of the most engaging figures in history. In the “confession of Jeremiah” and the memorials of his life contained in his own writings, supplemented by his friend and faithful disciple Baruch, we have, as Professor Cheyne says, a most “fascinating psychical problem.” Gentle in his general bearing, he becomes at times vehement when harassed by open and secret dangers; as a young man disillusionized at his birthplace Anathoth, the city of priests, by the sight of priestly corruption, later on arriving at Jerusalem, like Luther at Rome, he is struck with horror by worse sins perpetrated at the sacred shrine, the centre of piety, at the very threshold of the Holy of Holies; in the further course of his restless career a natural disposition to pessimistic views gathers strength. He is “the man that hath seen affliction.” But his pessimism never becomes that of rage and resentment, as in Schopenhauer; it is modified by the religious sense of dutiful resignation to the Divine will. His feeling of utter loneliness in the crowd of unsympathetic countrymen saddens his soul, and with the quick sensibility of a refined mind he shrinks from contact with the crimes and sins he witnesses in the city, in the court, in the sanctuary. What he sees and suffers, however, does not produce a sour misanthropy. Unlike Schopenhauer, he does not dwell with savage delight on the depraved worthlessness and abject meanness of his fellow-men. His enemies furnish him with sufficient ground for scorn and distrust, and the depressing influences of his environment produce occasionally doubts and misgivings as to his own mission in those strange words: “Wilt thou indeed be unto me a deceitful brook, as waters that be not sure?” (Jer_15:18, R.V. margin). But from such temporary attacks of sceptical pessimism he recovers quickly and listens to the reassuring voice, which bids him stand forth as a “brazen wall” against all opposition and assures him of Divine support.1 [Note: M. Kaufmann, in The Expositor, 6th Ser., ix. 188.]
2. We should have been glad to think that he endured his persecution with meekness and patience and forgiveness. We can hardly, indeed, be surprised that he bemoans his hard lot, or even curses the day of his birth. Many a Christian man's faith has failed him, and in moments of despair he has wished that he had never been born. When Jeremiah challenges the justice of God's government, or even complains that he has been deceived and deluded, we can sympathize with the human despair and weariness which for the moment loses its hold on God, and sinks exhausted and hopeless. But we are startled, nay, horror-struck, to hear his bitter curses against his persecutors, his passionate invocations of Divine vengeance upon them. They reach a terrible climax in Jer_18:19 ff.: “Give heed to me, O Lord, and hearken to the voice of them that contend with me. Shall evil be recompensed for good? for they have digged a pit for my soul. Remember how I stood before thee to speak good for them, to turn away thy fury from them. Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and give them over to the power of the sword; and let their wives become childless, and widows; and let their men be slain of death, and their young men smitten of the sword in battle.… Yet, Lord, thou knowest all their counsel against me to slay me; forgive not their iniquity, neither blot out their sin from thy sight: but let them be overthrown before thee: deal thou with them in the time of thine anger.”
Let it be granted that some personal vindictiveness was mingled with these imprecations. But there was a far deeper meaning in them. They were-in however imperfect a way-the expression of a desire for the triumph of righteousness, for the manifestation of God's justice in the world. We must remember how keenly the prophet felt that his cause was God's cause, and that his enemies were God's enemies; that God's honour was at stake to defend and vindicate His prophet, and prove his opponents to be utterly in the wrong; while in those times the idea of future rectification and redress of the wrongs of this world was hardly, if at all, entertained, and godly men longed to see God's righteous judgment visibly manifested in this present life.
However they phrased it, what the early Evangelicals meant by “the wrath of God” was the plain, incontestable fact that the universe turns a very ugly face towards sin, towards wrong being and wrong doing. The state of things brought always the worst consequences, now and always. To get a man out of that was worth some strong language. When a man is in a wrong and dangerous position, a thorough shaking up, even by wholesome terror, may be the best thing for him. He will do things then that surprise himself. Tell a man who says he cannot move a step farther that within six yards of him lies a mine of dynamite that will explode in five minutes and he will run like a deer. Well that he can! There is a moral condition, that of millions to-day, where nothing but a good fright will rouse. And if you put “hell and damnation” for all that system of things which punishes guilt and the abandonment of the good, are the words too strong? It is hell and damnation, and those early Evangelicals knew it and said it. And the medicine griped and worked.1 [Note: J. Brierley, Faith's Certainties (1914), 161.]
The idea that Yahweh forms a man in his mother's womb is often worked out with wonder and astonishment by the later writers. But Yahweh “knew” Jeremiah before He made him in his mother's womb. This idea is an advance on the other, and reminds us of the προέγνω of Rom_8:29. Yahweh knew beforehand what might and should become of the child whom He would give to Hilkiah. He needed a special instrument for the future; He did not wait till the time when the man was required and choose him then out of the available material; long ere that the image or, as a Greek would say, the idea of the person He would employ stood before Him and served as the model for what He formed. To this we must add that in the circumstances and character of the priestly family at Anathoth He saw the opportunity for carrying out His lofty purpose. According to Exo_33:12 Yahweh knows Moses “by name.” Moses has specially attracted His attention, so that He notices him more than others, occupies Himself with his person, and ultimately calls him. Amos is taken from following the sheep. Isaiah is submitted to a sort of test and then offers himself for the service. But Jeremiah, before he came into existence, was a thought of God's, pre-existed in God's Spirit, was specially created by Him for a great mission. That is an imposing thought, a deeply impressive idea!1 [Note: B. Duhm, in The Expository Times, xiii. 72.]
2. However it be, it is certainly the case that it is a source of comfort and power to us to think that not now for the first time has God thought of us, or is making use of us; but that we have been in His mind for long, always indeed, even from the beginning. When, for instance, we are in something like the position of this prophet, undertaking a serious responsibility, and can recall things in our history which we cannot but regard as providential, determining our course of life, and leading us on towards the place which we are going to occupy, it does strengthen our hope that God is now calling us to the place. The things we remember may be small, indeed trifles; but when we take a particular view of life, they acquire greater magnitude. Our minds were, perhaps, fixed on a certain career in life; but in order to pursue it, it was necessary that we should gain some distinction in learning, or obtain some position, and we failed; and the failure altered our whole career: and now we are where we are, about to enter upon a calling more sacred. Providences of this kind, being internal, strike us more readily; and reflecting on them does enable us to find God in our life. Indeed, though we ordinarily overlook such things from want of thought, when we are led more seriously to consider our history, we find it full of them.
We need to deepen the sense of our own direct personal connexion with God as His messengers. We are tempted to regard the commission to declare the Gospel as something which has been officially handed down from age to age. We shrink from acknowledging that it is in each case a Divine voice addressed to the individual soul. I would not indeed underrate for one moment the value of the historic filiation which connects us with the first envoys of Christ and gives authority to our ministry. But there is also something more than this. God whispers His call, eternal and unchangeable, and yet always personal and new, to every one of us. We openly confess that we “trust that we are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon us our office,” that “we think, in our hearts, that we are truly called” to the ministry of His Church. The words are not vain words. God gives to each priest in His Church-and to this office you all look forward-a peculiar charge. The sentence spoken to each newly-ordained deacon, “Take thou authority to read the Gospel in the Church of God, and also to preach the same,” lifts you above yourselves, above the misgivings of your own experience, above the littleness of your own hopes. Welcome it in every hour of loneliness as a sure sign that God is speaking still, speaking to you, and through you; that He has not left the world which He created and redeemed; that He orders the spiritual course of your lives; that He prepares for you a service which you-you alone-can render, and an utterance which you-you alone-can deliver.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Peterborough Sermons, 283.]
2. What likeness may we trace between them?
(1) For one thing, they were brought near each other in the times in which they lived.-Jeremiah was a prophet in the dying days of Jewish monarchy. He saw the last king who sat on the throne of Israel. He lived through those awful days when Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed, when the people were carried away into captivity, and the land was left desolate. Jesus appeared at a like critical time in the history of the Jewish people. He too had to tell His disciples, who were lost in admiration of the grandeur of the Temple, that the time was at hand when not one stone would be left standing on another. The fall of the Temple and the Holy City occupies all the foreground of the future into which Jesus gazed. His words dwell continually on these imminent events. They were not to take place till some forty years after His death; but many of those listening to Him were to be spared to see them. When they came, they were to be found big with meaning; they meant the dying of a religion; they involved the passing of an epoch. Men who lived when Jeremiah lived, and when Jesus lived, were on the eve of a new age. It was a sad day for the patriot. The glory of their land was to suffer eclipse. Unparalleled suffering was to be the portion of their countrymen. And it made the pain all the greater that, while these two saw clearly the coming of doom, all other eyes were blinded to the terrible issues. Therefore it was that they were both patriots of the broken heart. They knew what it was to nurse a hidden grief, and to shed bitter and unavailing tears over the city of their fathers, and the land that gave them birth. It enhances to us the worth of the gospel to remember that it came into being amid such commotions. Jeremiah saw the State perish, the Temple destroyed, the Holy City ruined; but he saw religion purified and strengthened. It came forth out of the fire refined. Jesus saw Temple and ritual about to pass away, the forms of worship consecrated by hoary associations become effete; but the gospel and a spiritual faith, and a worship not tied to holy places nor ancient rites, came, in the midst of these convulsions, to a glorious birth.
(2) For another thing, Jesus and Jeremiah were brought near to one another in their experience.-Of all the prophets, Jeremiah was most eminent for his sufferings. He is ever seen to be a man bearing his cross. His life was one long martyrdom. He stood alone, persecuted, suspected. The powers that be were allied against him. After the death of King Josiah he had to stand continual opposition and hatred. His enemies had it in their hearts to kill him, though their hands were restrained from this act of murder. Chief among those ranged against him were the religious classes of his day; priests and prophets were in league against Jeremiah: to such he was an arch-heretic, and his doctrine was opposed to truth and fatal to religion. Now it is because of all this that his is the life “that unto Christ's has most resemblance.” If you were to point to the Old Testament passage that most fully foreshadowed Christ, you would without hesitation point to the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah: that moving picture of the Servant of God who was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”
(3) They also come near to one another in their teaching.-Jeremiah is the prophet of the New Covenant. He looked for a religion that is to have neither holy place, nor privileged priesthood, nor cumbrous ritual, but wherein the grace of God shall be all in all, and every one shall enjoy immediate fellowship with the God of all mercy. He lived amid a generation that had an idolatrous reverence for the Temple and external rites, but he made nothing of these things; he set true and undefiled religion in the doing of righteousness; he had no care for sacrifices and outward forms; he made everything of the law written on the heart. He saw the Temple destroyed and the holy place profaned and sacrifices cease; but he did not identify religion with these things, nor did he fear that when these perished, religion perished also. Now in all this he anticipated Christianity; in such teaching we breathe “the ample ether, the diviner air” of the Gospels. Jeremiah prepared the way for the great doctrine, “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” It is because in the New Covenant there is neither sacrifice nor ritual, but only God's forgiveness of our sins and our communion with the God who has forgiven us, and our obedience from the heart to all His holy will, that Christ tells us it is sealed by His death. That is the religion to which the Saviour introduces us. What Jeremiah foreshadowed is now realized; what was for him a mere outline is now embodied in the faith of Christ. There was not a little in the accents of Jesus that reminded men who heard with an understanding heart of the voice of Jeremiah.
Am reading Jeremiah at present at family worship. What richness of metaphor and of feeling; what heart-broken eloquence; what a noble, weeping, wrestling, divine soul he was! His tears came down large, electric, like the first drops of a thunder-cloud. He is not so picturesque, but he is fully as eloquent as Isaiah. He has no passage so powerful as some in that prophet: but he is as a whole not inferior. He is the Demosthenes of sorrow, and often, too, of Philippic fire-with all his vehemence and intensity, but with far more poetry.1 [Note: George Gilfillan: Letters and Journals, with Memoir, 328.]