1. To Jeremiah, as to his predecessors, the God of Israel is supreme. The question has been raised whether the prophet was a speculative or a practical monotheist; in other words, had he completely broken with the conception which had prevailed in his nation up to his day? That conception was that the gods worshipped by Israel's neighbours, such as Milcom, Chemosh, etc., were really existent, and that the relation of Jehovah to these was merely that of a God of immensely superior power, who might be trusted to protect His people within the boundaries of the land, but whose omnipresence and claims to universal allegiance were not yet recognized. Whatever answer Jeremiah would have made to such a question, it is plain that he considered the heathen deities as at least practically non-existent, and that Jehovah demanded the homage of all the world. The gods of the nations are vanities. Jehovah is the Source of life. Every one severed from Him is brought to shame. He is One who tries the reins and the heart, this utterance being directed against those who maintained that it was only the outward conduct and due performance of ritual that mattered. And it follows from this that Jehovah is omniscient. As demanding universal obedience, He compels all nations to drink the cup of His wrath. In fact, so far was Jeremiah from believing, as Ahaz, for example, had believed, that the conquests of Assyria and Babylon were due to the superior power of the deities whom they worshipped, that he maintained that the secret of the success attained by those empires was only that they were the instruments employed by Jehovah for the chastisement of His guilty people.
I was complaining to St. Francis one day of a great injury which had been done to me. “I have no oil,” he said, “to pour into your wound, and, indeed, were I to affect to sympathize with you, it might only increase the pain of the wound you have received. I have nothing but vinegar and cleansing salt to pour in, and I must simply put in practice the command of the Apostle: ‘Reprove, entreat.' … It is a fine thing, indeed, for you to complain to an earthly father, you, who ought to be saying with David to your heavenly Father: ‘I was dumb and I opened not my mouth, because thou hast done it.' ‘But,' you will say, ‘it is not God but wicked men who have done this to me!' Ah, indeed! and do you forget that it is what is called the permissive will of God which makes use of malice of men, either to correct you or to exercise you in virtue? Job says: ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.' He does not say: The devil and the thieves took my goods and my dear ones from me: he sees only the hand of God which does all these things by such instruments as it pleases Him to use.”1 [Note: J. P. Camus, The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales (ed. 1910), 168.]
2. It was not the manner of Hebrew writers to argue for the existence of God, or elaborately to define Him. They had little concern with speculative problems, and even the godless scorners who said “There is no God” were guilty not of theoretical but of practical atheism. The task of their prophets and lawgivers was not to give them a firmer assurance of the reality of the God they worshipped, but to insist that the deities they set by His side were unrealities, and to purify their worship from materialistic and immoral elements. To this Jeremiah forms no exception. His own sense of God was so immediate and convincing, his consciousness of intimate fellowship so clear, that he would have been under even less temptation to doubt His existence than those who had derived their belief only from unquestioned tradition. The urgent questions were rather those suggested by the heathen tendencies of his countrymen, the recognition of Canaanite and foreign deities, the assimilation of Jehovah to them, the disbelief in His moral government. Whether we should speak of Jeremiah as a speculative monotheist may be debated. But practically his position was indistinguishable from monotheism. The gods of the heathen are no gods, they are vanities. Jehovah fills heaven and earth; none can elude His vigilance. He is the God of nature, who has set the sand as a bound of the sea; its mutinous waves may toss and roar, but their chafing at His curb is all in vain. He gives the rains in their season and harvest at the appointed time. He is the God of history; all nations, even the mightiest, are at His disposal and the instruments of His will. His character is to be inferred rather from His government of the world and His attitude to the conduct of His people than from the definite statements made by the prophet, though these are not wholly wanting. A characteristic utterance is, “I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgement, and righteousness in the earth: for in these things I delight.” With all the assertions of His sternness towards sin, there is constant reference to His goodness, grace, and readiness to forgive.
(1) Jehovah is the God of Israel.-If Jeremiah has not the eye for the glories of nature possessed by some of the other writers of Scripture, he is surpassed by none in setting forth God's love to His chosen people. His was a hidden and brooding nature; he was full of suppressed fire and passion; he was without wife or children, and the whole force of his affections was given to his country. Sometimes his love took the form of jealousy and indignation, but it was love all the same; and it enabled him to understand the love of God and to be the organ through which the Divine heart found expression. No prophet, unless it be Hosea-also a nature of the brooding and passionate type-equals him in the lyrical tenderness of outbursts like this: “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee”; and he is never weary of repeating the story of the ancient time of what he calls the espousals of Jehovah and Israel, when Jehovah brought forth His “people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs, and with wonders, and with a strong hand, and with a stretched out arm, and with great terror,” and gave them the land which He had sworn “to their fathers to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey.” No prophet is so conscious of the splendid chance which Israel thus obtained, because to be thus brought nigh to God was to be close to “the fountain of living waters”; and, had the nation realized its privilege, it would have been like “a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.”
(2) He is also the God of the nations.-Jeremiah had an express commission to the nations as well as to Israel. He speaks of a book of prophecies against the nations, some part at least of which is incorporated in the extant Book of Jeremiah. His message to the nations was in the main, as it was to Israel, a message of judgment. It was an epoch of judgment for the world, and Nebuchadnezzar was the Divine agent in its execution. “Lo, I begin to work evil at the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished: for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith the Lord of hosts.… The Lord hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; as for the wicked, he will give them to the sword.” Nebuchadnezzar is Jehovah's servant; into his power He has given the kingdoms of the world, for He as their Creator claims the sovereign right to dispose their destinies. And all the nations must serve Nebuchadnezzar, and his son, and his son's son, until the time of his own land come. But that day will come, a day of retribution for Babylon's heartless violence; and the book of the prophecies against the nations closes with a triumphant vision of vengeance on the great oppressor Babylon, who shall sink, and not rise again.
In his original call God had expressly designated Jeremiah “a prophet unto the nations,” thus indicating that his word was intended not only for Israel but also for the neighbouring peoples. How far this may have influenced the prophet's way of life, we cannot tell with precision. One would like to know whether he travelled among the neighbouring nations, in the exercise of his vocation, as Jonah went to Nineveh; but the indications are not sufficient to determine. At all events, he did not forget the extent of his call. He looked across the frontiers of his own country, and took the deepest interest in the condition and the fortunes of the neighbouring States. The extent of his information about some of them, especially Moab, would almost lead us to conclude that he had been there.
(3) Jeremiah's God was a righteous God.-In an appeal to God, when hard pressed by the people of Anathoth, he addresses Him as “Jehovah of hosts, who judgest righteously.” In another passage he makes Jehovah Himself say that “judgment and righteousness” are among the things in which He especially delights; and in a third he represents Him as asking, “What unrighteousness have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?” True, the prophet seems sometimes to have questioned the correctness of his own teaching on this subject. In Jer_12:1 he feels himself impelled to protest, “Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they at ease that deal very treacherously?” But he introduces this protest with a confession that Jehovah always vindicates Himself when His righteousness is questioned, and in Jer_17:10 he endorses the Divine declaration, “I, the Lord, search the heart, I try the reins; even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.”
The words, the many words, in which, directly or indirectly, Jesus speaks of God's Righteousness are no less wholesome than those in which He speaks of God's Love. They may not be quite as pleasant to us, but they are none the less wholesome on that account; it is neither the most agreeable food, nor the least disagreeable medicine, that is always the best for us. What Jesus tells us concerning the Love of God, needs to be accompanied by what He tells us of His Righteousness, in order that our boldness and confidence may be checked by reverence and godly fear. It is true that “perfect love casteth out fear”; and, when our love is perfect, we shall be and have a right to be entirely free from fear; but as long as our love is imperfect-and who does not feel that it is very imperfect?-fear has its place, and its office, and its power. “He that feareth is not made perfect in love”; and, consequently, he that is not made perfect in love feareth. It is not the fear that is wrong, but the imperfectness of the love. We need to know and remember both the Love and the Righteousness of God. Were His Love alone revealed, we might think sin a matter of indifference; were His Righteousness alone proclaimed, we should feel salvation to be impossible: in the one case we should presume, in the other despair; in the one God might be regarded by us as a foolishly lenient and indulgent parent, in the other as a hard and exacting master. Let us be thankful for both the revelations which, in their combined effect, cannot but produce the happiest result, in the wholesome confidence and equally wholesome reverence which they will teach us to cherish towards our Loving and Righteous Father.1 [Note: Hugh Stowell Brown: Autobiography and Commonplace-Book, 388.]
