A part, yet only a part, of a prophet's duty, as one sent from God and declaring the Divine will, lay in the direction of prediction. His principal function was not to foretell the future condition of the world, but to alter for the better its existing condition. As has often been pointed out, the word prophet does not itself express the idea of announcing future events. It means, not a foreteller but a forth-teller, one who sets out God's messages, whether as teaching the lessons of the past, or as emphasizing the duties of the present, or as heralding the Divine purposes in the future. A prophet's declarations in this last respect are modified by the circumstances under which he delivers them and by the conditions of his age. The fulfilment may be in a completeness of form and detail which the prophet was wholly unable to picture to himself. Jeremiah's Messianic hopes have thus attained in the Advent of the Saviour and the founding of the Christian Church a consummation much more glorious than it was granted to him to perceive. We may, however, see under the figures and in the accustomed language of the prophetic age his inspired realization of a coming time when the chasm which separated God from man should somehow be bridged over, when forgiveness of sins and spiritual religion should take up a prominence which they had never before held.
1. Jeremiah was no prophet of despair. To the very last he believed that the dark troubles he so clearly foresaw would be followed by a new era of what was better than a return of prosperity-genuine reformation and real progress. The storm would be terrible while it lasted; but it would clear the air, and, after it had passed, the subsequent serenity would outshine all the glory that the world had ever seen before. He showed his faith in the future by a significant deed that proved it to be real. In the picturesque manner of the Eastern teacher, he was accustomed to illustrate his lessons by symbolical actions. Thus, on one occasion, he buried his girdle in the mud of the Euphrates, and then brought it out and showed it to the people as an image of their defilement; and another time he went down to the valley of Hinnom and there broke a potter's vessel as a sign of the break-up of the kingdom that he predicted. But now what he did was more than a merely dramatic illustration. It was a piece of plain, matter-of-fact business, which men of the world would be bound to appraise at its true worth.
2. Three features of his vision of the future may be mentioned.
(1) He held firmly to the faith that the people of God could never perish. “Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which stirreth up the sea that the waves thereof roar; the Lord of Hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever.”
(2) Not only would the nation persist, but the soil of the Holy Land, from which it had been expelled, would be restored to it. Of his faith in this restitution Jeremiah gave a signal proof by purchasing a field in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, in the height of the Babylonian siege. The Roman historian, Livy, gives an account of a transaction almost identical at the moment when Hannibal was at the gates of Rome: the very spot on which the Carthaginian general was encamped was purchased at its full value by a Roman citizen who did not despair of the Republic.
(3) Of course the restoration of the Holy Land implied that the people would be brought back from their captivity. This was a most unlikely occurrence; but Jeremiah again and again in the clearest terms predicted it: “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. For, lo, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will turn again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the Lord: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.” The deliverance from Babylon would outrival even the famous exodus from Egypt: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.” To Jeremiah it was even given to specify the length of time that the Captivity was to last; and the fulfilment of this prediction is one of the most remarkable instances of fulfilled prophecy that the Scriptures contain: “After seventy years be accomplished for Babylon, I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.” At the time Babylon was the greatest military power on earth and seemed impregnable; but Jeremiah foretold that it would fall before the invader; and that in the catastrophe Israel would escape. And thus it all came to pass.
3. Not only does Jeremiah promise what actually came to pass-the return of the exiles to the territories of Benjamin and Judah, and the resumption there of the interrupted social state, in which again, as of old, the sounds of joy and life would be heard in the villages, shepherds would again tend their flocks, and houses and fields would again be bought and sold by the restored exiles-but he invests the future with ideal colours. The exiles of the Northern Kingdom will share in the restoration; the hills of Ephraim will again resound with happy throngs, and be clad with cornfields and vineyards; a great company will return from the farthest corners of the earth; the wants of all will be abundantly satisfied. The national life will be re-established; Jerusalem will be rebuilt, and will be entirely holy to Jehovah. The restored city is to bear the same symbolical name as the ideal King, “The Lord is our righteousness.” The restored nation is pictured as returning to Jehovah “with its whole heart”; words of confession and penitence are put into the mouth of both Judah and Ephraim; the iniquity of Israel will be forgiven, and remembered no more; one heart, and one way, even the way of Jehovah's fear, will be given to them; Israel will be Jehovah's people, and He will be their God.
It must be evident that many of these promises have not been fulfilled, and that circumstances have now so changed that they never can be fulfilled; but, like the similar pictures drawn by other prophets, they remain as inspiring ideals of the future which God would fain see realized by or for His people, and of the goal which man, with God's help, should ever strive to attain.
Like many of the world's greatest children, Jeremiah was little esteemed in his life, but when dead his spirit breathed out upon men, and they felt its beauty and greatness. The oppressed people saw for ages in his sufferings a type of itself, and drew from his constancy courage to endure and be true. Imagery from the scenes of his life and echoes of his words fill many of the Psalms, the authors of which were like him in his sorrows, and strove to be like him in his faith. From being of no account as a prophet, he came to be considered the greatest of them all, and was spoken of as “the prophet”; and it was told of him how in after days he appeared in visions to those contending for the faith like an angel from heaven strengthening them.1 [Note: G. Steven, The Kings and the Prophets, 118.]
