Jeremiah 45
ButlerThese few words are for Baruch, who has been already before us as the faithful friend, attendant, and amanuensis of the prophet. The date is that remarkable fourth year of Jehoiakim, when (see chap. 36) Baruch wrote out the first complete copy of Jeremiah’s prophecies, and was directed by the prophet to read it in the Temple before all the people. If we follow closely the dates as given in this chapter and in chapter 36, we must conclude that Baruch had written out this first complete copy, and had also probably received his commission to go on the ensuing fast-day and read it to the people, but had not yet gone when this message came for him, in good time to prepare him for the trial through which he was soon to pass. H. C.
The failure of this last appeal to king and people can scarcely have surprised Jeremiah, but it had a deep effect on his more youthful and ardent disciple. Baruch seems to have hoped that, amid the solemnity of the fast, the people would have been stirred up by his words to a movement of new national and religious life, and Jeremiah addresses him in words fitted to chasten the despair of the too sanguine patriot. He reminds him of God’s sovereign right to break down what He had built, and to pluck up what He had planted, and adds: “Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not: for, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh, saith Jehovah: but thy life will I give thee for a prey”—as if snatched from the net of the destroyer—“in all places whither thou goest.” The promise was fulfilled by Baruch’s sharing with Jeremiah the protection of Nebuchadnezzar when Jerusalem was taken, and by his afterward finding a refuge in Egypt with the remnant of the Jews. P. S.
Jeremiah had already passed through several seasons of stern mental conflict and purifying discipline; Baruch had them yet to pass. This was one of his first lessons: “Forego all your schemes of personal good. As for yourself alone, be content with your bare life as the best God can give; and having the assurance of life, make every sacrifice to which God may call you most cheerfully. If you can do anything for the truth of God; anything to bear testimony against the sins of your countrymen; anything to lessen the labors and lighten the griefs of the patriarchal prophet under whose shadow you walk, do it cheerfully, and even gladly. But dismiss forever all aspirations after great things for yourself.” It is pleasant to think of Jeremiah as having thoroughly sounded the depths of this counsel and drank in its spirit. He had ample occasion to act upon it subsequently; arrested by the savage Jehoiakim and some of his kindred spirits; cast into dungeons, darkness and mire; starved, tortured, and in peril of his life; kept in confinement months and years during the reign of Zedekiah; yet still charged with successive messages more and more severe and terrible to the king on his throne, and to his princes inflated with pride. H. C.
“Seekest thou great things for thyself?” said the prophet; “seek them not.” Why? Because there is no greatness in things. The only greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can justify the waste. H. Drummond.—He only is great of heart who floods the world with a great affection. He only is great of mind who stirs the world with great thoughts. He only is great of will who does something to shape the world to a great career. And he is greatest who does the most of all these things, and does them best. R. D. Hitchcock.
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made great man; teach or preach, or labor as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man’s capacity and another’s, and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another. What you can manufacture or communicate you can lower the price of; but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing men can generally do is to set themselves not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold when we see it from iron-glance, and diamonds from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds out of our own charcoal. Ruskin.
A magnanimous spirit is a spirit to bear and to do great things; to bear trials with fortitude; to control the temper under great provocations, and even to throw a benignant smile upon the face of a foe; to yield ingenuous sympathy to those who are not of us, and rejoice in their success; to carry out convictions of duty at the sacrifice of interests; to forget self in the cause of God and of humanity; to brave with a constant heart the greatest perils for the sake of great principles and the common good. Homilist.—Nothing but the practical habit of overcoming our own selfishness, and of familiarly encountering privations and discomfort on account of others, will ever enable us to do it when required. And therefore I am firmly persuaded that indulgence infallibly produces selfishness and hardness of heart, and that nothing but a pretty severe discipline and control can lay the foundation of a magnanimous character. Lord Jeffrey.—In the final analysis, self-worship is at the root of human misery. Self-love is the virus of melancholy. In a man of genius it breeds egotism; in a religious nature, Pharisaism; in an invalid, a desire to suffer before the looking-glass. No man can be happy who loves himself better than his neighbor. Health and wealth do not insure happiness when a devouring egotism is feeding on the heart. The most dazzling success, which carries its votary to the summit of power, has its Nemesis in a strange satiety and loathing of life. Van Santword.
The lowliest and the humblest in endowments is just as important in his place as the most brilliantly gifted. The great life in God’s sight is not the conspicuous one, but the life that fills the place which it was made to fill and does the work which it was made to do. God asks not great things; He asks only simple faithfulness, the quiet doing of what He allots. His design for each life is that it shall reach a holy character, do a good work in the world, fill a worthy place, however humble, and fill it well, so as to honor God and bless the world. J. R. Miller.
In the presence of great ambitions, what do men care for viewless prizes in invisible worlds? Men do not let the dust around them settle long enough to disclose eternal things. Notice the precise attitude of the man of the world to religious things. He does not deny them. That would imply consideration, and he does not consider. He simply ignores. He may get glimpses of them. But heaven never gives a man an instantaneous photograph. He cannot take it on the wing. He must pause a little. The indifference that comes from insensitiveness is the hardest to overcome. Light works at a disadvantage when it appeals to defective vision. Truth works at a similar disadvantage when it takes hold of faculties that are partly benumbed, whether that comes from misuse or lack of use. Hardness of heart stands for a common fact. There are people to whom religion no longer appeals. It does not find them. There are multitudes of people with whom an argument is useless. There is no use preaching to them. They are encased. They are proof against proof. The intellectual approach to them is barred. In such cases there is yet one door—the door of a good example. If men turn from preaching they may yet be reached by an appeal to the heart, and that comes cogently only on the path of an experience. Apologetics must get out of books. Men care little for the formal arguments. A great life was lived once, and the world bows to it as the unanswerable argument for Heaven. Interior.
For thyself. All forms of sin are ultimately resolvable into the principle of selfism. What is worldliness, whether as covetousness or sensuality, but the aim of a being who has lost the infinite good to substitute and appropriate the finite? Hypocrisy is the mask he wears to conceal his aim; anger and impatience the results of impediment and disappointment; envy and malice the emotions excited at the superiority or the success of others; and hatred and cruelty the reaction of thwarted self-will. Ambition is an attempt at lofty self-isolation; pride the feeling that we have achieved, or can achieve, such distinction; and despondency and moroseness the offspring of disappointed desire. Detached from God, man’s relation to every other object is false; he himself is a moral falsehood; and every breach of veracity is but a particular form of the great falsehood. Living out of harmony with God and with himself, variance with his fellow-man follows of course. Lawlessness of every kind is but the result of man’s attempting to be a law to and by himself. All human governments are still occupied in reconciling law and liberty—in restraining the fierce collisions of human wills. And “whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust and have not; ye kill and desire to have, and cannot obtain. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lust.” Impenitence is self-satisfaction unwilling to submit to God; the choice to remain at variance with Him. Unreasonableness is self-will substituted for reason and conscience. And unbelief is self-trust as opposed to trust in God.
“But is not self-love of moral obligation?” Undeniably: it is to be the measure of our love to others. But the ground of the obligation to love ourselves is the same as that on which we are required to love our fellow-man—our relation to God. My moral worth consists in my having been made in the image of God, capable of entering into His plans, and of sharing in His glory. But if God be lost from my soul, I cannot be said strictly to love my integral and proper self, but only the ungodly remains of myself. The act is essentially different in kind, for it is directed toward an essentially different object. A moral element is wanting in the love answering to the element wanting in the object. It is the idolatry of a self from which God is absent. An object of self-compassion I may rightly be; but this implies a desire of self-restoration, and of restoration to God. And it is only as I “lose myself,” surrender my self-predominance, and welcome God back again to His throne within, that my regard for myself can be morally good. J. Harris.
Arrangement of Jeremiah’s Prophecies.
The arrangement of the several prophecies with so very little apparent method and chronological order is accounted for by the circumstances narrated in this chapter. It was to both Baruch and Jeremiah a season of extreme peril. Now they are flying to escape arrest, and perhaps immediate death; anon they are imprisoned. Next the prophet is tortured, and at length hurried from his country to take his lot with the poor exiles who fled into Egypt.
So far as is known to us, no other book of prophecies in the Bible was compiled under circumstances so unfavorable to method and order. Certainly no other one exhibits such a lack of these qualities. *The book and the condition of the men who made it are remarkably correlated to each other, a fact which goes strongly to confirm its genuineness. It is what ought to be expected from the circumstances under which it was compiled. . . . His book is valuable to us almost exclusively for its great moral lessons. These are above rubies. Here we see delineated the full administration of God’s government not over Judah alone, but all the prominent nations of Western Asia. It also reveals God in His relations to His Church and people: how He dealt with them, how He felt toward them, how He made the very tears of His prophet witness to His own tenderness of heart, with what severity He denounces their sins, with what patience He bore with their long-continued abuse. H. C.