Jeremiah 8
Butler6. The Lord still speaks. After each appeal made to the people by messages sent through His prophets, He listens to catch the words of the people; but alas! none speak well; none of their words inspire hope of their repentance; no man gives his mind to reflection, saying, What have I done? Rather, after each momentary interruption, every man turns back to his course of sin, as the war-horse, roused by the trumpet-blast, rushes furiously to the battle.
7. These birds of passage understand when to turn their course and migrate from northern regions to southern, and again back to the northern. They mark the indications of the seasons and adjust their movements accordingly. But My people, saith the Lord, will not understand the laws of My moral kingdom; they will not see that sin brings ruin, and that nothing but substantial turning back to God brings promise of mercy. H. C.
There is a spiritual instinct working in man with just as unerring certainty as that which guides the turtle, the crane and the swallow on their pathless way to climes and seasons at the distance of near half the globe; but man disobeys it, and disregards the revelation which appeals to it, and which was given for its cultivation and its guidance. Of course, the longer it is neglected and disobeyed, the less perceptible and the weaker it becomes. Still it never goes out of existence; there always remains the consciousness of immortality, the instinctive feeling of the necessity of preparing for the future world, and an instinctive warning and prediction of evil to come, if there be not this preparation. The direction in which this instinct impels the soul is always toward God, and to the exercise of prayer; and men experience it and disobey it countless millions of times in their habitual existence, experience it and disobey it almost unconsciously. If they yielded to the instinctive warning impulse and obeyed it, under guidance of God’s Word, it would become a power of discernment and of knowledge in reference to the spiritual world, infinitely more wonderful in precision and far-reaching insight, even prophetic insight, than the instinct of animals in regard to the sphere of their existence in this world. Cheever.
8. It should be read, “Lo, certainly the lying pen of the scribes makes it” (the law of God) “into a lie.” Of course these are false scribes, fellow-workers with the false prophets, who made it their business to pervert God’s words and to misinterpret His law so that it could speak to them only falsehood and never truth. The whole verse expostulates with the people for their self-conceit and self-righteousness: How is it that ye boast of your wisdom and take to yourselves credit for having the law of God in your hands? Alas! that very law your false scribes and teachers pervert to a lie!
10-12. See the same sentiments, and nearly the same words, in chap. 6: 12-15. The repetition of set phrases is one of the features of Jeremiah’s style.
19. They profess to think it marvellous that God does not take care of His own city, Temple and people. To this assumed state of their mind the Lord Himself responds: If ye regard Me as your God and Saviour, why have ye provoked Me to anger with your graven images and with your foreign idols that are only a breath, mere emptiness and vanity? How can you complain of Me for neglecting to save Jerusalem when she has done her utmost to repel Me away and provoke Me to exterminating vengeance upon her?
20. The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.** These are proverbial expressions, and very plain in their significance. They speak of golden opportunities forever lost; of salvation long within their easy grasp, yet utterly neglected; till at length ruin comes and salvation is no longer possible. The harvest-time is past, and no supplies for winter can now be gathered. Opportunities for salvation come before remediless damnation. The summer and the harvest come before the inexorable rigor and the stern wants of a cold and barren winter. But as God lets the laws of nature take their course and bring winter on in its resistless march whether the sluggard gathers in harvest or gathers not, so in his moral kingdom time rolls us on toward eternity; retribution stays not for the folly of the self-hardened sinner, but rather seems to hurry him on the more relentlessly to his appalling, inexorable doom! Oh, will there not be bitter and unavailing regrets in that world of the lost! Can there be one ingredient in their cup of woe more bitter than this, that their summer and their harvest came and went, and they were not saved? The sweet tones of mercy’s voice fell gently on their ear, but fell unheeded! Love wept over their folly; fell at their feet imploring them to be wise—but love wept and implored only in vain! And now they are not only doomed, but damned. H. C.
As a season of preparation for eternity, life may be regarded as sustaining the same relation which spring and summer do to the harvest. There is a time to plough and sow, and there is an appropriate time for the harvest, and if these are neglected, a gloomy winter sets in when there can be no sowing, and when it will be too late to secure a harvest. There are favorable seasons in life to secure salvation. They are, one after another, fast passing away. When gone they cannot be recalled; and the favorable influence which might have been secured to bear on our future being is gone forever. We can no more recall it than the farmer can command the sun of springtime to rise again, or the showers and dews of summer to come down in the dreary winter. The opportunity of salvation will have passed away forever. A. Barnes.
We are made for the enjoyment of eternal blessedness; it is our high calling and destination; and not to pursue it with diligence is to be guilty of the blackest ingratitude to the author of our being, as well as the greatest cruelty to ourselves. To fail of such an object, to defeat the end of our existence, and in consequence of neglecting the great salvation, to sink at last under the frown of the Almighty, is a calamity which words were not invented to express nor finite minds formed to grasp. R. Hall.
How inexpressibly mournful is the lamentation, The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved! How heart-breaking the wail, even of the weeping Saviour, over that beautiful and beloved city, once the Zion of the Holy One of Israel, and indulged with so many warnings, so many waitings, so much mercy, so much patience, so much long-suffering and forbearance, so many seasons of such gracious and gentle visitation, so many and such precious opportunities, precious and available, even to the last, and the last infinitely the most precious of them all! “Oh, that thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things that belong to thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes!” Cheever.
22. The people are morally diseased; they have sinned against God and provoked Him to destroy them. They are warned by the prophet to repent and turn to God; they refuse and sin on. Destruction is come upon them. Might they not have avoided it? Yes. Was it the fault of God? No. Did He not send His prophets with the richest offers of mercy? Did He not give them time, the best instructions, and the most effectual means of returning to Him? Has not mercy, the heavenly balm, been ever at hand? And has not God, the great Physician, been ever ready to apply it? Yes. Why then are they not healed? Because they would not apply to the Divine Physician, nor receive the only remedy by which they could be spiritually healed. They, then, that sin against the only remedy must perish, because they might have had it but would not. It is not because there is a deficiency of grace, nor of the means of grace, that men are not saved; but because they either make no use or a bad use of them. Jesus Christ, by the grace of God, has tasted death for every man; but few are saved because they will not come unto Him that they may have life. A. C.
This soul-destroying plague, must it run its course? or is there any cure? Is there no balsam, no physician who can arrest its ravages and restore the spirit’s health, before it die the second death? Blessed be God, there is. The Gospel guides us to Gilead. It bids us go up and gather its balm; it reminds us of its great Physician, and invites us to carry to Him our sin-sick souls, and prove His skill, and reveals Him to us by that ancient name of His, Jehovah-Rophi, the Lord the Healer. . . . The holy life and atoning death of Immanuel are the balm of salvation; and it is by the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, that the Divine Physician applies them to the soul. He takes the things of Christ and shows them to the soul. He is the Spirit of Life, and heals those who are dying of their hurt, nay, even those who are dead in trespasses and sins. God’s truth in the hand of God’s Spirit, the Gospel applied by the Holy Ghost, the Balm of Gilead administered by the great Physician; this it is which brings health, peace, joy. Hamilton.
The “balm” is a beautiful symbol of Christ. The Mount Gilead, the tree, the pierced side, the stream thence issuing and its mighty healing power—these severally send our thoughts to Mount Calvary, the cross, the pierced side of the Saviour, the precious blood and the unquestionable spiritual healing might there is therein. And Scripture is ever speaking of sin as a disease; of man as one whose health needs recovery. The analogies are obvious. And the “physician,” who is He but that Divine Spirit whose office it is to take of the things of Christ and show them unto men? He so shows
to us the meaning and intent of our Saviour’s sacrificial death, that “by His stripes we are healed.” Yes; while we all are the stricken with mortal disease, Christ is the balm that surely heals, and the blessed Spirit is He who reveals Christ to the soul. “For no man can say that Jesus is Lord”—that is, in all the full meaning of those words, and with sincere intent—“but by the Holy Ghost.” P. C.