Jeremiah 13
SIBJeremiah 13:16
Glorify your own God, by confession and repentance of your sins, before he brings the most perplexing, scattering, deathful, and ruinous judgments upon you
Jeremiah 13:20-23
Behold, O Jews, the Chaldeans shall invade your country, and shall destroy, and carry captive, your once flourishing multitudes of God’s covenanted people; and when they, whom you formerly invited to your assistance, (and thus shewed them the way to subdue you), shall destroy you, how dreadful shall be your misery and anguish!—For your great iniquities shall ye be reduced to extreme disgrace and the basest of servitude; since ye are so hardened in a long course of sinning, that all attempts to remove your spotted practices, or your universal corruptions, are in vain
REFLECTIONS UPON CHAP. XIII.—God’s ministers are often strangely tried for the instruction of their hearers; and it will require all the arts that can be used to make men understand what concerns their eternal welfare. But infinite is the kindness of God in making any of them his peculiar people, to the praise of his glory. Fearfully does he disgrace and ruin such as had behaved unfaithfully in his honourable service: and self-complacence, in parts, gifts, station, wealth, or power, God rejects with abhorrence. Alas, how stupified, and what mutual destroyers, do nations become when God leaves them! Their very managers and protectors do but ruin instead of relieving them; and vain hopes will but aggravate their misery and increase their confusion. Nothing but self-humiliation and repentance can avail, when God lifts up his hand to destroy. Nor are the highest too great to sit in the dust when he calls to weeping and mourning for the sins of the land. Those ministers or others, who know the terrors of the Lord, cannot but tremble and weep for those who, insensible of danger, refuse to amend. Disgraceful miseries shall at last overtake the obstinate: and frequently the persons or things with which they sinned become the instruments of their punishment. Proud and ignorant sinners readily quarrel with the justice of their calamities. But, alas, how extensive and dreadful is God’s charge against them when he sets before them their great iniquities, their fixedness and obstinacy therein, their forgetfulness of and treacherous departure from him, and their mad propensity to whoredom and idolatry! Nothing less than the infinitely precious blood of Jesus, and the infinitely powerful grace of JEHOVAH, can renew and purify a sinner thus spotted and deformed both in nature and practice. And, alas, dreadful is the guilt and folly that, while God waits to cleanse us, we should so refuse and evade his kindness!