Chapter 10: The Fire of Holy Impulse
Chapter 10: The Fire of Holy Impulse
(JEREMIAH 20:9)
There is a stay, and we are strong!
Our Master is at hand
To cheer our solitary song
And guide us to the strand! .
Or if, for our unworthiness,
Toil, prayer, and watching fail,
In disappointment Thou canst bless,
So love at heart prevail!"
KEBLE
JEREMIAH'S NATURE REMINDS us of the Aeolian harp, which is so sensitive to the passing breeze, now wailing with sorrow, now jubilant with song; so delicately strung, so sympathetic, so easily affected by every passing circumstance, was the soul of the prophet. The whole book mirrors the changefulness of his mood, as the ocean the perpetual heavens outspread above it—now blue as the azure sky, and again dark with the brooding storm.
There are many indications of this in the chapters before us. For instance, there is the exclamation: "Cursed be the day wherein I was born; cursed he the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee. . . . Wherefore was I born to see labour and sorrow?" (xx. 14-18). But in the same breath there is the heroic outburst, "The Lord is with me as a mighty One and terrible; therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail" (xx. 11). How great the contrast between these moods In the first, he is traversing the valley of the shadow, where the dark trees shut out the sky, and the swollen torrent rushes turbidly through the gorge; in the second, he stands upon the heights where the sun shines, and to the far horizon the landscape lies outspread, its cornfields goldening in the summer sun.
The same contrast appears in this verse. There we find the half-formed resolution to make no further mention of God, and to speak no more in his name. Then he is instantly aware of his inability to control the passionate outburst of the Spirit within. " There is in mine heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my hones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain" (R.V.). Oh, wonderful heart of man! Who can understand thee? who can estimate the heights to which thou canst rise, or the depths to which thou canst sink? What an infinitude of bliss and of sorrow is within thy compass! How radiant thy heavens, how dark thine abyss! It is well for us when we learn to distinguish between the life of our emotions and that of our will; and resolve to live no more in mood or emotion, but to build the edifice of our life upon the granite of the obedient will.
I. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OUT OF WHICH THESE WORDS SPRANG. —Jeremiah's Half-formed Resolution.-"I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in his name." Not improbably by this time Nineveh had fallen. For six hundred years she had ruled surrounding nations with a rod of iron tyranny, exerting an imperial sway with merciless cruelty. At last her time had come. A vast host gathered from Asia Minor as far as the shores of the Black Sea, from the entire valley of the Tigris, from Armenia, Assyria, and the wandering tribes of the desert, and settled down on her as swarms of hornets on a putrid carcase. For two years the siege had lasted under the direction of the trusted general of the last king of Nineveh, Nabopolassar, whose son, Nebuchadnezzar, was destined to be the "hammer of God." Rumours of this catastrophe were spreading through the world, carrying everywhere sense of relief and fore-boding—relief that the tyrant was down, foreboding as to who should take his place.
At this time, Egypt was in the zenith of her power. Amid the decrepitude of Nineveh, Pharaoh had seized the opportunity of extending his empire to the banks of the Tigris. The kingdom of Judah, like all neighbouring nations, owned, at least nominally, the king of Egypt as suzerain. Confidence in the proximity and prowess of his great ally encouraged Jehoiakim in his career of shameless idolatry and sin. The whole land, as we have seen, was corrupt.
Jeremiah, the foremost of the little band that remained true to the best traditions of the past never lost an opportunity of lodging his complaint or striving to resist the downward progress of his people. In doing this, he aroused an ever-growing weight of opposition. The plot of his native town of Anathoth was the first volcanic outburst, to be followed by a long series of plots, and snares, and manifestations of hatred on the part of those for whom he would have gladly given his life as he daily gave his prayers. He sat alone, cast out by prophet and priest, by court and people.
"Come," they said on one occasion, "and let us devise devices against Jeremiah; for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet!' He was a laughing-stock all the day. Every one mocked him. The word of the Lord was made a reproach to him and a derision continually. His associates and those with whom he came in contact watched for his halting, and whispered that peradventure he would be enticed so that they should prevail against him, and take their revenge on him.
Matters culminated finally in the episode of chapters xix. and xx. Beneath a Divine impulse he procured a common earthen bottle, and gathering a number of the elders, led them forth into the valley of Hinnom, beside the gate of the potsherds. On this spot the refuse of the city was perpetually exposed to the foul birds and the wild dogs. It was a place of abhorring and loathsomeness. There he uttered a long and terrible indictment of the sins of his people, accompanying it with predictions of the certain and irrevocable doom to which they were hurrying. The men of Jerusalem would fall there by the sword before their enemies; in the straitness of the siege they would eat the flesh of their sons and daughters. The city itself would fall into ruins of blackened stones, and the surrounding valley be filled with the carcases of the slain making banquet for the fowls of the heaven and the beasts of the earth. To emphasize his words he broke the potter's vessel, pouring forth its contents in token that the blood of his countrymen would be shed to bedew and saturate the soil.
Not satisfied with this, he returned from Tophet and stood in the court of the Temple, perhaps on the steps that led up to the court of the priests. Crowds of people were probably at the time engaged in some sacred rite; it may have been the time of one of the great feasts. When his voice was heard, a vast concourse must have gathered, whose angry faces and vehement gestures indicated the intensity of their dislike to the man who cast the shadow of impending destruction over their gayest hours. The endurance of one of them at least had at last reached its limit. Pashur, the chief governor of the Temple, to whose jurisdiction its order was entrusted, gathering a band of Levites, or Temple servants, seized the prophet, threw him on the pavement, scourged him after the eastern fashion, and finally thrust him into the stocks, leaving him there the whole night, to the ridicule and hatred of the populace, to the cold night and the prowling dogs.
In the morning Pashur appears to have repented of his harsh treatment, and to have released the prophet, whose strong spirit was not for a moment cowed by the indignity and torture to which he had been exposed. Turning on his persecutor, he told him that he would live to be a terror to himself and all his friends; that all Judah would be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, now mentioned for the first time; that the people would be carried captives to Babylon, and slain there with the sword; and that all the riches and gains of the city, and all the precious things thereof, and all the treasures of the king of Judah, should be given into the hand of their enemies to carry to Babylon. It is this fourfold mention of Babylon that gives colour to the suggestion that Nineveh had fallen; and that the strong hand of Nabopolassar and his son was beginning to show itself; and to wield the sceptre which was falling from the faltering grasp of one of the oldest and greatest empires of antiquity.
Set free, Jeremiah went to his home, and there poured forth that marvellous combination of heroic faith and wailing grief, which is recorded for us that we may know the weakness of his nature, and learn how earthen was the vessel in which God had placed his heavenly treasure. No brazen wall was he, but a reed shaken by the wind; no wise strong hero, but a child. What he did and said when face to face with his age was due to no native strength or heroism; as he says himself, his was " the soul of the needy" (ver. 13, R.V.).
What a tale could be told by the walls of the secret chambers of God's greatest saints! What litanies of tears and sighs and broken sentences have beaten against them in successive billows of heartrending sorrow! Take, for instance, that outburst of Luther on the eve of his appearance before the Diet of Worms. Those who have seemed strongest and most rock-like in the presence of their fellows have sunk most helplessly on the ground in solitude, confessing that none were so weak and helpless as they.
Our prophet seems to have gone even further. Then came a suggestion to his heart that he should relinquish his labours, and renounce public for private life. Why struggle any more against the inevitable? Why set himself to convince those who would not be convinced, and who repaid his love with hate? Why surrender name, and comfort, and human love, for the thankless task of endeavouring to stem his people's career? He came to the point of saying, "Send whom Thou wilt send; entrust thy commission to some stronger soul, cast in a more heroic mould; let me go back to the seclusion and humble toils of my village home."
Not dissimilar have been the appeals of God's servants in every age, when they have measured their weakness against the strength of the evils they have combated, and have marked their limited success: the handfuls of seed wasted upon barren soil; the word spoken in the ear of the wind; the futility of opposing an Ahab or a Jezebel; the ingratitude of those whom they would have gladly saved. They have been disposed to cry, with the greatest of the prophets, "It is enough, let me die!"
II. THE IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSE.— "There is in mine heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing and cannot contain." "O Lord, Thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed." Three things arrest us here.
(1) The Prophet's Habit of turning from Man to God.—Throughout the book there are so many indications of the close fellowship in which he lived with Jehovah. God seemed always nigh at hand. His ear always bent down to the least whisper of his servant's need. Compelled to live much alone, this much-suffering man acquired the habit of counting on the companionship of God as one of the undoubted facts of his life. He poured into the ear of God every thought as it passed through his soul. He spread forth his roots by the river of God, which is full of water. There was no fear therefore that his leaf would become sere in the summer heat, or that he would cease from yielding fruit in the year of drought. The Lord was his strength, his stronghold, and his refuge in the day of affliction; and to Him he opened his cause. "Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved: for Thou art my praise, let me not be dismayed or ashamed" (xvii. 14-18).
Let us seek this attitude of soul, which easily turns from man to God, not foregoing the hours of prolonged fellowship; but, in addition, acquiring the habit of talking over our life with One who does not need to be informed of what transpires, but awaits with infinite desire to receive the confidence of his children. Talk over each detail of your life with God, telling Him all things, and finding the myriad needs of the soul satisfied in Him.
(2) The Burning Fire.—We have sometimes seen a little steamer, like The Maid of the Mist at the foot of the Falls of Niagara, resisting and gaining upon a stormy torrent, madly rushing past her. Slowly she has worked her way through the mad rush of waters, defying their attempt to bear her back; calmly and serenely pursuing her onward course, without being turned aside, or driven back, or dismayed. And why? Because a burning fire is shut up in her heart, and her engines cannot stay, because impelled in their strong and regular motion. Similarly, within Jeremiah's heart a fire had been lit from the heart of God, and was kept aflame by the continual fuel heaped on it. The difficulty, therefore, with him was, not in speaking, but in keeping silent—not in acting, but in refraining.
This sheds some light upon the prophetic impulse, and helps us to understand what the apostle Peter meant when he said, "Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." It was as though the current of thought and feeling came mightily from without, and, passing through them, swept them forward irresistibly. In this way it often happened that the prophets did not understand words which were put into their hearts by the Spirit of God, and of whose full meaning they were ignorant.
But, after all, our main desire is to know how we may have this heart on fire. We are tired of a cold heart toward God. We complain because of our sense of effort in Christian life and duty; we would fain learn the secret of being so possessed by the Spirit and thought of God that we might be daunted by no opposition, abashed by no fear. The source of the inward fire is the love of God, shed abroad by the Holy Ghost; not primarily our love to God, but our sense of his love to us. The coals of juniper that gave so fierce a heat to the heart of a Rutherford were brought from the altar of the heart of God. If we set ourselves with open face towards the cross, which, like a burning lens, focuses the love of God, and if at the same time, we reckon upon the Holy Spirit—well called the Spirit of Burning—to do his wonted office, we shall find the ice that cakes the surface of our heart dissolving in tears of penitence; and presently the sacred fire will begin to glow. Then the love of Christ will constrain us; whether we be beside ourselves, or be sober, will not be the subject of our consideration; but his Almighty Spirit, the thought of what He desires, the passion of fulfilling his will, shall destroy the fire of self-esteem, and replace it with the sacred fire of passionate devotion.
When that love has once begun to burn within the soul, when once the baptism of fire has set us aglow, the sins and sorrows of men—their impieties and blasphemies, their disregard of God, of his service and of his day, their blind courting of danger, their dalliance with evil, will only incite in us a more ardent spirit. To see the multitudes rushing to destruction, to hear the boast of the blasphemer, the taunt of the infidel, the cry of the oppressed, the ribald mirth of the profane, the desecration of all that is holiest and best in man; to think of the grief caused to the Spirit of God, the dishonour done to Him; to anticipate the outer darkness, the undying worm, the bottomless pit—surely, these will be enough to fan the smouldering embers till they break out in the least emotional; as when Jeremiah said that he felt an inner impulse, to restrain which was a weariness, to stay from obeying which was a sin.
(3) The Prophet's Safety — "The Lord is with me as a mighty One and terrible; therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail." The presence of God is salvation. When Ezekiel describes the plot of Edom to possess herself of the land of the chosen people, he indicates by a single phrase the futility of the attempt, saying significantly, "Whereas the Lord was there" (Ezek. 35:10). It was enough, though Israel was in exile, that God's Spirit was brooding over their desolate land.
Thus Jeremiah felt. He might be the weakest of the weak, having neither might, nor wisdom, nor power of speech, apparently the easy prey of Pashur and Jehoiakim; but since God was with him, casting the mantle of his protection around his servant, and pledging Himself to be his stronghold and house of defence, he was invulnerable.
O weak and trembling soul, if thou art true to God, God is with thee, besetting thee behind and before, and covering thee with the shadow of his wing. Thou shalt be like the city of the great King—the kings may assemble, but so soon as they see thee, they shall be stricken with terror and pass away; whilst thou shalt be a quiet habitation, a tent that shall not be removed, the stakes whereof shall never be plucked, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken. "This God is our God for ever and ever; He will be our Guide even for evermore" (Psa. 48:14, R.V. marg.).