Chapter 11: Afflictions, Distresses, Tumults
Chapter 11: Afflictions, Distresses, Tumults
(JEREMIAH 26)
"I see the wrong that round me lies,
I feel the guilt within;
I hear, with groan and travail-cries,
The world confess its sin.
"Yet in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed stake my spirit clings—
I know that God is good."
WHITTIER.
JEHOIAKIM WAS, PERHAPS, the most despicable of the kings of Judah. Josephus says that he was unjust in disposition; an evil-doer; neither pious towards God, nor just towards men. Something of this may have been due to the influence of his wife Nehushta, whose father, Elnathan, was an accomplice in the royal murder of Urijah. "Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem; and he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord his God." Such is the inspired epitaph by the chronicler.
Jeremiah appears to have been constantly in conflict with this king; and probably the earliest manifestation of the antagonism that could not but subsist between two such men occurred in connection with the building of Jehoiakim's palace. Though his kingdom was greatly impoverished with the heavy fine of between forty and fifty thousand pounds imposed by Pharaoh-Necho, after the defeat and death of Josiah, and though the times were dark with portents of approaching disaster, yet he began to rear a splendid palace for himself, with spacious chambers and large windows, floors of cedar and decorations of vermilion. As Elijah confronted Ahab, so did Jeremiah confront the young king with his terrible woes: "Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by injustice; that useth his neighbour's service without wages, and giveth him not his hire; . . thine eyes and thine heart are not but for thy dishonest gain, and for oppression, and for violence." He further reminded him that the stability of Josiah's throne depended not on the splendour of his palace, but upon the justice with which he judged the cause of the poor and needy (xxii. 13, etc.).
Clearly such a monarch must have entertained a mortal hatred towards the man who dared to raise his voice in denunciation of his crimes; and, like Herod with John the Baptist, he would not have scrupled to quench in blood the light that cast such strong condemnation upon his oppressive and cruel actions. An example of this had been recently afforded in the death of Urijah, who had uttered solemn words against Jerusalem and its inhabitants in the same way that Jeremiah had done. Such fury had been excited by his words that he had been obliged to flee to Egypt, from whence the king had secured his extradition, that he might avenge his bold denunciation by the sword, and fling his body into the graves of the common people. Small shrift, then, could be expected by Jeremiah, if the king dared to take measures against him. But it would appear that this time, at least, his safety was secured by the interposition of influential friends amongst the aristocracy, one of whom was Ahikam the son of Shaphan (xxvi. 20-24).
I. THE DIVINE COMMISSION.—Beneath the Divine impulse, Jeremiah went up to the court of the Lord's house, and took his place on some great occasion when all the cities of Judah had poured their populations to worship there. Not one word was to be kept back. We are all more or less conscious of these inward impulses; and it often becomes a matter of considerable difficulty to distinguish whether they originate in the energy of our own nature, or are the genuine outcome of the Spirit of Christ. It is only in the latter case that such service can be fruitful. And here for a moment we will turn aside to see how the heart of man may become the medium through which God can pour his thoughts on men, and the way by which we may recognise his inward prompting.
There is no greater enemy of the highest usefulness than the presence of the flesh in our activities. There is no department of life or service into which its subtle, deadly influence does not penetrate. We have to encounter it in our unregenerate life, when its passions reveal themselves, brooking no restraint. We meet it after we have entered upon the new life, striving against the Spirit, and restraining his gracious energy. We are most baffled when we find it prompting to holy resolutions and efforts after a consecrated life. The apostle Paul calls this the unequal marriage of the flesh, or self-life, with the holy law of God, a union which brings forth fruit unto death. And, lastly, it confronts us in Christian work, because there is so much of it that in our quiet moments we are bound to trace to a desire for notoriety, to a passion to excel, and to the restlessness of a nature which evades questions in the deeper life, by flinging itself into every avenue through which it may exert its activities.
There is only one solution to these difficulties. By the way of the cross and the grave we can alone become disentangled and discharged from the insidious domination of this evil principle, which is accursed by God, and hurtful to holy living, as blight to the tender fruit. In the cross of Jesus, when He died in the likeness of sinful flesh, God wrote his curse upon every manifestation of selfish and fleshly energy; and now it remains for each of us to appropriate that cross, to accept the Divine sentence, to lie in the grave where the voices of human ambition and adulation cannot follow us, to oppose the silence of death to the workings of our evil self. Not, however, to stay there; but to pass up by the grace of the Holy Ghost into the pure resurrection air and light, where no face is visible but that of the risen Saviour, where no voice is audible save his, and where in the hush of perfect fellowship the spirit becomes able to discern the wish of its Lord.
II. THE MESSAGE AND ITS RECEPTION.—There was a twofold appeal in the words Jeremiah was commissioned to deliver on this great occasion, when the whole land stood intent to hear. On the one side, by his lips, God entreated his people to repent, and turn from their evil ways; on the other, He bade them know that their obduracy would compel Him to make their great national shrine as complete a desolation as the site of Shiloh, which for five hundred years had been in ruins. It is impossible to realize the intensity of passion which such words evoked. They seemed to insinuate that Jehovah could not defend his own, or that their religion had become so heartless that He would not. Prophets and priests had assured the people that the very presence amongst them of Jehovah's Temple was a guarantee of their safety; and to suggest that a fate might overtake them like that which in the days of Samuel made the ears of every listener to tingle seemed the height of impertinence. "So it came to pass, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the Lord commanded him to speak unto all the people," that he found himself suddenly in the vortex of a whirlpool of popular excitement. Thus it befell Paul in after days, when the presumption that he had defiled the holy place produced so intense a paroxysm of popular feeling that all the city was moved, and the people ran together, and laid hold on him, and dragged him out of the Temple, so that he was with difficulty rescued by a regiment of Roman soldiers, who bore him by main force from the violence of the crowd, the multitude following and crying out, "Away with him!" (Acts 21:27-36). There is little doubt that Jeremiah would have met his death in a similar uprising, had it not been for the prompt interposition of the princes.
Such is always the reception given on the part of man to the words of God. We may gravely question how far our words are God's, when people accept them quietly and as a matter of course. The Word of God to those that hug their sin can only be as fire, a hammer, and a sharp two-edged sword. And here again is a certain test whether our message is the product of our own fancy, or the burden of the Lord. That which men approve and applaud may lack the King's seal, and be the substitution on the part of the messenger of tidings which he deems more palatable, and therefore more likely to secure for himself a larger welcome.
III. WELCOME INTERPOSITION.—The princes were seated in the palace, and instantly on receiving tidings of the outbreak, came up to the Temple. Their presence stilled the excitement, and prevented the infuriated people from carrying out their designs upon the life of the defenceless prophet. They hastily constituted themselves into a court of appeal, before which prophet and people were summoned. The priests and prophets acted as the exponents of the people's wish, and demanded sentence of death, turning from the court to the people, to ask their concurrence. Then Jeremiah stood on his defence. His plea was that he could not but utter the words with which the Lord had sent him, and that he was only re-affirming the predictions of Micah in the days of Hezekiah. He acknowledged that he was in their hands, but he warned them that innocent blood would bring its own Nemesis upon them all; and at the close of his address he re-affirmed his certain embassage from Jehovah.
This bold and ingenuous defence seems to have turned the scale in his favour. The princes gave their verdict: "This man is not worthy of death, for he hath spoken to us in the name of the Lord our God." And the fickle populace, swept hither and thither by the wind, appear to have passed over en masse to the same conclusion; so that princes and people stood confederate against the false prophets and priests. The conclusion thus gained was further confirmed by the voice of certain of the elders of the land, who had come from all the cities of Judah, and who reminded the people that the good king Hezekiah had acted very differently to the prophet Micah in listening to his remonstrances, entreating the favour of the Lord, and securing the reversal of the Divine sentence.
Thus does God hide his faithful servants in the hollow of his hand. No weapon that is formed against them prospers. They are hidden in the secret of his pavilion from the strife of tongues.
We have no narrative in Scripture of the fall of Nineveh, except the prophecy by Nahum. "The Assyrian empire," says Dean Stanley, "vanished from the earth so suddenly, and so noiselessly, that its fall is only known to us through the reduced grandeur of the palaces of its latest king, and through the cry of exultation raised over its destruction by the Israelite prophet." Upon her ruins arose the Babylonian empire, first under the government of Nabopolassar, and afterwards of his greater son, Nebuchadnezzar. Ezekiel describes it as the rising of a mighty eagle, with great wings full of feathers of divers colours; as though to indicate the variegated pennons of the various contingents that composed its vast hosts (Ezek. 17:3).
In a previous chapter we saw that Egypt was mistress of all lands from the Nile to the Euphrates. But as soon as the Chaldeans had established their kingdom upon the ruins of Nineveh, they turned their attention to wrest from Pharaoh-Necho some portion of his vast empire. Jeremiah had long before seen that this would be the case, and had depicted in graphic imagery the scene and issue of the awful battle at Carchemish, by the Euphrates, where the two mighty peoples wrestled for the supreme power of the world.
He heard the call to arms. He beheld the horses heavily armed, and the horsemen with flashing spears and coats of mail. The Egyptian hosts, like the Nile at flood, pour themselves against the solid ranks of their foes; her tributaries from Cush and Put, together with the Ludim, famous at handling the bow, strive in vain to check the flight of Egypt's mighty men. They flee apace, and look not back; the sword devours and drinks its fill of blood; the cry of the fugitive hosts fills the earth with clamour; and the mighty stumble never to rise (xlvi. 1-12). Egypt never rallied again, nor dared to do more than strive against the yoke that Nebuchadnezzar, with imperial might, fastened upon her.
After this there was nothing to stay the onset of Nebuchadnezzar, who probably had been associated in the kingdom with his aged father, and the first year of whose reign would therefore coincide with the fourth year of Jehoiakim (xxv. 1). Like a leopard, to use the expression of Habakkuk, who at this time was beginning to exercise his ministry, the young king leapt upon the peoples that had been subject to Egypt, and had aided in her expedition. And, as the tidings of his prowess spread through the world, Jeremiah foretold that he would be the scourge of God, to punish the abounding wickedness of the peoples. "I will send unto Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, my servant, and will bring him against this land, and against the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about; and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations, and this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment: and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years."
In his first invasion of Judah, the king of Babylon contented himself with binding Jehoiakim in fetters to carry him to Babylon, though be seems afterwards to have changed his intention, and to have restored him to his throne as his vassal, taking an oath of allegiance (Ezek. 17:12, 13). He stripped the Temple of its precious vessels to enrich the house of his god at Babylon, and carried into captivity several of the mighty of the land, amongst them Daniel and his three friends (Dan. 1:1,2). He then hastened back to Babylon, summoned thither by the tidings of the death of his father, Nabopolassar.
For three years Jehoiakim remained faithful to his oath (2 Kings 24:1); then he was deluded by the hope of independence, based on the hope of forming a confederation of neighbouring peoples. Messengers went to and fro between himself and Pharaoh, negotiating for horses and much people; though all the while Ezekiel and Jeremiah protested that Jehovah would certainly punish him for violating his pledge to the king of Babylon. This was a time of unusual activity for the prophets of Jehovah, who strove their utmost to avert a political mistake, founded upon a moral obliquity, and sure to incur terrible vengeance (Ezek. 17:1-21).
It befell as they feared. Nebuchadnezzar, who was not prepared to brook such infidelity on the part of a subject king, soon put his forces in motion, and prepared to advance across the desert to punish the weak and faithless Jehoiakim. It was during his march on Jerusalem that the incidents narrated in the two following chapters took place, the one the proclamation of a fast, the other the gathering of the Rechabites, with other fugitives, into the shelter of the city.
We have no certain clue to the prophet's history during these three or four years. His heart must have been filled with the patriot's anguish as he saw the coils of invasion drawn closer around the devoted city. To him, indeed, it was the year of drought, and there was no hope save in God; and often upon his lips must have been words like those which the great Florentine addressed to the city which he loved with the passionate affection which the Jews always cherished towards Jerusalem, "Thy sins, O Florence, are the cause of these stripes. But now repent, offer prayers, become united. I have wearied myself all the days of my life to make known to thee the truths of the faith, and of holy living; and I have had nothing but tribulations, derision, and reproach."