Chapter 12: The Indestructible Word
Chapter 12: The Indestructible Word
(JEREMIAH 36: 23).
"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again:
The eternal years of God are hers;
But error, vanquished, writhes in pain,
And dies amid her worshippers."
WE ARE ADMITTED to the prophet's private chamber, where he is keeping close that he may not excite the acute animosity and hatred of the people. Baruch, his trusted friend, a man of rank and learning, sits writing with laborious care at the dictation of the prophet, whose soul is borne along by the impulse of the Divine Spirit. "Tell us," the princes said afterwards to Baruch, "how didst thou write all these words at his mouth?" Then Baruch answered them, "He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book."
When the roll was filled, Jeremiah, not venturing to go into places of public concourse, entrusted it to Baruch, and bade him read it to the assembled crowds. Jerusalem just then was unusually full. From all parts of Judah people had come to observe the great fast which had been proclaimed in view of the approach of the Babylonish army. Adopting the cry which Jeremiah had so fervently deprecated, "The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these," and imagining that there was a special virtue in the Temple precincts, the multitudes had crowded thither in an agony of fear; hoping by their black vails, and covered lips, and heartrending cries, to propitiate the Almighty, and avert the fate that seemed imminent.
Choosing a position in the upper court at the entry of the new gate to the Lord's house, Baruch commenced to read, whilst the people stood densely massed around him. Amid the awestruck crowd was a young man, Micaiah, the grandson of Shaphan, who was so impressed and startled by what he heard that he hastened to acquaint the princes, then sitting in council in the chamber of the chief Secretary of State, in the royal palace. They in turn were so aroused by what he told them that they sent him back to the Temple, and asked Baruch to come without delay and read the prophet's words to them. He came at their request, and sitting among them, commenced to read.
In the group of princes were several notable men: Elishama, the Secretary of State; Elnathan, the father-in-law of the king, who had brought the prophet Urijah back from Egypt to die; and others. A great fear fell upon them as they heard those ominous words, which were probably closely similar to those recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter of this book. Though they had joined in the general hatred of the prophet, they were deeply sensible that there was everything to justify him in his prognostications of coming trouble; and it seemed their plain duty to acquaint the king with the contents of the roll.
Before doing so, however, they counselled Baruch and Jeremiah to conceal themselves, for they well knew the despotic and passionate temper of Jehoiakim; and the roll was left in the chamber of Elishama. It would appear that in the first instance they thought a verbal statement of the words they had heard would suffice. This, however, would not satisfy the king, who bade Jehudi fetch the roll itself. It was winter, the month of December; the king was occupying the winter quarters of his palace, and a fire was burning brightly in the brazier. It is a vivid picture—the king sitting before the fire; the princes standing around him; Jehudi reading the contents of the roll; consternation and panic reigning throughout the city and darkening the faces of the prostrate crowds in the Temple courts. As Jehudi began to read, the royal brow knit, and symptoms of a tempest of anger showed themselves. After the scribe had read three or four columns, Jehoiakim snatched the roll from his hand, and, demanding the penknife which he carried as symbol and implement of his calling, began to cut the manuscript in pieces, which he flung contemptuously into the fire. The worst have some compunctions, and for the most passionate there are warning voices that remonstrate and plead. So was it with king Jehoiakim. Delaiah, Gemariah, and even Elnathan, tried to dissuade him from his purpose; but in vain. Nothing could stop him until the whole roll was cut to pieces, and every fragment consumed. Not content with this flagrant act of defiance, he gave orders for the immediate arrest of Jeremiah and Baruch; an order which his emissaries attempted to execute, but in vain.
The destruction of the roll did not however cancel the terrible doom to which the ship of State was hurrying, under the orders of its passionate and wicked captain. On another roll all the words of the book which he had burned were written again; and others were added foretelling the indignity and insult to which the dead body of the king would be exposed. "His dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost."
I. EYES OPENED TO SEE.—There was a vast difference between Baruch, whose heart was in perfect sympathy with Jeremiah, and Jehudi or the princes. But there was almost as much between the faithful scribe and the heaven-illumined prophet. The one could only write as the words streamed from those burning lips; he saw nothing, he realized nothing; to him the walls of the chamber were the utmost bound of vision: whilst the other beheld the whole landscape of truth outspread before him, the rocks and shoals on the margin of the ocean, the inrolling storm-billows tipped with angry foam, the gathering clouds, the ship, straining in every timber, and driving sheer on the shore. For Jeremiah the walls of the chamber where they sat together were as though they had become transparent; he looked through and beyond them, and read off his message from what he saw, as a man might read from a book.
This was the work of the Spirit who inspired him, and whose special function it was to open the eye of the seers of the old time to the great facts of the unseen and eternal world, which were shortly to be reduplicated in the world of the temporal and visible. They beheld visions of God: the sapphire throne upborne by the strong cherubim; the terrible wheels of providence; the rise and fall of mighty empires; the subdual of sin and pain by the mighty sway of the coming One. To speak what he knew, and to testify what he had seen—such was the mission of the prophet.
In our case there is no likelihood of this. Yet men may be seers still. Two men may sit together side by side. The veil of sense may hang darkly before the one, whilst for the other it is rent in twain from the top to the bottom. There no thought, no ambition, no desire for aught beyond the temporal and seen; but here the vision of the presence and care of God, of the principalities and powers in the heavenlies, of the ministry of angels, and the opposition of fiends, of the chariots and horses of salvation, of the prize and crown, of the awards of Christ's judgment-seat, and the home beyond the river. Flesh and blood do not reveal such things, but the Spirit of God. They are hidden from the wise and prudent, but revealed to babes who love God. Happy are they, the eyes of whose heart are opened, to know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of his inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his power toward them that believe.
It is very important that all Christians should be alive to and possess this power of vision. It is deeper than intellectual, since it is spiritual; it is not the result of reasoning or learning, but of intuition; it cannot be acquired in the school of earthly science, but is the gift of Him who alone can open the eyes of the blind, and remove the films of earthliness that shut out the eternal and unseen. If you lack it, reader, seek it at the hands of Jesus; be willing to do his will, and you shall know. It is a thousand pities to be blind, and not able to see afar off, when all around stand the mountains of God in solemn majesty; as the Alps around the Swiss hostelry, where the traveller arrives after nightfall, to eat and drink and sleep, unconscious of the proximity of so much loveliness. It is related of Ampere, the electrician, who was shortsighted, without being aware of it, that when he became conscious of his defective vision through the casual use of the eye-glasses of a friend, he burst into tears as he realized how much he had missed throughout his life of the wonderful beauty and interest of the world around him. With more reason will many of us have to lament our untold loss through that spiritual near-sightedness of which the Holy Ghost speaks (2 Pet. 1:9, R.V.).
If, on the other hand, you have the opened eye, you will not need books of evidences to establish to your satisfaction the truth of our holy religion; the glory of the risen Lord; the world of the unseen. With the woman of Samaria, you will say, "We have seen it for ourselves." No further proof will be needed than your own spiritual senses afford. And though a series of well-ordered arguments should be brought into array to assail your position as a believer, you would be bold to reply, "Whereas I was blind, now I see." The patriarchs of old who reached forth their hands to greet the vision of the City that bath foundations, the New Jerusalem—which all holy souls behold descending out of heaven from God—furnish the model for spiritual men of every age; and they who see these things are indifferent to the privations of the tent-life, or, as in Jeremiah's case, rise superior to the hatred of man and the terrors of a siege.
II. THE USE OF THE PENKNIFE.—Men use the knife to the Bible in varied ways. Among these are Systems of Priestcraft and Error. They have done it. They will do it again. They are wise to do it—I mean, wise in their own interests. For when once the Bible is in the hands of the people, the false teacher, who has deluded them for selfish purposes, must pack. The long reign of the Roman Catholic church was broken as soon as Tyndale, Erasmus, and Luther, opened the Word of God, and the printing-press scattered it over the world. It is not to be wondered at therefore, that, as long as possible, fires were lit for Bible-burning, in every chief city of Europe, and the knife was freely used to cut out whatever condemned the office of the Pope, or the system to which he belonged. The Vulgate, with its mutilations and excisions, is a standing evidence that Jehudi's penknife survived his age.
The next that follows Jehoiakim's practice is the Infidel, who uses the keen blade of bitter sarcasm and miscalled reason to destroy the Scriptures. The hostility that manifested itself in the winter-palace among the princes of this world, has wrought in the halls of earthly learning and science, instigating similar acts to theirs. The laboratory of the chemist, the hammer of the mineralogist, the pry of the geologist, the telescope of the astronomer, the calculation of the arithmetician, and the explorations of the discoverer—have all been used in turn as the penknife of destruction. The Bible is cut up regularly once in each generation by men like these.
The next are the Higher Critics of our time, who surely have gone beyond the necessities of the case in their ruthless use of the knife. Some of them seem to delight in making havoc of the sacred writings, hacking at the Old Testament especially, and whittling away from the reputed work of a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Daniel. There is room for the honest examination of the fabric of sacred Scripture, its language, the evidence furnished in its texture of the successive hands which have re-edited its most ancient documents; but this is altogether different to the ruthless vandalism that wantonly assigns large portions of the Pentateuch to the age of Ezra, and the Book of Daniel to the times of the Maccabees.
We are all tempted to use Jehudi's penknife.—It is probable that no one is free from the almost unconscious habit of evading or toning down certain passages which conflict with the doctrinal or ecclesiastical position in which we were reared, or which we have assumed.
In our private reading of the Scripture, we must beware of using the penknife. Whole books and tracts of truth are practically cut out of the Bible of some earnest Christians—passages referring to the Second Advent, with their summons to awake and gird on the armour of light; those that deal with the undying worm, the unquenched fire, and the inevitable doom of the ungodly; those that describe the types and shadows of the ancient law; or those that build up massive systems of truth and doctrine, as in the epistles. But we can only eliminate these things at our peril. The Bible is like good wheaten bread, which contains all the properties necessary to support life. And we cannot eliminate its starch or sugar, its nitrates or phosphates, without becoming enfeebled and unhealthy. It is a golden rule to read the Bible as a whole. Of course each will have his favourite passages, dark with tears and use—Psalm xxiii.; Isaiah liii.; John xiv.—but, beside these, there should be the loving and devout study of all Scripture, which is given by inspiration of God, and is therefore profitable, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished to every good work.
III. THE INDESTRUCTIBLE WORD.—Men may destroy the words and the fabric on which they are written, but not the Word itself. It is the incorruptible Word of God which liveth and abideth, though all flesh wither as grass, and the glory of man as the flower of the field. It must be sometimes an uncomfortable reflection to those who refuse the testimony of the Word of God, who to all intents and purposes destroy it and despise its remonstrances and warnings, that their attitude towards the message cannot affect the reality to which it bears witness.
Jeremiah wrote another roll. The money spent in buying up copies of the Bible to burn at St. Paul's enabled Tyndale to re-issue the Scriptures in a cheaper form and a better type. And perhaps the most remarkable fact in this connexion is that, in spite of all that has been done to stamp out the Bible, it exists in millions of copies, and is circulated among all the nations of the world—not a chapter effaced, not a parable dropped out, not a miracle injured, not a promise scarred. It has been declared over and over again to be a careless, unauthenticated collection of works of different periods, having no unity save that given by the bookbinder; yet it is with us to-day in unimpaired authority.
And the facts to which Jeremiah bore witness all came to pass. Neither knife nor fire could arrest the inevitable doom of king, city, and people. The drunken captain may cut in pieces the chart that tells of the rocks in the vessel's course, and put in irons the sailor who calls his attention to it; but neither will avert the crash that must ensue unless the helm is turned. Let those beware who deny the testimony of Scripture to the retribution of sin and the wrath of God; these things are as true as the throne of God and the reward of the redeemed. You may tamper with and destroy the record, but the stubborn facts remain.