Bible Commentaries
Jeremiah 31

Verse 3

Everlasting Love

The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.— Jeremiah 31:3.

This tender and gracious assurance appears here in a somewhat unexpected connexion. The Book of Jeremiah, taken as a whole, is a sad book; it consists in the main of warnings, expostulations, and prophecies of doom; and these prophecies are shown in process of fulfilment almost while they were being uttered. It is a sombre picture of human life which is presented to us in these vivid pages. And yet here we have, in the very midst of all this darkness and all these oracles of stern judgment, the sweet utterance which forms the text: “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” With lovingkindness? Loved with an everlasting love? Nothing could have seemed less like it just then. Fierce, terrible, merciless were the ways of God to Israel so far as appearances went, and not without cause. Love was about the last word that could describe the relations of these suffering people to their offended God.

Think what the circumstances were. The chosen people were ripe for judgment. There were two invasions within a few years of each other, each of them involving a siege of Jerusalem and the carrying away of thousands of prisoners into captivity. The scenes of horror associated with both must have been indescribably dreadful, especially after the second, when Jerusalem was left a heap of smoking ruins. It was in the interval between these two sieges that the text was most probably spoken, and the fact is surprising when we consider the circumstances. The prophets view is that Gods love is not shown by His leaving His people to perish morally in the slough of an enervating security, but rather in the infliction of suffering which purifies the soul by the discipline of the flesh. He holds, with wonderful insight, that their sorrows not only are punishments for their sins, but are of the nature of a drastic preparation for the unique work which Israel had yet to do in the world. He foretells the return from the Captivity, which at the moment was only just beginning—in fact, the greater of the two Captivities had not yet taken place; Jerusalem was still standing and autonomous at the time the prophecy was uttered. Jeremiah says that after seventy years the exiles will be permitted to return to their own land, and then will commence their distinctive spiritual mission to all the nations upon earth. And this, as we now know, came true to the letter.

There are three strands in the prophets thought—

I. The love of God lies behind the darkest experiences of life.

II. This love is everlasting and changeless.

III. It is a tender and individual love, manifesting itself as lovingkindness.

I

Love Offered from Afar

“The Lord appeared of old unto me.”

1. The words, “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying,” etc., might mean either that the prophet had been convinced from early days, as well as all through the period of affliction, that God is a God of love; or it might mean, and more probably does mean, as the Hebrew literally states, “The Lord appeared from afar unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” The expression “from afar” suggests the more beautiful idea of the two. The thought is that God hears, as it were, from afar, the cry of His children and comes to their relief. The image suggested is that of the poor enslaved children of Zion far away in a strange land stretching their hands towards their ancient home and praying to God, whose altar once stood there, to come to their deliverance; and God hears that prayer and comes and breaks down their prison walls and brings them back.

Jeremiah represents Jehovah as seeking to win back His chosen people to Himself under the figure of a lover wooing a maiden. Jehovah speaks from His far-away dwelling-place, and when the “virgin of Israel,” in her distant exile, hears him, she answers, “From afar Jehovah appeared unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”

Then Jehovah makes answer:

Again will I build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of Israel:

Again shalt thou take thy tabrets and go forth in the dances of them that make merry;

Again shalt thou plant vineyards upon the mountains of Samaria; while they that plant shall enjoy the fruit. 1 [Note: H. W. Battle.]

2. But in a still deeper sense the meaning is that those who are afar from God in spirit will be heard and helped by Him at the first instant of their turning towards Him again. The saying is in substance almost exactly the same as that immortal utterance of the Master in the parable of the Prodigal Son, “When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.” It is not that God is a great way off, but that we in spirit may be a great way off from the apprehension of His eternal holiness and truth. But the grace of God takes advantage of every smallest opportunity to find entrance to the soul. “For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.” The faintest motion of our spirits Godward brings Him to our assistance. There may be very little in us for His goodness to take hold of, but such as it is He makes use of it. Those desolate Jews who lay in tears by the waters of Babylon were scarcely conscious of any change in their spiritual condition beyond the fact that they had suffered; they had been tried in the fire; their worldly delights had been rudely and cruelly swept away from them, but they could not yet have been capable of very much in the way of heavenly-mindedness. Nevertheless, says the prophet, God grasped at the little they had and gave Himself to increase it. It is the same with us. When everything is going well with us in the outer world we may be far from the Kingdom of Heaven, but when trouble overtakes us our thoughts turn more readily to God and things eternal.

During my absence I discovered the fact that love vanquishes distance, and—I think I may say it reverently—that love vanquishes death. I seemed to see it as a network of golden filaments, invisible to the selfish eye, but holding together the whole world. Moreover, India showed to me, much more clearly than I ever gathered before I went, the lovelessness of men when they have not heard or have not believed that God is Love.

Religion there is fear, not love; worship there is an attempt to propitiate the baleful and destructive forces in the midst of which we have to live; love has no part in it. In Mohammedanism, which has taken a fifth of India under its leadership and inspired them with its ideal, there is only submission to the Supreme Authority, but no love. I came back, therefore, as you can imagine, with quite a new apprehension of the meaning of the words of this text; and I wonder whether I ever could have learned the full meaning of that word apart from the experiences of the past few months. 1 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

3. The crowning glory of the Christian religion, the sum of all its glories, is its God. He is one; He is personal; He is self-existent, almighty, eternal; He is holy, wise, loving and good. Fairbairn states that the transcendent moment for man, the moment of supreme promise and of grandest hope, was when the idea of a moral deity entered his heart, when all the energies of religion came to be moral energies for the making of moral men. “The moment when gravitation, navigation, the secrets of the sea, or the stars, or the earth, were discovered had neither singly nor all combined equal or even approximate significance for man. Take from him this religion steeped in morality, made living by the moral character of its God, and you will leave him without the grandest energy working for God and peace and progress that ever came into his history or into his heart.”

“At heart Christianity is simply a revelation of a perfect God, doing the work of perfect love and holiness for His creatures and transforming men into His own likeness, so that they will do the work of love and holiness towards their fellows.” He is the universal Father, the giver of every good gift and every perfect gift. It is in Him that we live and move and have our being. He is interested in the welfare of every child made in His image, and makes all things work together for his good. “His glory is to diffuse happiness, and fill up the silent places of the universe with voices that speak out of glad hearts.”

The greatest of the philosophers of Greece did but sum up the belief of antiquity when he put into the mouth of Phaedrus the words: “Love is a mighty god, and wonderful among gods and men, but especially wonderful in his birth. For he is the eldest of the gods, which is an honour to him; and a proof of his claim to this honour is, that of his parents there is no memorial; neither poet nor prose-writer has ever affirmed that he had any.” 1 [Note: R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, ii. 254.]

4. There is nothing that so challenges the attention of the non-Christian peoples as the statement that God is love and that He loves them and desires their redemption and their present and eternal well-being. There is nothing that impresses them as this does. Missionaries say that people who were disposed to shut their ears to the message and to drive them away were profoundly affected by the story of Gods love and mercy and goodness. When they heard a little they were eager to hear more. The story is so unlike anything they ever heard or imagined and so pleasing in itself that they are charmed by it. It is to them like good news from a far country, like rivers of water in a dry place, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

Friendship and love [he wrote to Professor von Wyss of Zürich] are the deepest springs of happiness in this world. And what else is the sum of Christianity than Gods love in Christ, Christ for the world and we for Christ? The theology of the future must start from Johns definition of God, “God is love.” Just now we have set on foot in the Presbyterian Church a revision of the Westminster Confession. The Confession is too rigidly Calvinistic for my liking, a creed for the small number of the elect but not for the whole world for which the Saviour died.

We need a theology, we need a confession, that starts from the living person of Jesus Christ, the God-man and Saviour of the world. This is the burden of Peters confession, the fruitful germ of all creeds; this is a central fact and truth on which all true Christians can agree. We need a theology and a confession that is inspired and controlled, not by the idea of Divine justice, which is a consuming fire, but by the idea of Divine love, which is life and peace. Love is the key which unlocks His character and all His works. And this love extends to all His creatures, and has made abundant provision in Christ for the salvation of ten thousand worlds. 1 [Note: The Life of Philip Schaff, 428.]

God is love, and I for one can never conceive that God shuts out any human being from that love either here or in the world to come. But I think that a man can, and often does, as we know, so harden himself in sin here that he shuts away the love of God from himself. Now, God never compels, so that it is possible that this process may go on hereafter. I cannot conceive God not trying to reach the soul, but I can conceive the soul getting so hardened and devilish that it may go on resisting for ever. 2 [Note: Bishop John Selwyn: A Memoir, 256.]

I vexed me with a troubled thought,

That God might be

A God whose mercy must be bought

With misery.

But theres no wrath to be appeased

In heaven above;

No wrath with bitter anguish pleased,

For God is Love.

No pleasure from our suffering

The Lord could steal,

Or anguish of the meanest thing

He made to feel.

But on Himself the grief He took,

The pain and loss

And shame of sin, and its rebuke

Upon the Cross.

For love rejoiceth not in pain

Of good or bad,

But beareth all, and still is fain

To make us glad.

Love circles us with mercies sweet,

And guides our way,

And sheds its light around our feet

By night and day.

O love of Jesus! love of heaven!

O holy Dove,

Teach all the ransomed and forgiven

That God is Love. 1 [Note: Walter C. Smith.]

II

Love that Lasts

“I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”

The love of God is everlasting and changeless in contrast to that of other lovers. Elsewhere Jeremiah says, “All thy lovers have forgotten thee.” Israel had had many lovers professing regard and offering service; but what had their regard and service come to? They were now cold, careless, perhaps even hostile. They had shown the appearance of love to Israel, not that they cared for Israel, but because they themselves were advantaged. Now, that is no true affection which changes when the thing loved ceases to gratify us. Yet this was all that the affection of these other lovers amounted to—a mere name of love, a feeling which, in the course of time, was to evince their own instability and bring shame to them. But God is a contrast to all this. He loves with an everlasting love. He loved Israel, not only in the days of prosperity and wealth and beauty, but in the days of downfall and despair. His thought penetrates through to the abiding worth of humanity. We do not slander human affection, or in any way underestimate it, when we say that man cannot love his fellow-man as God loves him. God it is who first of all shows man what love really is; then man, having the Spirit of the Divine Father breathed into him, learns to love also. We cannot attain to anything which will give us the right to say with respect to duration that ours is an everlasting love; but, as true Christians, we may have something of the quality of that affection.

1. Love is everlasting.—It is from the first to the last. Love was, before love was expressed, as design is in the mind of the architect before he produces his drawings, and as harmony in the soul of the composer of music before he has written a musical passage. From everlasting, until the day of creation, love was pent up, if one may so speak, in the being of God, as the central fires of our globe, or as the waters of a spring without an outlet. It was unmanifest then, as the light below the horizon ere the morning has dawned. This cannot be said of selfishness or sin in any form. Sin is old, but sin is not eternal. One can look back through the past and see where sin begins; we cannot look back through the past and see where love begins, it is from everlasting.

In a letter dated June 22, 1864, Clerk Maxwell, who was then Professor of Natural Philosophy at Kings College, London, wrote to his wife: “Love is an eternal thing, and love between father and son or husband and wife is not temporal if it be the right sort, for if the love of Christ and the Church be a reason for loving one another, and if the one be taken as an image of the other, then, if the mind of Christ be in us, it will produce this love as part of its complete nature, and it cannot be that the love which is first made holy, as being a reflection of part of the glory of Christ, can be any way lessened or taken away by a more complete transformation into the image of the Lord. I have been back at 1 Corinthians 13. I think the description of charity or Divine love is another loadstone for our life—to show us that this is one thing which is not in parts, but perfect in its own nature, and so it shall never be done away. It is nothing negative, but a well-defined, living, almost acting picture of goodness; that kind of it which is human, but also divine.” 1 [Note: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 338.]

2. Gods love is continuous.—“He loved us from the first of time, He loves us to the last.” As His love cared for us in the past, it continues to care for us during the whole of our earthly life, notwithstanding all that may appear to be at variance with it. As it embraced us at first, irrespective of any good qualities in ourselves, so it embraces us throughout the whole of our varying experience. Our trials are no proof of its having forsaken us. Our unworthiness and sinfulness have not driven it away. When Israel was suffering as the consequence of wrong-doing, even then God bore testimony to His everlasting love, and intimated that through their suffering He would wean them from their sin, and thus promote their welfare. Thus did it prove its immutability amidst all changes in their experience, and in spite of all faults in their character.

Mans love ebbs and flows like the tide. Often it is as fickle as it is fervent. Sometimes when it talks loudest we can trust it least. Absence may cool it. Some little disappointment or opposition may change it into ill-concealed or unconcealed dislike. But there are no such changes in the love of God. His is no ebbing and flowing tide, but a sea, like the Mediterranean, ever full. His is no waxing and waning moon, but a full-orbed sun for ever shining in its strength. It shines as brightly and strongly now as it has ever done throughout the ages that are past; and it will continue to shine with the same brightness and strength throughout all the ages that are to come.

Our hearts may be well-nigh broken under some crushing sorrow; the light of our life may be taken away; the bitterness of death may enter our homes; the winter of an intolerable discontent may smite within us every spring of happiness and leave only the consciousness of a misery that hardly dares to lift its head. God may seem far away from us—at least as a power of love—in the midst of the darkness that surrounds us. The very sun may be turned into blackness, and the flowers of the earth and the charms of the sea and sky, which were once as the breath of Paradise, may seem only to add to our misery. But the voice of God is not still because man does not hear it, and the love of God is not gone because man does not feel it. It is still crying to us; it abides as an everlasting fact. No cloud can extinguish it, however it may obscure it; no misery born of the depths of human despair, no tragedy of human agony or of human crime, can make that love doubtful. It is still there; it is around us; it is with us; its everlasting arms are holding us even when we cannot feel it, and grasping us in its soft embrace although our feet may be bleeding and sore with the hardness of the road along which we travel.

I cannot go

Where Universal Love smiles not around,

Sustaining all yon orbs and all their suns;

From seeming evil still educing good,

And better thence again, and better still,

In infinite progression. 1 [Note: James Thomson.]

3. To the Divine love there is absolutely no end.—Never having begun, it will never terminate, but will last as long as God Himself shall live; for throughout the eternity which is His lifetime He never ceases to be Himself, and He is love. We have in His love, therefore, a guarantee not only for our present but for our future welfare. Never can we reach a point in our existence in which this love will not encircle and provide for us. When we come to die, He will love us as much in dying as He has loved us while we lived. When we appear at His judgment-seat, He will love us as much as when He gave Christ to die for us; through all eternity He will love us as much as He has ever done.

To a friend who was experiencing a heavy sorrow, Dr. Martineau wrote, “Often the love of God is hid—passes behind the cloud and leaves us with a cold shudder of alarm, as if it were not there. But the Divine realities do not depend on our apprehension of them; the eclipse of our vision makes no difference to their shining, except to us. The Infinite Love abides behind, and waits till we return to it, and the intercepting veil falls away. At times, I think, when the mists of fear and distrust gather round the heart, it is even better to forget Him till He finds us again, and say: I will possess my soul in patience, than to accuse either Him or oneself of deserting a relation which is suspended, it may be, only to be more closely bound.” 1 [Note: The Life and Letters of James Martineau, i. 450.]

III

Love as Lovingkindness

“Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.”

1. Here again is an alternative rendering. It might be, as the margin of the Revised Version has it, “I have continued loving-kindness unto thee.” But the expression as it stands is truer to the facts. The profound idea which it enshrines is that, despite appearances, the afflictions of Israel have all been the instruments of Gods love, means whereby He has been drawing His people towards Himself and towards a higher destiny than they knew. The sublime declaration thus made is that God draws His children by kindness even when it seems most like cruelty. It is almost audacious in its defiance of probabilities as judged from the standpoint of the natural man. Jeremiah calmly tells his contemporaries that all the ruin, woe, and devastation through which they were at the moment passing was a mode of the loving-kindness of God. One can hardly wonder that they refused to believe him, for anything more unlike the evidence of their senses it would have been difficult to find. We shall never reach the heart of the mystery of earthly misery and wretchedness by any exercise of the mind, but only by development of soul. For here is an amazing paradox—that the very thing which to the wisdom of this world is the most conclusive demonstration that there is no Divine love is that wherein the spiritual mind discerns it most clearly.

True love is not mere benevolence, it is a burning fire, a passionate eagerness to possess the souls of those who are loved. Therefore it is that the perfect love of God embraces what in our poor earthly language we term the wrath of God against all unrighteousness of men and also the grief of the Holy Spirit at mans ingratitude, as where it is written “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” There is no contradiction between those two great texts, “God is love” and “Our God is a consuming fire,” for the Love Divine is a Consuming Fire, which warms, lightens, and quickens all whose nature will receive it, but burns up all the wood, hay, stubble which cannot receive it. And so when the sword flashes forth in terrible judgment, the Hand behind the cloud that wields it is the Hand of Love.

You see the child running in from the garden full of tears, and saying, “Something has hurt me.” On examination it is found that a thorn is in one of his fingers. Then the gentlest of hands will endeavour to extract it. When she is doing so the child will cry out, “Oh, mother, you hurt me.” Ah, it is not the mother that hurts, but the thorn. When God takes out the thorn, we think that He hurts us. Not so, it is the thorn. Even God cannot take sin out of the heart without its giving pain. “Woe is me; who will deliver me from this body of death?” There are trials and disappointments, there are crosses and burdens, and we feel them keenly. God is then extracting the thorns. But in all His dealings His tender mercy is over all His works. Everywhere, and at all times, it is His lovingkindness. 1 [Note: T. Davies.]

2. Nothing but lovingkindness can draw men to goodness. No coercive force—only the force of love—can bring the sinner into repentance and faith—the repentance that shall not be repented of, and the faith that will secure the favour of God. It would be an easy matter for God to crush the sinner, and deprive him of every facility for sin; but it is a different matter to crush his sin and the desire which fosters it. The sinner may quail in the presence of Gods displeasure, or he may cease altogether from sin by reason of the abuse and the destruction of natural force; but there is no virtue in his tremor; there is no faith in his weakness. The sinner must be made willing to part with his sin. The power to effect this comes from God, but it can be applied only when the willing cry rends his heart—“Lord, save, or I perish.”

I understand the word “drawn” to be used here as the opposite of “driven.” I take the meaning to be, “It is because I love you that I do not force you; I desire to win by love.” We often express surprise that human life does not reveal more traces of Gods omnipotence. We see the visible universe subject to inexorable law and yielding submissively to that law. But man does not yield submissively; he resists the will of the Eternal. Why should he be allowed to resist? Is he not but an atom in the infinite spaces—these spaces that obey the heavenly mandate? Why not put down his insane rebellion and crush his proud will into conformity with the universal chorus? The Bible gives its answer. It is because love is incompatible with the exercise of omnipotence. Inexorable law can rule the stars; but the stars are not an object of love. Man is an object of love, and therefore he can be ruled only by love—as the prophet puts it, “drawn.” Nothing is a conquest for love but the power of drawing. Omnipotence can subdue by driving—but that is not a conquest for love; it is rather a sign that love is baffled. Therefore it is that our Father does not compel us to come in. He would have us “drawn” by the beauty of holiness; therefore He veils all that would force the will. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Thoughts for Lifes Journey, 70.]

Two beautiful allegories by the late Mr. Munro, The Journey Home and The Dark Mountains, describe a certain Palace of Unbelief, belonging to Azrael, the Prince of Darkness. It has no background; its motto is: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Here the careless revellers are disturbed by the sudden arrival of an unlooked-for visitor. His name is Conscience. He is pale and stern, with the starry crown of Truth upon his white forehead. All shrink back trembling at his approach, as though from the angel of death himself. Yet he does not win the wanderers back to the narrow way. They do but shudder for a moment at the awful vision. Then, once more, they strive to drown the new like the old cares, in mirth and debauchery. But are long another unbidden guest enters Azraels palace. His head is crowned not with stars but with thorns. His eye tells not of wrath, but of mercy. His words are words of love unspeakable—the love that in Gethsemane and on Calvary showed itself stronger than death. And that mighty love prevails. The fetters of lust and selfishness and pride are broken, and the prisoner is free. 1 [Note: E. Curling, The Transfiguration, 103.]

3. Gods love is truly personal; it is the love of one loving heart for another. When God is speaking to the Jewish nation, He very often, and as a rule, addresses them as if they were one person. Was it that He always saw Abraham in them? Was it that He always saw the Messiah in them? Or is it the language of affection? The more earnest we are in anything, the more we point our words. And so God, gathering in the wide circumference of His comprehensive love for every Jew, in every age, to the centre of a single man, says, “I have loved thee.” For with God the capacity of love is universal. It embraces all. Yet it individualizes all. It is to you and to me, and all who believe in Him and look to Him as a Father. How personal always was the ministry of our Lord! “Come unto me.” “Take up my cross.” “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?”

Gods love is like His sunlight, diffused throughout the heavens, catching the heights of the hills and crowning them with ruddy gold and clothing them in purple. So it seems to us an easy and a natural thing for God to love some people; outstanding men and women whose goodness might make them dear to Him. But this is not all that the sun does. It climbs higher that it may creep lower—down the hillsides farther and farther, until it lifts the mists of the valley and covers the meadows with its glory: and kisses the daisy and fills its cup with gold, and puts energy and strength into its very heart. God loves the good, the true, the pure, but His love rises higher that it may come down lower; and He loves me—me. 2 [Note: M. G. Pearse, Parables and Pictures, 52.]

Let me link together detached sentences from the Word, that in their associations we may discern what is meant by the depth of the love of God. “The high and lofty One whose name is holy.” … “He is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.” “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God … began to wash the disciples feet.” “And one cried with another, saying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord!” … “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.” All these are suggestive of what is meant by the love-depths of our God. It is only the really lofty that can truly reach the really deep. The arm that can reach far upward is the only arm that can reach far downward. It is only holy love that can deal with humanitys deepest needs. A low love has no depths of service. Low love is a thing of compromise, and has no dealings with extremes, whether of holiness or of sin. Holy love, crystalline love, goes down and down into human necessity, and is not afraid of the taint. Sunbeams can move among sewage and catch no defilement. The brilliant, holy love of God ministers in the deepest depths of human need.

Gods love is deeper than human sorrow. Drop your plummet-line into the deepest sea of sorrow, and at the end of all your soundings, “underneath are the everlasting arms.” Gods love is deeper than death, and there are multitudes who know how deep grim death can be. “Just twelve months ago,” said a near friend of mine a week or two ago, “I dug a deep grave!” Aye, and I know it was deep enough. But the grave-diggers spade cannot get beneath our Fathers love. Gods love is deeper than the deepest grave you ever dug! “And entering into the sepulchre they saw an angel,” and you can never dig into any dreary, dreary dwelling of death which is beyond the reach of those white-robed messengers of eternal love. Yes, Gods love is deeper than death. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

And Gods love is deeper than sin. Listen to this: “He descended into hell,” and He will descend again if you are there. “If I make my bed in hell. Thou art there.” “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” “He bore our sin”; then He got beneath it; down to it and beneath it; and there is no human wreckage, lying in the ooze of the deepest sea of iniquity, that His deep love cannot reach and redeem. What a Gospel! However far down, Gods love can get beneath it! 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Things that Matter Most, 15.]

Everlasting Love

Literature

Armitage (W. J.), The Fruit of the Spirit, 11.

Curling (E.), The Transfiguration, 102.

Davies (T.), Sermons, ii. 53.

Hutton (R. E.), The Crown of Christ, ii. 253.

Landels (W.), Until the Day Break, 58.

Macintosh (W.), Rabbi Jesus, 57.

McLean (A.), Where the Book Speaks, 200.

Martin (S.), Fifty Sermons, 171.

Matheson (G.), Thoughts for Lifes Journey, 70.

Paget (E. C.), Silence, 65.

Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 52.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxii. (1888), No. 1914; 1. (1904), No. 2880.

Stewart (J.), Outlines of Discourses, 174.

Tulloch (J.), Sundays at Balmoral, 18.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), v. (1867), No. 521.

Christian Commonwealth, xxxiv. 285 (R. J. Campbell).

Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 209 (J. Tulloch); lvii. 109 (J. S. Maver).

Homiletic Review, lxi. 147 (H. W. Battle).

Verses 31-34

The New Covenant

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people: and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.— Jeremiah 31:31-34.

1. This is one of the greatest messages that the Old Testament contains. Were we to distinguish degrees of importance by difference of type, then these verses ought to be printed in the boldest lettering, so as to catch every eye. Here is a prophecy that foretells Christianity, that anticipates the New Testament. When the prophet delivers this oracle, he speaks as a Christian born long before the time. When we look on all that is best and most distinctive in the Christian faith, we are entitled to say, “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in our ears.” It was of these words our Lord was thinking when He instituted the sacrament of the Supper, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” That New Covenant was neither more nor less than the New Covenant of which Jeremiah prophesied. And the whole Epistle to the Hebrews, which labours to show to half-converted Jews the vast superiority of Christianity to the religion of their fathers, may be called a sermon on this great text.

If we are to get at the heart of Jeremiahs meaning we had better change this word “covenant” into the word “religion,” and the full significance of the prophets startling teaching will begin to dawn upon us. That is a fair enough equivalent. The word “religion” does not occur in the Old Testament, but the word “covenant” is found some three hundred times; and when it is used to describe the relation of the people to God it really means religion. The core of the covenant is, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people,” but if you wanted to describe a true and living religion, could you come across better words than these to mark the relation to God in which it consists? 1 [Note: A. Ramsay, Studies in Jeremiah, 263.]

2. The words were uttered at a time of national disaster. Jerusalem was captured by the Assyrians, and Jeremiah was taken prisoner to Ramah. During the time of his imprisonment he looked forward to the day when Israel should again be free. Before that could happen, however, he saw that a great change must come over the people. The Old Covenant had proved a failure, not by reason of its own defects, but by reason of the conception of it as an external and legal code, imposing its laws upon a people whose inward spiritual life it had long ceased to reflect. Now the glory of Jeremiah is that in that dark night his heart was filled with hope. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” Religion is not to die, although the forms in which of old it found expression are antiquated and ready to perish. A better religion is to rise out of the ashes. He is the prophet of a new religion. He cannot mourn. He cannot sorrow and be in continual heaviness. If he sees Simeon in the Temple tottering and on the brink of the grave, he sees that he holds the infant Christ in his arms. The new and the better age is about to be; the light of the morning is on his face; it is the shadows of the night that flee away. Here indeed is an inspiring optimism. The political order changes; the ecclesiastical order changes; the theological order changes; and through all, not only does religion not die, but it passes forward to a nobler, worthier life; it becomes purer, more spiritual, more personal.

Archdeacon Boutflower, who was Bishop Westcotts domestic chaplain throughout his episcopate, refers as follows to his Diocesans hopefulness and faith in the future of Christianity:—“Parallel to that freshness of powers and interest which the Bishop brought to his last day of work, and still more wonderful, was the freshness of hope and sympathy which he carried to the end. This, no doubt, was cultivated in contemplation, but it was a singular grace of temperament to start with. In mind he never grew old. Occasionally he would say, I am too old for such things now; but it was not really true, and only half-serious. To most men there comes a time when they grow tired of readaptation and of looking forward. They speak of the past with a touch of regret, and the young feel that they are out of sympathy. There were no signs of this about our dear Bishop to the last. He was more hopeful than the youngest of us. He welcomed every new development, if only he was persuaded it was true development, and he waited for more. The Divine Spirit he believed in was a living Spirit, speaking and moving in the Church to-day, and he trusted every fresh age to add to the glory of Gods revelation. And he expected God still to send messages through Samuel to Eli. You must see visions, he said to one of his younger clergy—I despair of you if you dont. Visions belong to youth; when you are older you will only dream dreams. ” 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, ii. 371.]

I

The Need of a New Covenant

1. There had been many covenants—all of them ineffectual. God is said to have made a covenant with Noah, when He promised that a judgment like the flood should not be repeated; and with Abraham, when He promised Canaan to his descendants for an everlasting possession, and imposed the condition of circumcision. But by the phrase, “the Old Covenant,” is meant especially the covenant which God made with Israel as a people on Mount Sinai. The writing called the “Book of the Covenant” comprised the Ten Commandments, and the body of laws which are recorded in the twenty-first and two following chapters of Exodus. These were the conditions imposed by God when He entered into covenant relations with Israel; and the solemn act by which this covenant was inaugurated is described in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus. Gathered at the base of the holy mountain, before an altar resting on twelve pillars, in honour of the twelve tribes, the people waited silent and awestruck, while twelve delegates (as yet there was no priesthood) offered such sacrifices as yet were possible, and while the lawgiver sprinkled the blood of the victims upon the assembled multitude. That ceremony had a latent meaning, unperceived at the time, which many centuries afterwards would be drawn out into the light under Apostolic direction; but the solemn character of the transaction was there and then profoundly felt. And at later periods of Israels history this covenant was again and again renewed; as by Joshua at Shechem, by King Asa at Jerusalem, by Jehoiada the priest in the Temple, and also by the priesthood and people under Hezekiah, and under the auspices of Ezra and Nehemiah in later days still, after the great Captivity. It was renewed because it was continually broken. It was a Divine work, and yet, through mans perverseness, it was a failure. Hence the words, “Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord.”

Jeremiah had played his part in establishing covenants between Israel and its God. He is not, indeed, even so much as mentioned in the account of Josiahs reformation; and it is not clear that he himself makes any express reference to it; so that some doubt must still be felt as to his share in that great movement. At the same time indirect evidence seems to afford proof of the common opinion that Jeremiah was active in the proceedings which resulted in the solemn engagement to observe the code of Deuteronomy. But yet another covenant occupies a chapter in the Book of Jeremiah, and in this case there is no doubt that the prophet was the prime mover in inducing the Jews to release their Hebrew slaves. This act of emancipation was adopted in obedience to an ordinance of Deuteronomy, so that Jeremiahs experience of former covenants was chiefly connected with the code of Deuteronomy and the older Book of the Covenant upon which it was based. The Restoration to which Jeremiah looked forward was to throw the Exodus into the shade, and to constitute a new epoch in the history of Israel more remarkable than the first settlement in Canaan. The nation was to be founded anew, and its regeneration would necessarily rest upon a New Covenant, which would supersede the Covenant of Sinai. 1 [Note: W. H. Bennett.]

Oliver, we find, spoke much of “the Covenants”; which indeed are the grand axis of all, in that Puritan Universe of his. Two Covenants; one of Works, with fearful Judgment for our shortcomings therein; one of Grace and unspeakable mercy;—gracious Engagements, “Covenants,” which the Eternal God has vouchsafed to make with His feeble creature, man. Two; and by Christs Death they have become One: there for Oliver is the divine solution of this our Mystery of Life. “They were Two,” he was heard ejaculating: “Two, but put into One before the Foundation of the World!” And again: “It is holy and true, it is holy and true, it is holy and true!—Who made it holy and true? The Mediator of the Covenant!” And again: “The Covenant is but One. Faith in the Covenant is my only support. And if I believe not, He abides faithful!” When his Children and Wife stood weeping round him, he said: “Love not this world. I say unto you, it is not good that you should love this world!” No. Children, live like Christians:—I leave you the Covenant to feed upon!” 1 [Note: Carlyle, Oliver Cromwells Letters and Speeches, v. 151.]

2. The Old Covenant had thus become, for practical purposes, an outworn safeguard. Israel in her successive generations had utterly failed to perform her part, and so had made it impossible for God to do what He had promised; until at length He loathed the people with whom He was in covenant, and rejected them, and cast them forth out of their land. What if all this should happen over again in the history of our children as it happened in the days of our fathers? Was such a result not all too likely? Such doubting thoughts were most natural to one in Jeremiahs position, and they constituted, we may be sure, one of his direst spiritual trials. But faiths trials are but the precursors of new triumphs. Job despairs of relief in the present life, and his very despair causes faith to reach out beyond the tomb in search of the deliverance which, in spite of all present appearances, it believes will surely come. Even so Jeremiah, justly despairing of permanent prosperity for Israel on the basis of the Old Covenant, by a sublime act of Heaven—inspired faith—dares to predict the advent of a time when the old discredited and bankrupt constitution or covenant shall be superseded by a new one furnished with conditions that shall insure it against failure.

There follows the beautiful passage [in The Ancient Sage ] in which the hopeful and wistful upward gaze of faith is described. While melancholy and perplexity constantly attend on the exercises of the speculative intellect, we are to “cling to faith”:

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of “Yes” and “No,”

She sees the Best that glimmers thro the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they waild “Mirage”!

These lines present to the reader the hopefulness of the spiritual mind, hopefulness not akin to the merely sanguine temperament, but based on a deep conviction of the reality of the spiritual world, and on unfailing certainty that there is in it a key to the perplexities of this universe of which we men understand so little. We know from experience that material Nature is working out her ends, however little we understand the process, and however unpromising portions of her work might appear without this knowledge. That an acorn should have within it forces which compel earth, air, and water to come to its assistance and become the oak tree would seem incredible were it not so habitually known as a fact; and the certainty which such experiences give in the material order, the eye of faith gives in the spiritual order. However perplexing the universe now seems to us, we have this deep trust that there is an explanation, and that when we are in a position to judge the whole, instead of looking on from this corner of time and space, the truth of the spiritual interpretation of its phenomena will be clear—“ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et vincas cum iudicaris.” This view runs through all the poem. The poet pleads for steadfast trust and hope in the face of difficulty, as we would trust a known and intimate friend in the face of ominous suspicions. 1 [Note: Wilfrid Ward, in Tennyson and his Friends, 236.]

And is the Great Cause lost beyond recall?

Have all the hopes of ages come to nought?

Is Life no more with noble meaning fraught?

Is Life but Death, and Love its funeral pall?

Maybe. But still on bended knees I fall,

Filled with a faith no preacher ever taught.

O God— my God, by no false prophet wrought,

I believe still, in despite of it all!

Let go the myths and creeds of groping men.

This clay knows nought—the Potter understands.

I own that Power divine beyond my ken,

And still can leave me in His shaping hands.

But, O my God, that madest me to feel!

Forgive the anguish of the turning wheel. 2 [Note: Ada Cambridge, The Hand in the Dark, 121.]

II

The Content of the New Covenant

The New Covenant has three notes—Spirituality, Universality, and Finality. The formula of the Old Covenant was, “Thou shalt not.” These great words, like a flash of lightning, discovered to man what lies in the depth of his own being—moral obligation along with a sense of utter impotence to meet it, darkness and despair as of chaos returning. The formula of the New Covenant is, “I will”; still greater words, which discover the heights above, as it were the body of heaven in its clearness, unruffled serenity and easy self-achievement of the grace of God. It would not be possible to represent what is characteristic in each dispensation more vividly than by these contrasted formulas. On the one side is a vain effort to attain, a strife between the law of the mind and the law of the members, a sense of hopeless duality that carries unrest—noble, if you will, but not less fatal—to the centre of mans being. On the other side is the rest of faith, a great reserve of spiritual power, the reconciliation of Divine ideals with the practice of human lives achieved by grace. Moral obligation persists under the gospel, but only as it is resolved into the higher freedom of the new life. As Pascal says, “The law demands what it cannot give; grace gives all it demands.”

The fireguard serves a very necessary and beneficent purpose, but its real and ultimate worth lies in educating the child to do without it. So with the Mosaic law. It served its highest ends when it disciplined the soul to independence of it. The difference, therefore, between the Old Covenant and the New was not that one was ancient and the other modern; the mere “newness” was the least important thing about it. It was the difference between law and religion, between the letter of the one and the spirit of the other, between body and soul, between outward form and inward essence. The Old Covenant was imposed by an authority from without, whilst the New was established by an authority from within. One was graven on stone, and needed to be enforced by pains and penalties; the other was to be written in the heart as the glad, spontaneous expression of a free spirit.

1. The New Covenant will be spiritual.—The Old Covenant was formal, working from without inward, telling men what to do. This must come first. Childhood, of the race as of the individual, must begin life under rules. But the aim of the Law was to make itself superseded, by opening the way to a religious force which should work from within outward. A religion of forms, like an educational system, can never be closely personal. It cannot keep adjusting itself to the individual. It is machine work, not hand work. It fits only the average, and misfits everybody else. Gods work is with the inner heart of each human being, where dwells his truest individuality, his real life. When this is gained, the whole is won. From it flow the upright conduct, the gentle manners, the broad benisons of regenerated society. Society is not a machine to which we may bring raw characters to make them virtuous, but the effluence and product of what individual characters bring to it. Nor will religion, or a church, or any clever society or institution within the church, turn out a new generation of new souls by its most perfect adjustments. The best of them is but a path, a hand, to bring men to God, an avenue by which God comes to them. Spirit with spirit is the method of salvation.

One cannot read the words, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts,” without thinking of the tables of stone which occupy so prominent a place in the history of the Sinaitic covenant. And the writing on the heart suggests very forcibly the defects of the ancient covenant, in so far as it had the fundamental laws of life written on stone. Writing on stone may be very durable. The slabs on which the Ten Words are inscribed may abide as a lasting monument, proclaiming what God requires of man, saying to successive generations: Remember to do this and to avoid doing that. But while the stone slabs may avail to keep men in mind of their duty, they are utterly impotent to dispose them to perform it; in witness whereof we need only refer to Israels behaviour at the foot of the mount of lawgiving. At the very time the tables were being prepared, they danced around their golden calf; at the very moment Moses was descending with the two tables in his hand, with the Ten Words written on them, the first of which said, “Thou shalt have none other God before me,” they had chosen another God; insomuch that the legislator in disgust dashed the tables to pieces, as if to say, What is the use of making laws for such a people? Manifestly the writing on the heart is sorely wanted in order that the law may be kept, not merely in the ark, but in human conduct. And that, accordingly, is what Jeremiah puts in the forefront in his account of the New Covenant, on which restored Israel is to be constituted. How the mystic writing is to be achieved he does not say, perhaps he does not know; but he believes that God can and will achieve it somehow; and he understands full well its aim and its certain result in a holy life.

You may adjust your social relationships according to the most democratic principle; you may define, in terms of economic science, the relations of Capital and Labour; you may abolish slums and build garden cities; but until there is drawn up and ratified between God and man, and between man and man, a new covenant of the spirit, your scheme for a new heaven and a new earth will never be realized. It is here that religion is indispensable, for no covenant will endure which ignores the spiritual nature of man. It is here that the voice of Jesus Christ may be heard, saying to capitalist and to workmen, “Apart from me ye can do nothing.” It is here that the voice of the Redeemer may be heard saying to His Church, as He recalls it to a deeper appreciation of its character and mission: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; this do … in remembrance of me.” This, surely, is our supreme business as Christians, to make this new covenant of the Spirit possible, by writing it on our own hearts, and afterwards to write it on the life and soul of our day.

Till earth becomes a temple,

And every human heart

Shall join in one great service,

Each happy in his part.

And God shall be our Master,

And all His service own,

And men shall be as brothers,

And heaven on earth be won. 1 [Note: E. J. Barson.]

2. Under the New Covenant knowledge of God will become universal.—In ancient Israel as now, men learned what they could about God from human teachers. But the truths which they learned, though inculcated with great industry, were, in the great majority of cases, not really mastered, because there was no accompanying process of interpretation and adjustment within the soul. It was to be otherwise in the future. “And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them.” In the New Covenant the Divine Teacher, without dispensing with such human instruments as were wanted, would do the most important part of His work Himself. He would make truth plain to the soul, and would enamour the soul of truth by such instruction as is beyond the reach of human argument and language, since it belongs to the world of spirit. “Ye have an unction from the Holy One,” said St. John to his readers, “and ye know all things.” “Listen not,” says St. Augustine, “too eagerly to the outward words: the Master is within.”

No polemic against the priesthood is intended here. The prophet does not mean, with a stroke of his pen, to abolish an ancient Order to which he himself belongs. A much profounder idea underlies his words. He will have us distinguish between that knowledge of God which is esoteric and technical, the possession of a class, and that which is the instinct of every renewed nature, i.e., between the ceremonial and the moral in religion. We shall never be in a position to claim independence of each other in our spiritual experience. It is “with all saints,” i.e., in the communion of the Catholic Church, that we come to know the love which passes knowledge. Moral sense must be trained; even conscience must be educated. But the education of conscience is one thing, and the imposition of creed or code is quite another. The one develops that individuality which the other tends to repress. The latter is excluded here. When he says, “They shall all know me,” it is probable that the prophet does not consciously overlook the limits of his age. By “all men” he means all Jews. But the relative Universalism he asserts prepared for the absolute Universalism which is characteristic of the gospel age. Christianity is aggressive and world-subduing, because it is the religion not of the letter but of the spirit. English customs and ideals can hardly cross the Channel. They can no more take root in Eastern lands than the Mosaic Law could domesticate itself in the West. But the law of Truth is nowhere from home; the thirst for God is part of the heritage of the race; and it is to these that the gospel makes its appeal. As a revelation of God to the soul of man, Christianity is the absolute Truth, the universal Faith.

The clearest mark of the new order of things, says Jeremiah, is that religion shall henceforth be taken at first hand. Jesus said, “Have salt in yourselves”; do not be dependent for what keeps life strong and wholesome on influences outside of you. The religion that is worth anything is not what is told you but what you know of yourself. This does not mean that there is no room for teaching. Pauls understanding of what is contained in Jesus Christ is rich and subtle, for Paul had a sure insight and a burning love. But if we know only what Paul says, and have no answering knowledge in ourselves, even Paul will help us little. A man may be a heretic in the truth, as Milton says; and “if he believes only because his pastor says so, or because the assembly so determines, without knowing other reasons, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.” It was proclaimed by Joel that God would one day pour out of His Spirit upon all flesh, even upon the servants and the handmaids; for it is Gods intention in the covenant that nothing in station or in lack of education or opportunity should hinder any man from knowing God for himself. The motto of all our faith is, “With open face.”

It must be possible for men to know more of God, because the knowledge of God by man involves two elements, the known and the knower, God and man; and however perfectly God may have revealed Himself, man is but half developed and has only half possession of his knowing powers. The faith has been “once delivered to the saints,” as Canaan was given to the Israelites. To “go in and possess the land” is still the duty of the Christian Israel. Who shall say how far it has been occupied in all these Christian centuries? We may be yet only at Jericho and Ai. Some most adventurous and earnest tribes may have pushed on to Bethel. Some very determined and aspiring souls may have climbed to the mountain-tops and even caught sight of the flashing sea which bounds the Promised Land upon the western side. However we may estimate the progress of the past, there still remains “very much land to be possessed.” Surely the strongest way to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints is to go forward reverently till the saints shall perfectly possess the land and know all that it is possible for them to know of God and of His Book and of His ways. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Essays and Addresses, 226.]

3. The New Covenant will be permanent and final.—“For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.” Under the Old Covenant, the provisions for the cancelling of sin were very unsatisfactory, and utterly unfit to perfect the worshipper as to conscience, by dealing thoroughly with the problem of guilt—of which no better evidence could be desired than the institution of the great day of atonement, in which a remembrance of sin was made once a year, and by which nothing more than an annual and putative forgiveness was procured; under the New, on the contrary, God would grant to His people a real, absolute, and perennial forgiveness, so that the abiding relation between Him and them should be as if sin had never existed.

The trouble in every religious system that fails is that it does not bring men close enough to what God really is, and there is no regenerating virtue in bowing before a formless mystery. There must be revelation, and the revelation of a heart. Jeremiah, feeling after things to come, says, It must be God who is to bridge this gulf, and He will do so by showing what He is. The new order is to be inaugurated by a great act of forgiveness, in which all the heart of God will appear. In some public way He will treat as His friends the men who have refused Him, putting them all in His debt. Nothing short of that, as the prophet believed, will get at the obdurate hearts of men; but at the touch of an unmerited forgiveness, gratitude will spring up within them, and love—the power by which men know God and the constraint under which they are drawn willingly to obey Him. Forgiveness brings to erring men new conceptions of what their God is like—a God who does not deal with His creatures on terms of strict, legal precision, but who pardons at His own cost, and gives them what they have not worked for. And the very sight of such a God is a real new birth, clearing and deepening all the faculties, and making obedience easy.

Jeremiah hails here the coming of the religion of redemption. He dwells on what is the crowning glory of our faith. For what is it that is central in the New Testament? It is the cross of Jesus Christ. And why does that stand in the midst? It is because we have here the propitiation for the sins of the whole world. That death of the Son of God in our room and stead is the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for our sins. That indeed was only dimly and confusedly prefigured in the animal sacrifices of old. One is more struck with the difference than with the resemblance. A lamb led to the altar, unwillingly and unconsciously, is no adequate type of the Lamb of God offering Himself for us, taking upon Him our guilt, standing beneath the condemnation of our sins, and magnifying the justice of God in bowing His head beneath our sentence. The real precursors of Him who suffered on Calvary are to be found in those who gave themselves for their fellows, whose sacrifices did something to draw men nearer to God, and by whose stripes some of mankinds sorrows were healed. All stories, red with the blood of real life, that tell of the innocent suffering for the guilty, are a clearer foreshadowing of the old, old story of Jesus and His love than all animal sacrifices. The old religion had a temple in which sacrifices never ceased, but none of these atoned for sin with God. Christianity centres in the supreme self-sacrifice of the cross, by which we have been redeemed. “We have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” This great blessing of pardon becomes ours because Christ has died for us. The gospel can dwell on the forgiveness of sins. It vindicates and fulfils the great promise, “I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.”

For the most part, we are, as it were, ready rather to steal forgiveness from God than to receive from him as one that gives it freely and largely. We take it up and lay it down as though we would be glad to have it, so God did not, as it were, see us take it; for we are afraid he is not willing we should have it indeed. We would steal this fire from heaven, and have a share in Gods treasures and riches almost without his consent: at least, we think that we have it from him “ægrè,” with much difficulty; that it is rarely given, and scarcely obtained; that he gives it out ἐ?κὼ?ν ἀ?έκοντί γε θύμῳ? , with a kind of unwilling willingness—as we sometimes give alms without cheerfulness; and that he loseth so much by us as he giveth out in pardon. We are apt to think that we are very willing to have forgiveness, but that God is unwilling to bestow it, and that because he seems to be a loser by it, and to forego the glory of inflicting punishment for our sins; which of all things we suppose he is most loath to part withal. And this is the very nature of unbelief … Reasons line is too short to fathom the depth of the Fathers love, of the blood of the Son, and the promises of the gospel built thereon, wherein forgiveness dwells. 1 [Note: John Owen, An Exposition upon Psalms 130.]

Contrite to God I came in sore distress,

“I know,” I cried, “that twas but yester-eve

This self-same fault I asked Thee to forgive,

And promised to renounce all sinfulness.

Yet I would even ask again Thy grace,

Save that I fear Ive drained forgiveness dry

And reached Thy mercys utmost boundary!”

Then spake Gods mighty Voice, and filled the place:

“ With thy poor human tape, child, dost thou think

To measure My vast mercys outer bound?

With thy short plummet at Forgiveness brink,

Dost think that thou canst test its depth of ground?

Drop in thy weightiest sin, and bid it sink,

To strike the bottom—there comes back no sound.”

The New Covenant

Literature

Bennett (W. H.), The Book of Jeremiah (Expositors Bible), 346.

Gillies (J. R.), Jeremiah: The Man and his Message, 247.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 68.

Liddon (H. P.), Christmastide in St. Pauls, 38.

Macgregor (W. M.), Jesus Christ the Son of God, 27.

Masterman (J. H. B.), The Challenge of Christ, 52.

Ramsay (A.), Studies in Jeremiah, 261.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 5.

Southgate (C. M.), in Sermons by the Monday Club, 17th Ser., 60.

Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, ii. (1856), No. 93; Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxviii. (1882), No. 1687.

Christian World Pulpit, xvi. 369 (H. P. Liddon); lxxx. 269 (E. J. Barson); lxxxiv. 387 (N. H. Marshall).

Expositor, 1st Ser., xi. 65 (A. B. Bruce).