Preached at Burnham, Afternoon of the 14th Sunday after Trinity, September 2, 1866.
“And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say every man to his neighbour, Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this great city? Then they shall answer, Because they have forsaken the Covenant of the Lord their God, and worshipped other gods, and served them.”—Jeremiah xxii. 8, 9.
We have read two chapters of this prophet Jeremiah to-day. You will have perceived that the man who wrote them was a very sorrowful man; one who was full of grief for what he saw and for what he expected. Why was he in grief for what he saw? He was an Israelite, one of the race of Abraham. He believed that God had chosen his Nation to be a blessing to all Nations. He believed that it was to tell all Nations, ‘There is a righteous Lord governing us and you, and all the world. We cannot see Him, but He has promised to be with us and with our children. He delivered our Fathers out of bondage. He gave them commandments to warn them against the bad acts which would bring them into bondage again. He is ruling over us and watching over us day by day, as a husband watches over his wife. And we, who are His people, have been forgetting Him; we have loved things that we can see, and taste and handle, better than Him. We have broken His laws.’ Jeremiah saw signs all about him that men were breaking God’s laws. They were adulterers; they were drunkards; they were false-swearers. And Jeremiah did not say, ‘That is nothing to me. I am not as other men are. I am not an adulterer, a drunkard, a false-swearer.’ He did not say that. It was God’s great mercy if he had not yielded to all the temptations to which some of his countrymen yielded. But he felt that his country, the country which he loved, was polluted by the evil things that were done in it. They were dragging it down. They were separating it from God. They were dividing the members of it from each other. So Jeremiah the prophet, however pure he might be himself, felt that these sins were his sins. He could not tear himself from his nation. He was tearing himself from God if he did. God’s covenant was with Israel. He was in God’s covenant because he was an Israelite. Whatever calamities befell Israel must befall him.
And what calamities did he expect would befall Israel? He might not know exactly what they would be. But he knew for certain such evil as Israelites were committing, would bring their land into misery. The heart was going out of his people. They were losing their courage. They would not be able to face any enemies that came against them. They were become distrustful of each other, for they did not trust God. They were become lazy and restless. They would soon not think it signified much whether they worked or were idle. They were losing hope. So at last they would not care to sow their ground; for all who sow must sow in hope of a harvest. They would trust to chance to supply them with food. The land, therefore, would go to decay. And, above all, they were losing care for each other. Each felt as if he had an interest against his neighbour. The rich man coveted his neighbour’s wife. The poor man coveted his neighbour’s ox or his ass. Children did not honour their parents; parents did not care for their children. What would come of that? Why, if that was so, they were not a people any longer. And therefore when some strong king came upon them with his armies, they would become his prey. For his army would hold together and do its work; and his people did not hold together, and would not do their work. This, then, was what Jeremiah expected. He knew there was a very powerful king, the King of Babylon, who was watching to swallow up the nations. He was sure that he would come down on the nation of Israel and would swallow it up.
The thought of what the children of Israel were doing, pressed heavily on Jeremiah’s mind when he wrote the words which we read this morning; the thought of what they were about to suffer pressed heavily on his mind when he wrote the words we have read this afternoon. Much had happened between these times. They were in danger from two great monarchs. One of their kings had been carried into Egypt. Very soon a large portion of the people as well as their king would be taken to Babylon. At last the city of Jerusalem and the Temple would be destroyed. When all these things had come to pass, Jeremiah supposes that people of other countries would walk through the land of Israel, and see its capital city in ruins, and would say, “Wherefore hath the Lord done this to this great city?” And this, he says, would be the answer, “Because they have forsaken the Covenant of the Lord, and have worshipped other gods and served them.” The unseen God had bound them to Him; they had not believed Him, they had chosen the gods they could see instead of Him. There was no strength in these things to save them from their enemies. He who was their true Lord would let them learn by hard punishment what was the fruit of their wilful ways, what comes of forgetting His Commandments.
And now, my friends, let us ask ourselves why these chapters have been read to us. They speak of things that happened long ago; they tell us about a people who lived in quite a different part of the world from that in which we live. Why should we in this country, poor as well as rich, hear of what the people of Judea and Jerusalem did in the days of the prophet Jeremiah, and of what befell them? It would be the idlest thing in the world to read such chapters in this September, 1866, to dwellers in the county of Buckingham, if the Lord God of Israel were not also the Lord God of England; if His commandments to Israelites in the old time were not His commandments to Englishmen in this time; if He were not our King as He was their King; if He were not the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It would be quite idle to read these chapters to you, if you were not tempted to do just what the Israelites did; to forget the Lord your God, the righteous Lord of your land; to break His commandments which they broke. It would be idle to read these things to you if these transgressions of God’s law did not threaten to ruin the good land which the Lord our God has given us, as much as they threatened to destroy the good land which the same Lord God gave to the children of Israel. But if that is so, then we ought to give good heed to the words of the prophet, and to consider whether we should not do just what he bade them do; just what—as you heard this morning—John the Baptist bade them do many hundred years after.
My friends, you will ask what covenant the Lord our God has made with us in England which answers to the covenant which He made with the Jews. I told you what this was a few Sundays ago, or rather the Epistle to the Hebrews told you. It is said that this is God’s new covenant, “I will put my laws in your hearts, and in your mind will I write them, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.” It is a new covenant; a better covenant than that which God made with the Jews, because God does not merely say to us, ‘Keep my commandments;’ but He says, ‘I will give you my Holy Spirit that you may keep them.’ But the commandments which He bids us keep are the very same. He bids us worship Him who is the Deliverer out of bondage, and Him only. He bids us set up no likenesses of things in heaven or earth, or under the earth, but worship Him. He bids us not take His Holy name in vain. He bids us keep His days of rest and work. He bids us honour our fathers and mothers. He bids us not kill, or commit adultery, or steal, or bear false witness, or covet. The commandments are the same as ever. And every neglect of these commandments by Englishmen defiles England, makes the country weaker and more slavish; separates us from God, and separates us from each other. And when people grow indifferent to these commandments; when they think, ‘God is not really speaking to us, He does not care whether we obey Him or not, He does not care whether we do right or wrong,’ then it fares with us as it fared with the Jews; we cease to be a strong people, a united people, a wise and understanding people in the sight of the Nations; we become weak and divided and foolish. And though none of us may know in what way God will bring us down, and shew us what the misery is of breaking His commandments and trampling upon His law; we may be sure He will take some way. And whatever it is, we must all share the suffering together. It is very bad for any of us who says, ‘I am not my brother’s keeper, I am not a sharer in his wrong doing. My hands are clean.’ It is very bad, because if we understand that we are all Englishmen, all God’s people, all under His righteous and gracious government, we should feel that we could not divide ourselves from our countrymen, that God has meant us to be one people, and that we cannot be serving Him or doing righteously when we do not bear each other’s burdens, and grieve for each other’s sins, and feel that they are in very deed our own. None of us feel that as we ought; but the more we feel it the more we shall have of the mind of Christ, the more we shall understand what it means that He bore the sins of us all in His own Body on the tree; the more we shall understand that in Him we are united to all the members of our Nation, and to all mankind. It is not a hard sentence, that we should bear other men’s griefs and feel their sins in a little measure, if that was what He did, who is the Head and Brother of us all; if so He did His Father’s will, and performed His Father’s work. But if we feel each other’s sins, we ought to be desiring to raise each man out of his sins; to make him a true Englishman and a true man. We ought to be telling him that he need not be a drunkard, need not be a liar, need not let corrupt communications go out of his mouth, that there is a Lord who died and rose again to set him free from all his sins, and that there is a Holy Spirit who will help him to conquer them all. We should be asking for ourselves and all our people, what we have asked to-day, that God will give us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; that is to say, that He will teach us to believe in Him our righteous Lord and Saviour, to hope in Him who has promised to give us His righteousness and His Eternal Life; to be charitable with that infinite charity which His Spirit is willing to shed abroad in our hearts. Then we shall ‘love the things which God commands;’ we shall feel how good it is for us all to be under His government; how holy and wise His laws are; then we shall obtain that which He doth promise; for He promises that we shall know Him and be like Him.
That is the covenant which He has made with us in Christ. If we hold fast to that covenant, it will go well with us and with our seed after us. We shall be true citizens of our land and God will bless our land and cause His face to shine upon it. But if we refuse His covenant, if we will not let Him govern us, people hereafter will say of this good and glorious land, ‘Wherefore has all this evil and misery and ruin come upon it?’ and then the answer will be, ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God, because they have worshipped other Gods, their money, their pleasures, their malice, and served them.’