Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1585
“O Lord, are not Your eyes upon the truth?” Jeremiah 5:3.
THE allusion is not to doctrinal Truth of God, or truth in the abstract, but to practical truth as it should exist in the hearts and lives of men. It might be read, “Lord, are not Your eyes upon truthfulness?” Or, “upon faithfulness?” The Lord bade them produce a single truthful man in all Jerusalem and Jeremiah answers that if truth were to be found, the Lord Himself best knew where it was, for His eyes were always upon it. In this chapter you must have noticed, when I was reading it, that we have a fearful description of the condition of things in the days of the Prophet Jeremiah. We have also a most melancholy set of pictures of untruthful men which are drawn to the life with a grimly graphic touch which strangely reminds me of the series of Hogarth’s sketches known as, “the Rake’s Progress.” They hold the mirror up not only to the life, but to the heart of the men of the times.
Jerusalem was rotten to the core—the nation was deceitful through and through. In the 27th verse we read, “As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit.” They had schemes without number, plots without end and tricks without limit moving about in their minds like birds herded together in a little cage. What worse could be said? When a heart is untruthful and crooked—when uprightness has gone from it—then is it prepared to be the seed plot of every evil thing. Any crime is possible to a liar! He who is rotten with falsehood will tear at the touch of temptation. A man of bold, outspoken vice is far more hopeful than a sly, cunning hypocrite! These untruthful people began with acting untruthfully towards their fellow men. God challenges them to run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem and see whether they could find a man that executed judgment and sought the truth.
He says that they were not even commonly honest towards those persons whose necessities generally plead for favor. “They judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless and the right of the needy do they not judge.” They were not upright in cases where they should have been charitable. They even cheated the widow and the orphan! When a man has once become a rogue, all will be fish that comes to his net and he will as soon rob the fatherless as anybody else. Greed destroys common humanity. Cheating of men is a very common form of deceit, both in the open puffery of trade and the more quiet deceptions of daily life. Traders frequently think it useless to tell the honest truth, even, to one another and so society becomes a network of craft and falsehood. It is a dreadful thing when men are not to be trusted; when their word is but wind; when without its being to their advantage they would as soon lie as not.
God save us from that form of untruthfulness, since it leads on to something worse, for in the second verse it is said that these people were faithless even to their oaths! “They say, ‘Jehovah lives,’ but surely they swear falsely.” They dared to take that most sacred of all names upon their lips and call God to witness to a lie! He who has gone as far as falsehood will not always stop at perjury. That which makes our blood ran cold to think of may yet be perpetrated by us if we take the first steps in deceit. This being so—that they could perjure themselves—it is little wonder that they were not faithful to their marriage vows. I need not read the strong expression in which the Prophet sets forth the fornication and adultery which abounded in his day—when they did not hesitate to bring grief into their houses and the utmost sorrow and misery to their wives by indulging their passions—for he that is traitorous to God will soon be treacherous to all domestic ties.
What can we expect, even, when a man is irreligious but that he will soon be impure if he is not already? I have marked it often that when men who profess to be religious decline from the ways of God, it often happens that if you track them home—not to the home of their wife and children, but to their favorite haunts—you will discover a corruption of life of which the external observer little dreamed! Only Judgment Day will reveal how many hearths have been desolated, how many hearts have been broken by the cruel unfaithfulness of husbands who have crushed those whom they vowed to cherish! This is one of the meanest forms of falsehood—false to their marriage vows as well as to everything
else! It is small wonder that they were false to the plain teachings of Providence, for it is written that “they have belied the Lord and said, It is not He.”
When God had been chastening, they said, “It is not God. It is bad luck: it is fate: time and chance happen unto all.” They would not see the hand of God! Do you wonder that when men have corrupt and crooked hearts they should not be able to see God’s plain and truthful proceedings or that when they do see them they deny them?” “There is no God,” they say, “Or if there is a God, He does not meddle with the things of daily life.” “It is cant and hypocrisy,” they say, “to talk about our troubles coming from God! He does not interfere with human affairs. The laws of matter, the principles of na-ture—these govern all things. God has set the world going like a clock and left it to its own wheels and pendulum! Or, better still, He has wound it up like a watch and put it under His pillow and has gone to sleep. How does God know? And is there knowledge in the Most High?”