Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1661
“O Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, do it for Your name’s sake; for our backslidings are many. We have sinned against You. O the Hope of Israel, his Savior in time of trouble, why should You be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man that turns aside to tarry for a night? Why should You be as a man astonished, as a mighty man that cannot save? Yet You, O Lord, are in the midst of us, and we are called by Your name. Do not leave us!” Jeremiah 14:7,8,9.
THIS passionate appeal for mercy was forced from the people by extreme misery. There was a famine in the land until men fell in the streets of the city exhausted with hunger. Drought had long prevailed and lack of water was terribly felt. Meanwhile, invasion kept them in perpetual fear, so that the Prophet lamented, “If I go forth into the field, then, behold, the slain with the sword! And if I enter into the city, then, behold, them that are sick with famine!” Such judgment had God inflicted on a guilty nation for her sin. No springs were bubbling up from the earth and no rain dropped down from Heaven. This dire privation had produced universal distress. “Judah mourns, and the gates thereof languish; they are black unto the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up.”
As the calamity, like a river of lava, burned its dreadful way, an eyewitness, in his heart’s anguish, describes a few common scenes which forcefully tell the tale of utter desolation. Princes and peasants are seized with the same consternation—the Prophet paints them both with their heads covered in token of a common grief. Here in the city the children are coming back from the place of pools and fountains with empty pitchers, for they find not a drop of water in the pits. Out yonder in the fields the ground is chapped and cleft by the scorching sun in the absence of dew or rain. The plow is of no use in that parched soil! Farmers are sitting down ashamed, confounded, utterly dejected—it is vain for them to lift the hand of labor.
Down in the valleys the dumb cattle express their feeling with throes of anguish—the hind calves and forsakes her young. And up on the mountain heights the wild asses prove their share in the universal distress. Those creatures which are most apt to scent water from afar and to hasten to it to drink, are unable to discover a cooling brook, though they snuff up the wind like dragons. What a dreadful thing for a country to be placed, as it were, at the oven’s mouth and to become so completely burned up that even the wild beasts can discover no pasture and their eyes fail because there is no grass! Nothing could help the people. Grim death stared them in the face. None of their idol gods could cause rain and, without it, they must all perish.
Under such circumstances prayer to God was the last and only resource. Driven to their wits’ end, they now began to be wise. The Prophet has expressed in admirable words the penitent confessions and the earnest supplications of those who were ready to perish. Our text is a most appropriate model of humble petitioning. I can easily imagine that all the Jews of the land were willing enough to adopt this form of prayer at such an extremity and to follow it with a fervent, “Amen.” But, alas for them, the feet which had loved to wander were not willing to return! And the hearts which had cast off their allegiance to the Lord were not reconciled to His Law of righteousness. The Lord felt compelled to say of them, “I will destroy My people, since they return not from their ways.”
Theirs was prayer in terror, not prayer in penitence! How many there are who pray, similar to this, in times of dire distress! When the plague was raging, the cross was marked on many a door which otherwise had never known that token! When the cholera rages they go to Church. When poverty invades their homes and they are sorely pinched, they cry, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” When they are brought to death’s door, they entreat, “Send for some minister to come and pray at our side.” What a wretched business is this, that we should only be disposed to think of God when we are in our
utmost need! Dare we treat the Lord as if He were only to be called upon in our emergencies? How can we expect that God will accept prayers that are only forced out of us by selfish fears?
It is not uncharitable to suspect that too often such prayers are either hypocritical or superstitious—and far different from the contrite cries which are music in the ears of the Most High. What a mercy it is that God hears real prayer, even if it is presented to Him only because we are in distress! “Call upon Me,” says the Lord, “in the day of trouble. I will deliver you and you shall glorify Me.” When the prodigal went home to his father, his father did not say, “You have only come home because you have a hungry belly. You seek a meal among my hired servants because you could not fill yourself with the husks with which the swine are fed.” No, not so. Every word was welcome, every look was love.