Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1748
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, November 4, 1883
“Hear you, and give ear; be not proud: for the Lord has spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God, before He causes darkness and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains and, while you look for light, He turns it into the shadow of death and makes it gross darkness. But if you will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride; and my eyes shall weep bitterly and run down with tears, because the Lord’s flock is carried away captive.” Jeremiah 13:15-17.
IN this chapter Jeremiah had proclaimed the judgment of God against His sinful people under two very striking figures. Israel had been to God what a sash is to a man—the people had been bound closely about Him in His great love and favor. But on account of their sin, the Lord would put them away and they should be hidden by the Euphrates till their beauty was marred—until, in fact, like a rotten sash, their whole state had become decayed. “Thus says the Lord, After this manner will I mar the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem.”
Then He spoke to them by a second parable—“Every bottle shall be filled with wine”—and he showed how God’s wrath would come upon the people to fill them with a judicial drunkenness, so that they should become drunk, and in their delirium should strive, one with another, to their mutual undoing. The Lord declared that thus He would “dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together.” Thus, under two homely but exceedingly terrible figures, Jeremiah preached the Law of God to the people, that they might be humbled under a sense of sin.
Had they but felt the force of this teaching, they would have begun to mourn for their sin and, under dread of wrath, they would have cried for mercy. Taking it for granted that this might be the case, though, alas, it did not so happen, the Lord gave to His Prophet an interval for proclaiming mercy. After those two great thunderclaps of judgment came a gracious shower of Grace. The Prophet, in what we may venture to call an evangelistic style, exhorts the people and addresses to them the characteristic Gospel precept—“Hear you, and give ear; for Jehovah has spoken.”
His words remind us of Isaiah’s exhortation—“Incline your ears and come unto Me: hear, and your soul shall live.” And again—“Hearken diligently unto Me, and eat you that which is good.” Under the Gospel, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God—and so Jeremiah does, as it were, in these verses preach the Gospel to the backsliding house of Judah. This is always God’s design in threatening judgment—He desires to prepare the people for His Grace.
I would take up the Prophet’s strain, by the help of the Lord, praying to be a partaker of his earnest and tender Spirit. Oh, that today those who have never heard the voice of the Lord in the inward parts of their being may hear it and live! O Holy Spirit, work to that end!
I. We will enter upon our subject at once, for there is much to speak of. The first head will be this—listen, O my Hearers, with deep attention, for THERE IS A REVELATION. Read the text—“Hear you, and give ear; be not proud: for the Lord has spoken.” If the Lord had not spoken, the silence would have deepened and established your natural darkness. And if you had been inquiring after God, your heart would have cried, “Oh, that He would break this dreadful silence!” How sad would have been our state if the only way to find God depended upon our seeking Him! Shall man, by searching, find God? Who among us could reason ourselves into the knowledge of the Lord? Or imagine the thoughts of His mind?
But here you have the great source of comfort and instruction—“Jehovah has spoken.” Is not this a just call for the attention of all His creatures? The voice which we are bid to hear is a Divine voice! It is the voice of Him that made the heavens and the earth, whose creatures we are! Jehovah has spoken! If it were but the voice of Prophets apart from their Master, it might be but a slight sin to refuse what they say. But since Jehovah has spoken, shall men dare to be deaf to
Him? Shall they turn away from Him that speaks from Heaven? He that spoke us into being has spoken to our being! He by whose Word the heavens stand and at whose word both Heaven and earth shall pass away, has spoken, and His voice is to the sons of men! It is God who says, “I have written to him the great things of My Law.” The sacred Scriptures are the record of what God has spoken—receive them with the reverence which they deserve as coming from God, and as being, therefore, pure truth, fixed certainty, and unerring right.
It is a Word most clear and plain, for Jehovah has spoken. He might have taught us only by the works of His hands, in which the invisible things of God, even His eternal power and Godhead are clearly seen. What is all creation but a hieroglyphic scroll in which the Lord has written out His Character as Creator and Provider? But since He knew that we were dim of sight and dull of comprehension, the Lord has gone beyond the symbols and hieroglyphs and used articulate speech such as a man uses with his fellows—Jehovah has spoken! A man may act before us his mind in symbols and we may fail to perceive his meaning. But when he speaks, we understand his communications by language, since such modes of expression are suitable to the human intellect.