Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1812
“You drewnear in the day thatIcalled upon You: You said, Fear not.” Lamentations 3:57.
How different are our experiences from our fears! This man of God had said, “When I cry and shout He shuts out my prayer.” He had said again, “You have covered Yourself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through.” He had added to that, “Surely against me is He turned.” But now he corrects his misapprehensions. Neither was prayer shut out, nor had God turned against him, for he joyfully confesses, “You drew near in the day that I called upon You: You said, Fear not.” As much as to say—“Not only did You hear me, but You did come to me! Not only did You hear me speak, but You did speak, Yourself, and I heard You say—‘Fear not.’ Not only were You not turned against me as an enemy, but You did prove Yourself my Friend by being my loving and tender Comforter.”
Brothers and Sisters, if our experiences have, so far, exceeded our expectations and belied our doubts, let us take care that we record them! Do not let us suffer our lamentations to be written in a book and our thanksgivings to be spoken to the wind. Write not your complaints in marble and your praises upon the sand! Let the record of mercy received be carefully made, accurately measured, distinctly worded, correctly dated and so preserved that in years to come you may turn for your encouragement to it. Jeremiah tells us that on such a day the Lord drew near to him. David remembered God from the Hermons and the hill Mizar—time and place are elements of interest in the memory of the Lord’s great goodness.
Note the particulars, dwell on the details—abundantly utter the memory of the Divine loving kindness! Maybe your children and your children’s children may read the story of your experience for their learning—and nothing can be more fitting than that the fathers should thus lay up for their children. Even though that record should contradict yourself and bring the blush of shame to your cheek to think you should have so calumniated your God, yet write it clearly and let it stand to the Lord’s praise and glory—and your own comfort in some future hour of need. Write it, write it in capital letters, “I said I am cut off, but I found it was not so. You drew near in the day that I called upon You: You said, Fear
not.”
Jeremiah seems to record this fact with a considerable amount of surprise. He marvels that God should have drawn near to him, for his condition was a very pitiful one. He was so low that life seemed ebbing out and he groaned, “He has set me in dark places, as they that are dead of old.” In my own estimation I give one of the chief places among mortal men to the Prophet Jeremiah. He was sent of God to do a most painful duty which could not bring any honor to him, nor win for him the love of those to whom he ministered. He was sent to prophesy among a willful and disobedient people who would reject his admonitions. Like Cassandra, he spoke true tidings and sad tidings, but he was not believed. He pleaded with erring Israel—oh, how he pleaded! No Prophet is more pathetic than he. I sometimes read the book right through and it is a good thing to do that, with the books of Scripture, so as to get the run of them—if you will do this with Jeremiah, you will be borne away with the torrents of grief which swept over the Prophet’s soul.
Yet how constant and steadfast he was in love to the very people who provoked and persecuted him. How he cries to God and pleads with Him on their behalf, as affectionately as if they had been the most grateful of children and he had been the most rejoicing of parents! He was a grand man, that Jeremiah. He was as a mountain torrent, familiar at once with great heights and profound abysses, deriving force from his deep descents of woe. When he penned the words of our text, his sorrow had come to a climax. They had put him into an underground cistern—I was about to say into a dry well, only it was not dry. He sank in the mire up to the armpits! Reservoirs which, at one season of the year were filled
with water, were frequently used at other seasons as dungeons—and poor prisoners were let down, far beyond all reach of light or fresh air, into such horrible pits which were often knee-deep in miry clay.
Maybe the time of water floods would come on and the captive would hear the rushing of the waters down the sides of his prison and feel it flowing over the floor into some lower reservoir—so it would seem to have been with the Prophet, for he writes, “Waters flowed over my head.” The Prophet’s case was deplorable! He was cut off from all sound of human voices and, let him cry as he might, there was none to have any pity upon him. He was alone, forgotten, forsaken, refused by the many and abhorred by the few who were in power. Doubtless his spirit sank and we cannot wonder at it. A strong-minded, passionate patriot who would have saved his country, saw himself put aside, even, from the opportunity to rebuke and to exhort in the crisis of national calamity! When he felt most necessary to his people, he was put away.