Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2006
Delivered on Lord’s Day Morning, January 29, 1888
“And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.” Jeremiah 31:34.
TRUE knowledge of God is a Covenant blessing. To know Jehovah as the only living and true God, to know Him personally and intimately, so as to say with David, “You are my God”—this is one of the choice blessings of the Covenant of Grace which grace bestows upon all the chosen. In this prophecy Jehovah declares that He will yet give this knowledge to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. And this is our hope for the long-wandering seed of Abraham, whom He will yet restore and save.
If we regard the passage before us as instructive in its order, the knowledge of God follows closely upon the application of the Law to the heart. Read, “After those days, says the Lord, I will put My Law in their inward parts and write it in their hearts. And will be their God and they shall be My people … and they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, says the Lord.” The work of grace usually begins, so far as we can perceive it, by the Holy Spirit’s bringing the Law into contact with the inner man. The Law outside of a man is forgotten. He may profess a reverence for it but it does not affect his desires and thoughts.
But when the Holy Spirit begins to put the Law into the inward parts, the immediate result is the discovery of our shortcomings and transgressions. The more the man’s heart sees the perfect holiness of the Law of God the more he perceives his own unholiness and impurity. He sets his own conduct in contrast with the Divine righteousness and he is overwhelmed with shame, sorrow and dismay. He feels that if God should mark iniquities he could not stand in His presence—more—that if the Lord at once condemned him, He would be just. Law-work is grace-work in its darker dress. It is the axe which rough-hews the timber which grace goes on to fashion and smooth.
By the operation of the Law upon the conscience, convincing the man of sin, of righteousness and of judgment, the Holy Spirit works towards the transforming of the heart. He takes away the stone out of it and makes it to be a fleshy, tender, sensitive thing. Then with His own finger He writes the Divine Law upon the mind and the affections so that the Divine commands become the center of the man’s life and the governing force of his action. The man now loves that Law which before he, at his very best, only feared—it becomes his will to do the will of God. By a miracle of Divine Grace his nature is changed so that its tendencies, which were all towards evil are corrected by new tendencies which are all towards good.
Now is the Law of God indeed glorious, for it rules by love. It was terrible when written on those tablets of stone which Moses dashed to pieces. But its radiance is like that of a pearl most precious when it gently influences our manhood from the central throne of the heart. It is now written on a tablet which will endure throughout eternity, for it is engraved upon an immortal spirit. As the Law is written on the heart, a manifestation is made of God Himself. The man is made to know himself, to know God’s Law and thus he is led to know the Lord. Now he acquaints himself with God and is at peace.
Of this gracious knowledge of the Lord I am going to speak this morning. This is to be our first head—the one essential knowledge—“They all shall know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, says the Lord.” The second head equally arises out of the text—it is the one grand means of obtaining this essential knowledge. The text tells us how this knowledge is imparted by the Lord—“For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.” When we receive pardon from the hands of God, then we know Him, indeed. For, as Zacharias said in his song, our Lord Jesus has come “to give knowledge of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins.”
I. To begin with, then, we have here, first of all, THE ONE ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE. It is a great Truth of God that, “This is life eternal, to know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.” To know God is to live in the light. This knowledge brings with it trust, peace, love, holiness and acceptance. Do not read this passage as some do and tear it up by its roots and then use it as if it were a prophecy of the universal spread of religion. Do not dream of a day when we shall not need to teach our brother and our neighbor the great Truths of our holy faith—at any rate, the text before us says nothing of the kind.
This prophecy is to be read as it stands and in its own connection. In the first place, as we have already said, it relates to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. At the present time these have forgotten the Lord as to a true spiritual worship of Him. For they have rejected the Messiah, in whose face God’s glory is seen—this nation is to be brought back to its best estate. Both portions of it shall be converted and shall come under a new Covenant of a very different tenor from that which their fathers so wantonly broke. The Lord will gather the remnant of Israel under a Covenant of Grace by which He will work in them those things which under the old Covenant He justly required of them.