Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2025
“How long will you cut yourself?” Jeremiah 47:5.
TRAVELERS in the East tell us that among the most melancholy scenes they witness is the following: Men inflict upon themselves very grievous voluntary wounds and then exhibit themselves in public. They even disfigure themselves with gashes and cuts in the presence of excited throngs. I am speaking of what has occurred even within the last few years among the Muslims. When some great Prophet or emir is coming that way, a certain number of fanatical Mahometans take swords, spears and other sharp instruments and gash themselves terribly, cutting their breasts, their faces, their heads and all parts of their bodies.
Frequently they have taken care to dress themselves in white sheets so that as the blood flows copiously from their bodies, it may be the more clearly seen, that they may become the more ghastly spectacles of misery, or more fully display the religious excitement under which they labor. As everything in the East remains forever the same, this Muslim superstition carries us back to the olden times whereof we read in the Old Testament when the priests of Baal, having cried in vain to their idol, cut themselves with lances and with knives. Our translators were probably afraid to write the harsher words and so they translated the passage “knives and lances,” but they might have written swords and spears—sharp instruments of a desperate character.
Thus they displayed their inward zeal and thus, perhaps, they hoped to move the pity of their god. Eastern fanaticism surpasses belief—you would suppose that the raving creatures were about to commit suicide and yet there is a method in their madness. You could hardly think that men possessed of reason would torture themselves and disfigure themselves as they do. But they know what they are doing and are only carrying out their plans. The Lord expressly forbade His people, the Jews, to perpetrate such folly. They were not even to shave the corners of their beards, or to hack their hair, as the Orientals do in the hour of their grief.
And then they were further prohibited from injuring their bodies by the command, “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:28.) Men in Eastern lands, not only in connection with fanaticism but in reference to domestic affairs, will cut themselves to express their grief and anguish—or to make other people believe that they are feeling such grief and anguish. We may congratulate ourselves that we are free from at least one foolish custom.
The Prophet here speaks to the Philistines who were about to endure the tremendous judgments of God and, indeed, to be crushed as a nation by the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. And he says to Philistia, “How long will you cut yourself?” Gaza was to be made bald by the smiting of Pharaoh. Ashkelon was to be shorn away. And the whole nation was to feel the sword of the Lord, which would not rest in its scabbard. How long would they continue to bring upon themselves such terrible judgments?
The expression is used, first, almost in despair. The question is asked with little hope—as if the self-torturer would never have done but would go on to mutilate himself without end. I intend to use it at this time, in the second place, as a question asked instructively and hopefully, in the hope that some, who have practically been cutting themselves, will cease from this self-torture and find rest and peace where it is to be had and to be had at once and forever. May the good Spirit grant our desire!
I. First, dear Friends, I SHALL ASK THIS QUESTION VERY DESPAIRINGLY—“How long will you cut your-self?”—for many are cutting themselves very terribly and will have to feel their wounds for a long, long time—neither can we induce them to cease.
I allude, first, to some professors of religion who have been Church members for ten, twenty, or more years and yet have practically done nothing at all for the Savior. If they were really to awaken to a sense of their neglect, I do not know how long they would be in anguish, or how deep would be their distress. For if Titus mourned that he had lost a day when he had done no good action for twenty-four hours—and he but a heathen—what would happen to a Christian if he were really to see his responsibility before God and to feel that he has not only lost a day but a year—perhaps many years?
Have not some of you well-near lost a whole lifetime? What hosts of opportunities you have thrown away! What multiplied responsibilities you have incurred! Favored as you have been and so ungrateful! Comforted as you have been and yet keeping the comfort to yourself and never seeking out other lonely hearts to share with them the heavenly balm. Instructed as you have been and yet instructing none in return! With Divine light shining upon you and yet never giving that light to others!—