Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2742
“But I said, How can I put you among the children, and give you a pleasant land, a godly heritage of the hosts of nations? And I said, You shall call Me, My Father; and shall not turn away from Me.” Jeremiah 3:19.
MEN think very lightly of sin unless it brings them under the eyes of the law of the land. They smile at it, as though it were a trifle, but God thinks not as they do. He calls sin by very black names. In this chapter, from which our text is taken, the Lord uses very strong terms in describing sin and He knows what sin is. He is a better judge of it than we are, so He does not regard it as a trifle, but He calls it “adultery,” which among men is regarded as one of the grossest of wrongs and the foulest of crimes. Oh, if some here who think themselves righteous, could only see themselves, not as their fellow creatures see them, but as God sees them, the sight would appall them!
Then, because man thinks so little of sin, he also thinks very little of the Grace of God. To him it seems a very simple matter to remove human guilt—just let God rub it out and leave a clean sheet. But God, who knows what sin really is, makes a very different estimate of the difficulties in the way of mercy and, accordingly, in our text we find Him asking the idolatrous nation, “How can I put you among the children?” The Omniscient, the Omnipotent, is enquiring, “How can such a thing as this be done?” The Lord adopts the language of wonder and speaks after the manner of men, as the best method by which He can communicate to our mind His own conception of the difficulty of saving a sinner. He wants to save him—longs to save him—yearns to put him among His children, but so many difficulties arise that He says, “How can I put you among the children?”
I am going to speak of my text in two ways. You have, perhaps, noticed that our translators regarded the first clause of this verse as a question and they, therefore, put a note of interrogation, or question mark, after the word, “nations.” “How can I put you among the children, and give you a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations?” But the Hebrew bears another sense and some later scholars assert that the second meaning is the true one, namely that there ought to be here a note of exclamation or of admiration, as if God Himself delighted to think of all the wonders His Grace was about to work—“How can I put you among the children, and give you a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations!” The same meaning really underlies each of these two renderings, and we may get at the true sense of the passage by considering both of them. But please understand that my objective is not so much to expound this text as to bring unrenewed hearts into harmony with it. I long, I pray, I agonize that God may put among His children many of you who have never been numbered with them before.
’ I. First, then, let us CONSIDER THE TEXT AS WRITTEN WITH A NOTE OF INTERROGATION. And, in that sense, it divides itself into two parts—a difficult question. “How can I put you among the children?” And the Divine answer—“I said, You shall call Me, My Father; and shall not turn away from Me.” First comes the difficult question. ’ ‘How can I put you among the children?”
The Lord seems to say, “How can I do it? This man has lived in total neglect of Me. I was not in all his thoughts, or if he did think of Me at all, it was only to say to Me, ‘Be You far from me. I do not want to be brought near to You.’ How can I put him among the children? He neglected My statutes and my testimonies, and would have none of them. I called him, but he refused to come to Me. I warned him, but he despised My warnings. How can I, whom he has thus treated
with neglect, put him among the children? No, he has not merely forgotten Me and neglected Me, but he has chosen other lovers. He has found some other objects for his life’s ambition and spent his strength in seeking everything but that which is for My Glory. Let him go to his idol gods and find refuge among them in the day of his trouble. Let him call upon the objects of his ambition to administer comfort to him. If he has sought gold, let gold console him. If he has gone into the pleasures of sin, let the pleasures of sin yield him sweetness in the retrospect if they can. But why should I interfere with him? He has destroyed himself. He has pulled the house down upon his own head and all the while, when I stood by offering to bless him, he refused Me, rejected Me and turned against Me. Why then should I be called in now? Why should I be summoned to the rescue of one who is his own destroyer, and who has deliberately rejected Me?”
Let that solemn enquiry go home to the hearts of all whom it concerns. Some of you know that all these thirty, forty, or fifty years—or even longer—you have been living without God. Now that you are in trouble, you are beginning to think about Him. But suppose He were to say, “Go to your former companions and see what they will do for you. Now that you have spent all and there is a mighty famine in the land, go to the citizens of that country and join yourself to them. Go to the swine trough and fill your belly with the husks that the swine eat.” Ah, the mercy is that the Lord does not talk like that! Still, the difficulty of the task is suggested by the form of His question, “How can I put you among the children?”