‘BURNED, BUT NOT CONSUMED’
‘Take thee again another roll.’
God laid it upon Jeremiah’s heart to gather his prophecies into a single roll. For this work the prophet employed Baruch, a man whose business gifts we have already heard of (Jeremiah 32:12). It may be that Jeremiah, like many another prophet, had not the pen of a ready writer. And just as St. Paul employed another hand in writing most of his glorious epistles, so did Jeremiah dictate his summary to his amanuensis Baruch. What a debt do we all owe to Baruch in helping the prophet in this lasting work! Now at this time Jeremiah, though not in prison, was under some restraint from prophesying. So Baruch took the roll and went to the Temple, and there from a balcony read it to the people. Then he was sent for to read it to the princes, for the princes had not been in church that day; and so at last the tidings of the sermon came to the ears of Jehoiakim himself. The king did not summon Baruch to his presence. He sent a courtier to fetch the roll. Probably the courtier then (like many now) was not just a man of first-rate education. And we can imagine how he would halt and stammer, and add to the growing anger of the king, who was lying warming himself beside the brazier, for it was winter time and cold. But the courtier was not left to stammer long—three or four pages was all he stumbled through—when the king snatched the roll from him, and hacked it with his knife, and flung it, roller and all, into the fire. And there it burned, yet it was not consumed, either in its message or its form, for the message was terribly fulfilled, and at God’s bidding it was all rewritten.
There are three lessons which we ought to learn here.
I. The first is the kindness of severity.—The prophets of God were terribly severe, yet only thus could they be kind to Israel. It was one mark of every false prophet that he was easy and compliant and accommodating. It was one mark of every true prophet that he was terrible in his passion against sin. Yet the latter were the truest friends of Israel, and loved Israel with an enduring love, and were never kinder to their unhappy land than when they voiced the judgments of Jehovah.
II. The next is the foolishness of temper, for was not Jehoiakim supremely foolish?—Was anything gained for himself or for his country by this mad act of an unbridled anger? There is an anger which is wise and holy, and a wrath which is as the wrath of the Lamb; but there is an anger far more common than that, in which everything is lost and nothing gained.
III. The last is the penalty of rejection.—Do you note what we read in Jeremiah 32:32? Not only did Jeremiah re-write his roll, but he added to it ‘many like words.’ That is to say, the message that was scorned became a message of increased severity. The roll that was rejected with contempt, grew into a roll of sterner judgment. And that is what every one is sure to find who spurns the message of the love of God, and flings away from him, in pride of heart, the summons and the warning of the prophets.
Illustration
‘In many ages there has been this folly of burning Bibles and prophets, but it has only added to the light and fire of the increasing truth. Latimer, when being burned with Ridley at Oxford, in 1555, said: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.” The well-known words of Fuller, finding in the burning of the bones of John Wycliffe, the great translator of the Bible, when the ashes were cast into the Wye river, and so into the Severn, and at last into the great sea, a symbol of the ever-spreading circle of his influence, illustrate the same thought of the eternity of truth. The all-illuminating case is, of course, the crucifixion of Christ, the Truth.’