O Lord, are not Thine eyes upon the truth?
Truthfulness
The allusion is not to doctrinal truth, or truth in the abstract, but to practical truth as it should exist in the hearts and lives of men. The Lord bade them produce a single truthful man in all Jerusalem, and Jeremiah answers that if truth were to be found the Lord Himself best knew where it was, for His eyes were ever upon it. Look well at this picture of the progress of the deceitful. They begin with being dishonest to their fellow men, and at last they become Satan’s commission agents, trappers for the devil, fowlers who ensnare men as bird catchers take the winged fowl. This was the state of affairs in Jeremiah’s time. We have not, I trust, quite such a condition of things among us today, as a plague universally prevalent, but we have much of the disease of deceit in all quarters, high and low, and to what a head it may come time alone can show.
I. The utter folly of all pretence.
1. Hypocrisy is useless altogether, for God sees through it. The instantaneous imagination which flits across the mind like a stray bird, leaving nor track nor trace, God knows it altogether.
2. Nor is it only useless: it is injurious. You spoil your sacrifice if there be any tincture of the odious gall of hypocrisy about it. Everything about you and me that is unreal God hates, and hates it more in His own people than anywhere else.
3. Moreover, pretence is deadening, for he that begins with tampering with truth will go on from bad to worse. Once begin to sail by the wind of policy and trickery and you must tack, and then tack again and again; and as surely as you are alive, you will yet have to tack again; but if you have the motive force of truth within you, as a steamboat has its own engine, then you can go straight in the teeth of wind and tempest.
4. Falsehood and pretence before God are damnable. I cannot use a less forcible word than that. I have constantly seen almost all sorts of people converted--great blasphemers, pleasure seekers, thieves, drunkards, unchaste persons, and hardened reprobates,--but rarely have I seen a man converted who has been a thorough-paced liar. The heart which is crammed with craft and treachery seems as if it had passed out of the reach of grace.
II. The great value of truthfulness. The great value of it is this--that it alone is regarded by God in matters of religion: His eyes are upon that which is truthful about us. For instance, suppose I say “I repent.” The question is--Do I really and from my heart sorrow for sin! The same holds good in reference to faith. A man may say, “I believe,” as thousands say their creed,--“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” and so on. Ah, but do you trust in God with your whole heart! Are you sincerely believing in God and God’s Word, and God’s Son, and God’s Gospel?--refer, if not, all your professed faith is useless. As to love to Christ, you know how very easy it is to sing sweet hymns about love to Jesus, and yet how few are living so as to prove their attachment to the Redeemer. The same truth bears upon all the ordinances of religion. When we professed to worship God, how much praise was there in the song? As much as the heart made. As to prayer. “A large prayer meeting.” Yes, but the largeness of the number of attendants is not always a gauge of the quantity and power of prayer. The quantity of heart in the prayer decides its quality. This is equally true of all your private worship. That daffy reading of the chapter is a very excellent thing; but do you read with your soul as well as with your eyes? That morning prayer and that evening prayer, those few minutes snatched in the middle of the day--these are good. I will not wish you to alter the regularity of your devotion, but still it may all be clockwork, godliness with no life in it. Oh, for one single groan from the heart!
III. The influence of truthful men.
1. It is so great with God that one of them can save a city from destruction. Hence the value of good men in bad localities. When you go into a hamlet or village where there is no religion, do not be so very sorry at your position, for God may have great ends to be served by you. All light must not be stored up in the sun; scatter it over earth’s poor lands that need it, lest all the trees of the field die in perpetual night. God blesses us to make us blessings. Ask of God that you may be so sincere, so truthful, that He may bless those round about you for your sake.
2. This influence is such that it never was attributed to any man on account of his riches. No. The Lord is no respecter of persons, and He seeth not as man seeth. Sincerity before God is approved; true reliance upon Christ the Lord accepts: and for this He blesses us, and others through us.
3. And, mark you one other thing. If you are upright before God, and you should happen to fall among people that despise you and reject you--it is a sad thing to have to say, but it is true, and a proof of the great influence of truthful men,--your word, when you speak for God, shall be like fire, and those round about you shall be wood, and it shall devour them. If you are not a savour of life to life to men, you will be a savour of death to death to them.
IV. The necessity and the means of our being true and sincere before Him whose eyes behold truthfulness.
1. These times require it. This is an age of tricks and policies. Oh, the lying puffs you meet with everywhere in books and broadsides innumerable. Meet the prince of darkness with the light; he cannot stand against it. Our times require our sincerity.
2. So does our God also require it. I have already spoken to this, and I need not repeat the solemn strain.
3. So do our souls require it. Our eternal welfare demands it. Oh, there must be no mistake about our being true before God, for when it comes to dying work, nothing will stand us then but sincerity. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved.
God’s chastisements designed for man’s conversion
I. Turning to the Lord presupposes a deep conviction that you have gone astray, both from way of duty and of safety. That all your highest interests have been neglected.
1. The exceeding sinfulness of sin.
2. The purity and strictness of God’s law, the equity and terror of its penalty.
3. Your obligations to Him as Creator, Preserver, Redeemer.
II. Turning to God supposes a pull conviction of the necessity of immediate response.
1. If you die in your present condition, you will certainly be lost.
2. You have no time for delay.
3. It will wound your heart to think this work has not been done long ago.
III. If afflictions should prove the means of turning you to God, they will rouse you to most earnest persevering endeavours that you may truly find Him.
1. Pray without ceasing.
2. Accustom yourself to solemn meditation.
3. Seek the society of those who know the Lord.
IV. If afflictions should turn you to God, you will be made deeply sensible of your inability and the necessity of the Holy Spirit’s grace to your conversion.
1. Your endeavours avail to avoid hindrances and seek helps.
2. Yet your own heart is against you, and the disease of sin is irrecoverable but by Divine grace.
V. If ever you turn to the Lord, you will realise that Christ is the only way of access to God. You will come as criminals upon the footing of grace, not merit; will renounce all your righteousness; a broken-hearted rebel. Till then, you have nothing to do with Jesus.
VI. If you are turned to God, you will experience a great change in temper and conduct.
1. Heart and mind will take a new bias; thoughts and affections towards God; aspirations towards heaven; Jesus dear to you; all things become new.
2. Your practices will follow the inward impulse and principle of religion.
VII. If turned to the Lord, your mind will habitually retain that turn. Your religion not a transient fit, but permanent and persevering. (President Davies.)
Unsanctified affliction
I. Some of the forms of unsanctified affliction.
1. Insensibility.
2. Hardihood.
II. Some of the means by which this evil may be kept away.
1. By seeking ascertain and to accomplish the design of our affliction.
2. By repressing every tendency to murmuring or impatience.
3. By avoiding immoderate sorrow. (G. Brooks.)
Fruitless chastisement
Chastisement is designed by God to bear fruit in a purged and penitent heart; but it may be so neglected, resisted, or abused, as to become fruitless.
I. The sign of fruitless chastisement is impenitence.
1. Chastisement is the red lamp warning of danger, and urging us to stop in the course we are pursuing.
2. But, that it may serve this purpose, there must be--
(1) Reflection;
(2) Sorrow for sin;
(3) Return.
II. The cause of fruitless chastisement is hardness of heart.
1. Insensitiveness. The sufferer may feel the smart of the lash on his back, and yet be dead to the sting of shame in his heart.
2. Wilful resistance. The evil is in the will that refuses to yield to the mercy that comes disguised in bitterness.
III. The consequence of fruitless chastisement is an aggravation of future evils. The rebellious sufferer may imagine that he is free to do as he will with his sufferings; but even they are talents for which he will be called to account. For observe--
1. God’s searching watchfulness. “O Lord, are not Thine eyes,” etc. God searches the heart He chastises. He sees the rebellious thought, the stubborn self-will.
2. Man’s increased guilt. The more there is done to awaken a consciousness of sin, the more culpable is the indifference still persisted in.
IV. The remedy for fruitless chastisement is to be found in the grace of the Gospel. This will give--
1. The new heart;
2. The promise of forgiveness. Christ brings love and hope, and thus He brings also the tears of repentance. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)
Unsanctified affliction
This might not unfitly be called one of the lamentations of Jeremiah. The words may suggest to us the consideration of a subject more or less belonging to all of us, namely, the danger of unsanctified or unimproved afflictions. The remedies of heaven cannot be inoperative; they must aggravate the maladies which they are not allowed to heal, and will make the face harder than a rock, if they induce not a tender and softened heart.
I. Unsanctified or unimproved chastening.
1. The first impression in the text seems to set forth that misuse of it which comes of insensibility. “Thou has stricken them, but they have not grieved; Thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction.” The language may be taken to describe, not so much the receiving of correction in the spirit of defiant and avowed contempt, as the act of setting lightly by affliction, of not bestowing upon it the attention it deserves, having no reverence for its Author, and no consideration for its design or end. A calamity may visit us, but we think only of its human author; sickness may lay us prostrate, but science is sufficient to explain how it came,--it is chance or a skilled hand that causeth the shaft to pierce between the joints of the harness, and there is some poison in the atmosphere which has caused the withering of our favourite gourd. Thus, placing secondary agencies before our eyes, we can see no further, and look no higher. We see, then, why God was angry with the Jews, and why He will be angry with us, when His chastisements are received with unreflecting indifference. It is that, whether avowedly or not, such insensibility amounts to atheism. On this view--unavowed, of course--is based the indifference of unconverted men under chastisement: they feel that it is not correction, but the natural result of some law which no one can help. Why should they grieve at that which comes of an unhindered, self-governing, moral necessity
2. But the text adverts to a yet more offending and presumptuous deportment under affliction, namely, when the chastisements of God are received in a stouthearted, rebellious, defying spirit. Not only have they refused to receive correction, but they have made their faces harder than a rock. In this case, as we see, God is net left out of sight. On the contrary, He is believed and felt to be the Author of all permitted sufferings. The awful impiety is, that He is regarded as the unjust Author. We stand amazed at the impiety of that Roman emperor, who, because the lightning flash interrupted the pleasures of his banquet, feared not to hurl his blasphemous reproach against the powers of heaven. But let us consider how much of the spirit of these men is in us, when we indulge in angry chafings at the arrangements of Divine Providence; full of fury, like a wild bull in the net, or fretting as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke. How often do you find people under bitter reverses angry and out of humour with everybody about them; with friends who have had nothing whatever to do with their trouble, nay, who perhaps are trying all in their power to lighten them; but the fire of anger is in their bosom, and it must vent itself somewhere; it would vent it on God if it dared, but this is too dreadful to think of; yet it is with Him that they are at anger, and the thought of the heart is as much theirs as ever it was Jonah’s, that they do well to be angry. Extreme, therefore, as the ease of the text may seem to be, it is an extreme to which any rebellious thoughts may ultimately lead us, if not watched over and prayed against in their first beginnings.
II. How these dreadful effects may be prevented and the chastenings of God turned to a sanctified account.
1. First, we must he careful to acknowledge the design of God in sending our trials, and do all we can to bring that design about. Our trials may be of different kinds, one man being afflicted with this and another with that. Every heart has its own plague, and every soul its own leprous spot, and the Great Physician mixes our cup accordingly; that is, as pride lifts up the heart, or covetousness enslaves the will, or as vanity fills the mind, as human idols are exalted to Christ’s throne, or the love of this present world makes us slothful in the ways of God, does He apportion to each His remedial sorrow, to each His purging fire. Now this being so, can it be otherwise than displeasing unto God, if we take the smiting patiently, but still refuse the correction; if we submit to the discipline, but disregard the profit; if we allow the ploughshare of affliction to go over us, and yet cheek the springing up of those peaceable fruits of righteousness which chastisement yieldeth to them that are exercised thereby? The rod has a voice, and you must hear what it says.
2. Again, in order that chastening may be blessed to us, we must have a care that we do not become weary under it, however long it may continue. He who faints under the Divine correction first makes sure that he shall faint, and then, by casting off all effort, brings about the fulfilment of his own prophecy. He makes himself helpless. The feebleness of his graces arises from want of exorcise. He has hung up his shield of faith, he has cast off his helmet of hope, he wields the sword of the Spirit with an unsoldierly and trembling hand, and then he wonders that he faints in the day of battle. Chastisement thus received will yield no peaceable fruits of righteousness. So far from our trials being designed to supersede the exercise of our spiritual graces, the great battle of our faith is to be fought on this field.
3. In like manner we are in danger of losing the benefit of chastening, when, through immoderate grief, we unfit ourselves for the active duties of life. The connection between our bodily and mental states is so intimate, that long-continued disturbance of the one will always be followed by serious derangement of the other. Hence it is that protracted and cherished griefs are found to produce a general disturbance in our active and intellectual powers; duties are neglected, a state of apathy is induced, and all the higher demands of our social position are made to wait on a sinful and unprofitable grief. Conceive rightly of Him from whom that chastening comes, as of infinite holiness to do nothing unjust, of infinite love to do nothing unkind, of infinite wisdom to do nothing unsuitable to your best, truest, everlasting interests. And then conceive rightly of yourselves, as transgressors from the womb, as children of disobedience, as outcasts by nature from light and hope, and enemies by works from truth and godliness. And then consider what God sends trials for, and the certainty that, received aright, they shall all work together for good. The arrows of God can never miss their aim; with Him there are no bows drawn at a venture; His shafts speed home infallibly. Taken from the quiver of infinite love, winged with purposes of unerring mercy, they make no heart wounds which they do not more kindly heal, and kill nothing in us which were not better dead. (D. Moore, M. A.)
They have refused to return.--
Decided ungodliness
I. Who have refused to return?
1. Those who have said as much. With unusual honesty or presumption, they have made public declaration that they will never quit their sinful ways.
2. Those who have made a promise to repent, but have not performed it.
3. Those who have offered other things instead of practical return to God--ceremonies, religiousness, morality, and the like.
4. Those who have only returned in appearance. Formalists, mere professors, hypocrites.
5. Those who have only returned in part. Hugging some sins while hanging others.
II. What this refusal unveils.
1. An intense love of sin.
2. A want of love to the great Father, who bids them return.
3. A disbelief of God: they neither believe in what He has revealed concerning the evil consequences of their sin, nor in what He promises as to the benefit of returning from it.
4. A despising of God: they reject His counsel, His command, and even Himself.
5. A resolve to continue in evil. This is their proud ultimatum, “they have refused to return.”
6. A trifling with serious concerns. They are too busy, too fond of gaiety, etc.
III. What deepens the sin of this refusal?
1. When correction brings no repentance.
2. When conscience is violated, and the Spirit of God is resisted. Repentance seen to be right, but yet refused: duty known, but declined.
3. When repentance is known to be the happiest course, and yet it is obstinately neglected against the plainest reasons.
4. When this obstinacy is long-continued, and is persevered in against convictions and inward promptings.
5. When vile reasons are at the bottom: such as secret sins, which the sinner dares not confess or quit; or the fear of man, which makes the mind cowardly.
IV. What is the real reason of this refusal?
1. It may be ignorance, but that can be only in part, for it is plainly a man’s duty to return to his Lord. No mystery surrounds this simple precept--“Return.”
2. It may be self-conceit: perhaps they dream that they are already in the right road.
3. It is at times sheer recklessness. The man refuses to consider his own best interests. He resolves to be a trifler; death and hell and heaven are to him as toys to sport with.
4. It is a dislike of holiness. That lies at the bottom of it: men cannot endure humility, self-denial, and obedience to God.
5. It is a preference for the present above the eternal future. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Refusal to return
Lord Byron, a short time before death, was heard to say, “Shall I sue for mercy?” After a long pause he added: “Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!”
Surely these are poor;.. .I will get me unto the great.--
The ignorance of the poor and the insolence of the great
I. The character of many of the poor as here described.
1. Their obstinacy in sin was owing to their ignorance.
(1) Of religion.
(2) Of God’s providences.
2. Their ignorance was in great measure occasioned by their poverty.
(1) This deprived them of education.
(2) All their thoughts and cares are about their worldly wants.
(3) They absent themselves from God’s house because of poor attire.
(4) They associate with persons like-circumstanced and like-minded, who encourage one another in neglect of religion.
(5) They thereby lose all self-respect, sin impudently, and “glory in their shame.”
II. The character of the great as here described.
1. They had a better knowledge of religion than the poor.
2. They acted as bad as the poor, or worse.
3. Their conduct was chiefly owing to their greatness.
(1) Lifted up with pride, they resented admonition.
(2) They think religion is only to restrain the vulgar, not to bind those in rank.
(3) They shrink from showing reverence for God and being exact in religious observances.
(4) Worldly things have mischievous influence upon their hearts.
(5) Flattered by others, they forget or but formally pay homage to God.
(6) They mind earthly things, neglecting the culture and interests of the soul.
Application--
1. Learn what is the most important and profitable knowledge.
2. The advantages of being placed in the middle condition of life (Proverbs 30:8).
3. What an excellent charity it is to furnish the poor with the means of knowledge. (Job Orton, D. D.)