Jeremiah Reproves Israel
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dissatisfied with their attainments and seek greater blessings by closer
connection with heaven.
God’s plan is not to send messengers who will please and flatter
sinners; He delivers no messages of peace to lull the unsanctified into
carnal security. But He lays heavy burdens upon the conscience of
the wrongdoer, and pierces his soul with sharp arrows of conviction.
The ministering angels present to him the fearful judgments of God,
to deepen the sense of his great need and prompt the agonizing cry:
“What shall I do to be saved?” The very hand that humbles to the dust,
rebukes sin, puts pride and ambition to shame, lifts up the penitent,
stricken one, and inquires with deepest sympathy: “What wilt thou
that I shall do unto thee?”
When man has sinned against a holy and merciful God, he can
pursue no course so noble as to sincerely repent and confess his errors
in tears and bitterness of soul. This God requires of him; He will accept
of nothing less than a broken heart and a contrite spirit. But the king
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and his lords, in their arrogance and pride, refused the invitation of God
to return; they would not heed this warning and repent. This gracious
opportunity was their last. God had declared that if they refused to
hear His voice, He would inflict upon them fearful retribution. They
did refuse to hear, and He pronounced His judgments upon Israel; He
visited with special wrath the man who had proudly lifted himself up
against the Almighty.
“Therefore thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim king of Judah; He
shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body
shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost.
And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity;
and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem,
and upon the men of Judah, all the evil that I have pronounced against
them; but they hearkened not.”
The burning of the roll was not the end of the matter. The written
words were more easily disposed of than the reproof and warning
which they contained and the swift-coming punishment which God
had pronounced against rebellious Israel. But even the written roll
was reproduced at the command of the Lord. The words of the Infinite
were not to be destroyed. “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave
it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the
mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of