Jeremiah
271
Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to
dwell in this place. Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple
of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are
these. For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye
thoroughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbor; if ye
oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not
innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt:
then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to
your fathers, forever and ever.”
Jeremiah 7:2-7
.
The unwillingness of the Lord to chastise is here vividly shown. He
stays His judgments that He may plead with the impenitent. He who
exercises “loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth”
yearns over His erring children; in every way possible He seeks to
teach them the way of life everlasting.
Jeremiah 9:24
. He had brought
the Israelites out of bondage that they might serve Him, the only true
and living God. Though they had wandered long in idolatry and had
slighted His warnings, yet He now declares His willingness to defer
chastisement and grant yet another opportunity for repentance. He
makes plain the fact that only by the most thorough heart reformation
could the impending doom be averted. In vain would be the trust they
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might place in the temple and its services. Rites and ceremonies could
not atone for sin. Notwithstanding their claim to be the chosen people
of God, reformation of heart and of the life practice alone could save
them from the inevitable result of continued transgression.
Thus it was that “in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of
Jerusalem” the message of Jeremiah to Judah was, “Hear ye the words
of this covenant,”—the plain precepts of Jehovah as recorded in the
Sacred Scriptures,—“and do them.”
Jeremiah 11:6
. And this is the
message he proclaimed as he stood in the temple courts in the begin-
ning of the reign of Jehoiakim.
Israel’s experience from the days of the Exodus was briefly re-
viewed. God’s covenant with them had been, “Obey My voice, and
I will be your God, and ye shall be My people: and walk ye in all
the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you.”
Shamelessly and repeatedly had this covenant been broken. The cho-
sen nation had “walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their
evil heart, and went backward, and not forward.”
Jeremiah 7:23, 24
.