'A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our
sanctuary.'--JER. xvii. 12.
I must begin by a word or two of explanation as to the language of this
passage. The word 'is' is a supplement, and most probably it ought to
be omitted, and the verse treated as being, not a statement, but a
series of exclamations. The next verse runs thus, 'O Lord! the hope of
Israel, all that forsake Thee shall be ashamed'; and the most natural
and forcible understanding of the words of my text is reached by
connecting them with these following clauses: 'O Lord! the hope of
Israel,' and, regarding the whole as one long exclamation of adoring
contemplation, 'A glorious throne,' or '_Thou_ glorious throne, high
from the beginning; the place of our sanctuary, O Lord! the hope of
Israel.'
I. If we look at the words so, we have here, to begin with, a wonderful
vision of what God is.
'A glorious throne,' or, as the original has it, 'a throne of
glory,'--which is not quite the same thing--' high from the beginning,
the place of our sanctuary.' There are three clauses. Now they all seem
to me to have reference to the Temple in Jerusalem, which is taken, by
a very natural figure of speech, as a kind of suggestive description of
Him who is worshipped there. There is the same kind of use of the name
of a place to stand for the person who occupies or inhabits it, in many
familiar phrases. For instance, 'The Sublime Porte' is properly the
name of a lofty gateway which belonged to the palace in Constantinople,
and so has come to mean the Turkish Government if Government it can be
called. So we talk of the 'Papal See' having done this or that, and
scarcely remember that a 'see' is a bishop's seat, or, again, the
decision of 'the Chair' is final in the House of Commons. Or, if you
will accept a purely municipal parallel, if any one were told that 'the
Town Hall' had issued a certain order, he would know that our
authorities, the Mayor and Corporation, had decreed so and so. So, in
precisely the same way here, the prophet takes the outward facts of the
Temple as symbolising great and blessed spiritual thoughts of the God
that filled the Temple with His own lustre.
'A glorious throne'--that is grand, but that is not what Jeremiah
means--'A throne of glory' is the true rendering. And to what does that
refer? Now, in the greater number of cases, you will find that in the
Old Testament, where 'glory' is ascribed to God, the word has a very
distinct and specific meaning, viz. the light which was afterwards
called the 'Shekinah,' and dwelt between the cherubim, and was the
symbol of the divine presence and the assurance that that presence
would be self-revealing and would manifest Himself to His people. So
here the throne on which glory rests is what we call the _mercy-seat_
within the veil, where, above the propitiatory table on which once a
year the High Priest sprinkled the blood of sacrifice, and beneath
which were shut up the tables of the covenant which constituted the
bond between God and Israel, shone the Light in the midst of the
darkness of the enclosed inner shrine, the token of the divine
presence. The throned glory, the glory that reigns and rules as King in
Israel, is the idea of the words before us. It is the same throne that
a later writer in the New Testament speaks of when he says, 'Let us
come boldly to the Throne of Grace.' For that light of a manifested
divine presence was no malign lustre that blinded or slew those who
gazed upon it, but though no eye but that of the High Priest dared of
old to look, yet he, the representative and, as it were, the
concentration of the collective Israel, could stand, unshrinking and
unharmed, before that piercing light, because he bore in his hand the
blood of sacrifice and sprinkled it on the mercy-seat. So was it of
old, but now we all can draw near, through the rent veil, and wall
rejoicingly in the light of the Lord. His glory is grace; His grace is
glory.
This, then, is the first of Jeremiah's great thoughts of God, and it
means--'The Lord God omnipotent reigneth,' there is none else but He,
and His will runs authoritative and supreme into all corners of the
universe. But it is 'glory' that is throned. That is equivalent to the
declaration that our God has never spoken in secret, in the dark places
of the earth, nor said to any seeking heart, 'Seek ye My face in vain.'
For the light which shone in that Holy Place as His symbol, had for its
message to Israel the great thought that, as the sun pours out its
lustre into all the corners of its system, so He, by the
self-communication which is inherent in His very nature, manifests
Himself to every gazing eye, and is a God who is Light, 'and in whom is
no darkness at all.'
But reigning glory is also redeeming grace. For the light of the bright
cloud, which is the glory of the Lord, shines still, with no thunder in
its depths, nor tempests in its bosom, above the mercy-seat, where
spreads the blood of sprinkling by which Israel's sins are all taken
away. Well may the prophet lift up his heart in adoring wonder, and
translate the outward symbol into this great word, 'The throne of
glory; Jehovah, the hope of Israel.'
Then the next clause is, I think, equally intelligible by the same
process of interpretation--' High from the beginning.' It was a piece
of the patriotic exaggeration of Israel's prophets and psalmists that
they made much of the little hill upon which the Temple was set. We
read of the 'hill of the Lord's house' being 'exalted above the tops of
the mountains.' We read of it being a high hill, 'as the hill of
Bashan.' And though to the eye of sense it is a very modest elevation,
to the eye of faith it was symbolical of much. Jeremiah felt it to be a
material type, both of the elevation and of the stable duration of the
God whom he would commend to Israel's and to all men's trust. 'High
from the beginning,' separated from all creatural limitation and
lowness, He whose name is the Most High, and on whose level no other
being can stand, towers above the lowness of the loftiest creature, and
from that inaccessible height He sends down His voice, like the trumpet
from amidst the darkness of Sinai, proclaiming, 'I am God, and there is
none beside Me.' Yet while thus 'holy'--that is, separate from
creatures--He makes communion with Himself possible to us, and draws
near to us in Christ, that we in Christ may be made nigh to Him.
And the loftiness involves, necessarily, timeless and changeless Being;
so that we can turn to Him, and feel Him to be 'the same yesterday, and
to-day, and for ever.' No words are needed, and no human words are
anything but tawdry attempts to elaborate, which only result in
weakening, these two great thoughts. 'High--from the beginning.'
The last of this series of symbols, even more plainly than the other
two, refers originally to the Temple upon the hill of Zion; and
symbolically, to the God who filled the Temple. He is 'the place of our
sanctuary.' That is as though the prophet would point, as the wonderful
climax of all, to the fact that He of whom the former things were true
should yet be accessible to our worship; that, if I might so say, our
feet could tread the courts of the great Temple; and we draw near to
Him who is so far above the loftiest, and separate from all the
magnificences which Himself has made, and who yet is 'our sanctuary,'
and accessible to our worship.
Ay! and more than that--'Lord! Thou hast been our _dwelling-place_ in
all generations.' In old days the Temple was more than a place of
worship. It was a place where a man coming had, according to ancient
custom, guest rights with God; and if he came into the Temple of the
Most High as to an asylum, he dwelt there safe and secure from avengers
or foes.
'The place of our sanctuary,' then, declares that God Himself, like
some ancestral dwelling-place in which generation after generation of
fathers and children have abode, whence they have been carried, and
where their children still live, is to all generations their home and
their fortress. The place of our sanctuary implies access to the
inaccessibly High, communion with the infinitely Separate, security and
abode in God Himself. He that dwelleth in God dwelleth in peace. These,
then, are the points of the prophet's vision of God.