'I sent unto you all my servants the prophets, rising early and sending
them, saying, Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate.'--JER.
xliv. 4.
The long death-agony of the Jewish kingdom has come to an end. The
frivolous levity, which fed itself on illusions and would not be
sobered by facts, has been finally crushed out of the wretched people.
The dreary succession of incompetent kings--now a puppet set up by
Egypt, now another puppet set up by Babylon, has ended with the weak
Zedekiah. The throne of David is empty, and the long line of kings,
which numbered many a strong, wise, holy man, has dwindled into a
couple of captives, one of them blind and both of them paupers on an
idolatrous monarch's bounty. The country is desolate, the bulk of the
people exiles, and the poor handful, who had been left by the
conqueror, flitting like ghosts, or clinging, like domestic animals, to
their burnt homes and wasted plains, have been quarrelling and fighting
among themselves, murdering the Jewish ruler whom Babylon had left
them, and then in abject terror have fled _en masse_ across the border
into Egypt, where they are living wretched lives. What a history that
people had gone through since they had lived on the same soil before!
From Moses to Zedekiah, what a story! From Goshen till now it had been
one long tragedy which seems to have at last reached its fifth act.
Nine hundred years have passed, and this is the issue of them all!
The circumstances might well stir the heart of the prophet, whose
doleful task it had been to foretell the coming of the storm, who had
had to strip off Judah's delusions and to proclaim its certain fall,
and who in doing so had carried his life in his hand for forty years,
and had never met with recognition or belief.
Jeremiah had been carried off by the fugitives to Egypt, and there he
made a final effort to win them back to God. He passed before them the
outline of the whole history of the nation, treating it as having
accomplished one stadium--and what does he find? In all these days
since Goshen there has been one monotonous story of vain divine
pleadings and human indifference, God beseeching and Israel turning
away--and now at last the crash, long foretold, never credited, which
had been drawing nearer through all the centuries, has come, and Israel
is scattered among the people.
Such are the thoughts and emotions that speak in the exquisitely tender
words of our text. It suggests--