This singular institution was gradually discerned to be charged with
lofty meaning and to be capable of being turned into a dim shadowing of
something greater than itself. You will find that God begins to be
spoken of in the later portions of Scripture as the Kinsman-Redeemer. I
reckon eighteen instances, of which thirteen are in the second half of
Isaiah. The reference is, no doubt, mainly to the great deliverance
from captivity in Egypt and Babylon, but the thought sweeps a much
wider circle and goes much deeper down than these historical facts.
There was in it some dim feeling that though God was separated from
them by all the distance between finitude and infinitude, yet they were
nearer to Him than to any one else; that the nearest living relation
whom these poor persecuted Jews had was the Lord of Hosts, beneath
whose wings they might come to trust. Therefore does the prophet kindle
into rapture and triumphant confidence as he thinks that the Lord of
Hosts, mighty, unspeakable, high above our thoughts, our words, or our
praise, is Israel's Kinsman, and, therefore, their Redeemer. How
profound a consciousness that man was made in the image of God, and
that, in spite of all the gulf between finite and infinite, and the yet
deeper gulf between sinful man and righteous God, He was closer to a
poor struggling soul than even the dearest were, must have been at all
events dawning on the prophet who dared to think of the Holy One in the
Heavens as Israel's Kinsman. No doubt, he was dwelling mostly on
historical outward deliverances wrought for the nation, and his idea of
Israel's kinship to God applied to the people, not to individuals, and
meant chiefly that the nation had been chosen for God's. But still the
thought must have been felt to be great and wonderful, and some faint
apprehension of the yet deeper sense in which it is true that God is
the next-of-kin to every soul and ready to be its Redeemer, would no
doubt begin to be felt.
The deepening of the idea from a reference to external and national
deliverances, and the large, dim hopes which clustered round it, may be
illustrated by one or two significant instances. Take, for example,
that mysterious and very beautiful utterance in the Book of Job, where
the man, in the very depth of his despair, and just because there is
not a human being that has any drop of pity for him, turns from earth,
and striking confidence out of his very despair, like fire from flint,
sees there his Kinsman-Redeemer. 'I know that my Redeemer liveth.' Men
may mock him, friends may turn against him, the wife of his bosom may
tempt him, comforters may pour vitriol instead of oil into his wounds,
yet he, sitting on his dunghill there, poverty-stricken and desolate,
knows that God is of kin to him, and will do the kinsman's part by him.
The very metaphor implies that the divine intervention which he expects
is to take place after his death. It was a dead man whose blood the
Goel avenged. Thus the view which sees in the subsequent words a hope,
however dim and undefined, of an experience of a divine manifestation
on his behalf beyond the grave is the only one which gives its full
force to the central idea of the passage, as well as to the obscure
individual expressions. Most strikingly, then, he goes on to say,
carrying out the allusion, 'and that he shall stand at the last upon
the dust.' Little did it boot the murdered man, lying there stark, with
the knife in his bosom, that the murderer should be slain by the swift
justice of his kinsman-avenger, but Job felt that, in some mysterious
way, God would appear for him, after he had been laid in the dust, and
that he would somehow share in the gladness of His manifestation--for
he believes that 'without his flesh' he will see God, 'whom I shall see
for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.' Large and
mysterious hopes are gathering round the metaphor, which flash some
light into the darkness of the grave, and give to the troubled soul the
assurance that when life with all its troubles is past, and flesh has
seen corruption, the inmost personal being of every man who commits his
cause to God will behold Him coming forth his Kinsman-Redeemer.
Another illustration of the hopes which gathered round this image is
found in the great psalm which prophesies of the true King of Peace, in
language too wide for any poetical licence to warrant if intended only
to describe a Jewish king (Ps. lxxii. 14). The universal dominion of
this great King is described in terms which, though they may be partly
referred to the Jewish monarchy at its greatest expansion, sweep far
beyond its bounds in exulting anticipation that 'all kings shall fall
down before Him, all nations shall serve Him.' The reason for this
world-wide dominion is not military power, as was the case with the
warrior kings of old, who bound nations together for a little while in
an artificial unity with iron chains, but His dominion is universal,
'_for_ He shall deliver the needy when he crieth,...He shall _redeem_
their souls from oppression and violence, and precious shall their
blood be in His sight.' Two of the functions of the Kinsman-Redeemer
are here united. He buys back slaves from their tyrannous masters, and
He avenges their shed blood. And because His Kingdom is a kingdom of
gentle pity and loving help, because He is of the same blood with His
subjects, and brings liberty to the captives, therefore it is universal
and everlasting. For the strongest thing in all the world is love, and
He who can staunch men's wounds, and will hear their cries and help
them, will rule them with authority which conquerors cannot wield.
This universal King, the kinsman and the sovereign of all the needy, is
not God. A human figure is rising before the prophet-psalmist's eye,
whose meekness as well as His majesty, and whose kingdom as well as His
redeeming power, seem to pass beyond human limits. Divine offices seem
to be devolved on a man's shoulders. Dim hopes are springing which
point onwards. So that great psalm leads us a step further.
III. See the perfect fulfilment of this divine office by the man Christ
Jesus.
Job's anticipation and the psalmist's rapturous vision are fulfilled in
the Incarnate Word, in whom God comes near to us all and makes Himself
kindred to our flesh, that He may discharge all those blessed offices,
of redeeming from slavery, of recovering our alienated inheritance, and
of guarding our lives, which demand at once divine power and human
nearness. Christ is our Kinsman. True, the divine nature and the human
are nearly allied, so that even apart from the Incarnation, men may
feel that none is so truly and closely akin to them as their Father in
Heaven is. But how much more blessed than even that kinship is the
consanguinity of Christ, who is doubly of kin to each soul of man, both
because in His true manhood He is bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh, and because in His divinity He is nearer to us than the closest
human kindred can ever be. By both He comes so near to us that we may
clasp Him by our faith, and rest upon Him, and have Him for our nearest
friend, our brother. He is nearer to each of us than our dearest is. He
loves us with the love of kindred, and can fill our hearts and wills,
and help our weakness in better, more inward ways than all sympathy and
love of human hearts can do. Between the atoms of the densest of
material bodies there is an interspace of air, as is shown by the fact
that everything is compressible if you can find the force sufficient to
compress it. That is to say, in the material universe no particle
touches another. And so in the spiritual region, there is an awful film
of separation between each of us and all others, however closely we may
be united. We each live on our own little island in the deep, 'with
echoing straits between us thrown.' We have a solemn consciousness of
personality, of responsibility unshared by any, of a separate destiny
parting us from our dearest. Arms may be twined, but they must be
unlinked some day, and each in turn must face the awful solitude of
death, as each has really faced that scarcely less awful solitude of
life, alone. But 'he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit,' and our
kinsman, Christ, will come so near to us, that we shall be in Him and
He in us, one spirit and one life. He is your nearest relation, nearer
than husband, wife, parent, brother, sister, or friend. He is nearer to
you than your very selves. He is your better self. That is His
qualification for His office.
Because He is man's kinsman, He buys back His enslaved brethren. The
bondage from which 'one of His brethren' might 'redeem' the Israelite
was a voluntary bondage into which he had sold himself. And such is our
slavery. None can rob us of our freedom but ourselves. The world and
the flesh and the devil cannot put their chains on us unless our own
wills hold out our hands for the manacles.
And, alas! it is often an unsuspected slavery. 'How sayest thou, ye
shall be made free. We were never in bondage to any man,' boasted the
angry disputants with Christ. And if they had lifted up their eyes they
might have seen from the Temple courts in which they stood, the citadel
full of Roman soldiers, and perhaps the golden eagles gleaming in the
sunshine on the loftiest battlements. Yet with that strange power of
ignoring disagreeable facts they dared to assert their freedom. 'Never
in bondage to any man!'--what about Egypt, and Assyria, and Babylon?
Had there never been an Antiochus? Was Rome a reality? Did it lay no
yoke on them? Was it all a dream?
Some of us are just as foolish, and try as desperately to annihilate
facts by ignoring them, and to make ourselves free by passionately
denying that we are slaves. But 'he that committeth sin is the slave of
sin.' That sounds a paradox. I am master of my own actions, you may
say, and never freer than when I break the bonds of right and duty and
choose to do what is contrary to them, for no reason on earth but
because I choose. That is liberty, emancipation from the burdensome
restraints which your narrow preaching about law and conscience would
impose. Yes, you are masters of your actions, and your sinful actions
very soon become masters of you. Do we not know that that is true? You
fall into, or walk into a habit, and then it gets the mastery of you,
and you cannot get rid of it. Whosoever sets his foot upon that
slippery inclined plane of wrongdoing, after he has gone a little way,
gravitation is too much for him and away he goes down the hill.
'Whosoever committeth sin is the slave of sin.' Did you ever try to
kill a bad habit, a vice? Did you find it easy work? Was it not your
master? You thought that a chain no stronger than a spider's web was
round your wrist till you tried to break it; and then you found it a
chain of adamant. Many men who boast themselves free are 'tied and
bound with the cords of their sins.'
Dreaming of freedom, you have sold yourself, and that 'for nought.' Is
that not true, tragically true?
What have you made out of sin? Is the game worth the candle? Will it
continue to be so? Ye shall be redeemed without money, for Jesus Christ
laid down His life for you and me, that by His death we might receive
forgiveness and deliverance from the power of sin. And so your Kinsman,
nearer to you than all else, has bought you back. Do not refuse the
offered emancipation, but 'if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.'
Be not like the spiritless slaves, for whose servile choice the law
provided, who had rather remain bond than go out free. Surely when
Christ calls you to liberty, you will not turn from Him to the
tyrannous masters whom you have served, and, like the Hebrew slave, let
them fasten you to their door-posts with their awl through your ear. Do
you hug your chains and prefer your bondage?
Your Kinsman-Redeemer brings back your squandered inheritance, which is
God. God is the only possession that makes a man rich. He alone is
worth calling 'my portion.' It is only when we have God in our hearts,
God in our heads, God in our souls, God in our life--it is only when we
love Him, and think about Him, and obey Him, and bring our characters
into harmony with Him, and so possess Him--it is only then that we
become truly rich. No other possession corresponds to our capacities so
as to fill up all our needs and satisfy all our being. No other
possession passes into our very substance and becomes inseparable from
ourselves. So the mystical fervour of the psalmist's devotion spoke a
simple prose truth when he exclaimed, 'The Lord is the portion of mine
inheritance and of my cup.'
We have squandered our inheritance. We have sinned away fellowship with
God. We have flung away our true wealth, 'wasted our substance in
riotous living.' And here is our Elder Brother, our nearest relative,
who has always been with the Father; but who, instead of grudging the
prodigals their fatted calf and their hearty welcome when they come
back, has Himself, by the sacrifice of Himself, won for them the
inheritance, its earnest in the possession of God's spirit here and its
completion in the broad fields of 'the inheritance of the saints in
light,' the entire fruition and possession of the divine in the life to
come. 'If children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ.'
Your Kinsman-Redeemer will keep your lives under His care, and be ready
to plead your cause. 'He that touches you, touches the apple of Mine
eye.' 'He reproved kings for their sake, saying, Touch not Mine
anointed.' Not in vain does the cry go up to Him, 'Avenge, O Lord, Thy
slaughtered saints,'--and if no apparent retribution has followed, and
if often His servant's blood seems to have been shed in vain, still we
know that it has often been the seed of the Church, and that He who
puts our tears into His bottle will not count our blood less precious
in His sight. So we may rest confident that our Kinsman-Redeemer will
charge Himself with pleading our cause and intervening in our behalf,
that He will compass us about with His protection, and that we are knit
so close to Him that our woes and foes are His, and that we cannot die
as long as He lives.
So, dear brethren, be sure of this, that if only you will take Christ
for your Saviour and brother, your Helper and Friend, if only you will
rest yourself upon that complete sacrifice which He has made for the
sins of the world, He will give you liberty, and restore your lost
inheritance, and your blood shall be precious in His sight, and He will
keep His hand around you and preserve you; and finally will bring you
into His home and yours. 'In Him we have redemption through His blood,'
and He comes to every one of you now, even through my poor lips, with
His ancient word of merciful invitation: 'Behold! I have blotted out as
a cloud thy sins and as a thick cloud thy transgressions. Turn unto Me,
for I have redeemed thee.'
'AS SODOM'
'Zedekiah was one and twenty years old when he began to reign, and he
reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Hamutal
the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah. 2. And he did that which was evil
in the eyes of the Lord, according to all that Jehoiakim had done. 3.
For through the anger of the Lord it came to pass in Jerusalem and
Judah, till he had cast them out from his presence, that Zedekiah
rebelled against the king of Babylon. 4. And it came to pass, in the
ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of the
month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came, he and all his army,
against Jerusalem, and pitched against it, and built forts against it
round about. 5. So the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king
Zedekiah. 6. And in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month,
the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the
people of the land. 7. Then the city was broken up, and all the men of
war fled, and went forth out of the city by night by the way of the
gate between the two walls, which was by the king's garden; (now the
Chaldeans were by the city round about) and they went by the way of the
plain. 8. But the army of the Chaldeans pursued after the king, and
overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was
scattered from him. 9. Then they took the king, and carried him up unto
the king of Babylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath; where he gave
judgment upon him. 10. And the king of Babylon slew the sons of
Zedekiah before his eyes: he slew also all the princes of Judah in
Riblah. 11. Then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah; and the king of
Babylon bound him in chains, and carried him to Babylon, and put him in
prison till the day of his death.'--JER. lii. 1-11.
This account of the fall of Jerusalem is all but identical with that in
2 Kings xxv. It was probably taken thence by some editor of Jeremiah's
prophecies, perhaps Baruch, who felt the appropriateness of appending
to these the verification of them in that long-foretold and disbelieved
judgment.
The absence of every expression of emotion is most striking. In one
sentence the wrath of God is pointed to as the cause of all; and, for
the rest, the tragic facts which wrung the writer's heart are told in
brief, passionless sentences, which sound liker the voice of the
recording angel than that of a man who had lived through the misery
which he recounts. The Book of Lamentations weeps and sobs with the
grief of the devout Jew; but the historian smothers feeling while he
tells of God's righteous judgment.
Zedekiah owed his throne to 'the king of Babylon,' and, at first, was
his obedient vassal, himself going to Babylon (Jer. li. 59) and
swearing allegiance (Ezek. xvii. 13). But rebellion soon followed, and
the perjured young king once more pursued the fatal, fascinating policy
of alliance with Egypt. There could be but one end to that madness,
and, of course, the Chaldean forces soon appeared to chastise this
presumptuous little monarch, who dared to defy the master of the world.
Our narrative curtails its account of Zedekiah's reign, bringing into
strong relief only the two facts of his following Jehoiakim's evil
ways, and his rebellion against Babylon. But behind the rash, ignorant
young man, it sees God working, and traces all the insane bravado by
which he was ruining his kingdom and himself to God's 'wrath,' not
thereby diminishing Zedekiah's responsibility for his own acts, but
declaring that his being 'given over to a reprobate mind' was the
righteous divine punishment for past sin.
An eighteen months' agony is condensed into three verses (Jer. lii.
4-6), in which the minute care to specify dates pathetically reveals
the depth of the impression which the first appearance of the besieging
army made, and the deeper wound caused by the city's fall. The memory
of these days has not faded yet, for both are still kept as fasts by
the synagogue. We look with the narrator's eye at the deliberate
massing of the immense besieging force drawing its coils round the
doomed city, like a net round a deer, and mark with him the piling of
the mounds, and the erection on them of siege-towers. We hear of no
active siege operations till the final assault. Famine was
Nebuchadnezzar's best general. 'Sitting down they watched' _her_
'there,' and grimly waited till hunger became unbearable. We can fill
up much of the outline in this narrative from the rest of Jeremiah,
which gives us a vivid and wretched picture of imbecility, divided
counsels, and mad hatred of God's messenger, blind refusal to see
facts, and self-confidence which no disaster could abate. And, all the
while, the monstrous serpent was slowly tightening its folds round the
struggling, helpless rabbit. We have to imagine all the misery.
The narrative hurries on to its close. What widespread and
long-drawn-out privation that one sentence covers: 'The famine was sore
in the city, so that there was no bread for the people'! Lamentations
is full of the cries of famished children and mothers who eat the fruit
of their own bodies. At last, on the memorable black day, the ninth of
the fourth month (say July), 'a breach was made,' and the Chaldean
forces poured in through it. Jeremiah xxxix. 3 tells the names of the
Babylonian officers who 'sat in the middle gate' of the Temple,
polluting it with their presence. There seems to have been no
resistance from the enfeebled, famished people; but apparently some of
the priests were slain in the sanctuary, perhaps in the act of
defending it from the entrance of the enemy. The Chaldeans would enter
from the north, and, while they were establishing themselves in the
Temple, Zedekiah 'and all the men of war' fled, stealing out of the
city by a covered way between two walls, on the south side, and leaving
the city to the conqueror, without striking a blow. They had talked
large when danger was not near; but braggarts are cowards, and they
thought now of nothing but their own worthless lives. Then, as always,
the men who feared God feared nothing else, and the men who scoffed at
the day of retribution, when it was far off, were unmanned with terror
when it dawned.
The investment had not been complete on the southern side, and the
fugitives got away across Kedron and on to the road to Jericho, their
purpose, no doubt, being to put the Jordan between them and the enemy.
One can picture that stampede down the rocky way, the anxious looks
cast backwards, the confusion, the weariness, the despair when the rush
of the pursuers overtook the famine-weakened mob. In sight of Jericho,
which had witnessed the first onset of the irresistible desert-hardened
host under Joshua, the last king of Israel, deserted by his army, was
'taken in their pits,' as hunters take a wild beast. The march to
Riblah, in the far north, would be full of indignities arid of physical
suffering. The soldiers of that 'bitter and hasty' nation would not
spare him one insult or act of cruelty, and he had a tormentor within
worse than they. 'Why did I not listen to the prophet? What a fool I
have been! If I had only my time to come over again, how differently I
would do!' The miserable self-reproaches, which shoot their arrows into
our hearts when it is too late, would torture Zedekiah, as they will
sooner or later do to all who did not listen to God's message while
there was yet time. The sinful, mad past kept him company on one hand;
and, on the other, there attended him a dark, if doubtful, future. He
knew that he was at the disposal of a fierce conqueror, whom he had
deeply incensed, and who had little mercy. 'What will become of me when
I am face to face with Nebuchadnezzar? Would that I had kept subject to
him!' A past gone to ruin, a present honey-combed with gnawing remorse
and dread, a future threatening, problematical, but sure to be
penal--these were what this foolish young king had won by showing his
spirit and despising Jeremiah's warnings, It is always a mistake to fly
in the face of God's commands. All sin is folly, and every evildoer
might say with poor Robert Burns:
'I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear.'
Nebuchadnezzar was in Riblah, away up in the north, waiting the issue
of the campaign. Zedekiah was nothing to him but one of the many
rebellious vassals of whom he had to make an example lest rebellion
should spread, and who was especially guilty because he was
Nebuchadnezzar's own nominee, and had sworn allegiance. Policy and his
own natural disposition reinforced by custom dictated his barbarous
punishment meted to the unfortunate kinglet of the petty kingdom that
had dared to perk itself up against his might. How little he knew that
he was the executioner of God's decrees! How little the fact that he
was so, diminished his responsibility for his cruelty! The savage
practice of blinding captive kings, so as to make them harmless and
save all trouble with them, was very common. Zedekiah was carried to
Babylon, and thus was fulfilled Ezekiel's enigmatical prophecy, 'I will
bring him to Babylon,... yet shall he not see it, though he shall die
there' (Ezek. xii. 13).
The fall of Jerusalem should teach us that a nation is a moral whole,
capable of doing evil and of receiving retribution, and not a mere
aggregation of individuals. It should teach us that transgression does
still, though not so directly or certainly as in the case of Israel,
sap the strength of kingdoms; and that to-day, as truly as of old,
'righteousness exalteth a nation.' It should accustom us to look on
history as not only the result of visible forces, but as having behind
it, and reaching its end through the visible forces, the unseen hand of
God. For Christians, the vision of the Apocalypse contains the ultimate
word on 'the philosophy of history.' It is 'the Lamb before the
Throne,' who opens the roll with the seven seals, and lets the powers
of whom it speaks loose for their march through the world. It should
teach us God's long-suffering patience and loving efforts to escape the
necessity of smiting, and also God's rigid justice, which will not
shrink from smiting when all these efforts have failed.