JEREMIAH 22


3 Thus saith Yahweh; Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place.

The Truth is for everyday use. It is not, as some people imagine, a theory of things which, once known, may be put away in an intellectual drawer or cupboard, in reserve, like a useful document or a memorandum of reference. It is not a sensational thing, or an exceptional thing. It is a thing of sober and practical necessity. We require it every day, like our food.

God lives every day, and must be thanked and supplicated every day, as the daily incense in the tabernacle typified. This is what he requests, and what we need. Christ lives every day, and makes intercession every day, and every day we must come to the Father in his name, as the morning and evening lamb of the first year on the altar showed forth. The need for hope is with us every day, and the need for help and the need for learning and guidance in the ways of righteousness and danger.

"Be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long,"-

is one of the standing exhortations of the Spirit, and it points to a constant actual need which the Truth alone supplies. If there are some who have no experience of this need, but on the contrary, get along the most comfortably with the Truth out of sight, it is because they are dead while nominally alive, abortions of human development while supposed to be sufficiently after the divine type to be fitted to become the sons of God.

Bro Roberts - Children of promise



30 Thus saith Yahweh, Write ye this man [gever] childless [ ish ariri (childless, stripped of the honor that progeny bestows) ] , a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man [none]of his seed [zera] shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David [kisse Dovid], and ruling any more [moshel od] in [Yehudah].

THE CHILDREN OF THE PROMISE

Because the Truth is for everyday use, God has given it to us in a diversified form, admitting of a constant familiarity without mental weariness. The wisdom that has varied natural food in so wonderful a manner has done the same in the supply of the spiritual man. The Scriptures exhibit a constant variety.

It is not all history; it is not all prophecy; it is not all precept. It is not all joy; it is not all sorrow; it is not all reproof. It is sometimes one thing and sometimes another, but all spiritual, and all fitted to furnish the man of God thoroughly for the life and state that God requires in him. It matters not what comes before us in our daily readings; we find something fresh, and always profitable when thoroughly seen into.

This morning we have a theme causing sorrow at first sight- a sorrow which every deeply thinking mind is made to feel in his own particular way - yet a sorrow for which there is an entire antidote in a very unexpected place - also before us this morning. The theme comes before us in a message by Jeremiah to Israel. The message is one of reproof.

The reproof is based on this accusation, that the whole land is estranged from God; that every one, from the least to the greatest, is given to covetousness; that none are valiant for the Truth; that none are zealous for the ways that please God in their midst - because of all which, the prophet is instructed to say there will be calamity and desolation.

The sadness of the theme is partly connected with the date of the message - in round numbers, 600 years before Christ. Israel came out of Egypt over 1,500 years before Christ. When they came out, Moses bewailed them as a stiff-necked and faithless generation, and here, nearly a thousand years afterwards, is the same apparently hopeless state of things.

Not only so, but we come 600 years - nearly 700 years further down the stream of time, and what have we here - in Romans 9. The same thing. Paul speaks of "great heaviness, and continual sorrow of heart, for his kinsmen after the flesh, who were Israelites" - who were the people of the covenant - and yet who were blind and obdurate and disobedient - from age to age, the work of God an apparent failure.

We come to our own day - 1,800 years later, and we have the same sad discouraging state of things ã Israel disobedient, and not only Israel, but the Gentile nations, to whom the word of invitation was sent in the days of the apostles, given over to entire indifference and disobedience; nursing lies when they give any attention at all to religion, and for the most part despising all wisdom and following ungodliness with eager steps.

This prolonged spectacle of failure and sin is liable to be depressing to the point of destruction. It is liable to present itself to the mind as a problem that defies solution. We are liable to ask ourselves, Why has not God constructed the world upon a principle admitting of better results than these?

Why has He not managed things in such a way as to secure some sensible measure of success to the efforts put forth from the beginning to bring mankind to ways of wisdom and life?

Now, there is an answer, and it is profitable to get thorough hold of it, for with the getting of it comes great rest. In the first place, we must remember the obvious truth that it is God, and not man, that has invented the universe - to use human language; and that, however incapable we may be in following His plan of management, it must be that His plan is a wise one, and must, in the upshot of things, be a successful one.

We are always liable to look at the affair from the human standpoint - as if man had made the world and could work it. Man forgets that he is himself a part of the system of things, and cannot, of himself, judge the working of it. We must ascend to the standpoint of the mind that contrived the universe, and the power that upholds it before we can see the drift and understand the enigma. If God had not spoken to us, we could not have done this. But He has spoken, and so we are able, in some measure, to enter into His mind.

We get the clue in the chapter read from Romans, and in a verse in it where it does not seem to be lurking. It lies in verse 16:

"It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy."

To see wherein this furnishes the clue, we must follow the line of thought of which it is the climax. Paul having deeply lamented the perverseness of Israel, anticipates the suggestion that in that case, the Word of God has been without effect - has failed in its mission.

He demurs decisively to this suggestion: He says:

"Not as though the Word of God hath taken none effect, for they are not all Israel that are of Israel, neither because they are the seed of Abraham are they all children, but in Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is, they who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted for the seed."

The argument is that though the Word has failed to transform the mass of Israel to whom it has been sent from generation to generation, it has not failed as regards the result aimed at, viz., the development of the children of promise. As it is written in Isaiah, concerning the word that goeth out of Yahweh's mouth,

"It shall not return unto Me void. It shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it" (Ch. 55:11).

Seasons 2: 43