Jeremiah 33:9-13

Joy After Desolation

Jer 33:9-13

We are called upon to realise the fullest meaning of desolation "desolate, without man, and without inhabitant, and without beast." We must realise the circumstances before we approach the miracle. We lose much by slipping over whole spaces of history, without attending to the pregnant and instructive detail. Think of a forsaken city, think of being afraid of the sound of your own footfall! Even in that desolation there comes an overpowering sense of society, as if the air were full of sprites, spectres, ghostly presences. What a singular sense there is too of trespass, encroachment, of being where you have no right to be as if you were intruding upon the sanctuary of the dead as if you were cutting to the life some spiritual ministry, conducting itself mysteriously but not without some beneficent purpose. You have broken in upon those invisible ones who are watching their dead; you want to escape from the solitude in one sense it is too sacred for you, wholly too solemn; you would seek the society of your kind, for other society is uncongenial, unknown, and is felt to be a criticism intolerable, a judgment overwhelming. Yet if you do not fasten your attention upon the possibilities of desolation, darkness, forsakenness, loneliness, how can you appreciate what is to follow? May we not then hasten to inquire what is to follow? Is there not a voice which first says, What can follow? Can any mystery of love be wrought upon a field so lost, so desolate a field that is but a gigantic sepulchre? Can God work miracles here? It is just here that he works his grandest miracles; it is when all light dies out that he comes forth in his glory; it is when we say, There is no more road, the rock shuts us out, our progress is stayed, it is then that a path suddenly opens in rocky places, and footprints disclose themselves for the comfort and inspiration of the lone traveller.

Notice how exactly God's miracles fit human circumstances. They overflow them, but they first fill all their cavities and all the opportunities which they create and present. What is it then that is to follow upon this blackness, desolation, and oppressive silence? If a poet has made the promise, he has made it well; the words fit the necessity. See if this be not so. The picture of desolation having been painted, and the reader having been made to feel the terribleness and coldness of that desolation, he is told that there in that place shall be heard

"The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness; the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride; the voice of them that shall say, Praise the Lord of hosts: for the Lord is good; for his mercy endureth for ever: and of them that shall bring the sacrifice of praise into the house of the Lord" ( Jer 33:11 ).

Thus God displaces darkness by light; thus God does not drive away the silence with noise but with music: it is no battering of rude violence that brings back human intercourse into plains that have been swept with human desolation; it is a festival, a banquet, a wedding scene, and already the forsaken valley vibrates as if under the clash of wedding bells. It is thus that God works. The miracle is not something alongside the necessity; it is something clearly within it, filling it, overflowing it, and causing it to be lost in a redundance of power and grace. When the multitude was an hungred, Christ gave them bread: thus the miracle and the necessity were one; the bread matched the occasion, was the only thing that could be equal to the necessity of the case. So every miracle vindicates itself, not by something metaphysical, highly argumentative, and only to be comprehended by subtle or virile intellects; but the miracle condescends to experience, to common observation, so that it is not an intrusion upon society, but a natural revelation of God's presence and care. The healed men had no need that the miracle should be explained to them, for they themselves embodied the miracle; the rejoicing mother who received her son back again needed not to ask metaphysical questions about the action of law, and the suspension of continuity, and the upbreaking of regularity: there was the living, glowing, rejoicing son of her womb; let her be glad with the result of the miracle, and not vex herself by cross-examination of the incomprehensible details. When you want to understand a miracle, understand the circumstances under which it was wrought, and the circumstances will be the best exposition.

What was the quality of the joy that was wrought? It was profoundly religious. The voices that were uplifted were to say, "Praise the Lord of hosts: for the Lord is good; for his mercy endureth for ever." That was the joy: it was religious, not sensuous; it was experimental, not speculative; it was the testimony of men who had handled the word of life, who had received release from captivity, and who had seen the city streets lost and desolate revived, refilled; and under the pressure gracious and loving of that revelation of divine power there were exercises profoundly religious. There are times when men must praise the Lord. Sometimes the atheist has been at the very door of the sanctuary, and if some friendly hand had thrown it open the atheist might have gone in and left his atheism outside. There are times when men only need a word of encouragement, a gentle hint, and all the dark past will go away, and in its place will be found festival, sanctuary, altar, and long, sweet song. The heart settles many difficulties. The heart leads the judgment; the uppermost feeling, elevated and sanctified, tells the whole man what to do, uses the understanding as one might use some inferior creature to help him in carrying out the purposes of life. What is this highest faculty, what is this mysterious power, that takes to itself understanding, imagination, conscience, will, and all elements of energy? It is religious emotion; not sentimentalised and frittered away into mere vapour, but high, intelligent, noble feeling, glowing, passionate enthusiasm, a consecration without break or flaw or self-questioning, a wholeness of consent and devotion to the supreme purpose of life. We cannot understand God's providence when we are cold-hearted. We can only see some distances by rising to great heights; then the mountains become stairways up which we travel, and when we reach the top we see the land beyond, and rejoice in the illuminated and glorious landscape. So it is religiously: we see nothing from the little hillock of criticism; we cannot feel much whilst we are merely analysing words and sentences: all this may be needful, it may be part of a process, but not until we have climbed the Nebo of real feeling, highest sentiment, divinest, tenderest emotion, can we see what lies beyond, of hill and dale, and shaggy forest, and blooming garden, and pouring, fluent, redundant river. Never consult a cold-hearted man about anything, especially about anything that is religious. We cannot work without fire. God himself, be it reverently spoken, finds it necessary to work through the medium of fire. They who have various ways of tracing the genesis of the universe have never omitted the element of fire. At the first it was a fire-cloud, a tuft of fire-mist; there was, however, fire, and without that we can make no progress in the understanding of profoundest truths and divinest mysteries.

When this desolation is banished, when this wedding feast is held, by what picture is the safety of the people represented? By a very tender one:

"In the cities of the mountains, in the cities of the vale, and in the cities of the south, and in the land of Benjamin, and in the places about Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah, shall the flocks pass again under the hands of him that telleth them, saith the Lord" ( Jer 33:13 ).

Sometimes this passage has been mistakenly interpreted as pointing to discipline and punishment: shall pass under the hands of him that telleth them: shall be chastised, or rebuked, or chastened, or punished, or otherwise attended to with a view to ultimate perfectness. That is not the meaning of the passage. We had in England shepherds who long ago spoke of taking care of their flocks under the idiom of "telling their tale" counting the flock one by one. There shall be no hurrying, crowding into the fold, but one shall follow another, and each shall be looked at in its singularity; there shall be nothing tumultuous, indiscriminate, promiscuous; every process of providence is conducted critically, individually, minutely: so there is no hope for a man getting into the fold without the Shepherd seeing him; every sheep of the flock has to pass under the hand of him that telleth his tale. We spend our days as a tale that is told, not as a story, an anecdote, a narrative, but as a number that is counted; the tale is counted one by one, and so the days are ticked off and off, until the last day falls, and all eternity begins. Let no man imagine that God conducts his processes promiscuously, under some general policy that allows a margin to indifference and criminality. Strive to enter in at the strait gate; strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life everlasting; we go in one by one. It is thus the world dies; it is thus the world lives; in units, in singular acts, in special personal dispensations. Until we realise the personality of the divine supervision we shall flounder in darkness and our prayers will be mere evaporations, bringing back no answer, no blessing, no pledge from Heaven. This is the picture presented by the prophet. Not one tittle of this providential order has been changed; the whole mystery of human life is to be found within its few lines.

Consider what desolation good men have been called upon to realise. Never let us shut our eyes to the suffering aspect of human life. On the contrary, let us dwell upon it with attentive solicitude, that we may wonder, and learn to pray and trust. It is the mystery of the ages that good men should not always be strong, successful, triumphant. This mystery has bewildered the saints of all time. They have seen what they did not expect to behold, the wicked prospering on every hand, and they have said, Surely the Lord hath forgotten his own, and the saints are no longer of any account with Heaven, for they have no bread, they are in great darkness and stress and fear; whilst evil men are opening the door and entering in, the poor abandoned saints are but appealing for admission, and no voice from within answers their lost appeal. There are good men in the sick-chamber who will never leave it until they go to heaven; there are saintly men who have lost every possession they had in the world, and have sat down, as it were, in ashes, being themselves clothed in sackcloth. Looking at them narrowly and exclusively, who could believe that "Our Father which art in heaven" is not a mocking prayer, a lie which men tell to themselves, when they are in deepest sorrow? There are good men and women who have lost their last child, and who listen for voices they will never, never hear again on all the earth. Yet they are good men, men of prayer, spirits that trust the Cross, and say they have no other plea than the blood that was shed for the remission of sins. Realise this, and when the infidel mocks you with it acknowledge it; within given limits it is so; do not attempt to apologise for it or explain it away; accept the stern history, the naked, chilling, desperate fact. But in the darkness grope for the temple. God's church is open at night as well as at day. Say nought to the mocker, for he is not worth heeding, but say to the poor suffering heart itself, Wait: joy cometh in the morning: it is very sore now; the wind is very high, the darkness is very dense; our best plan, poor heart! is to sit down and simply wait for God: he will come we cannot tell when, in the early part of the night, or not until the crowing of the cock, but come he will; it hath pleased him to keep the times and seasons wholly to himself, without revelation to narrow human intellects; let us then wait, and there is a way of waiting that amounts to prayer: poor heart! we have no words, we could not pray in terms, because we should be mocked by the echo of our own voice, but there is a way of sitting still that by its heroic patience wins the battle.

Consider what changes have been wrought in human experience. You thought you could never sing again when that last tremendous blow was dealt upon your life, yet you are singing more cheerfully now than you ever sung in any day of your history; you thought when you lost commercial position that you never really could look up again, for your heart was overpowered, and behold, whilst you were talking such folly, a light struck upon your path, and a voice called you to still more strenuous endeavour, and today you who saw nothing before you but the asylum of poverty are adding field to field and house to house. Job cursed the day of his birth: we must not close the Book of Job after reading the chapter of malediction; we must read on, for at the end of the book there is wedding and birth and feast, and a song of those who gather harvests with both hands, the shouting of triumph, the music of victory. Hold on; be steadfast; hope constantly unto the end; what time you are afraid, pray more; what time the enemy mocks you and says, Where is now thy God? answer him without defiance, with the calmness which is better than violence. If then you can say "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," you may win more by your patience than ever you could win by your excitement; you can do more by suffering well borne than ever was done by speech well spoken. You have been raised again from the very dead, you have forgotten your desolation, and you are now sitting like guests invited by heaven's own King at heaven's great banqueting table. Hold on; the end will judge all things. Yet be patient and tender-hearted to men who are but men, who are where you once were. It is not a sign of strength to mock a man who is down,

What is the joy that is depicted in this text? It is religious joy. The joy created by religion is intelligent. It is not a bubble on the stream, it has reason behind it; it is strengthened and uplifted, supported and dignified, by logic, fact, reality. Religious joy is healthy. It is not spurious gladness, it is the natural expression of the highest emotions. Religious joy is permanent. It does not come for a moment, and vanish away as if it were afraid of life and afraid of living in this cold earth-clime; it abides with men. It does not always assume forms such as commend themselves to the vulgar and the uncritical: there is a silence that is ecstatic, there is an appearance of gloom upon the face that but veils the wedding feast that is proceeding in the soul. The vulgar would have us in one continual grin, in one never-broken smile of folly; they know not what it is to keep house in the heart, to have banqueting within; they cannot tell what it is to see at once the mystery of sorrow which shrouds the face, and the mystery of joy which gladdens the heart. We must not take our judgment from them. We consult them on nothing else it would be superlative madness to consult them regarding religious education and progress.

Let us know by way of application that there is only one real deliverance from desolateness. That is a divine deliverance. We cannot release ourselves from captivity; we are inside the prison-door, and the key is outside. It is in vain to patter against God's granite; we do but hurt our poor fingers in trying to break down God's masonry. There is no deliverance to the soul of man but by processes known only to him who made that soul the mystery that it is. Let us flee then to the living God; lot us be forced to prayer. God has to take in men under every variety of condition and feeling; some reluctantly go, but if they go they are received; they have not gone along the line of argument, but they have been driven along the valleys of desolation. Some men would never have prayed if they had had banquets at home; they learned to pray by the altar of their own empty table. Some would never have gone to Christ if they could have kept a fire in their own grate at home, but when the cold struck them, chilled them, when the cold lay upon them like a burden of ice, then they began to wonder if there was no way upward, if surely there was none on the right hand or on the left. Remember that there is only one fountain of real joy. The fool can have no gladness; his life is an empty attempt to make himself glad. There is nothing in folly that can satisfy the soul, and the soul can never really eat and drink to its own nutrition and satisfaction except at the table of the Lord. We have taken our pitcher to many wells, and we have drawn from their depths nothing but crystal poison. We have accepted many an invitation to the feast spread by reason and by natural hospitality and by cunning invention, and the more we have eaten the less satisfied we have become.

It is in vain to seek joy except in one direction. There is a fool's laugh that can be had cheaply enough, there are jests that will writhe the faces of ignorance into smiles that have in them no gladness; but if you would be really restored, if you would really be delivered from desolation and sadness, behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. Once this was a speech eloquent, pointed, but only a speech: now it is a fact; men millions strong crowd around the witness to testify that they themselves have seen God's Son and are satisfied with an ineffable contentment. Not to have seen Christ is to have seen only darkness.