'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.