The Pulpit Commentary — Jeremiah — Volume 1 — Section 54

perish, to doom yourself to the pangs of an insatiable hunger and a quenchless thirst. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee," etc. (John xvii. 3). '!'his is death eternal-not to know him, to refuse the knowledge of him, to dream that you can live without him. TI. THE FOLLY AND EXCEEDING SINFULYESS OF BIN. The" two evils JI here ~roken of arc but two forms, two sides, of one and the same thing. There is the self-willed departure from God, and there is the endeavour in that to kad a self-determined and ~elf-suflicicmt life. 1. They have forsaken me. All sin is a forsaking of God. Adam tnr □ ed his back on God when he listened to the voice of the tempter. The prophet rebukes here the shameful idolatries of the people. Think what idolatry means. It lias, no doubt., its fairer side, in which it is seen to be the ignorant' but still honest expression of the religious sentiment in men--:-the blind" feeling after God if haply 1hey may find him." But think how it arose, and what its issues have been. St. Paul tells us how it was born of the corruption of man's nature, and has ever since been the Satanic means of deepening that corruption (see Rom. i. 20, et seq.). So is it with every sinful life. It begins with a more or less intentional and deliberate renunciation of God. The exact point of departure may not be very definitely marked ; but as the life unfolds itself, the fact that this is its true meaning becomes more manifest. How mar- -vellous a picture of this dread reality of moral life does our Lord's parable of the prodigal supply ! Such is the history of prodigal souls. Happy are they who "come to them- scl-ves" before it is too late to return to the forsaken home of the Father. 2. The dream of a self-determined and self-contained life. "They have hewed them out cisterns" of 1 heir own, which shall render them, as they think, independent of the " Fountain of living waters." Here is the idea of a proud endeavour to find in one's self and one's own self-willed way all necessary good. Ilut it is altogether vain. The cisterns are miserably shallow, and they are "broken." It is true of every nian, indeed, that his satisfactions must spring from what he finds within rather than from his earthly sur- rounding~; but then he is "satisfied from himself" only because he has learnt to link himself with the Divine Source of all blessedness-the living God. " Here would we end our q nest; Alone are found in thee The life of perfect love, the rest Of immortality." w. EXPOSITION. CHAPTER m Ver. 1.-They eay, etc.; o.s the margin of Authorized Version correcL!y states, the That this chapter (to which the first four Hebrew simply has "saying." Various in- verses of eh. iv. ought to have been at- genious attempts ho.ve been made to explain tached) belongs to the time of Joaiah seems •this. Hitzig, for instance, followed by Dr. Payne Smith, thinks that •!saying" mo.y bo to be pro\'ed by ver. 6, and the years im- an unusual equivalent for" that is to say," mediately following the reformation ore •• for example," or the like; whil~ the Vul- not obscurely referred to in vers. 4, 10. gate and Rashi, followed by De Wette and Kaegelsbach gives a striking distribution Rosenmliller, assume o.n ellipsis, o.nd render, of its contents. The general subject is a "It is commonly said," or •• I might say." call to "return." First, the prophet shows pose But fe.r the most nat.ural way is to sup- that "saying" is 11, fro.gment of the that, in spite of Deut. xxiv. I, etc., a return. superticription of the prophecy, the re- is possible (vers. I-5). Then he describes mainder of which has been ,acciclentally succeBBively an invitation already uttered placed in ver. G, and tho.t we should read, in the past, and its sad results (vcrs. G-10), "And the word of the Lord came unto me and the co.ll which will, with a happier in the do.ye of Josiah the king, saying." So J. D. Michaelis, Ewald, Gro.f, No.egelsbach. issue, be sounded in the future (vers. 11- If a man put away his wife, The o.rgument 25); this is followed by an earnest exhorta- is founrletl on the Jaw of Dent. xxiv. 1-4, tion, addressod first to Isr&el and then to which forbade an Israelite who had divorced Judah (eh. iv. 1- -4). hie wife to take her again, if in the interval 011. m. 1-25.] THE .BOOK vF THE PROPHET JEREMIA.lI. 49