Vers. 27— 30.— The physical side of the Messianic blessing. Its effect npon the heart of tlie pardoned sinners will be such that they will fnlly recognize the justice of the Divine judgments. There will no longer be any room for a certain favourite proverb ; the death of a sinner will be imiversally acknowledged to be the reward of his per- sonal sin (Keil).
Ver. 27. — I will sow, etc The passage may be illustrated by Isa. xxvi. 18, wheie the Church of the restored exiles is repre- sented as complaining that the land (of Judah) has not been brought into a state of security, and that inhabitants (in sufficient numbers) have not been begotten. Similarly he^e, only the tone of complaint is wanting. 'Ihe thought has suggested itself — Will the Israelites of the latter days be sufiScient to fill up the land ? Yes, is the answer of revelation ; for Jehovah will perform a wonder, and make the people and their cattle so prolific that it will seem as if children and young cattle grew up like plants.
Ver. 28. — ^As I have watched ... so will I watch, etc. The allusion is to the twofold commission given to the prophet (ch. i. 10), which was partly to pluck up and to destroy, partly to build and to plant. Jehovah has hitherto been " watchful " (another point of contact with cli. i. ; see on ch. i. 12) over the fulfilment of the destructive prophecies ; he will now be equally zealous for that of the promises of regeneration.
Ver. 29.— Have eaten a soui grape ; rather, (our grapes. The prophet (like EiekieL
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THE BOOK OF THE PBOPHET JEREMIAH, [oh. xixi. 1— 10.
ek. ZTi'ii.) condemns the use of this proverb, and declares that the sinner is the artificer of his own ruin. At first sight, it may seem as if Jeremiah opposes the second command- ment, which describes how God " visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the chil- dren " (Ezod. zx. 5). This, however, can- not really be, for he endorses this declaration later on (oh. zxxii 18). The fact is that he is not BO much condemuing the proverb, as the blasphemous application of it made by the Jews of his time. It is an eternal truth that sin perpetuates itself (except by the miracles of grace) in the children of trans- gressors, and intensified sin leads to inten- sified punishment. Bnt the children of transgressors do not cease to be responsible for their own share in the sin ; — this was the truth which Jeremiah's contemporaries ig- aored. He does not deny the solidarity of the family or the race, but he superadds the neglected truth of the special responsibility of the individual. This is one among many evidences of the deepening sense of indi- vidual life in the later period of the Jewish monarchy. (A somewhat different view is offered by Delitzsch, ' Messianic Prophecies,' § 50. Accordiug to him, Jeremiah lool^s forward to a time when the individual shall be liberated from the consequences of his solidarity with his race, and when person- ality shall be "invested with its rights." But can the individual be thus liberated ?) Vers. 31 — 34. — The new covenant. A prophecy which stands out from the rest of Jeremiah by its evangelical character, in which it strongly reminds us of parts of the second half of Isaiah. The doctrine of the covenant is "the thread which binds to- gether the hopes and the fears of the pro- phet, his certainty of coming woe, his certainty of ultimate blessing." A coven- ant was granted of old, but that covenant had on man's side been broken. Still " the gifts and calling of God are not to be retracted " (Bom, zi. 29) ; and Jeremiah felt that the very nature of God guaranteed the renewal of the covenant on a new basis. "Covenant" is, no doubt, an unfortunate rendering. Tlie Hebrew word so rendered means, primarily, a decision or appointment, and there is a whole group of passages in the Old Testament which requires this meaning (see the present writer's note, in ' The Prophecies of Isaiah,' on Isa. xlii. 6). We retain it, however, as that with wliich the reader is familiar, and only remind him that God is everything, and man nothing, in fixing the terms of the transaction. The characteristics of the new covenant are ^ three : (1) The relation between God and ' his people is protected from all risk by God l]imself making the people what he would have them be. (2) " Whereas, in the
case of the old, the law of duty was written on . dbhs of stone, in the c^ise of the new the law is to he written on the heart ; where- as, under the old, owing to the ritual charac- ter of the worship, the knowledge of God and his will was a complicated affair, in which men generally were helplessly depen- dent on a professional class, under the new, the worship of God would be reduced to the simplest spiritual elements, and it would be in every man's power to know God at first hand, the sole requisite for such knowledge am would then be required being a pure heart." And (3) " whereas, under the old, the provisions for the cancelling of sin were very unsatisfactory, and utterly unfit to perfect the worshipper as to conscience, by dealing thoroughly with the problem of guilt, under the new God would o^rant to his people a real, absolute, and perennial forgiveness, so that the abiding relation be- tween him and them should be a^i if sin had never existed" (Dr. A. B. Bruce, in The Expoeitm, January, 1880, pp. 70, 71). Comp. the abolition of the ark indicated in cb. iii. 16. — The inspired author of Hebrews tells us (viii. 6 — 13), speaking generally, that this promise delivered through Jeremiah was fulfilled in the gospel. But it must be remembered that the gospel has not yet taken form outwardly, except in a compa- ratively meagre sense. If the Jews as a nation (that is, the better part or kernel of Israel) should embrace the gospel, not neces- sarily iu the logical expression familiar to the West, but in its essential facts and truths, we should see quite another embodiment of the promise, and feel the spiritual im- pulse in ourselves as we have not yet done. It seems appropriate, in conclusiun, to quote a finely expressed passage from De Quin- cey's exposition of the New Testament term lj.erivoia. Without pledging ourselves to the absolute correctness of his explanation of that word, his language may be well applied to Jeremiah's prophecy. " What would have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to transfigurate tlie celestial mechanics ; if he had said, ' I will create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation;' briefly,*! will make new earth and new heavens' ? And yet a thousand times more awful it was to un- dertake the writing of new laws npon the spiritual conscience of man."