II. The CAnsE of pbaise. Praise and gladness always have some cause, but tl •■ question remains to be asked whether it be a cause which God will approve. If it lie gladness rising out of some selfish triumph or gain, then tlie joy will assuredly i><' turned into mourning. But here the goodness of Jehovah is emphatically describi d as being the cause of the joy and singing. There is something substantial to sing about— coin, and wine, and oil, and cattle : the appropriate produce of the land, some- thing that is at once the reward of righteous striving and the gift of an approviiu God. Everything is right externally and internally. The very life of the people i- like a watered garden, which surely is a very suggestive expression to indicate that all is as it ought to be. A watered garden suggests a piece of knd worth cultivating, wi II cultivated, and supplied with every factor contributing to fruitfulness. But what lias been said of the place of praise must also be said of the cause of praise. Com and wine and all tlie rest of the good things are only symbnls of deeper blessings that have to do with the satisfaction of the heart. " Man livcth not by bread alone, but by every word that piuceedeth out of the moutli of Gud." It is an easy thing for him, if needs be, to make up the defects of nature, which he showed at the feeding of the fivi.
44 THE BOOK OF THE PKOPKET JEREMIAH, [oh. xxxi. 1—40
tliousand. Yet, in spite of this, famines are not always interfered with. God i* no< solicitous to go beyond what he has provided in nature for the support of natural lifa 15ut he is solicitous that we should apprehend the great spiritual abundance within our reach. The deepest meaning of this prophecy is that spiritual men only can really praise God, because they are praisinj; him out of hearts that are being sustained by the richness of spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
I II. The obbtaintt of pbaisb. The satisfied heart must praise, else there is a proof that the heart is not really satisfied. Satisfaction can no more be concealed than dissatis- faction. When in the writings of the apostles we come across outbursts of doxology, it is just what we might expect as being in harmony with the greatness of the blessings received. And this is just what often makes the praise part of worship eminently unsatisfactory, that men are thanking God for what they have not received. All compositions having praise and thanksgiving for their elements, and being successful compositions, must, by the very nature of the case, owe their origin to some actual experience of Gud's goodness. Hence it is important in this passage to notice how three things are bound togetlier in the one prediction. 1. There is the gift of God. 2. The consequent satisfaction. 3. The irrepressible joy. And what greater gift can we have from God than a heart filled with pure, abiding joy, free from reproach, free irom apprehension?
IV. The univbrbalitt of thk fbaibb. Young and old, priests and people, are joined together in the common song. God's spiritual blessings are for all. There is much significance in that promise, " I will satiate the soul of the priests with fatness." That means that the people are right religiously, and that again means that the priests are attentive to their own pro|ier duty. Liberality to all Christian institutions, to all that is truly evangelistic and charitable, to all that is in the way of the highest ministry to mankind, is • sign of spiritual prosperity. — Y.
Vers. 15 — 17. — Sorrowing mothen and their consolatum. L Thk OBiErs ot BEREAVED MOTHERS. There is an innumerable company of women who have seen the children die to whom they themselves had given birth, and Rachel is their great representative. She stands before us here as the mother of a nation ; for surely it only spoils a grand poetical idea to attach her to some tribes rather than others. She sees the nation which sprang from her husband Jacob going from the land of promise into captivity, and straightway she reckons it as a dead nation. Bear in mind distinctly that the mourning is not over dead individuals, but over a dead nation. The indi- viduals went on living, but the nation in its pride and privilege was gone. So one might think of some representative spirit bewailing dead Greece and dead Rome. The figure, moreover, derives its strength from what must have been very frequent in the land of Israel, as in every land before or since, namely, the sad sight presented by a mother weeping over her dead child. The mother's sorrow is unique ; its elements can only be imperfectly apprehended by others. The object of so much hope, solicitude, and pleasure is gone. The proper order of things is reversed. The mother should see the child grow to manhood or womanhood, and then go first into the unseen world. Death, coming in this way, seems to furnish a plausible ground of complaint, and if anything can be said to lessen the mystery and the sorrow and make hope rise in the heart, it should be said.
II. Consolation in buoh time of grief. The real Rachel needed no such consolation. But bereaved mothers both need it and can have it. They have worked for something else than death and the breaking off of their purposes, and their work shall not be in vain. Death is a great deceiver in making his power seem greater than it is. When children are taken from this world into the next, opportunities are not lost, they are only changed. God will assuredly not allow the highest joys belonging to human nature to suffer from a cause so purely external as the duration of temporal existence. When Herod slew the children at Bethlehem, this prophecy had a sort of fulfilment, and surely so far as it was fulfilled it was fulfilled altogether. To every one of those weeping mothers it might have been said, " Refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears." The weeping and the tears are natural enough, but after all they have no sufficient ground in reason. As a general rule, life must be taken with all its risks »nd casualties, seeing that risk and casualty, as we call them, are after til, according
OH. zxxi. 1— 40.] THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET JEREMIAH. M