Ver. 23. — Lessons from the sea. "There is sorrow on the sea ; It cannot he quiet." We must remember that the sea to the Jew of old time was an object of almost unmixed terror. Nearly all the allusions in the Bible tell of its power and peril, never of its prcciousness and value to man. The Jews were a non-seafaiing people ; they dreaded it. In Deut. xxviii. 68 the being taken back to Egypt in ships is held out as a great threatening. They had no seaport worth mentioning. For centuries their seaboard was held by the Philistines. All their conceptions of it relate to its hurtful and destructive power (cf. Ps. cvii., " They that go down to the sea in ships," eta ; cf. also histories of the Deluge, Exodus, Jonah). The epithets applied to it are never pliasino;, but all more or less terrible. It is " raging," " roaring," " troubled," " breaking ships of Tarshish." Hezekiah failed to construct a navy. And hence St. John (Rev, xxi. 1), when telling of the beauty, the glory, and the joy of the new heavens and the new earth, is careful to add, "And there was no more sea." Now, this ver. 23 is an illustra- tion of this common Jewish feeling. But this Jewish feeling was a false one, though not so to them. For the sea is one of God's most blessed gifts to man., Life would be impossible without it. It has been justly called, "the life-blood of the land, as the blood is the life of the body. It is the vital fluid that animates our earth, and, should it disappear altogether, our fair green planet would become a heap of brown volcanic rocks and deserts, lifeless and worthless as the slag cast out from a furnace." We remember, too, how God said of the sea that it was " very good," and no mistaken Jewish ideas must be allowed to reverse that verdict. Think of: Its vapours. Each recurring harvest is really the harvest of the sea as much as of the land. For from the sea ascend those vapours which form the clouds and which descend in the feitilizing indispensable rain. Its currents, heaving along the sun-heated waters of sub-tropical climes, far away northward and southward, and giving to regions like our own that mild and on the whole beautiful clirriRte which we enjoy, whereas but for these warm waters of the sea our shores would be bleak, inhospitable, barren, and all but uninhabitable, like the shores of Labrador. Its breezes, so health-giving, imparting fresh life to the sick and feeble. It« beauty, ever presenting some fresh form of loveliness in colour, movements, outline, brilliancy. Its tides, sweeping up the mouths of our great rivers and estuaries, and all along our shores, washing; clean what else would be foul, stagnant, poisonous. Its salt- ness, ministering to the life of its inhabitants, retaining the warmth of the sun, and 80 aiding in the transmission of those currents spoken of above, preserving from corrup- tion, etc. But these thoughts were not those of the Jew. To him the sea was a type of manifold ills, and he rejoiced to believe that in his eternal home there should be "no more sea," For it told of unrest, instability, painful mystery, afflictions, separation, and hence impossiliility of intercourse and death. For all these the sea serves in the Scrip- tures as 1 symbol, as reference to the passages which speak of the sea will show. But it has its brighter teachings also. Note —
I. Its waves. See them in their blithe meny-heartedness, their buoyant spring and rush, coming in landwards from out the far distance, gleaming and sparkling aa thej
262 THE BOOK OF THE PKOPHET JEREMIAH, [oh. xlix. 1—39.
roll along, " clapping their hands " as David would say, praising God as they leap and bound in their joy. How often we have seen them coming in such fashion, long tnes of them ! — nearer and nearer they approach, the sea-breeze filling them with vigour, and the sunshine gleaming on them and adorning them with the most exquisite colour- ing, until at length the shelving shore stops them, and they fall over, and in masses of- snow-white foam, with merry rush and roar, they dash up the beach, brightening every- thing they toucli ; and then, their strength all gone, they glide down the sands and hie away back to their ocean-home, to begin the same joyous career all over again. Now, surely this perpetual process suggests the joyful vigour of the sea. True, its waves lie broken on the beach, their spray scattered far and wide, and it would seem as if that were but a poor ending for such a career. But not heeding that at all, the waves just gather up their strength again, and, never knowing when they are beaten, return again and again to the charge. And does not this teach us how we should meet rdmff and disapimntment 1 Not lie down and moan, but hie back again to the source of our strength once more, and then again to the work God has given us to do. They seem to say to us, "Never be discouraged; see us as we begin again after each rebuff, how we sparkle all the more that we are scattered and broken, and then go back to come on again. So do you. Hope continually, and praise God more and more."