Jeremiah 12:5 If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, then how can you contend with horses? and if in the land of peace… These words are a remonstrance which God addresses to His prophet, Jeremiah. He had the most shrinking, sensitive nature of all the Hebrew prophets. Yet his task was to make a stand for God in the time of his nation's direst need. Babylon, the great heathen power, had thrown a cord round the neck of Israel which it tightened every year. Its forces were closing round Jerusalem with the slow but sure pressure of a military advance. And the people all the while were unaroused, like sleeping children in a house that has caught fire. The politicians trusted to their diplomacy; they hoped to fight the brute force of the enemy with their wits. The priests and the prophets drugged the conscience of the nation with the facile phrases of a lazy and stupid trust. Jeremiah stood out alone, like against the world, hated alike by the statesmen and the leaders of the religious world. There are usually, we say, two sides to every question, and the case for Jeremiah's foes was something like this. He seemed to them a tiresome herald of ill, prating always of fateful things because he had a gloomy nature. He seemed to be without any patriotic feeling, constantly saying hard things about his own country, and glorifying Babylon as the avenging instrument of God. So it had come about, long ere the last crisis of Jerusalem, that the Jews felt a bitter hatred of Jeremiah. We have read (Jeremiah 11:18; Jeremiah 12:6) how, somewhat early in his history, some of them tried to kill him. The prophet was paying a visit to his native village of Anathoth, a few miles from Jerusalem. He was ignorant of danger. And all the while his own townsmen and brethren were plotting his death. But for some special providence of God his career would have reached a too early close. But now, when the danger is past, a strange thing is seen. There is no record of any psalm of deliverance to help the praise of our later generations. But, as if in its place, there falls on the prophet one of those terrible moods of depression when, in Bunyan's language, he is held in the grasp of Giant Despair and thrown into Doubting Castle. Why must he face with single hand the troops of the wicked? Why cannot God strike in and cut short the struggle? He who by nature was sensitive as a reed became by God's grace as an iron pillar and a brazen wall. And so it is here. In the words of the text, the demon of depression is driven off and retires for a season. Jeremiah crushes the cowardly thoughts that had arisen within him by the vision of sterner trials in the future. The brush with the men of Anathoth is a small affair, a mere race with footmen; Jerusalem in the days to come will see him try his speed against horses. Soon he will look back to the present time as to a mild land of peace, girdled by a summer-dried river. Ah, you say, we have little in common with a great prophet. He was set to do a loud-resounding task, while our days are passed in obscurity, far away from the roar of a battle of the nations. Yes, but all human lives run up to a centre. The inner struggle of every soul is the same, whether it is fought out in the cottage, or in the tent of the soldier, or in the fiery heart of the prophet. It has come readily to men to liken human life to a stream descending to the sea. But it is not the precise image of the text, which rather compares the life of man to the flat meadows that adjoin some mighty stream. For long months of the year there is a time of holy quiet. The flowers are gay, the grass is green, the river murmurs gently as if singing a song of rest, the boys and girls are shouting at their play. But one day a change seems to come over the stream. Its gentle murmur swells into a threatening roar. The days of dreadful ease are gone; desolation looks men in the face with a grey and grim reality; the evil days have come. That is the image of the text. What of its practical meaning? There are times when our duty seems almost easy, when it is not hard to beat off temptation. Such times are our "land of peace." But there are other times, when the need is sore and the contest cruel. Every nerve is strained. Such times are for us as "the swelling of Jordan." The text puts into heightened and rhythmic words a very obvious truth, which surely wins emphasis and illumination from the stern history to which it belongs. It should make us cease moaning over our trivial griefs, when we find that God speaks so lightly of a serious trouble. Jeremiah had barely escaped with his life, yet his foretaste of the bitterness of death is compared to "a land of peace." He gets no petting, and is promised no relief from such trial in the future. He is merely asked to reflect on the principle that underlies all moral heroism. "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much." Let us follow out this principle in two or three illustrations. Take first of all the everyday calls of duty, what Keble has named "the trivial round, the common task." To all of us, at some time in our lives, there come periods of crisis when a heavy demand is made on our store of courage and endurance. Then it is that the dire need sifts our character and declares the moral poverty or wealth. As the man is, so is his strength. The text tells us that this great clay of "the swelling of Jordan" is bound together with our easy days in "the land of peace." Those deeds of vast renown, which the grace of God calls out on occasion, do not come flashing out of a background of moral laxity or shame. They are not idle, lawless lights of heaven, coming we know not whence, going we know not whither. They have been prepared for by long and quiet days of lowly service. In the "Character of the Happy Warrior" Wordsworth insists that a soldier's brave feats of daring in battle are just the outcome of faithfulness to duty in days of peace. In "the mild concerns of ordinary life" the genuine hero is training for a mightier task. Suddenly he confronts some awful moment, weighty with solemn issues. Then the hidden strength leaps forth. He is "attired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired." Water; we say, does not rise higher than its source, and certainly men and women do not leap to a height and marvel of self-sacrifice until their daily practice has subdued them to a resolute self-mastery. Take, as a second illustration of the principle of the text, our everyday experiences of temptation and moral defeat. The man who brings his conscience to bear on his everyday tasks is training for higher things in a future that may rush on him at any moment. But there is also the sad opposite of that truth. Neither for good nor for evil can we wholly cut ourselves away from our past life. The years that are no more have a part on shaping the years that are to be. The fall from grace today was easier because yesterday you did not strive mightily against sin. Habits and desires move on to their climax and fulfilment. Alike in the kingdom of God and the kingdom of sin, you have no permission to stand still. Every day of our lives puts us to some proof or trial. These things are so, yet it is only in our high moments that we fully realise and act upon them. We forget that the oft-repeated story of a ruined life tells not of one great fall, but of many little ones. Men overlook the tiny breaches which sin has made in the wall of resistance. They are weary of this endless running with the footmen. After long days there steals on them the drowsiness of the enchanted ground. But the weariness is fatal, as the soft sleep of the tired traveller amid the falling snow. Let us remember that those periods of moral crisis struck even upon the stainless Christ. He was tempted, an apostolic writer tells us, in all points as we are. But temptation concentrated its powers in great turning points of His history, in the wilderness and in the agony of the garden, in the remonstrance of a chosen apostle and in the hour of darkness on the Cross. All the disastrous forces with which the moral atmosphere was charged gathered themselves together and burst in furious storm. And the life of Jesus resembles in this the life of men. All our history is in part a history of temptation. But there are times in the lives of all of us when temptation concentrates its powers. Our life is no longer a series of skirmishes. Now at length it is a pitched battle with the enemy in full armour, and all his forces set in array against us. (D. Conner, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses? and if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan? |
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