Jeremiah 7:12-14 But go you now to my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first… It is to many minds impossible to avoid a feeling of deep sadness when we look upon the ruins, noble even in their desolation, of some former beautiful and august sanctuary of God. There are many such scattered over this and other lands: Tintern, Furness, Melrose, etc. Our imagination pictures them when in the zenith of their glory, with their many stately towers and tapering spires, their long-drawn aisles and lofty roofs, the glorious vista of high-arched nave and choir and glittering sanctuaries stretching away further still in the dim distance, the gleaming altars, the magnificent service, the vast throng of kneeling worshippers, the soul-enchanting music, and the murmur of myriad prayers. The memories of saintly men and women who have worshipped and are buried there crowd upon the mind, and we wistfully wonder where and why that consecrated genius has flown which had power to rear for God shrines so glorious as those whose ruins we are beholding must once have been. It is sad to think of such glory and beauty as these forsaken shrines once had gone forever. The Jews who came back from the Captivity wept when they thought of the glory of the ancient temple, which they never more might see. But if the departure of material glory may cause sadness to the mind, how much more the departure of that which is spiritual! If we mourn that we shall no more have the presence of some fair temple of the Lord, how much more when we lose the Lord of the temple! And it is such sadder loss that Shiloh, the God-forsaken shrine, has to tell of. And we observe upon it that - I. THERE ARE FEW MORE MOURNFUL HISTORIES THAN THAT OF SHILOH. Shiloh was one of the earliest and most sacred of the Hebrew sanctuaries. There for full three hundred years the ark of God remained and the priests of the Lord ministered. As soon as the promised land was mainly subdued, Joshua brought the ark of God from Gilgal, near the Jordan, to Shiloh. The place was probably chosen for its seclusion and hence its safety, it being off the great highways of the land. Bethel, which otherwise might have been chosen as especially sacred, was yet in the hands of the Canaanites. Hence Shiloh, in the territory of the powerful tribe of Ephraim, and of their great ancestor Joseph, a tribe which more and more had been coming to the front amongst their brethren, was chosen for the sanctuary of the ark of God. There, as afterwards at Jerusalem, "the tribes went up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the Name of the Lord." What glad festivals; what gracious deliverances; what Divine responses to their inquiring of the Lord; what holy memories of thronging worshippers, of accepted sacrifices, of saintly priests and prophets who had dwelt there, were all associated with that shrine at Shiloh! There Eli ministered, and Hannah came to present her offerings, to pour out her prayers and to pay her vows. There she brought Samuel, and there the Lord called him to his high service as he ministered before him. All their truest and noblest life drew its inspiration from the God who had placed his Name there, and whom there they went to worship. But at length, under the rule of Eli, that well-meaning but weak-willed high priest, priesthood and people alike sank down into a state of moral and religious degradation from which Eli was powerless to deliver them. His own sons led the way in abominable wickedness, and became sons of Belial even beyond others. So low had they fallen, that they had come to regard the ark of God as a kind of fetish, and hence they carried it down to battle against the Philistines, thinking thereby to certainly win the day. But the ark of God was taken, its besotted priests slain, and Eli, hearing the dreadful tidings suddenly, died, a worn-out and broken-hearted old man. From that hour, as the seventy-eighth psalm tells, "God forsook Shiloh, the tent which he placed among men;... he refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the tribe of Ephraim." And it was all because, as the same psalm tells, Israel "tempted and provoked the most high God, and kept not his testimonies: but turned back, and dealt deceitfully like their fathers: they were turned aside like a deceitful bow. For they provoked him to anger with their high places, and moved him to jealousy with their graven images." Wherefore "he was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel." And now, ages after, Jeremiah bids the people of his day go to Shiloh, and see what God did to it for the wickedness of the people. They might trace out, perhaps, the foundations of her ancient walls, and discover the vestiges of the former sanctuary; but now no altar bore the sacred fire, the smoke of no sacrifice ascended, no priest ministered, no God gave answer, no song of the Lord went up; the whole place was probably ravaged and overthrown by the enemies of Israel, who had carried off their great treasure, the ark of God. Well might the wife of Phinehas, in the hour of her agony, call her new-born, but now fatherless, and soon to be altogether her orphan, child, Ichabod, for indeed the glory had departed, the ark of God was taken, and the Lord had forsaken Shiloh. Oh, the sorrow, the shame, the unavailing remorse which would overwhelm the faithless priesthood and the godless people, when they beheld that God-abandoned shrine, and remembered wherefore this calamity had come upon them! Yes, this story is a sad one; but it is most salutary also, and therefore we may well heed the word of the Lord which says to us, ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my Name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel." But we observe - II. THAT SHILOH HAS MANY PARALLELS. Shiloh is not the only God-forsaken shrine of which the Bible tells or of which we have had knowledge. No; there are all too many like it. There was the temple of the Lord in Jeremiah's time. All its splendor, its solemn ritual, its lavish sacrifices, its ever-burning altar fire, could not save it. The stern sentence went forth against it, and it was burnt with fire and laid in ashes on the ground. There was the temple which was afterwards built on the return from Captivity, and which was so beautiful and adorned in the time of our Lord; concerning that, too, Jesus said, "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!" And it was the same with many Churches, those "spiritual houses" which, after our Lord's time and in his Name, were reared for a habitation of God through the Spirit. The Christian Church at Jerusalem. The honor of being the mother Church of Christendom was taken from her and transferred to Antioch, and ultimately it was overwhelmed altogether in the destruction that came on the city in which it was gathered. And there were the Churches of Asia; their "candlestick was removed out of its place," as the Lord warned them would be the case, and now secular historians bear their testimony to the truth of that warning word. Gibbon tells how "in the loss of Ephesus the Christians deplored the fall of the first angel, the extinction of the first candlestick of the Revelation; the desolation is complete; and the Temple of Diana or the Church of Mary will equally elude the search of the curious traveler. The circus and the three stately theatres of Laodicea are now peopled with wolves and foxes. Sardis is reduced to a miserable village; the god of Mahomet, without a rival or a son, is invoked in the mosques of Thyatira and Pergamos; and the populousness of Smyrna is supported by the foreign trade of Franks and Armenians. Philadelphia alone has been saved by prophecy or courage. At a distance from the sea, encompassed on all sides by the Turks, her valiant citizens defended their religion and freedom above four score years; and at length capitulated with the proudest of the Ottomans. Among the Greek colonies and Churches of Asia, Philadelphia is still erect; a column in a scene of ruins." They have thus all disappeared, as Christian Churches almost utterly; they are as Shiloh and Jerusalem - their houses in which they worshipped God left unto them desolate. And there have been many other Churches since, and some nearer our own time and in our own land. And many still, perhaps, need sorely the admonitory counsel to go to Shiloh, and see what the Lord has done there. But not in material edifices alone, nor even in those gathered communities to which more properly the name of Churches belongs, need we go to find instances of God-forsaken shrines. For inasmuch as we all are "temples of the Holy Ghost," so St. Paul tells us, and our own experience confirms his word, it is possible to find only too many illustrations of this same mournful fact. Take the ever-memorable example and warning of the fallen apostle Judas. What a shrine of the Holy Ghost he once was! How richly gifted! how gloriously endowed! He came with the rest, saying, "Lord, even the devils are subject to us through thy Name." He with the rest" ate and drank in Christ's presence, and in his Name did many wonderful works." He enjoyed the fellowship of Christ, and by him was sent forth in his Name. But behold him giving place to the devil, yielding his soul up to the demon of covetousness and worldly ambition, and then acting as the guide to them who arrested the Lord, betraying the Son of man with a kiss, and then, when too late he awoke to see the madness and horror of what he had done, rushing forth to seek and find a suicide's grave in the Aceldama, "the field of blood," purchased by the price of his traitorous gain. And Ananias and Sapphira and Demas and yet others, what are they all but deplorable instances and names of these God-forsaken shrines? And have we not known such? Men who prayed, and worshipped, and taught, and preached, and. then, having denied the Lord who bought them, fell away, and found henceforth nothing but "a fearful looking for of judgment" and of the "fiery indignation" of God destined to be poured out on all such as they. Ah! it is a sight which might well make angels weep, and which drew forth the bitter tears of the Son of God himself. III. AND IN EVERY CASE THE CAUSE OF THIS FORSAKING OF THEM BY GOD WAS ONE AND THE SAME. It was always "wickedness." Not any outward circumstance, not any of those secondary causes which we are so apt to regard as the real cause. But this which these verses so plainly declare. It was so even in those ruined edifices to which we referred at the beginning of this homily. History will tell you how gross immorality and horrible corruption found a too-ready home in those fair fabrics which had been reared for far other purposes and with far other design. But "wickedness" having made them its haunt and home, the people, roused to fierce wrath, rose up and tore them down, and their gray, ivy-clad stones utter forth to this day such message as that in our text. And in all those other instances to which we have pointed, whether temples made with hands, whether Churches or individual men, it has ever been sin, sin, which has wrought all this evil. And in that every-day fact of bodily death We have the standing type of this terrible truth, "The wages of sin is death." That body once so bright, so full of energy, so lit up with intelligence and love, so possessed too, it may have been, with the Spirit of God, so fall so lovely to look upon when life dwelt in it, now in death, - what is it but a God-forsaken shrine, and hence doomed to return, "earth to earth, dust to dust, and ashes to ashes?" We are so accustomed to death that this its solemn lesson we are ever forgetting or putting out of sight. IV. BUT ALL THESE SHILOHS HAVE A MESSAGE FROM GOD UNTO US, ACCORDING TO WHAT WE ARE. We every one of us are either examples of these forsaken ones, or becoming so, or, blessed be God, still habitations for him through the Spirit. Now, if we be already forsaken of God, then if this fact be - as surely it should be, and as we trust it is - a matter of sore distress to us, then there is a gracious word to us if we be willing to hear it. All of us were once "temples of God." We can look back to the time when none of the unclean spirits that now haunt and harm us so terribly had any home in our souls; when thoughts were pure, hands undefiled, and our lips unpolluted with evil. Our fathers and mothers brought us to be baptized, or in other ways recognized the blessed truth that we belonged to the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And in our childhood days we, as all children are, were members of the kingdom of heaven. But what are we now? O God, it is dreadful to think of what some are now] The desolate ruins of once glorious Churches; the lifeless bodies that we carry to the grave are but faint types of what some of these God-forsaken ones have become. And can it be that any are willing to continue so, and thus make it inevitable that God should sweep you away into the hell of all corruption? Oh no; you cannot be willing that that should be. Well, then, if you tremble at such doom, as well you may, listen: God will re-enter his shrine, and make you once again his temples. Yes, he will do that. He will "restore your souls and lead you in," etc. But first, as when Hezekiah cleansed the temple, you must cast out the manifold uncleanness that is there. There must be a thorough purging, a real repentance. God will not come back to a sin-inhabited and evil-loving soul. You must "thoroughly amend your ways." This is indispensable. See how in this chapter and throughout his Word God insists upon this. And then, as the high priest was wont to do, come bearing the blood of atonement into the presence of God; come, that is, pleading the Name of Jesus for acceptance and pardon and restoration, - and you shall behold, in the shrine of your soul, the cloud of glory once again shining there and the presence of God again manifested there. Thus come day by day, and you shall find how Christ saves "to the uttermost all that," etc. But are you of those whom God is now forsaking? Is the dread process of crowding out God by the bringing into the shrine of your heart those many things God hates and with which he will not abide, going on in you? Ah! that may be so. As others, so you were once the temple of the Holy Ghost, and perhaps there came a day when more than ever you welcomed him as your Ruler, because he had taken of the things of Christ and had shown them unto you. You made your open confession and avowal of your desire to be ruled and governed by him; you pledged yourself by his help to be Christ's faithful servant always. And for a time you were so: you were careful, conscientious; you remembered your Lord's word, "Watch and pray;" you readily abandoned all that stood between you and the doing of his will; you walked with God. But a change has come over you. One by one you received into your heart likings, and desires, and beliefs, and dispositions which were contrary to the Spirit of Christ. These suggestions you listened to, their counsels you obeyed. And so the love of the world fastened on you, propensities and habits which war against the soul took hold of you, and now you, whose heart was once a shrine of God, will, if the sad process I have spoken of goes on much longer, be forsaken of him altogether. Oh that the consideration of the doom of Shiloh may fill us with a holy fear, and lead us to such prayer as that which the well-known verse expresses! - "Search me, O Lord, and try my heart, For thou that heart canst see, And turn each cursed idol out That dares to rival thee." But some of you are to be congratulated that you are still temples of God, still shrines of the Holy Ghost. Well, then, cherish his presence as the greatest joy of your life. For "he is your life." You would not invite to meet and abide with a dear and honored earthly friend those with whom you well knew he had no sympathy nor they with him, who were distasteful and hostile to him. You would not treat an earthly friend so. Be careful, then, not so to treat the Spirit of God, who now dwells within you. Be full of solicitude not to grieve him, yet more to do naught that would drive him from you. "Walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." So shall God dwell in you and you in God, and that more and more to your ever-increasing strength and purity and joy. Thus though, as we have now done, you may go in devout thought to Shiloh, and behold what God has done there, yet you shall be able with thankful joy to know that never, never shall you be as that God-forsaken shrine. - C. Parallel Verses KJV: But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. |
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