Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922

by George Adam Smith

30. Therefore, Behold, I am against the prophets—Rede of the Lord—who steal My Words [pg 258] each from his mate. 31. Behold, I am against the prophets who fling out their tongues and rede a Rede.[552] 32. Behold, I am against the prophets of false dreams who tell them and lead My people astray by their falsehood and extravagance[553]—not I have sent them or charged them, nor of any profit whatsoever are they to this people.[554]

We have now all the material available for judgment upon Jeremiah's life-long controversy with the other prophets. His message and theirs were diametrically opposite. But both he and they spoke in the name of the same God, the God of their nation. Both were convinced that they had His Mind. Both were sure that their respective predictions would be fulfilled. Each repudiated the other's claim to speak in the name of their nation's God. With each it was an affair of strong, personal convictions, which we may grant, in the case of some at least of Jeremiah's opponents, to have been as honest as his. At first sight it may seem hopeless to analyse such equal assurances, based apparently on identical grounds, with the view of discovering psychological differences between them; and as if we must leave the issue [pg 259] to the course of events to which both parties confidently appealed. Even here the decision is not wholly in favour of the one as against the others. For Jeremiah's predictions in the Name of the Lord were not always fulfilled as he had shaped them. The northern executioners of the Divine Judgment upon Judah were not the Scythians as he at first expected; and—a smaller matter—Jehoiakim was not buried with the burial of an ass, dragged and flung out from the gates of Jerusalem, but slept with his fathers.[555] Yet these are only exceptions. Jeremiah's prophesying was in substance vindicated by history, while the predictions of the other prophets were utterly belied. This is part of Jeremiah's meaning when he says, Of no profit whatsoever are they to this people.[556]

What were the grounds of the undoubted difference? On penetrating the similar surfaces of Jeremiah's and the prophets' assurances we find two deep distinctions between them—one moral and one intellectual.

We take the moral first for it is the deeper. Both Jeremiah and the prophets based their predictions on convictions of the character of their God. But while the prophets thought of Him and of His relations to Israel from the level of that [pg 260] tribal system of religion which prevailed throughout their world, and upon that low level concluded that Yahweh of Israel could not for any reason forsake His own people but must avert from them every disaster however imminent; Jeremiah was compelled by his faith in the holiness and absolute justice of God to proclaim that, however close and dear His age-long relations to Israel had been and however high His designs for them, He was by His Nature bound to break from a generation which had spurned His Love and His Law and proved unworthy of His designs, and to deliver them for the punishment of their sins into the hands of their enemies.[557] What else can I do? Jeremiah hears God say. The opposing prophets reply, Not He! This is the ground of his charge against them, that they plan to make the people forget the Name, the revealed Nature and Character, of God, just as their fathers forgat Him through Baal,[558] confusing His Nature with that of the lower, local god.[559] This ethical difference between Jeremiah and the prophets is clear beyond doubt; it was profound and fundamental. There went with it of course the difference between their respective attitudes to the society of their time—on the one [pg 261] side his acute conscience of the vices that corrupted the people, on the other their careless temper towards those vices. They would heal the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly, saying it is well, it is well when well it is not, and in their prophesying there was no call to repentance.[560] Moreover, though this may not have been true of all of them, some both in Jerusalem and among the exiles were partakers of other men's sins; for Jeremiah charges them with the prevailing immoralities of the day—adultery and untruth. Instead of turning Judah from her sins, they were the promoters of the godlessness that spread through the land.[561] Though we have only Jeremiah's—or Baruch's—word for this, we know how natural it has ever been for the adherents, and for even some of the leaders, of a school devoid of the fundamental pieties to slide into open vice. Jeremiah's charges are therefore not incredible.

But the grounds of the difference between Jeremiah and the other prophets were also intellectual. Jeremiah had the right eye for events and throughout he was true to it. Just as he tells us how the will of God was sometimes suggested to him by the sight of certain physical objects—the almond-blossom that broke the winter of Anathoth, the boiling caldron, or the potter at his wheel—so the sight of that in which the physical [pg 262] and spiritual mingled, the disposition and progress of the political forces of his world, made clear to him the particular lines upon which the ethically certain doom of Judah would arrive. He had the open eye for events and allowed neither that horror of his people's ruin, of which he tells us his heart was full, nor any other motive of patriotism, nor temptations to the easier life that had surely been his by flattery and the promise of peace to his contemporaries, to blind him to the clear and just reading of his times, to which God's Word and his faith in the Divine character had opened his vision. On the contrary the other prophets, to take them at their best, were blinded by their patriotism, blinded by it even after Carchemish and when the grasp of Babylon was sensibly closing upon Judah—even after the first captivity and when the siege of Jerusalem could only end in her downfall and destruction. Nothing proved sufficient to open such eyes to the signs of the times.

Making allowance, then, for the fact that we depend for our knowledge of the controversy upon the record of only one of the parties to it, and imputing to the other prophets the best possible, we are left with these results: that as proved by events the truth was with Jeremiah's word and not with that of his opponents, and that the causes of this were his profoundly deeper ethical conceptions of God working in concert with his unwarped [pg 263] understanding of the political and military movements of his time.

To this were allied other differences between Jeremiah and the prophets who were against him.

Along with the priests they clung to tradition, to dogma, to things that had been true and vital for past generations but were no longer so for this one, which turned exhausted truths into fetishes. To all these he opposed the Word of the Living God, Who spoke to the times and freely acted according to the character and the needs of the present generation.

Again, the other prophets do not appear to have attached any conditions to their predictions; these they delivered as absolute and final. In contrast, not merely were Jeremiah's prophecies conditional but the conditions were in harmony with their fundamentally moral spirit. His doctrine of Predestination was (as we have seen) subject to faith in the Freedom of the Divine Sovereignty, and therefore up to the hopeless last he repeated his calls to repentance, so that God might relent of the doom He had decreed, and save His people and His land to each other.

Further, despite his natural outbursts of rage Jeremiah showed patience with his opponents, the patience which is proof of the soundness of a man's own convictions. He believed in “the liberty of prophesying,”