The following shows how this came about:—
And the Lord said unto me, Say not I am too young, for to all to which I send thee thou shalt go, and all I command thee thou shalt speak,
Be not afraid before them
For with thee am I to deliver,
Rede of the Lord. And the Lord put forth His hand and caused it to touch my mouth, and the Lord said to me, Lo, I have set My Word in thy mouth,
See I appoint thee this day
Over the nations and kingdoms,
To pull up and tear down and destroy,[126]
To build and to plant.
To this also objection has been taken as still more incredible in the spiritual experience of so youthful a rustic. It has been deemed the exaggeration of a later age, and described as the “gigantic figure” of a “plenipotentiary to the nations,” utterly inconsistent with the modest singer of the genuine oracles of Jeremiah, “a hero only in suffering, not in assault.”[127] Such an objection rather strains the meaning of the passage. According to this Jeremiah is to be the carrier of the Word of the Lord. That Word, rather than the man [pg 084] himself, is the power to pull up and tear down and destroy, to build and to plant[128]—that Word which no Hebrew prophet received without an instinct of its world-wide range and its powers of both destruction and creation.