Hebrew Life and Times

by Harold B. Hunting

Second citizen: I suppose, then, it is all right. But did not the prophets speak against sacrifice, unless one remembered justice and mercy?

First citizen: Yes, but they were speaking of the old sacrifices on the "high places," at the village shrines. Everyone knows they were heathen shrines and hateful to Jehovah. I offered my sacrifice at the temple yonder, just as we are told to do in the law of Moses, which King Josiah's servants found in the temple.

Look! Why is all that crowd gathered over there in the temple yard? Let us go and see what is happening. I heard some one say, that a certain Jeremiah who calls himself a prophet, was to speak there to-day. All my friends who have heard him say that he is a false prophet.

(They reach the edge of the crowd. Jeremiah is standing on the steps of the temple, addressing the people, as follows:)

"Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, are these. For if ye thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute justice between a man and his neighbor; if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow ... then I will cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, from of old even forevermore. Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, ... and come and stand before me in this house, ... and say, We are delivered; that ye may do all these abominations? Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?"

Jeremiah's Message of a Heart Religion

It is clear that Jeremiah was fighting the same old battle that Amos and the other prophets had fought against a religion of mere empty ceremonies. But the battle had grown even harder, because the old false practices had been accepted as though they were just the kind of religion that Amos had preached. The people said, "We are keeping the law of Jehovah," and so they were satisfied with themselves.

The law to be written on the heart.—Jeremiah saw that this mistake had come from relying too much on a written law. Something more than an outward law was needed before men could succeed in living together as brothers. It is so easy to keep the letter of the law, or to think one is keeping it, while we lose the spirit of it. What is needed, Jeremiah said, is a changed heart. Again and again he cried to the people, "Oh Jerusalem, cleanse thy heart." And in one of the great chapters of the Bible, the thirty-first of the book of Jeremiah, he looks forward to a time when Jehovah and his people should be bound together in a new covenant—not a covenant written on tables of stone like the one which Moses wrote at Sinai:

"But this is the covenant that I will make ... after those days, saith the Lord. I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their hearts I will write it."

The apostle Paul saw this promise fulfilled by the love which Jesus Christ awakens in men's hearts, so that they gladly and eagerly do the will of God. On account of this prophecy of Jeremiah our Christian Bible is called the New Covenant, or (from the Latin) the New Testament.