Sermons on National Subjects

But the lesson was too hard for the proud conqueror; he did not take the warning.  He could not believe that the Most High ruled in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.  He still fancied that he, and such as he, were the lords of the world, and took from others by their own power and cunning whatsoever they would.  He does not seem to have been angry, however, with Daniel for his plain speaking.  Most Eastern kings like Nebuchadnezzar would have put Daniel to a cruel death on the spot as the bearer of evil news, speaking blasphemy against the king; and no one in those times and countries would have considered him wicked and cruel for so doing; but Nebuchadnezzar seems to have learnt too much already so to give way to his passion.

Yet, as I said before, he had not learned enough to take God’s warning.  The lesson that he was nothing, and that God is all in all, was too hard for him.  And, alas! my friends, for whom of us is it not a hard lesson?  And yet it is the golden lesson, the first and the last which man has to learn on earth, ay, and through all eternity: “I am nothing; God is all in all.”  All in us which is worth calling anything; all in us which is worth having, or worth being; all in us which is not disobedience and shortcoming, failure and mistake, ignorance and madness, filthiness and fierceness, as of the beasts which perish; all strength in us, all understanding, all prudence, all right-mindedness, all purity, all justice, all love; all in us which is worth living for, all in us which is really alive, and not mere death in life, the death of sin and the darkness of the pit—all is from God the Father of lights, and from Jesus Christ the life and the light, who lighteth every man who cometh into the world, shining for ever in the darkness of our spirits, though that darkness, alas! too often cannot comprehend, and embrace, and confess Him who is striving to awake it from the dead and give it light.  Hardest of all lessons!  Most blessed of all lessons!  So blessed, that if we will not let God teach it us in any other way, it would be good and advantageous to us for Him to teach it us as He taught it to Nebuchadnezzar—good for us to become with him for awhile like the beasts that perish, that we might learn with him to lift up our eyes to heaven, and so have our understandings return to us, and learn to bless the Most High, and not our own wit, and cunning, and prudence; and praise and honour Him that liveth for ever, instead of praising and honouring our own pitiful paltry selves, who are in death in the midst of life, who come up and are cut down like the flower, and never continue in one stay.

“All this came upon the King Nebuchadnezzar.”  It seems that after he or his father had destroyed the old Babylon, the downfall of which Isaiah had prophesied, he built a great city, after the fashion of Eastern conquerors, near the ruins of the old one; and “at the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon.  The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?  While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken, The kingdom is departed from thee.  And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.  The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar.”

What a lesson!  The great conqueror of all the East now a brutal madman, hateful and disgusting to all around him—a beast feeding among the beasts: and yet a cheap price—a cheap price—to pay for this golden lesson.

Seven times past over him in his madness.  What those seven times were we do not know.  They may have been actual years: or they may have been, as I am inclined to think, changes in his own soul and state of mind.  But, at the end of the days, the truth dawned on him.  He began to see what it all meant.  He saw what he was, and why he was so; and he lifted up his eyes to heaven; and from that moment his madness past.  He lifted up his eyes to heaven.  That is no mere figure of speech: it is an actual truth.  Most madmen, if you watch them, have that down look, or rather that inward look, as if their eyes were fixed only on their own fancies.  They are thinking only of themselves, poor creatures—of their own selfish and private suspicions and wrongs—of their own selfish superstitious dreams about heaven or hell—of their own selfish vanity and ambition—sometimes of their own frantic self-conceit, or of their selfish lusts and desires—of themselves, in short.  They have lost the one Divine light of reason, and conscience, and love, which binds men to each other, and are parted for a while from God and from their kind—alone in their own darkness.  So was Nebuchadnezzar.

At last he looked up, as men do when they pray; up from himself to One greater than himself; up from the earth to heaven; up from the natural things which we do see, which are temporal and born to die, to moral and spiritual things which we do not see, which are real and eternal in the heavens; up from his own lonely darkness, looking for the light and the guidance of God; for now he began to see that all the light which he had ever had, all his wisdom, and understanding, and strength of will, had come from God, however he might have misused them for his own selfish ambition; that it was because God had taken from him His light, who is the Word of God, that he had become a beast.  And then his reason returned to him, and he became again a man, a rational being, made, howsoever fallen and sinful, in the likeness of God; then he blessed and praised God.  It was not merely that he confessed that God was strong, and he weak; righteous, and he sinful; wise, and he foolish; but he blessed and praised God; he felt and confessed that God had done him a great benefit, and taught him a great lesson—that God had taught him what he was in himself and without God, that he might see what he was with God in its true light, and honour and obey Him from whom his reason and understanding, as well as his power and glory, came, that so it might be fulfilled which the prophet says: “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty man in his might, nor the rich man in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.”

And so was Nebuchadnezzar’s soul brought to utter, in his own way, the very same glorious song which, or something like it, is said to have been sung by the three men whom, years before, he had seen delivered from the fiery furnace, which calls on all the works of the Lord, angels and heaven, sun and stars, seas and winds, mountains and hills, fowls and cattle, priests and laymen, spirits and souls of the righteous, to bless the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.

And so ends Nebuchadnezzar’s history.  We read no more of him.  He had learnt the golden lesson.  May God grant that we may learn it also!

But who tells the story of his madness?  He himself.  The whole account is in the man’s own words.  It seems to be some public letter or proclamation, which he either sent round his empire, or commanded to be laid up among his records; having, as it seems, set Daniel to write it down from his mouth.  This one fact, I think, justifies me in all that I have said about Nebuchadnezzar’s nobleness, and Daniel’s affection for him.  He does not try to smooth things over; to pretend that he has not been mad; to find excuses for himself; to lay any blame on any human being.  He repents openly, confesses openly.  Shameful as it may be to him, he tells the whole story.  He confesses that he had fair warning, that all was his own fault.  He justifies God utterly.  My friends, we may read, thank God, many noble, and brave, and righteous speeches of kings and great men: but never have I read one so noble, so brave, so righteous as this of the great king of Babylon.

And therefore it is; because this letter of his, in the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel, is indeed full of the eternal Holy Spirit of God; therefore it is, I say, that it forms part of the Bible, part of holy scripture to this day,—a greater honour to Nebuchadnezzar than all his kingdom; for what greater honour than to have been inspired to write one chapter, yea, one sentence, of the Book of Books?

My friends, every one of you here is in God’s school-house, under God’s teaching, far more than Nebuchadnezzar was.  You are baptised men, knowing that blessed name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which Nebuchadnezzar only saw dimly, and afar off.  Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is striving with your hearts, giving to them whatsoever light and life they have.  You have been taught from childhood to look up to Him as your King and Deliverer; to His Father as your Father, to His Holy Spirit as your Inspirer.  Take heed how you listen to His voice within your hearts.  Take heed how you learn God’s lessons; for God is surely educating you, and teaching you far more than He taught the king of Babylon in old time.  As you learn or despise these lessons of God’s, will be your happiness or your misery now and for ever.  Unto the king of Babylon little was given, and of him was little required.  To you and me much has been given; of you and me will much be required.

XXIX.

JEREMIAH’S CALLING

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.—Jeremiah xxiii. 5.

At the time when Jeremiah the prophet spoke those words to the Jews, nothing seemed more unlikely than that they would ever come true.  The whole Jewish nation was falling to pieces from its own sins.  Brutish and filthy idolatry in high and low—oppression, violence, and luxury among the court and the nobility—shame, and poverty, and ignorance among the lower classes—idleness and quackery among the priesthood—and as kings over all, one fool and profligate after another, set on the throne by a foreign conqueror, and pulled down again by him at his pleasure.  Ten out of the twelve tribes of Israel had been carried off captive, young and old, into a distant land.  The small portion of country which still remained inhabited round Jerusalem, had been overrun again and again by cruel armies of heathens.  Without Jerusalem was waste and ruins, bloodshed and wretchedness; within every kind of iniquity and lies, division and confusion.  If ever there was a miserable and contemptible people upon the face of the earth, it was the Jewish nation in Jeremiah’s time.  Jeremiah makes no secret of it.  His prophecies are full of it—full of lamentation and shame: “Oh that my head were a fountain of tears, to weep for the sins of my people!”  He feels that God has sent him to rebuke those sins, to warn and prophesy to his fellow-countrymen the certain ruin into which they are rushing headlong; and he speaks God’s message boldly.  From the poor idol-ridden labourer, offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven to coax her into sending him a good harvest, to the tyrant king who had built his palace of cedar and painted it with vermilion, he had a bitter word for every man.  The lying priest tried to silence him; and Jeremiah answered him, that his wife should be a harlot in the city, and his children sold for slaves.  The king tried to flatter him into being quiet; and he told him in return, that he should be buried with the burial of an ass, dragged out and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.  The luxurious queen, who made her nest in the cedars, would be ashamed and confounded, he said, for her wickedness.  The crown prince was a despised broken idol—a vessel in which was no pleasure; he should be cast out, he and his children, into slavery in a land which he knew not.  The whole royal family, he said, would perish; none of them should ever again prosper or sit upon the throne of David.  This was his message; shame and confusion, woe and ruin, to high and low; every human being he passed in the street was a doomed man.  For the day of the Lord was at hand, and who should be able to escape it?

A sad calling, truly, to have to work at; and all the more sad because Jeremiah had no pride, no steadfast opinion of his own excellence to keep him up.  He hates his calling of prophet.  At the very moment he is foretelling woe, he prays God that his prophecy may not come true; he tries every method to prevent its coming true, by entreating his countrymen to repent.  There runs through all his awful words a vein of tenderness, and pity, and love unspeakable, which to me is the one great mark of a true prophet; a sign that Jeremiah spoke by the Spirit of God; a sign that too many writers nowadays do not speak by the Spirit of God.  If they rebuke the rich and powerful, they do it generally in a very different spirit from Jeremiah’s—in a spirit of bitterness and insolence, not very easy to describe, but easy enough to perceive.  They seem to rejoice in evil, to delight in finding fault, to be sorry, and not glad, when their prophecies of evil turn out false; to try to set one class against another, one party against another, as if we were not miserably enough split up already by class interests and party spirit.  They are glad enough to rebuke the wicked great; but not to their face, not to their own danger and hurt like Jeremiah.  Their plan is to accuse the rich to the poor, on their own platform, or in their own newspaper, where they are safe; and, moreover, to make a very fair profit thereby; to say behind the back of authorities that which they dare not say to their face, and which they soon give up saying when they have worked their own way into office; and meanwhile take mighty credit to themselves for seeing that there is wrong and misery in the world; as if the spirits in hell should fancy themselves righteous, because they hated the devil!  No, my friends, Jeremiah was of a very different spirit from that.  If he ever was tempted to it when he was young, and began to fancy himself a very grand person, who had a right to look down on his neighbours, because God had called him and set him apart to be a prophet from his mother’s womb, and revealed to him the doom of nations, and the secrets of His providence—if he ever fancied that in his heart, God led him through such an education as took all the pride out of him, sternly and bitterly enough.  He was commissioned to go and speak terrible words, to curse kings and nobles in the name of the Lord: but he was taught, too, that it was not a pleasant calling, or one which was likely to pay him in this life.  His fellow-villagers plotted against his life.  His wife deserted him.  The nobles threw him into a dungeon, into a well full of mire, whence he had to be drawn up again with ropes to save his life.  He was beaten, all but starved, kept for years in prison.  He had neither child nor friend.  He had his share of all the miseries of the siege of Jerusalem, and all the horrors of its storm; and when he was set free by Nebuchadnezzar, and clung to his ruined home, to see if any good could still be done to the remnant of his countrymen, he was violently carried off into a heathen land, and at last stoned to death, by those very countrymen of his whom he had been trying for years to save.  In everything, and by everything, he was taught that he was still a Jew, a brother to his sinful brothers; that their sorrows were his sorrows, their shame his shame, their ruin his ruin.  In all their afflictions he was afflicted, even as his Lord was after him.

He struggled, we find, again and again against this strange and sad calling of a prophet.  He cried out in bitter agony that God had deceived him; had induced him to become a prophet, and then repaid him for speaking God’s message with nothing but disappointment and misery.  And yet he felt he must speak; God, he said, was stronger than he was, and forced him to it.  He said: “I will speak no more words in His name; but the Word of the Lord was as fire within his bones, and would not let him rest;” and so, in spite of himself, he told the truth, and suffered for it; and hated to have to tell it, and pitied and loved the very country which he rebuked till he cursed “the day in which he saw the light, and the hour in which it was said to his father, there is a man-child born.”  You who fancy that it is a fine thing, and a paying profession, to be a preacher of righteousness and a rebuker of sin, look at Jeremiah, and judge!  For as surely as you or any other man is sent by God to do Jeremiah’s work, so surely he must expect Jeremiah’s wages.

Do you think, then, that Jeremiah was a man only to be pitied?  Pitiable he was indeed, and sad.  There was One hung on a cross eighteen hundred years ago, more pitiable still: and yet He is the Lord of heaven and earth.  Yes; Jeremiah had a sad life to live, and a sad task to work out; and yet, my friends, was not that a cheap price to pay for the honour and glory of being taught by God’s Spirit, and of speaking God’s words?  I do not mean the mere honour of having his fame and name spread over all Christ’s kingdom; the honour of having his writings read and respected by the wisest and the holiest to the end of time; that mere earthly fame is but a slight matter.  I mean the real honour, the real glory, of knowing what was utterly right and true, and therefore of knowing Him who is utterly right and true; of knowing God; of knowing what God’s character is: that he is a living God, and not a dead one; a God who is near and not absent at all, loving and merciful, just and righteous, strong and mighty to save.  Ay, my friends, this is the lesson which God taught Jeremiah; to know the Lord of heaven and earth, and to see His hand, His rule, in all that was happening to his fellow-countrymen, and himself; to know that from the beginning the Lord, the Saviour-God, Jehovah, the messenger of the covenant, He who brought up the Jews out of Egypt, was the wise and just and loving King of the Jews, and of all the nations upon earth; and that some day or other He must and would conquer all the sinfulness, and misery, and tyranny, and idolatry in the world, and show Himself openly to men, and fulfil all the piteous longings after a just and good king which poor wretches had ever felt, and all the glorious promises of a just and good king which God had made to the wise men of old time; and, therefore, in the midst of shame and persecution, despair and ruin, Jeremiah could rejoice.  Jehoiakim, the wicked king, and all his royal house, might be driven out into slavery; Jerusalem might become a heap of ruins and corpses; the fair land of Judæa, and the village where he was bred, might become thorns, and thistles, and heaps of stones; the vineyard which he loved, the little estate at Anathoth which had belonged to him, might be trodden down by the stranger, and he himself die in a foreign land; around him might be nothing but sin and decay, before him nothing but despair and ruin: yet still there was hope, joy, everlasting certainty for that poor, childless, captive old man; for he had found out that the Lord still lived, the Lord still reigned.  He could not lie; he could not forget his people.  Could a mother forget her sucking child?  No.  When the Jews turned to Him, He would still have mercy.  His punishment of them was a sign that he still cared for them.  If He had forgotten them, He would have let them go on triumphant in their iniquity.  No.  All these afflictions were meant to chasten them, teach them, bring them back to Him.  It would be good for them, an actual blessing to them, to be taken away into captivity in Babylon.  It might be hard to believe, but it must be true.  The Lord of Israel, the Saviour-God, who had been caring for them so long, rising up early and sending His prophets to them, pleading with them as a father with his child, He would have mercy; He would teach them, in sorrow and slavery, the lesson they were too rebellious and hard-hearted to learn in prosperity and freedom: that the Lord was their righteousness, and that there was no other name under heaven which could save them from the plague, and from the famine, from the swords of the Chaldeans, or from the division, and oppression, and brutishness, and manifold wickedness, which was their ruin.  And then Jeremiah saw and felt—how we cannot tell—but there his words, the words of this text, stand to this day, to show that he did see and feel it, that some day or other, in God’s good time, the Jews would have a true King—a very different king from Jehoiakim the tyrant—a son of David in a very different sense from what Jehoiakim was; that He would come, and must come, sooner or later, The unseen King, who had all along been governing Jews and heathens, and telling his prophets that Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, the Chaldee and the Persian, were his servants as well as they, and that all the nations of the earth could do but what he chose.  “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute justice and judgment on the earth.”

This was the blessed knowledge which God gave Jeremiah in return for all the misery he had to endure in warning his countrymen of their sins.  And this same blessed knowledge, the knowledge that the earth is the Lord’s, that to Jesus Christ is given, as He said Himself, all power in heaven and earth, and that He is reigning, and must reign, and conquer, and triumph till He has put all His enemies under His feet, God will surely give to everyone, high or low, who follows Jeremiah’s example, who boldly and faithfully warns the sinner of his way, who rebukes the wickedness which he sees around him: only he must do it in the spirit of Jeremiah.  He must not be insolent to the insolent, or proud to the proud.  He must not be puffed up, and fancy that because he sees the evil of sin, and the certain ruin which is the fruit of it, that he is therefore to keep apart from his fellow-countrymen, and despise them in Pharisaic pride.  No.  The truly Christian man, the man who, like Jeremiah, has the Spirit of God in him, will feel the most intense pity and tenderness of sinners.  He will not only rebuke the sins of his people, but mourn for them; he will be afflicted in all their affliction.  However harshly he may have to speak, he will never forget that they are his countrymen, his brothers, children of the same Father, to be judged by the same Lord.  He will feel with shame and fear that he has in himself the root of the very same sins which he sees working death around him—that if others are covetous, he might be so too—if they be profligate, and deceitful, and hypocritical, without God in the world, he might be so too.  And he must feel not only that he might be as bad as his neighbours, but that he actually would be, if God withdrew His Spirit from him for a moment, and allowed him to forget the only faith which saves him from sin, loyalty to his unseen Saviour, the righteous King of kings.  Therefore he will not only rebuke his sinful neighbours; but he will tell them, as Jeremiah told his countrymen, that all their sin and misery proceed from this one thing, that they have forgotten that the Lord is their King.  He will pray daily for them, that the Lord their King may show Himself to their hearts and thoughts, and teach them all that He has done for them, and is doing for them; and may convert them to Himself that they may be truly His people, and His way may be known upon earth, His saving health among all nations.

XXX.

THE PERFECT KING

Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh to thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.—Matthew xxi. 5.

You all know that this Sunday is called the First Sunday in Advent.  You all know, I hope, that Advent means coming, and that these four Sundays before Christmas, as I have often told you, are called Advent Sundays, because upon them we are called to consider the coming of our King and Saviour Jesus Christ.  If you will look at the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for these next four Sundays, you will see at once that they all bear upon our Lord’s coming.  The Gospels tell us of the prophecies about Christ which He fulfilled when He came.  The Epistles tell us what sort of men we ought to be, both clergy and people, because He has come and will come again.  The Collects pray that the Spirit of God would make us fit to live and die in a world into which Christ has come, and in which He is ruling now, and to which He will come again.  The text which I have taken this morning, you just heard in this Sunday’s Gospel.  St. Matthew tells you that Jesus Christ fulfilled it by riding into Jerusalem in state upon an ass’s colt; and St. Matthew surely speaks truth.  Let us consider what the prophecy is, and how Jesus Christ fulfilled it.  Then we shall see and believe from the Epistle what effect the knowledge of it ought to have upon our own souls, and hearts, and daily conduct.