Jeremiah 2

Jeremiah GOD’S LAWSUITJeremiah 2:9 . Point out that ‘plead’ is a forensic term. There is a great lawsuit in which God is plaintiff and men defendants. The word is frequent in Isaiah. I. The reason for God’s pleading. The cause-’wherefore.’ Our transgression does not make Him turn away from us. It does profoundly modify the whole relation between us. It does give an aspect of antagonism to His dealings. II. The manner. The whole history of the world and of each individual. All outward providences. All the voice of Conscience. Christ. Spirit, who convinces the world of Sin. III. The purpose. Wholly our being drawn from our evil. The purely reformatory character of all punishment here. The sole object to win us back to Himself. He conquers in this lawsuit when we come to love Him. IV. The patience. That merciful pleading-’I will yet ’-runs on through all sin, and is only made more earnest by deepening hostility. After rejections still lingers. Extends over a thousand generations. Is exercised even where He foresees failure.

Jeremiah STIFF-NECKED IDOLATERS AND PLIABLE CHRISTIANSJeremiah 2:11 . The obstinacy of the adherents of idolatry is in striking contrast with Israel’s continual tendency to forsake Jehovah. It reads a scarcely less forcible lesson to many nominal and even to some real Christians. I. That contrast carries with it a disclosure of the respective origins of the two kinds of Religion. The strangeness of the contrasted conduct is intensified when we take into account the tremendous contrast between the two Objects of worship. Israel’s God was Israel’s ‘Glory’; the idol-worshipper bowed down before ‘that which doth not profit,’ and yet no experience of God could bind His fickle worshippers to Him, and no experience of the impotence of the idol could shake its votaries’ devotion. They cried and were not heard. They toiled and had no results. They broke their teeth on ‘that which is not bread,’ and filled their mouths with gritty ashes that mocked them with a semblance of nourishment and left them with empty stomachs and excoriated gums, yet by some strange hallucination they clung to ‘vanities,’ while Israel was always hankering after opportunity to desert Jehovah. The stage of civilisation partly accounts for the strange fascination of idolatry over the Israelites.