Jottings

by J. Miller | Category: Jottings | Dec 1953

Often the condition of God's people was such as to cause Him to wish to leave them. Such were His thoughts in the time of Jeremiah, when He said,

"Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I might leave My people, and go from them for they be all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men" (Jeremiah 9.2).

In Jeremiah's day good king Josiah sought to bring them back to a condition worthy of their high calling and position. In some sense there was outward conformity to what God required, but largely the revival in Josiah's time was outward and formal, even as the Lord said,

Judah hath not returned unto Me with her whole heart, bat feignedly, saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 3.10).

There was no genuine repentance and restoration, and this is clearly seen, that when the godly restraint of Josiah was removed by his untimely and lamented death, off they went again in their sinful ways and practices until the Chaldeans under Nebuchadnezzar came and carried them off to Babylon.

God calls Judah, "treacherous Judah," and in Jeremiah 9. He calls them an assembly of "treacherous men." What can be worse than treachery? which is the violation of allegiance or plighted faith, a faithless, deceptive condition, the exact opposite of being faithful - faithless and faithful are the antithesis of each other.

God longed to leave His people and go into the wilderness to a lodging place of wayfaring men, to the lodging place of travellers through the wastes. Such should ever be the spirit and outlook of God's people, for the world through which they are travelling is truly a spiritual waste, and the day the Christian looks at this world with the thought of permanency, that day lie will begin to register the beginning of a decline in spiritual life and activity.

God could never forget the early days of Israel's journey through the wilderness. He sent Jeremiah to Jerusalem to remind them of those early days.

"Thus saith the Lord, I remember for thee the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals ; how thou wentest after Me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. Israel was holiness unto the LORD " (Jeremiah 2.2, 8).

What is more touching than references to the love of the heart! Those tender yet strong ties which bind people together in different relationships in life ought to be treated reverently, and the LORD was sorely distressed with His people when He went back to those days of love and tenderness, when the people of Israel left their homes in Egypt and went after Him, entirely depending upon Him for all, with but a little unleavened dough in their kneading troughs. They believed that God would be at the end of their short rations, though, alas, they got into Doubting Castle" a little later.

Israel in Jeremiah's day were no longer the Israel they had been. In 2 Chronicles 36.15, 16, the story of God's pleading with them and of their rejection of His words is tersely told

"And the LORD, the God of their fathers, sent to them by His messengers, rising up early and sending; because He had compassion on His people, and on His dwelling place."

We cannot fail to see the yearning of the heart of God in these words, the yearning of everlasting love for Israel His people.

The words of the next verse show how they threw back in His face the pleadings of love.

"But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the Loan arose against His people, till there was no remedy."

The Lord's question through Isaiah might well be asked: "What could have been done more to My vineyard, that I have not done in it?" (Isaiah 5.4).

The love of God for men, and in particular for His people Israel in the past, oozes like sweet anointing oil out of all Scripture. He longs to be near to His people, and in wondrous love and humility desires to dwell with them. Solomon, in his dedicatory prayer, as he banded over the temple as the dwelling place of God in Jerusalem, asks the profound question:

"But will God in very deed dwell on the earth'? behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house that I have builded!" (1 Kings B. 27).

It is the simplest and most blessed truth that God dwells in heaven, and we the redeemed are moving thither borne along upon time's resistless tide, but will God in very deed dwell on the earth? The answer from the heart of the Eternal God is-Yes, provided men build for Him a house and comply with His requirement as to their behaviour in connexion therewith, for though it is said again and again in Scripture, that "He that built all things is God" (Hebrews 3.4), yet it is a fact that He never built a house for Himself on earth; the house of God was ever a dwelling which men prepared for God.

when Israel at Sinai agreed to the conditions of their behaviour, as contained in the covenant terms in Exodus chapters 19.. to 24., saying, "All the words which the LORD hath spoken will we do" (Exodus 24.8), we hear the LORD expressing His desire to have a dwelling place among them:

"Let them. make Me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them. According to all that I shew thee, the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the furniture thereof, even so shall ye make it, " (Exodus 25.8, 9).

Here was a divine centre from which it was God's will that He should move out to the enlightening of the nations as to the knowledge of the true God, for the nations were sunk in all manner of abominable idolatries and immoralities. The tabernacle was the tabernacle of the testimony, in which was the ark Of the testimony, in which were placed the tables of the law, which were the testimony given by God to. Moses. Its ten commandments came into immediate collision with the practices of men in their idolatries and immoralities.

Alas, the bright start which Israel made in their first year in the wilderness (for the tabernacle was made in the first year, and reared on the first day of the first month in the second year-Exodus 40.17) was soon beclouded by departure in heart from the LORD. Their journey from Sinai to the Jordan where they entered the promised land was one of murmuring, sin and rebellion, till, as they stood on the wilderness side of Jordan, only two men remained of the original number who were numbered at the first, only Joshua and Caleb remained of the original twelve tribes.

The early chapters of 1 Samuel make sad reading as to the condition of God's house then. It makes one inwardly groan to read of the behaviour of Eli's sons, Hophni and Phinehas. This Phinehas was nothing like the earlier Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, who by his zeal for the LORD gained for his seed an everlasting priesthood (Numbers 25.7-18), The impiety and immoralities of Eli's two sons brought upon themselves the vengeance of God, and God's displeasure ran on through their seed (compare 1 Samuel 2.81-34 with 1 Kings 2.26, 27). God

forsook His tabernacle in Shiloh and never again returned to it.

David brought the ark to Zion and Solomon built God a house in which the ark was the only old thing in the new house.

God still looks to man to build Him a house, even as He says, "The heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool: what manner of house will ye build unto Me? and what place shall be My rest?" (Isaiah 66.1; Acts 7.49). In Stephen's time the change over from the material to the spiritual house had taken place (see 1 Peter 2.3-5; Hebrews 3.6).

J. Miller | Dec 1953
Jottings