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Show Spokesman of God Lesson for November 27, 1949 GOD MAKES USE of strange characters. What shall we think of a preacher who tried to beg off from being a preacher? What can we make of a. man who actually reproached God for forcing him into the ministry? minis-try? How shall we rate a man who in time of war urged his own nation to surrender, who was believed by almost nobody, who was repudiated by his own class and even Dr. Foreman his own family? What can we say of a man who was often in hot water with the city authorities, who spent months of his time in jail, who was called subversive, subver-sive, and who never got along with the established religion of his time? ( The prophet Jeremiah was that man; yet posterity honored him. His own generation thought him a liar. But some then knew, as we know today, that he was a teller of God's truth, a spokesman of God. Was he a pessimist? WE KNOW (Jer. 1) that Jeremiah did not wish to be a prophet in the first place, though unlike Isaiah he shrank back not from a sense of sin but because he thought of himself as a mere child. We know (chap. 20) that at times he was thoroughly discouraged about himself, and even cursed the day he was born. It is also true that in the last war waged by his little country of Judah before it was smashed, his advice from beginning begin-ning to end was "Surrender." No wonder people thought him a pessimist, a calamity-howler. But before we call him such names we must remember two things. First is, that his unwillingness to be a prophet, and the fact that so to speak he hated the job, marks . a vital fact: he, perhaps even more than other prophets, sensed the difference dif-ference between his own ideas and what God was saying through him. Even when what the Lord said was not what they themselves them-selves would have wished to say, they spoke for ihe Lord nevertheless. The other thing to remember is that when everybody wants to believe a pleasant lie, and a man comes along telling the unpleasant truth, he is not a pessimist, he is simply stating facts. Jeremiah stood by the facts as God gave him insight to see them. If they jailed him for it, he could not help that; but they could not shut his mouth nor close his eyes. Was he a patriot? JEREMIAH was constantly accused ac-cused of acts and attitudes which today might be called "subversive," "subver-sive," though he dearly loved his country. This was because he dared to rebuke the ambitions of his country's leaders. They said: Our country shall be free! But Jeremiah knew it would not be free. They said: Our king will conquer! Jeremiah knew he would end his days a prisoner. Jeremiah was unpopular, to put it mildly, because he advised his country to take the only place among the nations it could take an humble one. Then, as now, many persons think that patriotism means believing be-lieving yours is the perfect country. If anyone points to injustice in-justice in our land, some one may yell, "Deport him!" But Jeremiah showed what is a true patriot. He is not necessarily necessar-ily the man who approves all the foreign policies of his nation na-tion (Jeremiah approved not one), nor the man who speaks only good of his country and his people. The best patriot is the person who, seeing his country as God sees it, will dare to speak out against evil wherever he finds it. A Way to Know God JEREMIAH knew- God well, and the trouble with his contemporaries contemporar-ies was that they did not know God. But Jeremiah did not say: "Know God by becoming a prophet like me," for he knew that only a few are called to be prophets. Neither did he say, "Go to church oftener," for you can see in chap. 7 what he thought of the Temple of his time. He pointed to the good king Josiah (chap. 13). That king had found God, not in a mystic vision like Jeremiah's, not in burnt offerings of-ferings and sacrifices, but in the doing of justice, looking out for the exploited, caring for the helpless, seeing that justice was done. (Copyright by the International council of Religious Education on behalf of 4C Protestnnt denominaUons. Released bj WNU Features.) |