The Soul of Jeremiah Was Torn

"The Soul of Jeremiah Was Torn" – Jeremiah 9:1-3 There are great men in history who leave our lives a teaching. Jeremiah is a prophet of splendid singularity; but greater still were his tears, his loneliness, his punishments, his mockings, and his scourgings. These verses show him weary, sickened, and vulnerable, in one of his worst hours, when Nebuchadnezzar had already laid Jerusalem waste. His soul was wholly torn, and what is torn cannot be sewn. What sickened him was not his own suffering, but the insensibility of a people in which the ungodly man looked like the religious one and the religious one like the ungodly.

I. Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people! (Jeremiah 9:1).

A. A prophet weary, spent, and disheartened.

1. These were the days when Nebuchadnezzar had already invaded Jerusalem and all Israel, laid them waste, and killed all he could.

2. He had received so much contempt, so much mockery, and so much physical abuse; they broke him and they tortured him. His time for what he had to do was running out.

3. He must have thought: what is left for me tomorrow? Will God come out? Will there be any rest for an afflicted soul? Will I see any door open? But there was nothing.

4. If you have a bad day you are troubled, you complain, you mutter, and we come to look like victims. Victims of what? Troubles come and go, and they give everyone the same sort of trouble.

5. There is nothing better than all we pass through, if we come out victorious: we show the faith we have and the reward God gives; for the only reward is the one God gives.

B. Destined to weep more than to see.

1. That is why he is called the weeping prophet. And he did not weep for himself nor for family; as a prophet it is nowhere recorded that he had a dwelling, a house, children, or descendants.

2. He was a man chosen wholly to serve God: it did not matter to him that they stoned him, nor that they put chains on his body, nor that they threw him into the cistern. He knew there was a reason he existed.

3. Now I ask: do you know the reason you were born on the earth? The first thing we all have in common is that we must pray every day.

4. Our life must keep growing. If you do not grow, you stayed small; and staying small, you cannot see what is high.

5. He wept more than he saw because the people were being destroyed more and more: there were no miracles, no men and women rising up, and God had gone from among them.

6. Nebuchadnezzar would destroy the offspring and he destroyed the temple. It fell to him to weep more than to see: everything ended, the grace departed, and the people were destroyed.

II. The insensibility that tore his soul.

A. The ungodly looked like the believer.

1. He was literally sick from watching. For the believer acted like the ungodly; it was not that the ungodly acted like the believer: that is impossible.

2. Here we are all saints for the moment; but going out those doors, what is the conduct with the neighbor, with the one who nearly hit you, with the one who criticized you?

3. He spent his days praying, loving, preaching, and warning, only to find the insensibility that tore his soul.

4. If someone depends on you to grow spiritually and you are an insensible person, you will make that person insensible. Then there are two; and if there are descendants, the multiplying follows.

5. Where we must struggle is to be spiritual human beings, not carnal ones; it is enough that the world is full of that.

6. Being spiritual costs nothing: one eats the same, dresses the same, sleeps the same. But when what is inside a spiritual person flows out, it is whatever is good, just, lovely, true, and of good report.

B. When the heart is a fountain of sin.

1. When we find in our heart such a fountain of sin, it is fitting that our eyes be fountains of tears.

2. You gather at every service; but afterward you go out, and the week begins. If you spent it in worldliness, every time you look at me you want to kill me.

3. Instead of leaping to the defense and to loftiness, for that is the heart speaking, and the heart is hard; the Bible says the heart is wicked.

4. And what better do we have? To turn our eyes into tears. And what must be done with this back? Bend it; for the back is haughty, swaggering, ill-mannered, and rude.

5. The judgment is unavoidable, but with weeping: God would make Jerusalem a den of jackals, despicable animals that eat everything they find, and the cities of Judah a desolation.

III. And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it (Luke 19:41).

A. It is better to weep than to talk.

1. When our beloved Jesus draws near to Jerusalem and sees how all that humanity stands, He wept over it.

2. In our life the best thing we can do is weep: over the trouble, over the child, over this one, over that one. For if you are going to talk, you will not be heard.

3. But if you groan to God, you do not weep to people: you weep to God, you cry to God, you ask of God, you plead with God. And who wins? You do.

4. Remember that the Scripture produces faith; and faith is the evidence of things not seen. If you have made prayer a habit, you mature, and faith is more active.

5. Jesus is grieved by the city's want of understanding about His work as Messiah, and by the destruction that would come in consequence. Not receiving Him, what would come to them? The consequences.

B. A lodging place in the wilderness (Jeremiah 9:2).

1. Nebuchadnezzar had a place and a house ready for him to go to; but to Jeremiah life had become wearisome and distasteful.

2. It was a moment of despair. He did not do it, let that be clear: he did not abandon his countrymen, though those people dishonored God.

3. For he knew that if he left them, the one who would be destroyed was himself.

4. And he does not think of leaving them because they are in trouble, but because they are in sin: they had given themselves wholly to sinning, and they are corrupt.

5. They were disloyal not only toward God but also toward one another: a band of traitors. That was the multitude Jeremiah carried.

IV. They bend their tongues like their bow for lies (Jeremiah 9:3); I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart (Romans 9:2).

A. The darts of falsehood.

1. In the Hebrew it says literally that they twisted their tongues like their bows of falsehood. Such was the tongue of that people; and today this is common enough.

2. As the archer draws the bow to shoot, so they set their tongues; and it is to kill with the darts of falsehood.

3. In a conversation there must be no darts of falsehood. Falsehood breaks in, settles, and once it enters the soul there is no one who can draw it out.

4. They grew strong in the land, but not to be faithful. They could render very good service if they used it for the truth; but they will not.

5. Those faithful to the truth are brave. If you are not brave for good, you are brave for evil, and there you have your own ruin.

6. One day we must answer, not only for our enmity in facing the truth, but also for our cowardice in not defending it.

B. How often would I have gathered thy children, and ye would not (Luke 13:34-35).

1. Having told the truth about this hard city, Jesus was moved and wept over it. This city that kills the prophets was the object of His tender love.

2. If God has wanted to gather you to the body of Christ and you will not, and you have this reason and that one and the other, think of the Master's tears.

3. The difficulty lay in their stubborn will. Stubbornness is not loving the will of God and not parting from worldly pleasures; and then, in church, being unable to worship or to read the Word.

4. They spent seventy years in Babylon for not repenting when Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the minor prophets preached to them; not one would listen.

5. And that land no longer flowed with milk and honey. If you want to live so, the land where you will settle is dry, bears no fruit, has no peace nor joy; and you will be a slave of your own flesh.

6. Verse 35 refers to the second coming: a remnant of Israel will repent and say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

C. Great heaviness and continual sorrow.

1. Jesus uttered a lament over the city that had lost its golden opportunity. If only the people had received Him as the Messiah, it would have meant peace for them.

2. But they did not recognize that He was the source of peace, and it was too late; and because they had rejected Him, their eyes were blinded.

3. When Paul thinks of the glorious calling of Israel and then of their rejection, his heart fills with great heaviness and continual sorrow.

4. He who rejects the Messiah will have that same heaviness and that same sorrow. If you take Him by halves, there ought to be a sorrow in your life for rejecting Him.

5. Do not speak to your own of salvation telling them they will be saved: you fight so that they may be, you preach to them, you tell them there is a hell. Better that they be angry with you, and one day you will make them reason.

6. For what? So that God may see you; for if God sees you, He has compassion on you. But that sorrow has to be a tearing one. Amen.