II Kings 22:1—13; 23:1—5; Jeremiah 1; 7:1—15; 31:31—34 I Corinthians 11:23—25; Hebrews 8
About a hundred years after the time of Isaiah there came to the throne of Judah a king who seemed the perfect embodiment of the prophetic ideal. Josiah was noted for his goodness, his fair dealing and his loyalty to the God of Israel. The fine qualities of Josiah’s rule were all the more striking because of the contrast they presented to the reign of Manasseh
who, for over fifty years, just before Josiah’s time, had terrorized the loyal worshipers of Jehovah and forced the party of the prophets to become a kind of political underground. The story of Josiah’s reign begins in II Kings 22:1—13. It must have seemed to those who lived through his early days that the Kingdom of God was at hand and that all the dreams of the prophets were about to be realized. The temple of God which had been long neglected, was restored to its former magnificence (vv. 3—7) and in the course of the renovation a book was discovered which set forth in legal style the requirements of Israel’s God as the prophets understood them (8—13). No sooner had the book been
brought to the king’s attention, than he ordered it to be publicly read and accepted formally as the law of the land (23:1—5).
But admirable as Josiah’s intentions were and fine as was the law which he imposed (commonly thought to be a part of our present Book of Deuteronomy), the Kingdom of God did not arrive. As a matter of fact, Judah was standing at this moment on the edge of disaster. Josiah’s life was to end in tragic defeat; the Babylonian Exile was drawing near; the great reform was only the bright glow before the sunset. The people of God had begun to learn the meaning of sin; they still had to learn the meaning of suffering and hopelessness.
All through these strange and discouraging times there was one man who kept his head, the prophet Jererniah, the most human and attractive of all the great figures of the prophetic tradition. He was not swept away by enthusiasm for Josiah’s well-intentioned, but superficial, reform; and he did not fall into despair when the kingdom was destroyed and Israel’s worldly hopes were shattered. He knew that true reform has to begin with time hearts of men and not with the laws under which they live.
When things were darkest, he was sure that God is in control of things, and that He is at work through all the devious windings of human history to reclaim the souls and minds of men.
We read the story of his call in the first chapter of his book. It tells of a country boy, quiet and introspective by nature, whom God called to His service and sustained by His grace through forty years of loneliness and violent opposition. Jeremiah had none of the natural qualities of a hero, but because he knew that God was with him he became "a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls" (vv. 18f). The account makes it evident that the burden of his preaching, in the beginning, was to be the imminence of judgment. "Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land" (14). Jeremiah felt the inner corruption of
the nation, in spite of external evidences of reformation, and he knew she would still have to pass through the fire.
The precise counts in Jeremiah’s indictment of Israel are summarized in his Temple Sermon in chap. 7:1—15, where he accuses the people of trusting in the sticks and stones of the House of God to protect them, whereas they should have put their trust in steadfast loyalty to God and in just dealing "between a man and his neighbor" (vv. 4—7). Because they had not done this, God was about to destroy Solomon’s
magnificent temple, which meant so much to them (14), and bring the kingdom to an end (15).
But the message of Jeremiah was by no means entirely a message of doom. He lived to see his predictions come true and, when that
happened, the nature of his preaching changed. The most remarkable of his prophecies, and perhaps the most important in the Old Testament, is the one in which he foresaw the establishment of a New Covenant
(31:31—34), a covenant which would be based on an inner and personal communion with God rather than on external obedience to a written code of laws. In many ways the thought of Jeremniah rises above the limitations of his own day to find points of contact with both the remote past and time remote future—with the religion of the patriarchal age, symbolized for us by the covenant with Abraham, and with the religion of the New Testament, embodied in the New Covenant in Christ. Recent studies in the Old Testament have shown that the religion of Israel’s ancestors in the days before Moses was a much more personal thing than it became after the Israelite community was established. This is shown by the references in the Pentateuch to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Gen. 26:24; 28:13; Exod. 3:15), and by the intimacy with which their relationship to God is described. The mind of Jeremiah seems to have a deeper affinity for this kind of religion than for the more legalistic type which was associated with the name of Moses, and which had so recently, and fruitlessly, been revived by the reforms of Josiah. So he looks forward into the future and sees a time when the covenant of laws will be done away and a new order established in which God would rule directly in men’s "inward parts . . . and in their hearts" (v. 33). The very existence of a book called the New Testament (which means New Covenant—see the title page in the RSV) is evidence that the hope of Jeremiah was fulfilled. The selected passages from the New Testament underline this fact. In St. Paul’s account of the Last Supper (I Cor. 11:23—25—the earliest we have), Jesus speaks of the shedding of his blood as the means by which the New Covenant would
come into being. Every communion a Christian makes is both a pledge and a renewal of this covenant. The passage from Hebrews (chap. 8) is a splendid as well as a solemn affirmation of its final validity and
adequacy.