Jeremiah 38:19

A ROYAL PUPPET

‘And Zedekiah the king said unto Jeremiah, ‘I am afraid.’

Jeremiah 38:19

I. It is strange to think of the contrast between this reed shaken with the wind, and the stalwart oak, defying every storm, which Jeremiah was.—The prophet stood alone. He stood as adamant against every foe. He held by his testimony. Nothing could shake him. He was not to be bribed nor cajoled, nor terrified into silence. He was a pulpit that all the wealth of the state could not tune. He delivered the same message to the king in secret audience as to the people in public assembly. Yet to that timid, cowering, pithless man he could impart no breath of his own dauntless spirit and iron will. He clings to Jeremiah: he shows him favours: he believes that what the prophet speaks is the word of God, and yet he never has a grain of courage to act according to his counsel.

II. If decision of character be lacking in any man, that indeed is a fatal want.—We habitually underrate the seriousness of such a defect. We so often apologise for a man, saying, ‘There is no evil in him, but he is weak.’ Now in this world, where the forces of evil are so aggressive, where the current flows so fiercely towards evil, where temptation is so insistent, that is a sentence of doom. We are apt to think of such a man as Zedekiah, that if only he had been a private citizen he would have been inoffensive and respectable. He was amiable and religiously inclined, and had nothing vicious in him. He was a weak man in a false position, in a place that before all things else required force of character. He was without conviction, without strength of will, without resolution. Now, we had better awaken to the brutal fact that God does not supply cloisters and sequestered retreats, sheltered from all rough blasts, for such effeminate souls. They are like the rest of us, thrust out into life, and they go under. They cannot swim against the stream. Invertebrate they are, and without force to resist, and the decision ever to say no. The only thing they can do is weakly to yield. Now it follows that such a fatal temperament shuts a man out of the ranks of Christians. Christ’s appeal is always to decision. He puts iron into the blood. He calls us to follow Him, to take up our cross, to deny ourselves. If all we can do or care to do is to go with the crowd, then we cannot have part or lot with Him. It may all the more open our eyes to the evil of this disposition if we follow the career of this last king of Judah, who to his own and his nation’s ruin was cursed with feebleness of will.

Illustration

‘What a pitiable character is this weak king, shuttle-cocked between stronger wills, sometimes sending for Jeremiah and having secret talks with him, which he is desperately afraid may leak out, sometimes listening to the princes, and then again doing as Ebed-melech urges. There is a dash of bitterness in his answer to the truculent demand for the prophet’s life: “The king is not he that can do anything against you.” Like all weak men, he resents the dominance of the stronger will to which he yields, and yet yields to the dominance which he resents. Poor creature! the times were “out of joint,” and he, certainly, was not the man “to set them right.” So he “hobbled along on both knees,” to use Elijah’s contemptuous simile, and, of course, ruined himself and all that was entrusted to him. Such men always do. This is no world for an irresolute man to make his way in.’