Jeremiah 36:4-7

I am shut up.

Jeremiah in prison

1. Jeremiah’s age was one of great political troubles.

2. It was also an age of signal religious privileges.

3. It was an age of great moral corruption.

I. His imprisonment suggests the sad moral character of his age. The prisons of an age are often criteria by which to determine its character. When prisons are filled with men of signal excellence of character, force of conscience, and self-denying philanthropy, you have sad moral proofs of the deep moral corruption of the age that could tolerate such enormity.

II. His imprisonment suggests God’s method of raising humanity. Heaven’s plan embraces the agency of good men. The agency is twofold, primary and secondary. There are spiritual seers and spiritual mechanics.

1. Jeremiah may be regarded as a type of the primary human agents whom God employs. They are frequently in the lowest secular condition; yet in that condition God communes with them, and gives them a message for the world.

2. Baruch may be regarded as a type of the secondary agents. In this age the Baruchs are numerous. Men abound who will take down the thoughts of great thinkers; but the Jeremiahs are rare. Thought power, rather than tongue power, is wanted now.

III. His imprisonment suggests the inability of the external to crush a holy soul.

1. He is free in his communion with heaven. From the dungeon he cried, and God heard him (Lamentations 3:56).

2. He was free in his sympathies with the race. He could not go out in body to the house of the Lord, but he went out in soul. Walls of granite, massive iron bars, chains of adamant, cannot confine the soul; nor can the densest darkness throw on it a single shadow. (Homilist.)

God’s servant imprisoned

When Henry Burton, two centuries ago, was persecuted for the name of Christ and put in prison, “I found,” he said, “the comforts of my God in the Fleet Prison exceedingly, it being the first time of my being a prisoner.” Go thou, and read in the roll.

The prophet and the roll:--

I. The solicitude of Jeremiah--(verses 4, 5).

II. The command of Jeremiah (verse 6).

III. The hope of Jeremiah (verse 7).

If Divine mercy could not woo them back to righteousness, he hoped that Divine justice might drive them. Alas! he was disappointed. The national heart, with a few rare exceptions, hardened into granite. And then they were overwhelmed with calamities. (E. Davies, D. D.)

The utility of Holy Scripture

See here the utility of the Holy Scriptures and the excellent use that may be made of reading them. A man maybe thereby doubtless converted, where preaching is wanting, as divers were in Queen Mary’s days, when the Word of God was precious; as Augustine was, by reading Romans 13:1.; Fulgentius, by the prophet Jonah; Franciscus Junius, by John 1:1., &c. (John Trapp.)