Jeremiah 7:17-18

Seest thou not what they do in the streets of Jerusalem?

The streets of the city

I. As an index to character.

1. The streets are the pulse of commercial prosperity. The man who goes from a dull, sluggish place to a city of great business activity must quicken his pace, or get run over.

2. The street on which a man lives is no index to his character. It does not even indicate the amount of money he has. Not a few proud families stint their table to pay their rent on a costly street, in order to make or keep up appearances. Their fine street, to those who know the facts, is an index of their pretensions. Another man who has plenty of money lives on a cheap street, because he is too niggardly to pay rent for more comfortable quarters. To those who know him the street is an index of his meanness. A Christian man may choose to live on a cheap street, because he prefers to save money with which to do good. His street indicates self-denying liberality.

3. What can be seen on the streets of a city, however, is to a great extent an index of the character of its people. Dirty streets suggest dirty morals. If indecent handbills pollute the streets of a city, it indicates either sinful apathy, or a very low moral tone.

II. As a test of character. To walk down one of our streets is to some men like going into a furnace. Their moral courage is tested at nearly every step. There is within them a demon of drink that can be waked from his sleep by the smell of a beer barrel. A deep-sea diver laid his hand on something soft, and curious to know what it was, he took hold of it to examine it. Fatal curiosity! The long tentacles of an octopus reached out and grasped him in its deadly embrace. The friends above, feeling the struggle, drew him to the surface, to find only a corpse still in the clutches of the monster. Many a young man has come from his pure country home to the great city, and, prompted by a curiosity excited by the signs on the streets, has entered one of these homes of the devil fish. Soon its slimy tentacles are wrapped around him, soul and body. (A. C. Dixon, D. D.)

The streets and their story

The prophet evidently knew what was going on in the city. He had gone up and down the streets by night and by day, and had seen the sins and iniquities of the people. The great city of Jerusalem lay like a putrid sore, filled with all manner of pollution and corruption. The time had come for a warning. Hiding no detail of its iniquity, he catalogued before the sin-laden people the awful record of their sin, and launched against their filthiness and impenitence the sentence of the condemnation of God. It was no pleasant task. To sing in sweeter strains the adoration of God and the beauties of holiness had been a far more gladsome work--but to sing of holiness in such a city had been like singing of springs amid the sands of the arid desert. Moreover, the Word of God had commanded, again and again, “Cry aloud, spare not lift up thy voice like a trumpet,” etc. I suppose an over-cautious but easy-going city cried out against the prophet who left his harp to throttle sin. I suppose its wicked inhabitants had a great many sneers and scoffs for the preacher who ventured to look in upon their wickedness; but he heard God’s Word and he did it; he called things by their right names, and shook above them the thunderstorm of Divine wrath and the penalties of the broken law. Sin must be assailed in the name of God. Its colours must he shown, clear of the prism tints by which it dazzles and deceives. Its wages, hidden too often behind the screens of shame and misery, must be brought to light, and men warned in the name of facts, in the name of experience, in the name of God, against the man traps of hell. I want to show you sin as it is and it always must be, and from its actual facts of awful misery I want to read a warning. The old legends ten of a dual life that walks the earth; how in the shades of night, when all else is slumber bound and still, another life comes out and fills the night with weird events. The elf folk, hidden all day in earth caves and crannies, now come out and fill the sleeping earth with a weird, unnatural life. The old legend has a sort of awful reality here in our darkened streets, for when the day is spent, and the life of business sinks to rest, and the great buildings darken into shadow, another life comes out and passes to and fro in the darkened streets and plies its concerns in the silent shadows. It is a life of sin and of shame. We pause a moment, and watch and listen. Now and then a belated passer-by hastens with hurried step, but it is almost noiseless--this night life on these silent streets. Here and there, there are figures standing within the shadows. A young man emerges from the building, where late accounts have kept him long after the hours of accustomed toil. A dozen steps, and he is accosted; there is a rustle and a voice, and then maybe a woman’s laugh ringing out with strange echo in the darkness. They loiter along with slow step, and together are lost to our view, and the night covers up this silent trap of hell, whose snares are spread for unwary feet. A little further and we drive hurriedly across the glare, where the crowds flow along the great night arteries of the city--a motley crowd, vastly differing from the daylight throng. There are hundreds of young men, scores of young women, whose days are spent in shops and behind counters, and whose nights court ruin in the streets. The air is noisy and the lights are dazzling; here and yonder are those brilliantly lighted stairs that lead up into apparent gloom, for all the curtained windows show by their darkness. It is the old story: “The idle brain is the devil’s workshop.” The life that simply works to live, and that only six hours, if six hours will keep the body, courts the devil for his master. And yet, go out among the thousands of young men in this city tonight, and let us question them as to the object of life, and you may well wonder at the multitudes who only live to live. No thought of anything above the body, no glimpse of anything beyond the sky--an animal life, serving only appetite and seeking only pleasure. Oh, is that all of life? To spend the day in toil, the night in empty pleasure; our days for nothing, and our future in eternal poverty of soul. Oh, hear me preach the gospel of yourself, your better self; its possibilities, its powers, its future. Think what you may be, and then be it, by God’s grace, and cheat the devil as you save your soul. I marked most of all in these streets the presence of death. They were full of dead men, of dead women, of corpses, walking, talking, jesting in loathsome death. Do you remember Valjean’s dream in “Les Miserables”? How, conscious of his crime, he slept, and sleep revealed to him the death of sin. He dreamed he was at Romainville, a little garden park near Paris, full of flowers and music and pleasure. But as he in his dream comes to this domain of revelry, the flowers, and the trees, and the very sky, all are of the colour of ashes. Leaning against a wall he finds a man at the corner where two streets meet. “Why is all so still?” The man seems to hear not and makes no reply. In amazement Valjean wanders on through vacant rooms and courts and through the gardens, all the colour of ashes, and finds everywhere silence by the fountains, in the pavilions, everywhere these silent men and women, who have no answer to his questions. In horror he endeavours to fly from the ashen abode of terror, when, looking back, he finds all the inhabitants of the lifeless town suddenly clustering about him, and their ashen lips open, they cry to him, “Do you not know that you have been dead for a long time?” And with a cry Valjean wakens and feels his sin. So I saw in these ways of sin dead men all about me. Beneath that silken robe and sparkling necklace, loathsome death; behind that laugh and empty jest, a dead man; walking, talking, drinking, feasting, and yet dead. Dead in sin, helpless in habit’s chains, snared in the man traps of hell. (T. E. Green, D. D.)

Home missions

First, glance at the circumstances and conduct of the Jewish people, which gave rise to the language of the text. During the days of Jeremiah, and of all the later prophets, they appear to have sunk into the very depths of national degeneracy. The sanctions of the Divine authority, and the terrors of Divine indignation, were equally disregarded with the promises and protection of the Most High. The prophet would have awakened them to a sense of their criminality and danger; but in vain. He interceded in secret for the reversal of that righteous sentence by which they were doomed to prove the folly and misery of their own ways; but this also was without effect. While his voice was still tremulously pleading for their forgiveness, and the saint and patriot blended in every gushing tear, and every irrepressible emotion,--the mandate of almighty justice, tempted too far and wearied of forbearance, imposed an awful interdict--“Pray not thou for this people,” etc. How happy that no such solemn prohibition rests upon ourselves; but that we may pour forth our utmost fervour in supplicating for mercy upon those who are ready to perish! How unspeakable the happiness of reflecting, too, that we have an Advocate on high, whose plea can never be thus silenced. What was the particular nature of their idolatry at this season we know not,--or by what offerings they sought to propitiate and honour that mysterious divinity which they worshipped as “the queen of heaven”; but that it was a service accompanied with whatever was fitted to inflame the jealousy and provoke the retribution of the God of Israel, the tenor of this book and of their subsequent calamities suffers us not to question. But there is one reflection forced upon our minds by the mention of this subject, which is perpetually arising in the perusal of these sacred documents,--how inveterate and how wonderful is the depravity of the human intellect, as well as the corruption of the human heart! How great, too, is the compassion, of God!--how impressive and encouraging the illustration of His long-suffering! “He remembered that they were but dust,” etc. This is the compassion and long-suffering which we are called every day to recognise, amidst provocations and unfaithfulness which would have wearied out all other grace but the grace of Omnipotence, and which no might could restrain itself from punishing but that which upholds the mountains and which grasps the thunderbolt. Its very power alone is our security. We cannot meditate upon these facts without one other suggestion,--how great is the necessity for continued zeal and diligence, on the part of good men, to counteract to the uttermost the evils, not only of their own hearts and conduct, but of those among whom they dwell The condition of men at large forces itself on our notice, as one of universal calamity and peril,--“Seest thou not what they do?” Let us suppose the spectator one from a distant region, an inhabitant of one of the remoter provinces of intellectual being,--acquainted with the character, and reposing with joyful confidence in the presiding power, of the Creator,--but unread in the history of man. He has heard of redemption, and is desirous to explore it; but he knows not yet the state of those for whom it was designed. And he is permitted this momentary inspection of the human system, that he may gather from it the elements of heavenly truth, and “the manifold wisdom of God.” Alas! how perplexed and intricate would all appear! What numberless anomalies, difficulties, and causes of shame and wonder, would everywhere astonish and overwhelm him! For what end would such a system seem to have been constructed, or wherefore still upheld, or tending to what result, or interpretative of what purposes, or susceptible of resolution into its contradictory phenomena by what reconciling and all-commanding principles, or calculated to excite what other sentiment except the melancholy apostrophe, “Wherefore hast Thou made all men in vain!” Descending from the contemplation of the whole, he would consider each several particular with the intensity of interest which that stupendous but appalling spectacle had summoned into being. And first, he would probably be arrested with the secular condition of mankind, and their extreme differences in the nature and degrees of social happiness. The effect would be as painful as the scene was intricate. He would shrink and tremble, as if within the boundaries of chaos, or the empire of darkness and of blind misrule. He would next consider their religious state. And now, what would be the agitation of his feelings, or in what explanation of such strange appearances could he find or seek relief? Here, he would sicken at the sight of gross and grovelling idolatries; there, at the bewildering glare of cruel yet invincible delusions; and elsewhere, at the reveries and dreamy visions of a spurious philosophy, neutralising at once every claim of human duty, and every attribute of God. Nothing would seem to him so terrible as our exposure to the jealousy and wrath of our Creator; nor anything so unfathomable as the mystery of His compassion. Outraged, defied, forgotten; His being denied by some, His noblest characters mocked, falsified, contemned by others; His best gifts perverted to the vilest purposes, His gentle inflictions misinterpreted or impiously repelled, His forbearance converted into an argument to set aside His veracity, His glorious mad terrible name, eve where it is not unknown, employed only to add force to blasphemy, or emphasis to imprecation and falsehood:--what could the stranger anticipate but the kindling up of His fury, while its flame should burn unto the lowest hell! Thus prepared--how would he dart his eager eye toward the scenes of men’s future and everlasting habitation! To what, he would ask himself, can all be hastening onwards? Where must this pilgrimage of sin and folly end? Conceive now of the surprise and the delight with which he would hear of the means provided for the restoration of men. That astonished spectator is no creation merely of the fancy. Many “a watcher,” and many “a holy one,” looks down upon the scene, and wonders. All that environs us is revealed, in a light of which we are strangely unconscious, to innumerable witnesses. We walk ourselves, at every step, beneath their gaze. And it is their judgment, not ours, respecting the dependencies and results of moral action, which shall be confirmed in the decisions of the last day. (R. S. M’All, LL. D.)