Jeremiah 50:46

REFLECTIONS

READER! contemplate in this Chapter, what all Scripture proclaims, and all experience in the history of men and things confirm; God's people must ultimately triumph, and all the enemies of God, and of his Christ, must be destroyed. How little did proud Babylon calculate the dreadful purchase they made when leading Israel into captivity! How little did Egypt suppose, for the deliverance of their poor brick making slaves, Egypt should be destroyed! And how little now, in the present hour, doth mystic Babylon frame an idea, that in one day her ruin will be accomplished. Oh! that the people of God, when racking under chastisement and oppression, would hear the rod, and who hath appointed it: and in their transgressions and unbelief, trace the source of the Lord's displeasure. But let them not forget, amidst all, that though like lost sheep, as this scripture beautifully describes them, their shepherds have caused them to go astray, yet they are still the sheep of Christ. And in the cities of the mountains, in the cities of the vale, and both in Jerusalem and Judah, the flocks must pass again under the hands of him that telleth them. Oh! the blessedness, when grace inclines the heart, of doing as the poor Captives from Babylon are described, going and weeping, they shall seek the Lord, and shall ask the way to Zion, with their faces thitherward, to join themselves to the Lord, in a perpetual covenant that shall not be broken. And as in grace, so in glory, what blessedness will break in upon the soul of all the Lord's outcasts, which here dwell with Moab, and are constrained to have their habitation in the Babylon of the world, when finally and fully they shall return, and come to the Zion which is above, with songs of everlasting joy upon their heads, when they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.