Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: April 8th

" Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord." ― Jeremiah 17:7.

We should greatly err if we understood this word " blessed’ as teaching that the man who trusteth in God will pursue a path of tranquil enjoyment and exemption from sorrow. He is blessed because he is enabled to pursue the path, the only path, that leadeth unto everlasting life. Because the favor of God is his. Because Christ forsaketh him never. Because the Spirit of God dwells in him. Because he has grace to seek the welfare of his fellow-men. And he is blessed because of the peculiar nature of his suffering. His tears are not as others’ tears. His agony is not the agony of impious men. His despair even has a dignity and sacredness about it.

Jeremiah was a man that trusted in God. But it is evident from the sublime bursts of misery occurring in his prophecies, that he was permitted to sound the depths of human woe. It was his faith in God that separated him from all his country men, deprived him of their sympathies, made him a stranger to their joys, and compelled him to drink the cup of sorrow which they should have drunk. He trusted in God, and therefore he could not hide from them that God was about to pour upon them the vials of destruction, and to surrender them into the hands of a heathen king. They listened with amazement to words that seemed to them nothing less than blasphemy, and denounced him as the enemy of his country, a traitor to the hallowed and God-defended interests of Judea. When, in the freshness of youth, he received his prophetical commission from the Lord, it was distinctly intimated to him that " all should fight against him," the kings, the priests, the people, the bad and the good, not excepting even the God fearing and devout. He was a man ever spoken against; and those that could agree upon no other topic, cordially harmonized upon the one subject of the baseness and treachery of Jeremiah. Other reputed prophets might be true or might be false; but that Jeremiah was a false prophet was something not to be questioned. And it did not please the Lord to give unto his servant that stern indifference that would have lifted him above the reach of these cruel shafts. No, he left him to the native sensitiveness and keen susceptibility to injury that characterized him. His was a nature of exquisite poetic sensibility, and many a piercing cry of anguish escapes him as he meets, remembers and broods upon the opprobrious looks and words addressed to him. At times he loathes his very existence, and abhors the day that gave him birth. " Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth."

Is our faith in the goodness of God staggered by the discovery of what he permitted this his chosen servant to suffer? Are we at a loss how to reconcile this inexorable rigor, with the many declarations of the divine pitifulness? Or, on the other hand, do we decide that the prophet’s faith must have failed him in those hours of bitterness, and that a deeper reaching glance into the future would have saved his susceptible soul those fearful shocks? No, faith has no alliance with stoicism. It does not make us ignore present things. Faith goes beyond sense and shows us actualities that cannot other wise be discerned; but it does not set aside sense, or separate our soul from the body that is in the world. ― And what be comes of the divine compassion? Why, Jeremiah the sufferer, himself bears unequivocal testimony to the goodness of God. It is he that teaches us to say, " Blessed is the man that trusteth in thee."

At long intervals God calls a Job, a Jeremiah to the experience of their aggravated sorrows: but he supports them; and their triumphant faith animates the drooping faith of thousands who are called to tread inferior paths of sorrow. Honor to Jeremiah, who notwithstanding all his excruciation of soul, hath left us this testimony, " Blessed is the man that trusteth in thee!" What believer will refuse to take up the refrain?

-