Yahweh says, “Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, ‘Where is the good way?’ and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
Parallel Translations
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Yahweh says, “Stand in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, ‘Where is the good way?’ and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
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Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.
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Thus saith the LORD: Stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said: 'We will not walk therein.'
Cross-references (26)
Passages linked to Jeremiah 6:16 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- Isaiah 30:21 and when you turn to the right hand, and when you turn to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.”
- Deuteronomy 32:7 Remember the days of old. Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you; your elders, and they will tell you.
- Jeremiah 18:15 For my people have forgotten me. They have burned incense to false gods. They have been made to stumble in their ways, in the ancient paths, to walk in byways, in a way not built up,
- Matthew 11:28-29 “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you will find rest for your souls.
- Jeremiah 7:23 but this thing I commanded them, saying, ‘Listen to my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. Walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.’
- Colossians 2:6 As therefore you received Christ Jesus, the Lord, walk in him,
- Isaiah 2:5 House of Jacob, come, and let’s walk in the light of Yahweh.
- Jeremiah 18:12 But they say, ‘It is in vain; for we will walk after our own plans, and we will each follow the stubbornness of his evil heart.’ ”
- John 12:35 Jesus therefore said to them, “Yet a little while the light is with you. Walk while you have the light, that darkness doesn’t overtake you. He who walks in the darkness doesn’t know where he is going.
- Jeremiah 22:21 I spoke to you in your prosperity; but you said, ‘I will not listen.’ This has been your way from your youth, that you didn’t obey my voice.
- Hebrews 11:2–12:1 For by this, the elders obtained testimony. By faith, we understand that the universe has been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which are visible. By faith, Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he had testimony given to him that he was righteous, God testifying with respect to his gifts; and through it he, being dead, still speaks. By faith, Enoch was taken away, so that he wouldn’t see death, and he was not found, because God translated him. For he has had testimony given to him that before his translation he had been well pleasing to God. Without faith it is impossible to be well pleasing to him, for he who comes to God must believe that he exists, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. By faith, Noah, being warned about things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared a ship for the saving of his house, through which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to the place which he was to receive for an inheritance. He went out, not knowing where he went. By faith, he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for the city which has the foundations, whose builder and maker is God. By faith, even Sarah herself received power to conceive, and she bore a child when she was past age, since she counted him faithful who had promised. Therefore as many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as innumerable as the sand which is by the sea shore, were fathered by one man, and him as good as dead. These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and embraced them from afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own. If indeed they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had enough time to return. But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed of them, to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. By faith, Abraham, being tested, offered up Isaac. Yes, he who had gladly received the promises was offering up his one and only son, to whom it was said, “Your offspring will be accounted as from Isaac,” concluding that God is able to raise up even from the dead. Figuratively speaking, he also did receive him back from the dead. By faith, Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau, even concerning things to come. By faith, Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff. By faith, Joseph, when his end was near, made mention of the departure of the children of Israel, and gave instructions concerning his bones. By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that he was a beautiful child, and they were not afraid of the king’s commandment. By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill treatment with God’s people than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a time, considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he looked to the reward. By faith, he left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible. By faith, he kept the Passover, and the sprinkling of the blood, that the destroyer of the firstborn should not touch them. By faith, they passed through the Red Sea as on dry land. When the Egyptians tried to do so, they were swallowed up. By faith, the walls of Jericho fell down, after they had been encircled for seven days. By faith, Rahab the prostitute didn’t perish with those who were disobedient, having received the spies in peace. What more shall I say? For the time would fail me if I told of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked out righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, grew mighty in war, and caused foreign armies to flee. Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Others were tried by mocking and scourging, yes, moreover by bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned. They were sawn apart. They were tempted. They were slain with the sword. They went around in sheep skins and in goat skins; being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated— of whom the world was not worthy—wandering in deserts, mountains, caves, and the holes of the earth. These all, having had testimony given to them through their faith, didn’t receive the promise, God having provided some better thing concerning us, so that apart from us they should not be made perfect. Therefore let’s also, seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let’s run with perseverance the race that is set before us,
- Jeremiah 44:16 “As for the word that you have spoken to us in Yahweh’s name, we will not listen to you.
- Malachi 4:4 “Remember the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded to him in Horeb for all Israel, even statutes and ordinances.
- John 13:17 If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
- Luke 16:29 “But Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’
- Hebrews 6:12 that you won’t be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and perseverance inherited the promises.
- Isaiah 8:20 Turn to the law and to the covenant! If they don’t speak according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.
- Isaiah 28:12 to whom he said, “This is the resting place. Give rest to weary,” and “This is the refreshing;” yet they would not hear.
- John 5:39 “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and these are they which testify about me.
- Matthew 21:28-32 But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first, and said, ‘Son, go work today in my vineyard.’ He answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind, and went. He came to the second, and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I’m going, sir,’ but he didn’t go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said to him, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Most certainly I tell you that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering into God’s Kingdom before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. When you saw it, you didn’t even repent afterward, that you might believe him.
- Romans 4:1-6 What then will we say that Abraham, our forefather, has found according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not toward God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” Now to him who works, the reward is not counted as grace, but as something owed. But to him who doesn’t work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness. Even as David also pronounces blessing on the man to whom God counts righteousness apart from works,
- Song of Solomon 1:7-8 Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you graze your flock, where you rest them at noon; for why should I be as one who is veiled beside the flocks of your companions? If you don’t know, most beautiful among women, follow the tracks of the sheep. Graze your young goats beside the shepherds’ tents.
- Acts 17:11 Now these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.
- John 5:46-47 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me. But if you don’t believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
- Romans 4:12 He is the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham, which he had in uncircumcision.
- Jeremiah 2:25 “Keep your feet from being bare, and your throat from thirst. But you said, ‘It is in vain. No, for I have loved strangers, and I will go after them.’
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this verse (19 sources)
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain The Prophet teaches us here that the fault of…
The Prophet teaches us here that the fault of the people could not be extenuated as though they had sinned through ignorance; for they had been warned more than necessary by God. The same sentiment is found in Isaiah,
“This is your rest; but they would not hear.” (Isaiah 28:12.)
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But our Prophet more at large condemns the Jews; for God had commanded them to stand in the ways, to look and to inquire respecting all the old paths. He uses a similitude: and we ought not to doubt respecting the way, since it has been shewn to us by the mouth of God. But the impiety of the people is exposed and reproved, because they did not so much as open their eyes, when God shewed them the way and allowed them a free choice: for he introduces God here, not strictly as one who commands, but as one who shews so much indulgence, that the people were free to choose the way they approved and thought best. When God deals so kindly with men, and so condescendingly sets before them what is useful and expedient, it is the basest ingratitude to reject such kindness on God’s part.
We now then understand the Prophet’s design in saying, that God had commanded them to stand in the ways and to consider what was best to be done. Consider, he says, and ye shall find rest, that is, that ye may find rest (for the copulative here denotes the end) to your souls Here the Prophet means, that it remained only with the Jews to secure prosperity and a quiet state; for if they had obeyed the counsel of God, rest would have been provided for them: in short, he means, that they were miserable through their own willfulness; for God had set before them the prospect of a happy condition, but this favor had been despised by them, and wantonly despised, as these words intimate, And they said, We will not walk in it
We see that the people’s perverseness is here discovered; because they might have otherwise objected and said, that they had been deceived, and that if they had been in time warned, they would have obeyed good and wise counsels. In order to cut off this handle, Jeremiah says, that they from deliberate wickedness had rejected the rest offered them by God: they have said, We will not walk in it. This resolution deafly shews that they obstinately remained in their sins; so that the rest, which was within their reach, was not chosen by them.
This passage contains a valuable truth, — that faith ever brings us peace with God, and that not only because it leads us to acquiesce in God’s mercy, and thus, as Paul teaches us, (Romans 5:1,) produces this as its perpetual fruit; but because the will of God alone is sufficient to appease our minds. Whosoever then embraces from the heart the truth as coming from God, is at peace; for God never suffers his own people to fluctuate while they recumb on him, but shews to them how great stability belongs to his truth. If it was so under the Law and the Prophets, as we have seen from Isaiah, how much more shall we obtain rest under Christ, provided we submit, to his word; for he has himself promised it, “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.” And ye shall find rest, he says here, to your souls. This passage then serves to commend this celestial truth, that it avails to pacify consciences, so that there is no perplexity nor doubt. It follows —
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain Wherein the Patriarchs and Prophets walked, directed by the…
Wherein the Patriarchs and Prophets walked, directed by the word of God: signifying that there is no true way, but that which God prescribeth.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain Jer 6:16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in…
Jer 6:16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where [is] the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk [therein].
Ver. 16. Stand ye in the ways and see.] Duly deliberate and take time to consider whether you are in the right or not.
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Ask for the old paths.] Chalked out in the Word, and walked in by the patriarchs. Think not, as some do today, by running through all religions to find out the right; for this is viam per aria quaerere, as Junius phraseth it; to seek a way where none is to be found. How many religions are there now among us! So many men, so many minds. Non est sciens hodie qui novitates non invenit, as one complained of old. He is nobody that cannot invent a new way; but as old wine is better, so is the old way; hold to it therefore. Quod primum verum, {a} That which was first is true; but beware of new truths that cannot be proven to be old. {as 1Jn 2:7}
“ Qui veteres linquit, calles sequiturque novatos
Saepius in fraudes incidet ille suns. ”
But they said, We will not walk therein.] So Jer 6:17, "But they said, We will not hearken." See the like resolute answers, Jer 22:21; Jer 44:16, savouring of a self-willed obstinace. It is easier to deal with twenty men’s reasons than with one man’s will. A wilful man stands as a stake in the midst of a stream, lets all pass by him, but he stands where he was. Luther saith of some of his Wittembergians, that so great was their obstinace, so headstrong and headlong they were, that the four elements could not bear it. Jeremiah seems here to say as much of his Jerusalemites. See Jer 6:18-19.
{a} Alnar. Pelagius.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain Having told the false prophets their doom, he now…
Having told the false prophets their doom, he now turns his speech to the people, and gives them counsel; for he rather propounds than commands, by a metaphor taken from travellers, that being in doubt of their way, do stand still, pause, and consider, whether the direction they have received from some ignorant person or false guide be right or not.
The old paths, Heb. paths of antiquity, such as their godly forefathers of old were wont to walk in, the ancient paths, Jer 18:15. Or, the oracles of God, what directions his word gives, Isa 8:20. Or, the providence of God. Observe what hath been God’s ways and method in times past, with reference to sin and punishment, Deu 4:3,4; Jdg 5:6,8; Jer 22:15,16, and what have been want to be the best courses, called here the
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good way, or the best way to continue mercies and prevent judgments, Deu 32:7, he.: see 1Th 5:21.
Walk therein; when you have found what was best and most prosperous, keep it, stick to it.
Ye shall find rest; you will find God to stand by you, and be a sanctuary to you, Deu 33:12,29. See Mat 11:29. You will find things mend with you; it will be well with you, as it hath been with others; you will be satisfied and quiet; you will not doubt any longer which way to follow: see 1Ki 18:21.
We will not walk therein; it notes their great wilfulness and obstinacy, that though the prophets had directed them in the right way, and though they knew others had experimented it to be so, yet they would not be persuaded to walk in it, but deliberately refused those favours offered, Isa 8:11-13; Jer 18:11,12.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain Thus saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways,…
Thus saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways, and see,.... These are the words of the Lord to the people, whom he would have judge for themselves, and not be blindly led by the false prophets and priests; directing them to do what men should, when they are in a place where two or more ways meet, and know not which way to take; they should make a short stop, and look to the way mark or way post, which points whither each path leads, and so accordingly proceed. Now, in religious things, the Scriptures are the way mark to direct us which way we should take: if the inquiry is about the way of salvation, look up to these, which are able to make a man wise unto salvation; these show unto men that the way of salvation is not works of righteousness done by them, but Christ only: if the question is about any doctrine whatever, search the Scriptures, examine them, they are profitable for doctrine; they tell us what is truth, and what is error: if the doubt is about the matter or form of worship, and the ordinances of it, look into the Scriptures, they are the best directory to us what we should observe and do:
and ask for the old paths; of righteousness and holiness, which Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and others, walked in, and follow them; and the way of salvation by Christ, which, though called a new way, Heb 10:20, yet is not newly found out, for it was contrived in eternity; nor newly revealed, for it was made known to Adam and Eve immediately after the fall; nor newly made use of, for all the Old Testament saints were saved by the same grace of Christ, and justified by his righteousness, and their sins pardoned through his blood, and expiated by his sacrifice, as New Testament saints; only of late, or in these last days, it has been more clearly made known; otherwise there is but one way of salvation; there never was any other, nor never will be; inquire therefore for this old path, which all true believers have trodden in:
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where is the good way, and walk therein; or, "the better or best way" (x), and more excellent way, which is Christ, Joh 14:6, he is the way of access to God, and acceptance with him, and the way of conveyance of all the blessings of grace; he is the way to the Father, and to eternal happiness; he is the living way which always continues, and is ever the same; and is a plain, pleasant, and safe way, and therefore a good one; there is no one better, nor any so good; and therefore this must be the right way to walk in, and to which there is great encouragement, as follows:
and ye shall find rest for your souls; there is rest and peace enjoyed in the ways of God, and in the ordinances of the Gospel; wisdom's ways are ways of peace, which are the lesser paths; and in the doctrines of the Gospel, when the heart is established with them, the mind is tranquil and serene, and at rest, which before was fluctuating and wavering, and tossed to and fro with every wind; but the principal rest is in Christ himself, in whom the true believer, that walks by faith in him, has rest from the guilt and dominion of sin, from the curse and bondage of the law, and from the wrath of God in his conscience; and enjoys a spiritual peace, arising from the blood, sacrifice, and righteousness of Christ, Mat 11:28,
but they said, we will not walk therein; in the old paths, and in the good way but in their own evil ways, which they chose and delighted in; and therefore, as their destruction was inevitable, it was just and righteous.
(x) "quae sit via melior", Vatablus; "via optima", Schmidt.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain Stand - He now turns his speech to the…
Stand - He now turns his speech to the people, and gives them counsel; by a metaphor taken from travelers, that being in doubt of their way, stand still, and consider, whether the direction they have received from some false guide, be right or not.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain Verse 16. Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in…
Verse 16. Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see] Let us observe the metaphor. A traveller is going to a particular city; he comes to a place where the road divides into several paths, he is afraid of going astray; he stops short, - endeavours to find out the right path: he cannot fix his choice. At last he sees another traveller; he inquires of him, gets proper directions - proceeds on his journey - arrives at the desired place - and reposes after his fatigue. There is an excellent sermon on these words in the works of our first poet, Geoffrey Chaucer; it is among the Canterbury Tales, and is called Chaucer's Tale. The text, I find, was read by him as it appears in my old MS. Bible: - Standith upon weies and seeth, and asketh of the olde pathes; What is the good weie? and goth in it, and gee schul fynden refresching to your soulis. The soul needs rest; it can only find this by walking in the good way. The good way is that which has been trodden by the saints from the beginning: it is the old way, the way of faith and holiness. BELIEVE, LOVE, OBEY; be holy, and be happy. This is the way; let us inquire for it, and walk in it. But these bad people said, We will not walk in it. Then they took another way, walked over the precipice, and fell into the bottomless pit; where, instead of rest, they find -
____________ a fiery deluge, fed
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With ever-burning sulphur, unconsumed.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain Jer 6:16-17. Stand ye in the ways, &c. —…
Jer 6:16-17. Stand ye in the ways, &c. — He now turns his speech to the people, and gives them counsel; by a metaphor taken from travellers, who, being in doubt of their way, stand still, and consider, whether the direction, which they have received from some false guide, be right or not. Ask for the old paths — Inquire in what way the patriarchs, the judges, the kings, and prophets of former times walked, and imitate their practices. And ye shall find rest for your souls — You will find peace with God, will be safe under his protection, and in consequence thereof will have comfort and satisfaction in your own minds. See Mat 11:28-29. But they said, We will not walk therein — If they did not say so in express words, yet such was the language of their actions: though the prophets had directed them into the right way, and though they knew others had experienced it to be so, yet they would not be persuaded to walk in it, but deliberately refused the blessings offered them. Also I set watchmen over you — I gave you prophets, as so many watchmen, to warn you of the evils that threatened you. And they faithfully discharged their duty, admonishing you of your sins, and giving you faithful warning of the judgments they would bring upon you; saying, Hearken to the sound of the trumpet — That is, to the warning given you of approaching danger. It was customary, in those days and countries, to have continually watchmen placed on high towers, or on hills, who observed the country all round, to prevent any sudden hostile invasion, by giving early notice of any appearance thereof by sound of trumpet. “So the prophets, who were the observators of the manners of the people, and who had early notice from God what evils were coming, unless prevented by repentance and amendment of life, are called watchmen.”
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain The sense is: God’s prophet has declared that a…
The sense is: God’s prophet has declared that a great national calamity is at hand. “Make inquiries; stand in the ways; ask the passers by. Your country was once prosperous and blessed. Try to learn what were the paths trodden in those days which led your ancestors to happiness. Choose them, and walk earnestly therein, and find thereby rest for your souls.” The Christian fathers often contrast Christ the one goodway with the old tracks, many in number and narrow to walk in, which are the Law and the prophets.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain Paths, of patriarchs, and of Moses. Avoid novelty in…
Paths, of patriarchs, and of Moses. Avoid novelty in religion. (Calmet) --- This advice is very applicable to the present generation. (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain Image from travellers who have lost their road, stopping…
Image from travellers who have lost their road, stopping and inquiring which is the right way on which they once had been, but from which they have wandered.
old paths--Idolatry and apostasy are the modern way; the worship of God the old way. Evil is not coeval with good, but a modern degeneracy from good. The forsaking of God is not, in a true sense, a "way cast up" at all (Jer 18:15; Psa 139:24; Mal 4:4).
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rest-- (Isa 28:12; Mat 11:29).
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain JUSTIFICATION OF THEIR OVERTHROW IN THEIR STUBBORN RESISTANCE, Jer_6:16-21.
JUSTIFICATION OF THEIR OVERTHROW IN THEIR STUBBORN RESISTANCE, Jer_6:16-21.
16. Ask for the old paths — The one remedy for all apostasy — call back the old times. In what path did your holy and heroic fathers walk? Go back where the ways meet, and again enter those everlasting paths.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain 16. saith] rather, said, in His frequent remonstrances.
16. saith] rather, said, in His frequent remonstrances.
Of the branching paths the old established one will prove that which alone ye may follow with divine sanction.
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the good way] lit. the way of that which is good. Cp. Jer_18:15; Deu_32:7.
rest for your souls] The words have not the significance which the similar expression bears in Mat_11:29. It is “not the inward peace which the soul has in fellowship with God, but the peace and safety which they will secure by adherence to God’s commands.” Pe.
16–21. The third division. See introd. note to the ch.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain (16) Stand ye in the ways.—In the prophet’s mind…
(16) Stand ye in the ways.—In the prophet’s mind the people were as a traveller who has taken a self-chosen path, and finds that it leads him to a place of peril. Is it not well that they should stop and ask where the old paths (literally, the eternal paths; the words going, as in Jer_18:15, beyond the mere antiquity of the nation’s life) were, on which their fathers had travelled safely. Of these old paths they were to choose that which was most distinctly “the good way,” the way of righteousness, and therefore of peace and health also. The call, however, was in vain. The people chose to travel still in the broad way that led them to destruction.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain Vers. 16-21. Without hearty repentance, there is no hope…
Vers. 16-21. Without hearty repentance, there is no hope of escape. But hitherto Judah has rejected all admonitions. What availeth mere ceremonial punctuality?
Stand ye in the ways; literally, station yourselves on (or, by) roads, i.e. at the meeting-point of different roads. There (as the following words state) the Jews are to make inquiry as to the old paths. Antiquity gives a presumption of rightness; the ancients were nearer to the days when God spoke with man; they had the guidance of God"s two mighty "shepherds"; (Isa_63:11) they knew, far better than we, who "are but of yesterday, and know nothing", (Job_8:9) the way of happiness. For though there are many pretended "ways," there is but "one way" (Jer_32:39) which has Jehovah"s blessing. (Psa_25:8, Psa_25:9)
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The old paths.
I CONSIDER THE RECOMMENDATION TO FOLLOW THE OLD PATHS.
1. The course of life should be determined after thoughtful deliberation. Jeremiah is to "stand in the ways and see." It is foolish to go with the multitude without individual convictions of what is right, or to follow our own private impulses blindly and aimlessly.
2. The choice should fall on a good way. Other ways may be smooth, pleasant, flowery at the starting, only to lose themselves in the pathless wilderness, while this may look more rugged and steep at first; but it should not be the present attractiveness, but the direction, the whole course and the end of a way, which should determine our choice of it.
3. There are old paths of right. Religion has not to be made anew. It is not left for the latest saint to discover the way of holiness.
4. Having found the right way, we should forthwith "walk therein." Knowledge is useless without practice; nay, guilt is aggravated if, knowing the right, we follow the wrong.
5. In the right way is rest for the soul. Even while on the earthly pilgrimage many quiet resting-places may be found, (Psa_23:2) through all the course an inward peace may be enjoyed, (Pro_3:17) and at the end will be found the perfect rest of the home of God. (Heb_4:9)
II CONSIDER THE GROUNDS ON WHICH THIS RECOMMENDATION IS BASED.
1. Old ways have been tested by experience. We choose for a guide one who has already traversed the country. In an unknown land we naturally turn to beaten tracks in preference to following stray footprints across the wild, or striking out for ourselves a pathless way. If others have done rough pioneer work, why should not we avail ourselves of it? If they have reached the goal, they have proved that it is attainable by their way. This is fact; that a new way will be easier or shorter is conjecture. There is, therefore, a presumption in favor of the old.
2. Old ways in religion are nearer to the original fountains of inspiration. Israel was referred back to the old ways marked out by Moses, the great founder of the Jewish faith. Christians are referred back to primitive Christianity, to the teaching of the apostles, to the life and example of Christ. Christianity is not a speculation, a creation of the spirit of the age. It is a tradition, a following of those Divine counsels which are indicated in the New Testament.
III CONSIDER THE LIMITATIONS TO THE APPLICATION OF THIS RECOMMENDATION.
1. The old ways are to be followed only in so far as they are good. Still we must judge by our own conscience. Antiquity must not be taken as a despotic master. There are bad old ways. The first-born man struck out an evil way; it was left to Abel, the second-born, to show the better course.
2. In considering the character of an old way, we must take note of the character and light of those who founded it. There have been dark ages in the past. Corruption soon crept in. Things are not good just in proportion to their age. Christians must look, not to the Puritans, the Reformers the medieval Church, the Fathers, but, passing numerous errors and corruptions, reach back to Christ himself for the true old way. He is the. (Joh_14:6)
3. We must ever progress beyond the attainments of the past. We are to follow those old ways that are good; we are to build on the one foundation. But we are not to be content with having the foundation. The fabric must rise higher and higher. (1Co_3:11-15) Christianity is a religion of progress. It is not to be subject to revolutions. Progress must follow the lines laid down by Christ and his apostles. Christianity is not strengthened nor adorned, but only burdened and hidden, by a mere accretion of human ideas and institutions; yet it is a seed which grows, developing larger, fuller life out of its own essential principles. (Mat_13:31) Jeremiah himself took a great stride forward beyond the limits attained by antiquity, though in the direction of the old path, i.e. in the spirit of the religion of his fathers. (Jer_31:31-34) "These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we count ancient, ordine retrograde, by a computation backwards from ourselves" (Francis Bacon).
The old paths.
Men are surrounded from their earliest years with various religious systems, the claims of which conflict. To a conscientious mind, intellectual disquietude is the first result of this; in those less in earnest it produces and justifies indifference. All religious tend, under these circumstances, to assume the aspect of speculative questions, and the moral life is increasingly detached from religious sanctions. Morality must thereby be impaired, if it do not ultimately disappear. The prophet, therefore, recalls the people to the consideration of religion as a practical question. It is with him a question not of pure theory, but of conduct and experience. He urges the settlement of the conflict upon these grounds, and furnishes certain criteria by which to determine it.
I ANTIQUITY IS A TEST OF TRUE RELIGION. Man is a religions being by nature, and God has never left himself without a witness in the world. There has been no generation in which some have not sought and found him. From the very first, therefore, there must have been religions conditions observed, which from their nature must be, as they were intended to be, permanent. The argument for the existence of God, for instance, is greatly strengthened by the evidence of the recognition of him by primitive and ancient peoples. Even in their errors and mistakes, when their views and observances are collated and compared, witness is given to fundamental truths. But the argument is stronger still when the people appealed to are those who, like Israel, have a historical faith. Ages of faith were behind them, illustrated by mighty heroes and saintly men of God, For ages a certain communion had been observed between the nation and its theocratic Head. What was the secular character of those" ages? Were they marked by political strength, social order and purity, and commercial prosperity? Were the leaders of the people men whose ideal of life and actual behavior commended themselves to the general conscience of the world? Was it to be supposed that any essential truth for the spiritual guidance of men had to be discovered thus late in the day? Were men to be always on tiptoe to learn what the last finding of research might be? There were paths that had been tried by holy men. When the nation was at its best, it acknowledged God in these ways. The vast majority of those who were holiest and best had tried them and found them satisfactory.
II BUT DISCRIMINATION IS REQUIRED, The children of Israel were to "stand in the ways," i.e. to examine the different systems of religion and morals that laid claim to their attention. Critical and historical judgment had to be exercised. It is not simply the oldest religion that is to be retained and followed, but that in the religious history of the past which has most evidently conduced to noble action, spiritual health, and wellbeing. The" heathenisms of the world are self-condemned; immorality has ever tended to destruction. The Englishman, therefore, is not to look to the Druids for infallible teaching; nor Christians to the saints of the Old Testament times. The dictum of Ignatius is sound: Nobis vera antiquitas est Jesus Christus. But the teaching and personality of Jesus were commended by their essential agreement with Mosaicism in its most ancient form; as that in turn was but a confirmation and elaboration of patriarchal convictions, experiences, and revelations. The truth that has been held in all ages is retained in each new development of revelation and history, but it is spiritualized and grounded upon deeper and wider sanctions.
III THE NATURAL HUMAN DESIRE FOR MERE NOVELTY HAS TO BE OVERCOME. True religion is not to be despised because it is old. The truth, when carefully studied and spiritually realized, is ever new and fresh. And the "new truths" to which advancing time introduces us are justified only as we can organically and spiritually evolve them from their archaic predecessors. Obligations which are merely relative will change or disappear with the relations upon which they are founded, but the cardinal truths of heart and life must ever retain their authority, and new experience will but tend to deepen and strengthen their hold upon the religious nature. If, on the other hand, the teachings of experience and the warnings of prophets are despised, new heinousness will be added to the wickedness of the wicked. It will be willful disobedience, and as such will be more severely punished.
IV OBEDIENCE TO THESE DOCTRINES OF EXPERIENCE WILL CONFIRM AND SATISFY THE SOUL. If, in spite of these corroborations, the doctrines were productive of misery and spiritual unrest, then they would go for nothing. But this is the final and absolute criterion Do they tend to the welfare and increase of spiritual life, and to the satisfaction of the deepest longings of the soul? M.
The good old paths.
It is noticeable in the order of nature how God has secured the true adjustment and hence the highest well-being of his universe by means of the action of contrasted and opposite forces. By means of that power which the mighty mass of the sun has to draw everything to itself if this were left alone to operate, the whole of those innumerable orbs that now circle round the sun as their center would be drawn in upon it and perish. But this is prevented by the action of an opposite force, called the centrifugal, as the first-mentioned is called the centripetal. This opposite force tends, by the velocity with which the planets revolve around the sun, to drive them off and away from it: thus, by the effect of these opposite forces, that perfect harmony and unerring order of the whole stellar universe, which has been the admiration of all observers in all ages, are preserved. Chemistry also can furnish illustrations not a few of the beneficent action of opposite forces, where either left alone would work only harm. In the great law of sex, the constitution of all life, plant life as well as animal, as male and female, this in all its aspects is another marked instance of the same Divine method. In political life, the two great tendencies, monarchial and democratic, or the rule of the one versus the rule of the many the mutual strugglings of these two keep the world in such equilibrium as we see. In religion , the Catholic principle which makes self nothing, and the Protestant principle which makes self all-important, each man having to give an account of himself to God, these are both designed to contend the one against the other, and whilst Catholicism is to cheek the selfish individualism into which Protestantism is apt to lapse, Protestantism is in its turn to struggle against that servility of mind into which the principle of self-abnegation, the essential principle of Catholicism, is prone to degenerate. It is in the resultant of these two forces that the purest form of religious life is found. And in regard to the life of obedience to God, the life which he would have us live here on earth, that, too, is governed by the action of opposed laws. There is the law which works through our bodily nature, and which if left alone would make us, not in body only but in soul, of the earth earthy, forever "groveling here below." But there is the opposed law which works through our spiritual nature; but, blessed as it is, it needs to be disciplined and made perfectly healthful to us by means of the salutary necessity of giving heed in due measure to the lesser law just spoken of. The first preserves us from being mere enthusiasts, the second from the far greater peril of enslavement to the world, the flesh, and the devil acting through them. And in those two tendencies, one of which is plainly referred to in this sixteenth verse and the other implied, the love of the old is contrasted with the love of the new. Here, again, we have set before us two great forces in humanity, which by their mutual contentions preserve it in tolerable health and comfort, and ensure its steady, onward progress. Conservatism and liberalism are not the products of any one national revolution, like our own in 1688, but they are two God-implanted tendencies of the human mind, each of which has its appropriate and most useful function, and neither of which can be dispensed with without harm to the whole body politic" in every nation under the sun. To lie like a log on the ocean of human life, useless and despised amid the nationalities of the world, is the doom of those who will blindly close their eyes to the fresh light and truth which are forever breaking forth upon the world; to run upon the rooks and make shipwreck of everything is the doom of those who despise the teachings of experience, and care only to be forever finding out some new way and to follow some new guide. But let these two act and react each on the other the love of the old upon the love of the new, the tendency to be always looking back upon the tendency to be always looking forward, and then the result is that men will come generally to practically act upon that prudent, though to many minds most prosaic, maxim which counselsBe not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
But in regard to the way in which God would have us go, our text teaches
I THAT THERE ARE NO NEW WAYS. From the beginning that which the Lord God hath required of man has been, even as it yet is, that we should "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God." The gospel of the Lord Jesus is not to supersede or make void this eternal law, but to establish it as it never had been or could have been before. "What the Law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh," did, "that the righteousness of the Law might be fulfilled in us." For this end, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the burden of guilt is taken off from us, and a new heart and a right spirit given. But the law of life is ever the same. It is the old and good way.
II NEVERTHELESS, MEN ARE CONTINUALLY DEVISING NEW WAYS. It was so in Jeremiah"s time; it is so in our own. By denials of truths most surely believed amongst us for many generations, or by additions thereto, or by substitutions of other forms of faith, men have done to-clay as in the days of old. Every magazine and newspaper, besides innumerable volumes ever issuing from the press, all alike are popular as they throw over old ideas and propound "some new thing." Science and secularism and superstition between them would, lung ere this, have destroyed the good old way, had it not been so firmly constructed that all these powers combined are not adequate for such a task.
III IN THESE NEW WAYS WHAT IS TRUE WILL BE FOUND TO BE OLD, AND WHAT IS NOT OLD WILL BE FOUND TO BE NOT TRUE. For there are tests by which new teachings may be tried, and ought to be tried, and by which the prophets of God tried the new teachings of their day.
1. The test of conscience. The human conscience confesses God. It is borne in upon the human heart that God is. Nothing can permanently stifle or destroy that confession, which Conscience, left to herself, would ever make. The very word "conscience" implies the recognition of some other being as with us, in us, around and about us. It confesses God. All teachings, therefore, that deny God, or explain him away as a blind force or law, or identify him with his universe, the pantheist"s God, these teachings by this sure test are tried, and found wanting.
2. The test of result. Note what is the result of any professed truth upon personal happiness. God, who has given us so many things richly to enjoy, must from his very nature purpose the blessedness of his children. But if a system be offered us, the inevitable result of which is to blot out hope, to shut us up to this often most miserable life, as all they would do who would take from us the Christian hope. then its drear and dread effect upon the heart of man proclaims it false. See, too, how any teaching tells upon character. Here is a surer test still. Whatever else is dark and obscure, goodness and truth must ever be right. But if any new doctrines tend to deteriorate character, as many of them do, to make sin easier and virtue more difficult; if they throw the reins upon our lower nature; if they take away the great motives to nobleness of life; then again they are demonstrated false. And note their effect upon society generally. Can the denial of God"s existence, of the religious basis of morality, as Mr. Herbert Spencer denies it, of the authority of Holy Scripture, of the sanctity of the sabbath, of the Divine mission of the Son of God, of the resurrection of the dead, the judgment and future blessedness or woe depending upon our lives here; can the denial of any of these things, which, alas! is common enough now, tend to the good of society? Must not the general well-being of mankind be greatly threatened if such doctrines be generally accepted? But doctrines that would thus destroy good are ipso facto declared to have no part nor lot in the kingdom of truth. By these tests of conscience and result let the new ways be tried, and it will be seen that what in them is true is old, and what is not old is not true.
IV WHEREFORE, THEN, DO MEN DEVISE THESE NEW WAYS? The causes are sometimes:
1. Intellectual. Mental restlessness on the part of some will lead men, even in the most perilous matters, to be doubting the old and devising what is new. And God often suffers them to wander in the far and drear country of mental unrest, and to feed upon its husks, and so come to themselves, and arise and go back to their Father"s heart and home, from whence it had been better had they never strayed.
2. Sometimes, and more often, moral. Religion is that which binds. It is a ligature, a restraining cord upon the evil propensities of our nature. If, therefore, doctrines be offered which will relax that little-loved bond, they will be eagerly welcomed. A faith that will give not true liberty, but "license," men will ever love.
3. And always spiritual. Where the heart is surrendered to Christ the mind will not be ensnared by these subtleties of the evil one. If the Holy Spirit of God have wrought in us the great regenerating change, we shall have liberty and deliverance from all these. Safety from the wanderings of the intellect, as well as from the worse wanderings of our sinful nature, are alike ensured to him who has given himself up unreservedly to God.
V BUT THOSE WHO WOULD WALK IN THE WAY GOD WOULD HAVE THEM GO MAY KNOW THE WAY BY ITS BEING "OLD" AND GOOD. All old ways are not good, but the way of God is both. It is old, therefore familiar to many; has been often described, is well marked out; its different stages are well known. "The wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein." And it is good. It leads to him who is the supreme Good God. It has been the chosen way of all the good. It makes those good who walk therein. He who alone on this earth of ours was perfectly good our Lord Jesus walked in it, and lives to enable us to walk therein also. It is the will of God that we should walk therein. "Its ways are all ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace." "Ye shall find rest to your souls." For all these reasons it is the good way as well as the old; therefore let us "stand," "see," and "ask" for this way, and this way alone. C.
At the meeting of the ways. "Stand ye in the ways," etc.
I THIS IS WHERE VERY MANY ARE. The young especially. Paths stretch out on either hand, some of them inviting, some repelling. But for the young, and for many others beside who have not yet fully chosen their path, the present is a time when a decided choice must be made. If the matter were to be settled according to the inviting or other aspect of the beginning of the ways, the one we should choose would soon be fixed upon. But we have to take into consideration the progress of the way, and, above all, the end of the way. Here the text gives
II GOOD COUNSELS FOR ALL WHO HAVE COME TO THIS MEETING OF THE WAYS. We are bidden:
1. Pause a while. "Stand ye in the ways." Oh, if we could but secure this thoughtful pause! if we could but induce those we are now contemplating to "ponder" a while the paths before them! if it were but realized that the way we take is a matter for consideration, add that only a fool would rush heedlessly on!
2. Investigate. As one at the meeting of the ways, but not certain which was the right one for him, would look along each way in turn, and "see" which appeared to be the most likely to bring him to his desired destination. Therefore we are bidden, not only "stand," but "see.
3. Inquire. Other travelers come along men who are familiar with the district, who have traversed one or other of these roads themselves. Then let us avail ourselves of their knowledge and experience, and "ask" as to these ways.
4. And let your mind be made up as to the character of the way you desire to walk in. Let there be no mere vague, listless looking over all the paths without much concern which of them you take; but we are bidden, "Ask for the old paths... the good way" The way the holy prophets went, The way that leads from banishment, The King"s highway of holiness.
All the "old" paths are not also "good ways;" far from it. But there is an old, am! therefore well-known, well-trodden, and hence unmistakable way, which also is the good way. One purpose of the lives of God"s faithful people is that, by the observation in the record of them, men may be led to ask for the paths in which these walked, feeling sure the way they took must be a good, the good way. Happy they who have been led to resolve they will find out the secret of such men"s lives and make it their own. These will ask, not for any way, but for the old paths, the good way.
III GREAT ENCOURAGEMENTS TO FOLLOW THIS COUNSEL.
1. It is implied that if such guidance be asked it will be given. For, if that guidance were not given, how could any walk in these paths? That it is open to them to do so proves that the guidance asked has been given. And so it ever will be.
2. It is promised that, if we walk in the old and good way, we shall find "rest" to our souls. After all, this is everything. If a man has inward rest and peace, heaven for him has begun below. What matters it what we have if this rest be not? What matters what we have not if this rest be ours? And it is a true rest not a mere lethargy of the soul or sleep of conscience, but that "rest which remaineth for the people of God," the rest of faith, the rest promised by the Lord Jesus when he said," Come unto me,... and I will," etc.
IV CHRIST HIMSELF IS THAT WAY THE OLD, THE GOOD WAY. Let the will be utterly surrendered to him; let our faith daily look to him; then "he shall be made to us of God, wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." This is what he meant when he said, "I am the Way." This is the way I long had sought, And mourned because I found it not; Till late I heard my Savior say, "Come hither, soul, I am the Way. And so we shall find rest to our souls. C.
HOMILIES BY J. WAITE Ver. 16. The good way.
The prophet here employs the memory of the past as a motive to repentance. He would fain persuade the people to return to the better ways in which their fathers walked. The calamities that were falling so heavily upon them were the result of their having forsaken those good old ways. Let them consider how they have fallen, search out the real causes of the trouble and sorrow they endure, retrace their wandering steps, and the old prosperity shall come back to them again. Note here
I THE DIVERSE WAYS MEN TAKE, diverse as regards their moral quality and issues. "Stand ye in the ways." Think of the various kinds of moral life that men are leading. Amid the social conditions and relations of this world we are as travelers with many paths branching out in different directions before them, who must choose their own. We may know little of the internal experiences of our associates in the pilgrimage of life, but the broad types of character, the general tendencies of moral habit, are open enough to our view. The "ways" are many, but there is only one path of eternal rectitude and blessedness. There is the way of reckless transgression, of thoughtless indifference, of base avarice, of exclusive devotion to earthly ambitions, of mere virtuous respectability, of religious indecision, etc.; and there is the way of faith and piety, "the path of the just which is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day." Men cannot help to some extent revealing outwardly the tenor of the life within them. Every one of us bears more or less clearly upon him the stamp of a certain distinctive character. Whatever the bent of his spirit may be, it will always betray itself, in look, manner, speech, conduct, by the books he reads, the friendships he forms, the places he frequents, the gratifications in which be delights, through a thousand channels of self-revelation. We are all "living epistles" of something some type of character, some order of moral life and read of men.
II THE THOUGHTFUL OBSERVATION THESE CONDITIONS DEMAND. "Stand in the ways, and see." It is a great thing to know how to "see" There are those who "seeing, see not." One of the first lessons in the moral science of life, as in physical science, is observation to know how to note facts and trace laws and draw conclusions, to know how to learn and to turn what is learnt to good account. The characters and lives of others are not to be to us mere matters of amusement or philosophic speculation, much less ill-natured criticism; but sources of instruction, teachers of practical truth. They all have their admonitory and exemplary use. The higher advantages of social life have never been reaped, the very rudiments of our duty as social beings have not been mastered, till we thoroughly apprehend this. Let the young specially lay the lesson to heart. Their position is favorable the plain of life before them, not yet entangled in a network of circumstantial difficulties, nothing to undo that ought never to have been done, no false steps to retrace that were rashly taken. But how soon may they be drawn into forbidden and dangerous paths if they do not consider! As the ship glides imperceptibly from the open sea into the broad mouth of the river, whose distant banks are hidden, so easily are they led captive to the power of evil if they allow themselves to drift with the tide of outward influence and inward impulse, and will not think . At the same time, enlarged experience of life may be expected to give added force to its moral lessons. Beset as a man may be with associations that seem to determine his course for him in spite of himself, it is always possible for him to pause and consider his way. The darkness and confusion of the storm may be too great to allow the sailor to take his observations and find out his real place on the pathless ocean; not so with any man as concerns his relation to the heavenly powers and the eternal realities. He has always light enough to "discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not". (Mal_3:18) The true way of life is clearly revealed to those who are willing to see." The wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein". (Isa_35:8)
III THE PRACTICAL RESULT TO WHICH SUCH OBSERVATION MUST LEAD. "Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein." Asking and acting, inquiry after the right way, and a resolute determination to follow it; when these conditions are supplied there can be little doubt as to the issue. A life of practical godliness, based on faith in revealed truth, springing from the inspiration of the spirit of truth and purity in the secret soul, this is the way. It is the old way." New as regards the light Christianity has shed upon it, new as regards the revelation of him in whose redeeming work its deep foundations have been laid, it is old" as regards its essential principles of faith and righteousness. The martyrs, prophets, and holy men of every age have left their glowing footprints upon it. Elijah ascended from it in his chariot of fire. David made the statutes of the Lord his delight as he pursued his pilgrimage along it. Abraham trod the same path, led on by the star of promise. Upon it Enoch walked in lowly fellowship with God. It is stained with the blood of righteous Abel. Our glorious Leader claims our praise For his own pattern given; While the long cloud of witnesses Show the same path to heaven.
The way is as plain as Divine teaching and human experience can make it; let us gird up the loins of our minds to walk in it.
IV THE REWARD OF PRACTICAL OBEDIENCE. "Ye shall find rest unto your souls." "Rest," for beings such as we are, is the repose of the mind in discovered truth, the pacification of the conscience in the assurance of Divine forgiveness, the satisfaction of the heart in the embrace of real good, the balance of all our powers in a holy service. In the life of faith and godliness, the life Christ gives to all who come to him, can such rest alone be found. "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me... and ye shall find rest unto your souls". W. (Mat_11:29)
The ancient paths to be sought and walked in.
I THE ADDRESS IS TO THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY WALKING IN A CERTAIN WAY. There is activity of the whole life, a conscious and chosen activity. We are sometimes spoken of as being asleep and needing to be awakened out of sleep, and even as being dead and needing to be renewed to life; but here there is rather an approach to the other extreme in the aspect of sinful man that is presented. One kind of movement in human life lies beyond choice. Man must move on, from birth, through time, into eternity. This is a movement which, as he does not produce it, so neither can he in the least retard it. But now we are called to notice another kind of movement, that which man chooses emphatically chooses and into which he throws oftentimes his whole energy. Thus there is no man but what is in.a path which he has chosen. However much he may seem to be the sport of circumstances, yet it will be found, in the complete inspection of his heart, that he loves to have circumstances moving him rather than that he should do what he can towards controlling circumstances. Moreover, the address is to those who are walking in a wrong way. Evidently they are persisting in it. And it is not only wrong, but seriously, even fatally, wrong. Yet, though the address is to those in the wrong way, there is every reason why those who happily are in the right way should also consider the appeal. If it is very difficult to turn from the wrong way into the right, it is very easy to make some divergence, at first imperceptible, from the right way, and so become most dangerously entangled in the wrong one.
II THERE IS AN APPEAL TO THOSE ADDRESSED, TO GIVE THE MATTER IN QUESTION MOST EARNEST CONSIDERATION. There is surely a great deal in these two words, see and ask. The difference between right and wrong is also the difference between the soul"s highest bliss and deepest misery; but it is a difference only to be comprehended when the soul is thoroughly in earnest to get to the bottom of all that is involved in the difference Hence we are told to look; and we must be sure that we see as we ought to see. It is quite possible to have eyes and to look towards a thing, and yet to be practically blind, not discerning the real nature of it. A man"s ways may be right in his own eyes; he may think the warnings of others, or the differing course that they take, to be mere scrupulosity, ending in nothing. Wherefore a man is to distrust his eyes, and add to what they may tell him the information to be gotten by the hearing of the ear. It is interesting to notice how sometimes the eye confirms the ear, and sometimes the ear the eye. Here the man is to make the tongue follow the eye, asking to follow upon seeing; so that he may get information on a matter of the utmost moment from authorities on whom he may depend with the utmost confidence. We must not dare to blame any one but ourselves if we make some gross error in the conduct of our life. God knows how easily the children of men wander; and so he expects them to do all they can by way of making sure that they are in the right road. Consider how alert some people are, in travelling by rail, lest perchance an omitted inquiry may send them in a wrong direction. A prudent man will never miss his way for want of asking. Yet these very people, who are reckoned prudent in such a small matter as finding their way from one place to another on the surface of the earth, are indifferent to an event which it is awful to contemplate, when they are told to see and ask if they be in the right way for eternity.
III OBSERVE THE DEFINITENESS WHICH IS GIVEN TO THE LOOKING AND THE ASKING. Man is not sent out on a vague quest, with nothing to guide and to limit him. If he will look where God points, and ask the questions which God puts into his mouth, his quest will soon be at an end. The right path is indicated by infallible signs. It is the ancient one; the way which began to he trodden, not one or two generations back, but as far back as the record of human relations extends. The right way is older than the wrong. The way appointed for the first progenitors of mankind, when they stepped out where none had been before them, is the way for us. As to essentials, Christ points out no different way from that which Adam was set to travel. Adam"s path was to be the path of strict attention, so that he might understand God"s will; of strict obedience in doing the will when understood; and of perfect trust in God, feeling that his commandments for his dependent and finite creatures were the best, even though reasons for them might not be given. The most ancient of all paths prescribed for men is that of a willing handing over of one"s life to the will of that wise, loving, and holy One who is supreme. All that Christ has told us, all he has done for us, is for the purpose of leading us into an effectual compliance with the requirement. Does not the experience of Enoch show that the right path is an ancient one? What more can be said of the most devoted Christian, rich in all the resources of grace, than that he has walked with God? What else can there be but true good and rest undisturbed when one is under the immediate influence of that God whose own peace knows not the slightest invasion amid all the commotion of the universe? Real rest, a rest to the heart, was wanted by these people of Israel, and all that was so much wanted would surely come if only the ancient paths were found and once more frequented. Y.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask…
Jer_6:16
Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.
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The good old way
Were you called together to listen to the present preacher only, courtesy might demand at your hands an attentive hearing for him; but if an apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ were the preacher, he would have far higher claims; and if one of the ancient prophets were the speaker, or at any rate, could an angel or an archangel be permitted now to address you, we think you would all admit that to be inattentive to his words would be highly unbecoming: how much more so to be inattentive if the God of the whole earth were addressing you! And is He not? Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, etc.
I. To the way recommended in the text. Ask for the old paths, where is the good way. The words of the text are metaphorical, and represent true religion under the aspect of a pilgrimage or a journey. If, then, you ask me, What is the way to heaven? I refer to the words of the Lord Jesus when speaking to Thomas. I, said He, am the way. No man cometh unto the Father but by Me. Christ is the way. He is the way from sin to holiness,--from darkness to light,--from bondage to liberty,--from misery to happiness,--from the gates of hell to the throne of heaven. But how is He the way? By His example: for leaving us an example, we should follow His steps. By His doctrine: for we know that He is true, and teaches the way of God in truth. By His sacrificial death: for we have boldness to eater into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh. By His Spirit: when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all the truth. How, then, are we to walk in the way? By repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Except ye repent ye shall all perish. Believe m the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. He that believeth shall not perish. But what are the epithets by which the way is described in our text? The way is not the broad way that leadeth to destruction; nor the hard way, pursued by transgressors; nor the way that only seemeth right to a man, while the end thereof is death; but it is the good way, and the old path.
1. It is an old way. True, there are persons who more than insinuate that the way, as just described to you, is a new thing. They say the way to heaven is not now what it formerly was, if our definition is correct. But what have we said? Have we not affirmed that salvation is by Christ, and through Him only? Have we not said that repentance and faith are the conditions of obtaining it from Him? And is this new doctrine? Why, this doctrine is as old as the days of Wesley and Whitfield, for they proclaimed it in England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and America. But go a step further back. What were the leading doctrines of the illustrious Reformers? For what were they traduced, slandered, excommunicated, and martyred, but for this? They asserted that penance was a human prescription--that works of supererogation were a delusion--that images, beads, holy water, crucifixes, and relics were but sanctified nonsense--that Christ was the only mediator between God and man. But we go further still. What did our Lord and the apostles themselves teach? They preached repent and believe! Nor do we stop here. What did the prophets--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Malachi, and the rest--who flourished from seven hundred to a thousand years anterior to the Christian era teach? Did not they speak of the promised seed, the Messiah, the Redeemer, in whom men should believe, and by whom they should be saved? Go to that splendid treasury of ecclesiastical biography--the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and look at the fourth verse: By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead, yet speaketh. Well, then, some three thousand years elapsed between the time of Abels believing and that of Jeremiahs preaching, and the way had been tried during the whole of that long period, and was therefore properly called by the prophet the old path. Oh no; we bring no new doctrine to your ears, no new way before your eyes. We grant you that some of the circumstantials of religion have been changed since the days of Abel; but the essentials have remained the same. A Saviour, a mediator, a sacrifice, an atonement; repentance, faith, prayer, and holy living--thane all abide ever. The way is called new by the apostle, in reference to that fuller and clearer development of it furnished by the life and death of the Lord Jesus; and even when contrasting it with those ritualistic observances on which the Jews had long laid more than sufficient stress: but in all ages Christ has been the Saviour of men, and faith in Him the prime condition of salvation.
2. The text speaks of this way as a good one. Where is the good way? It is not only a good way, but the good way--good emphatically; the only good way, therefore, par excellence, the good way. God is the author of it, and He is good. He is the good Being: His name God implies this, as it is a contraction of the adjective good. Christ is the way, and He is good. Pilates question, What evil hath He done? remains still unanswered. The Holy Spirit recommends this way; and He would not recommend anything evil. The Bible is a good book--all insinuations by scoffers to the contrary notwithstanding,--and it strongly urges us to pursue this way. There have been--and, thank God! still are--some good men in the world, bad as it is; and they have travelled, or are travelling in this way. However vile they may have been ere entering this way, they became virtuous and happy when they began to travel on this path. Men have said the way of salvation by faith in the merits of another is not good, for it will lead to licentiousness--to latitudinarianism. But such men speak without experience. The faith that saves us is not a nominal thing--not merely speculative, but practical, evangelical faith. Show me thy faith without thy works, O objector, and I will show thee my faith by my works. Ah, there it is. This faith of ours works, and has works; it works by love, and purifies the heart. While we repose on the merits of the Saviour, we copy the example of the Saviour; while we believe He died for us, we exhibit the genuineness of our belief by a holy life.
II. The duty the text enjoins. Stand ye in the ways, etc.
1. Stand in the ways, and see. These words seem to refer to the position of a traveller on foot, who, in prosecuting his pilgrimage, has reached a point where there is a junction of several roads; and who is perplexed by this circumstance, and at a loss which way to pursue. What can he do in this case? The text says, Stand, halt, ere you go astray, and try to ascertain the proper direction, or you may lose time in losing your way, and perchance may haw to retrace your steps, amid the jeers of witnesses, and under the self-inflicted penalty of regretful reproach. He takes from his pocket a book and a map, from which he learns that the road to the right goes to one place, that to the left to another, but the one straight on to the place of his destination. He then, after due examination, prosecutes his pilgrimage with pleasurable satisfaction; having no tormenting doubts as to his course, but a strong assurance of reaching, by and by, the desired end. Now, the traveller to eternity--the man in search of the path of life--has been graciously provided with an itinerary; that is, Gods own road book, the Bible. Hence, says the Saviour, Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me. Go, then, fellow traveller, to the ever-blessed book; pore over its lessons; study its precepts; imitate its examples; and realise its promises.
2. Ask for the way. See that man with his map and book; he is still perplexed somewhat; he wants counsel; he needs a guide; let him ask advice of those who know by experience what he has yet to learn. Ah! up comes a person who knows the road intimately, who has travelled along it these many years, and who loves to give his best practical advice to all inquirers. Well, ask him. He is a Gospel minister, or some old weather-beaten pilgrim, who has borne the heat of many a summer, and the stormy blasts of many a winter; he will be right glad to tell thee the way thou shouldst go. And, if he fail, there is a Guide who never will; for, when the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all the truth.
3. Walk therein. Yes, it avails not what we read, how much information we acquire, with whomsoever we converse, or even how often we pray, unless we walk in the way. John Bunyan tells us of a Mr. Talkative, who was very ready and fluent in religious discussions and conversations; but who left the practical part of religion to others. Alas! that the descendants of that personage are not extinct. Remember that no man can get to heaven by looking at maps of the road, or conversing with those who are journeying thitherward; we must all walk in the way.
III. To the blessing promised. Ye shall find rest for your souls. The word rest is one of the sweetest monosyllables in our language. Robert Hall said he could think of the word tear till he wept; I could think of the word rest till I smiled. After a paroxysm of pain, how delicious is ease and rest after a hard days toil, how delightful to retire to rest! And if rest of the body be sweet, sweeter still is rest for the soul. The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmities, but a wounded spirit who can bear? Rest for the soul we all long to find; we cannot help it. We must be in quest of rest do what we may. Peace, happiness, mental quietude, rest, every man of all things desiderates. But where may it be found? Secularists and quondam socialists say in gratifying our animal passions; the miser--significant name, literally miserable--hopes to find it among golden gains; the ambitious climbs up the rugged heights of power and fame, and hopes to descry it there; but the Christian is the only man who can exclaim with the exulting Greek, Eureka! Eureka! I have found it! (W. Antliff, D. D.)
The ancient paths
Transition is easy from an outward physical path to a moral meaning: roads men walk with their feet suggest the road mens thoughts habitually walk in, the path in which their feelings are accustomed to move, the way in which their conduct naturally flows. In this secondary sense, use text to point out the necessity, in all who would go right, of keeping upon the old ways, the ascertained ways, which, in the experience of mankind, have been proved beneficial.
I. Our boast of novelty, our glorying in our newness, as if we were in advance of everybody and everything else, is a fanciful mistake. Our thoughts, and all the channels of our thoughts, are the result of the thought and experience of thousands of years that are gone by. Political habits and customs, knowledge of right and equity, have been gradually unfolded from ages past. Combinations are new, elements are old.
II. The present time is noticeable for an extraordinary outbreak of activity along new lines of thought and belief.
1. Men are inclined to doubt generally the social and moral results of past experience, to repudiate long-accepted social maxims and customs.
2. General distrust is being thrown upon religions teachings: not positive unbelief, but uncertainty. And by having confidence in religion its real power is destroyed. Thus thousands are abandoning old paths--old thoughts, usages, customs, habits, convictions, virtues.
III. There are certain great permanencies of thought, character, and custom, especially necessary in our time.
1. Moral and social progress can never be so rapid as physical developments. Men cannot be changed in their principles, feelings, and inner life in the same ratio as external changes go on.
2. There is danger in giving up any belief or custom which has been entwined in our moral sense. Regard as sacred the first principles of truth.
3. In the transition from a lower to a higher form of belief there is peril. Hence, we are not to think it our duty in a headlong way to change mens beliefs simply because they are erroneous. As if changing from one mode of belief to another was going to change the conscience, reason, moral susceptibility, and character.
IV. The relinquishment of trust or of practice should always be from worse to better. If you want a traveller to have a better road, make that better road, and then he will need no argument to persuade him to walk in it. If you are teaching that one intellectual system is better than another, and that one religious organisation, church, or creed, is better, prove it by presenting better fruit than the other, and men will need little argument beyond. If a Church breeds meekness, fortitude, love, courage, disinterestedness; if it makes noble men--uncrowned but undoubted princes,--then it is a Church, a living epistle which will convince men.
V. All new truths, like new wines, must have a period of fermentation.
1. All truths are at first on probation; must be scrutinised, ransacked, vindicated.
2. Guard against wild and unseasonable urgency in throwing off traditional faiths and truths, for those you can discover for yourselves. Accept what other men construct for you. We are so related, by the laws of God, one to another, that no man can think out everything for himself.
VI. We do well to look cautiously at new truths and those who advocate them. There is a conceit, a dogmatism, a bigotry of science, as really as there is of religion. Application--
1. All the tendencies which narrow the moral sense and enlarge the liberty of the passions are dangerous.
2. All tendencies which increase self-conceit are to be suspected and disowned.
3. Those tendencies which extinguish in a man all spiritual elements, such as arise from faith in God, in our spirituality and immortality, must inevitably degrade our manhood.
4. All tendencies which take away your hope of and belief in another world, take away your motive for striving to reach a higher life. Without this hope men will have a weary pilgrimage in a world of unbelief. (H. W. Beecher.)
The old paths
I. The old paths are to be distinguished from theological creeds and dogmas. Lifted upon the shoulders of many generations, with opportunities for interpreting the Bible in the light of a developing Christianity, it would be strange if our horizon had not increased. Think as those men thought--not necessarily what they thought.
II. A return to the old paths does not call us away from vigorous life. Wherever human thought, in obedience to its best nature, essays to got wherever desire for higher and better things reaches out, there are the paths of the Lord. They are as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. Treading them, every power finds sweet employ.
III. Some of the characteristics of the old paths.
1. They are plain. True, the fogs sometimes hang low upon them as upon worldly ways; but we can always, in the darkest hour, see one step before us, and that taken, we can see another. The engineer cannot see his track all the way from New York to Albany, but in the heaviest night he trusts his headlight and keeps on his way. So let the Christian do.
2. They are unchanging. Gods paths, like Himself, are the same yesterday, today, and forever.
3. They are paths of righteousness (Psa_23:3). Old coins lose their royal stamp by much handling. So with some of our grandest words. Righteousness is one of them. It is not formalism, it is not morality. It is right living, with a pure heart as its source.
4. They are paths of mercy (Psa_25:10).
5. They are paths of plenty (Psa_65:11). What a struggle men have for mere existence! They rise early and sit up late and eat the bread of affliction. They have left the paths of the Lord. They have chased phantoms. They must endure for the time the fruit of their doings. Yet, notwithstanding these seeming exceptions, the precious promise abides (Psa_37:3).
6. They are paths of life (Pro_2:19). What a path that where Christ is the support of our steps, guide of our way, and the crown of our journeys end!
7. They are paths of peace (Pro_3:17; Isa_26:3). There is no peace but in the narrow way where God gives pardon and reconciliation.
8. They are His paths (Isa_2:3). It is not possible, in a spiritual sense, that God should give us anything and not give us Himself. Without Himself the graces of the Spirit are only names.
IV. How to find these paths.
1. By standing. How hard it is to stop and stand still and think and search!
2. By seeing. With open eyes we may see whether the path be an old path, whether it is macadamised with living truth, whether they who are upon it wear the livery of the Great King.
3. By asking. Men are ever ready to ask counsel in worldly things. Why not of God and His servants in regard to heavenly things? Ask, and ye shall receive.
4. By walking. Having used sight and tongue and thoughts, we are then to act. God has united faith and works, prayer and activity.
V. The promise to those who obey. Rest. (E. P. Ingersoll, D. D.)
Novelty in religion exploded
Novelty is a term which, when applied to man, always involves a degree of previous ignorance. The astronomer finds out new stars, the botanist new plants, the linguist new tongues, the geometrician new modes of proof and illustration, the politician new laws, the geographer new islands, the navigator new creeks, anchorages and havens, the tradesman new articles of commerce, the artificer and mechanic new methods of accomplishing the work of their hands. Each successive generation, in a civilised country especially, makes advancement on the experiments of the former. In religious matters, however, it is different. We am to expect no new Bible, no new ordinances, no new Messiah, no new discoveries in the substance of truth and piety, any more than we look for a new sun, moon, and seasons, in the institutions of nature. We allow, indeed, that in ourselves, as we pass from a state of unregeneracy to that of renewal, old things pass away, and all things become new; that in the progress of sanctification, there is a succession of discoveries, as we grow in knowledge and grace; that in the pursuit of schemes of usefulness, new modes of operation may be struck out; but as to all the rest, it is established by the Great Head of the Church to be subjected to no alteration until the time of the restitution of all things, when there shall be a new heaven and earth, etc.
I. Trace the good old way.
1. There is the way of theory. This will be found in its grand and essential elements in the Word of truth; for this is the chart or map in which the path is laid down in which the pious have walked from the beginning.
2. There is the way of experience, or the application of these truths to the mind by such an influence and in such a way as to render them living principles of activity and enjoyment. Repentance for sin, dependence, devotion, etc.
3. There is the way of practice; and this with regard to God and our fellow creatures.
II. Show what is your duty with respect to the path which has been described.
1. Primarily, to institute a serious, a deliberate and cautious inquiry, that you may ascertain whether you are in the right way. One grand reason why many who profess to make the inquiry What is truth? do not succeed, is, that they indulge in a light, trifling temper of mind, quite unsuited to the character of their avowed engagement, and highly offensive to God.
2. Steadily pursue the path you have ascertained to be right. Aim to be established, strengthened, settled on your most holy faith, and guard against that versatility which will be an effective preventive to sanctification, comfort, and usefulness. With walking we always connect the idea, not of habit only, but of progress. Your knowledge, your sacred virtues, your practical obedience should be always on the advance.
Conclusion--
1. The lamentable consequences of a refusal to walk in this way.
2. The inestimable advantages of walking in the good old way. (John Clayton.)
The old paths
Perhaps the chief danger attending modem progress is the neglect of antiquity. This does not apply to literature and art, but to science and religion. A man who aspires to excellence in letters or art must go on pilgrimage to the old paths, and having found them must abide in them. Take the single example of sculpture. What has been gained for this art in the advancement of later times? Nothing has been gained, but much lost which can never be recovered. The most celebrated work of recent artists in stone is little more than an imitation of the masterpieces of Athens executed between two and three thousand years ago. The hope of the learner in this profession is to stand in the old paths. With some qualifications the same is true of literature. The Greek and Roman classics are still our teachers; and there is no prospect of the immediate declension of their authority. No liberal education is supposed to be possible without the languages of antiquity and the compositions that adorn them. Scientific culture has been repaid by abundant fruit in recent years: but the losses sustained by science through our ignorance of antiquity are inconceivable. Students in science will be the first to acknowledge and deplore this loss. But while literature cannot neglect the old paths, and science is devoutly engaged in retracing her lost ways, religion is in imminent danger of drifting from her ancient landmarks. The peril I desire to point out is not new in the history of the Christian faith. There is something in his nature which makes a human being feel after a God; and this act of search would be far more likely to touch the object sought when the race was young, when the impressions received were new, uncorrupted by speculation, unfettered by tradition, than at this time when the race is old and our impressions of the self within us, and of surrounding nature, are unconsciously weighted and often made false by hereditary influences, and by misleading ideas that swarm about us in childhood and are the spring of errors which it is the most difficult task of education to discover and correct. This invariable tendency to look for truth and wisdom and goodness, not to the possibilities of the present, not even to the lessons of the immediate past, but to the records and traditions of a remote age, is a striking confirmation of the biblical history of mankind. That wistful looking back on the part of the nations is a pathetic sign that something is missing which once was ours when heaven and truth were nearer to this earth than they are now. When I bring these problems to the ancient ways of God that, setting out from the creation of man and following the race, converge upon Christ, I discover the clue that leads to their interpretation. The old paths ran into Christ. His attitude towards the men who flourished before Him was neither hostile nor independent. He spoke of them with reverence; He quoted their teaching in support of His own claims; He proved that that teaching when divided from Himself was not only incomplete, but in some cases had no meaning; that He, in fact, was the complement of the older wisdom. He dwelt not only with contemporaries, but in the old paths as the Illuminating Presence of the past. Before Abraham was, I am. He lighted up the parables of the sages; He harmonised prediction with history, and type with the fulfilling event or person. And as the old paths met in Christ--as He was the Way to which all other paths and ways led the traveller, not only thoroughfares defined and laid down in systems of law and belief, but irregular tracks made by earnest but wandering feet in search of the Highway; as He was the Truth, in which all moral intimations, ideas, and aspirations found their fulfilment and satisfaction; as He was the Life, in which all the nobler elements of the heart attained their highest purity and their perfect expression--so He is now the centre and resting place of all doctrine, of all inquiry, and of all faith. What will be the result of the attempt to make the New Testament a modern publication? We smooth a hardness here, we read in a meaning there, we hide the significance of this doctrine behind the assumed importance of that, on the plea of keeping the Book in touch with a scientific age. There will be no end to this recasting until we end the Bible itself. We share the conquests of science, and partake the renown of scientific men; but theirs is the truth of research, ours is the truth of revelation. Their conclusions are necessarily subject to revision; many of them perish outright; but the Word of our God abideth, and shall stand forever. (E. E. Jenkins, LL. D.)
The old paths
I. Excellent general advice. Stand, and see, and ask. I take these words to be a call to thought and consideration. Now, to set men thinking is one great object which every teacher of religion should always keep before him. Serious thought, in short, is one of the first steps towards heaven. There are but few, I suspect, who deliberately and calmly choose evil, refuse good, turn their back on God, and resolve to serve sin as sin. The most part are what they are because they began their present course without thought. They would not take the trouble to look forward and consider the consequences of their conduct. By thoughtless actions they created habits which have become second nature to them. They have got into a groove now, and nothing but a special miracle of grace will stop them. There are none, we must all be aware, who bring themselves into so much trouble by want of thinking as the young. Too often they choose in haste a wrong profession or business, and find after two or three years, that they have made an irretrievable mistake, and, if I may borrow a railway phrase, have got on the wrong line of rails. But the young are not the only persons who need the exhortation of the text in this day. It is preeminently advice for the times. Hurry is the characteristic of the age in which we live. On every side you see the many driving furiously, like Jehu, after business or politics. They seem unable to find time for calm, quiet, serious reflection about their souls and a world to come. Men and brethren, consider your ways. Beware of the infection of the times.
II. A particular direction. Ask for the old paths. We want a return to the old paths of our reformers. I grant they were rough workmen, and made some mistakes. They worked under immense difficulties, and deserve tender judgment and fair consideration. But they revived out of the dust grand foundation truths which had been long buried and forgotten. By embalming those truths in our Articles and Liturgy, by incessantly pressing them on the attention of our forefathers, they changed the whole character of this nation, and raised a standard of true doctrine and practice, which, after three centuries, is a power in the land, and has an insensible influence on English character to this very day. Can we mend these old paths? Novelty is the idol of the day. But I have yet to learn that all new views of religion are necessarily better than the old. It is not so in the work of mens hands. I doubt if this nineteenth century could produce an architect who could design better buildings than the Parthenon or Coliseum, or a mason who could rear fabrics which will last so long. It certainly is not so in the work of mens minds. Thucydides is not superseded by Macaulay, nor Homer by Milton. Why, then, are we to suppose that old theology is necessarily inferior to new? I ask boldly, What extensive good has ever been done in the world, except by the theology of the old paths? and I confidently challenge a reply. There never has been any spread of the Gospel, any conversion of nations or countries, any successful evangelistic work, excepting by the old-fashioned distinct doctrines of the early Christians and the reformers.
III. A precious promise. Ye shall find rest to your souls. Let it never be forgotten that rest of conscience is the secret want of a vast portion of mankind. The labouring and heavy laden are everywhere: they are a multitude that man can scarcely number; they are to be found in every climate and in every country under the sun. Everywhere you will find trouble, care, sorrow: anxiety, murmuring, discontent, and unrest. Did God create man at the beginning to be unhappy? Most certainly not. Are human governments to blame because men are not happy? At most to a very slight extent. The fault lies far too deep to be reached by human laws. Sin and departure from God are the true reasons why men are everywhere restless, labouring, and heavy laden. Sin is the universal disease which infects the whole earth. The rest that Christ gives in the old paths is an inward thing. It is rest of heart, rest of conscience, rest of mind, rest of affection, rest of will. (Bishop J. C. Ryle.)
Standing in the old paths
I. The dangers of judging of religion, without long and diligent examination. Happy would it be for the present age if men were distrustful of their own abilities.
II. The reasonableness of searching into antiquity, or of asking for the old paths. With regard to the order and government of the primitive Church, we may doubtless follow their authority with perfect security; they could not possibly be ignorant of laws executed, and customs practised, by themselves; nor would they, even supposing them corrupt, serve any interests of their own, by handing down false accounts to posterity. Nor is this the only, though perhaps the chief use of these writers; for, in matters of faith, and points of doctrine, those, at least, who lived in the ages nearest to the times of the apostles, undoubtedly deserve to be consulted. The oral doctrines, and occasional explications of the apostles, must have been treasured up in the memory of their audiences, and transmitted for some time from father to son.
III. The happiness which attends a well-grounded belief and steady practice of religion. Suspense and uncertainty distract the soul, disturb its motions, and retard its operations; while we doubt in what manner to worship God, there is great danger lest we should neglect to worship Him at all. There is a much closer connection between practice and speculation than is generally imagined. A man disquieted with scruples concerning any important article of religion, will, for the most part, find himself indifferent and cold, even to those duties which he practised before with the most active diligence and ardent satisfaction. Let him then ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and he shall find rest for his soul. (S. Johnson, LL. D.)
On the appeal to antiquity in matters of religion
The appeal to antiquity is worth your closest observation, as one which may as well be made in our own days as in those of the prophet Jeremiah. The paths which are to be sought for are the old paths, and it is their age which seems represented as giving them safety. Now it were quite idle to assert that this is in all cases a sound view, or that it will necessarily hold good when applied to the businesses and sciences of life. If we attempted, for example, to introduce into natural philosophy, the principle that the old paths are the best, we should only be urging men to travel back to a broad waste of ignorance, and to settle themselves once more in the crudest and most erroneous of opinions. We are quite ready with the like admission, in matters of civil polity. We hold unreservedly that nothing human can come to its perfection at once; and that whilst there are certain fundamental principles which can never be swerved from with safety, the determination of the best form of government for a community demands many successive experiments; so that one generation is not to hand down its institutions to the next, as not to be violated because not to be improved. The legacy of the fathers should be their experience, and that experience should be carried by the children as a new element into their political competitions. But the principle which applies not to sciences or governments may be applicable, without reservation, to religion. Religious truth is matter of revelation, and not therefore left to be searched out and determined by successive experiments; whereas truth of any other description is only to be come at by painful investigation; and until that investigation has been carried to the farthest possible limit, we have no right to claim such a fixedness for our positions, that those who come after us must receive them as irreversible. Yet we would not have it thought, that even in matters of religion, we yield unqualified submission to the voice of antiquity. We hold that there is room for discovery, strictly and properly so called in theology, as well as in astronomy or chemistry. We ourselves must necessarily be more advantageously circumstanced than any of our fathers, when the matter in question is the fulfilment of prophecy. Prophecy is of course nothing but anticipated history; and the further on, therefore, we live, in the march of those occurrences which are to make up the story of our globe and its tenants, the more power have we to find the foretold in the fulfilled, and thus to lessen the amount of unaccomplished prediction. Now when this exception has been made, we do not hesitate to apply our text to the disclosures of revelation, and to assert that in all disputes upon doctrines, and in all debates upon creeds, it is the part of wise men to appeal to antiquity.
1. When we speak of antiquity, we refer to Christianity in its young days, whilst the Church was still warm with her first love, and her teachers were but little removed from those who had held intercourse with Christ and His apostles. It is in this manner, for example, that we introduce the authority of antiquity into the question of infant baptism. Unless apostles baptised infants, and unless they taught that infants were to be received into the Church, it seems well-nigh incredible that those who lived near their times, and must have obtained instruction almost from their very lips, should have adopted the custom of infant baptism. We would advance another illustration of the worth of the witness of antiquity, and we fetch it from a fundamental matter of doctrine. We believe, undoubtedly, that the Bible is adapted to all ages of the world and all ranks of society; and that the Spirit which indited it, is as ready now, as in the early days of Christianity, to act as its interpreter and open up its truths. We are assured, therefore, that the sublime doctrine of the Trinity, if it, indeed, be contained in the Word of inspiration, will be made known to every prayerful and diligent student; and that there will need no acquaintance with the creeds or the commentaries of primitive Christians, in order to the apprehending of this grand discovery of the nature of Godhead. But, at the same time, when all kinds of opinions are broached, diametrically at variance with the doctrine of the Trinity, and men labour to devise and support interpretations of Scripture which shall quite overthrow this foundation stone of Christianity, we count it of no mean worth, that in writings which have come down to us from days just succeeding the apostolic, we can find the Trinity in unity as broadly asserted, and as clearly defined, as in any of the treatises which now professedly undertake its defence. Now you will understand, from these instances, the exact use of antiquity, in matters of religion; and the sense in which it may fairly be expected that the old paths are the right. Where was your religion till Luther arose? is the question broached in every dispute between the Romish Church and the Reformed. The Romish Church prides itself on being the old Church, and reproaches the Reformed with being the new. And we admit, in all frankness, that if the Romish Church made good its pretensions--if it could win for itself the praise of antiquity, and fix fairly on the Protestant newness, Popery would gain an almost unassailable position; for we are inclined to hold it as little less than an axiom in religion, that the oldest Christianity is the best. But we are quite ready to meet the Roman Catholic on the ground of antiquity; and to decide the goodness by deciding the oldness of our paths. We contend, that whatever is held in common by the two Churches may be proved from Scripture, and shown to have been maintained by the earliest Christians; but that everything received by the Romish and rejected by the Protestant, can neither be substantiated by the Bible, nor sanctioned by the practice of the primitive Church.
2. There is not one amongst you, who ought not to know something of this appeal to antiquity. We may make the like assertion in regard to the Christian Sabbath. If asked for our authority for keeping holy the first day of the week, in place of the seventh, you cannot produce a direct scriptural command; but we are in possession of such clear proof, that the apostles and their immediate successors made the first day their Sabbath, that we may claim to the observance all the force of Divine institution. This, however, we must all see, is employing the practice of antiquity where we have not a distinct precept of Scripture; in other words, we prove the right paths by proving the old paths. We are not, indeed, able to appeal to primitive Christians, and to show you this union of Church or State as being sanctioned by apostolical practice. Of course, until the rulers of the kingdom embraced the faith of Christ (and this was not of early occurrence), Christianity could not become established. But, as Milner observes, from the earliest ages of patriarchal government, when holy men were favoured with a Divine revelation, governors taught the true religion, and did not permit their subjects to propagate atheism, idolatry, or false religion. There was, as under the Jewish constitution, an unquestionable authority which the magistrates possessed in ecclesiastical regulations: so that union between Church and State, in place of being novel, can be traced up almost from the beginning of the world. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
The old paths
I. The denomination.
1. Old paths. Way of--
(1) Obedience.
(2) Worship.
(3) Piety.
2. Old, because--
(1) Ordained from eternity.
(2) Herein all the saints haw walked.
(3) Tried, and found pleasant and profitable.
II. The despot. Good way.
1. A path may be old, yet not good; this is both.
2. When may a path be called good?
(1) When safe.
(2) Direct.
(3) Frequented.
(4) Pleasant.
(5) Firm and passable.
III. The directions. They who seek this path should bell.
1. Cautious in their observations.
2. Earnest in their inquiries.
3. Prompt in entering thereon.
IV. The destination.
1. In the journey many blessings of rest will be enjoyed, as contentment, satisfaction, cheerfulness, security.
2. Afterwards there will be fulness of rest: the path leads to eternal repose, happiness, glory. (Sermon Framework.)
The good old path
Men are travellers. No continuing city here; no rest. Days upon earth but a shadow; none abiding. Must go on--from earth, with its cares and sorrows and privileges and joys--either to heaven or hell.
I. A solemn exhortation.
1. We should ascertain what path we are walking in. Men do not think enough about spiritual things. Many a poor misguided traveller would enter the right path and obtain eternal life if he gave heed to the things which make for his peace.
(1) This examination of the path should be made immediately. Not a moment to be lost. Next step may plunge you in some deadly pit.
(2) This examination should be made faithfully. Not superficially. Our being different from those around us is not enough, for we may still be wrong. Must bring our conduct and habits of life to the standard of Gods Word, and compare them with that.
(3) This examination should be made prayerfully. It is useless for us to make it in our own strength or wisdom; but, influenced and guided by the Spirit of Christ, we cannot err.
2. We must not only ascertain if our way be wrong, but inquire for the right path.
(1) It is here termed the old path. The way of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, good and holy of every clime and age. The everlasting Gospel has existed from eternity.
(2) It is to be sought out. Eternity depends on the issue.
3. Having found the right path, we are to walk in it. Knowledge alone is not sufficient; there must be practical application of it.
II. A gracious promise.
1. The rest promised is of the highest kind. For the soul. The soul requires it. Burdened with sin; filled with feverish anxiety; like a ship tossed on a troubled sea.
2. This rest can be bestowed by God alone. It is the fruit of our union with Him, the result of our being His dear children.
3. In what does it consist? In our being forgiven; in our being conscious of the Divine favour; in our having the Spirit of Christ in our souls; in our dependence upon the promises. (H. B. Ingrain.)
The good old way
I. The nature of the old way from which adam so fatally swerved, and all his descendants with him.
1. The way of self-denial. As this principle involves resistance to temptation, control of temper and overthrow of natural inclinations and habits, it is necessarily an important ingredient of true religion; from the nature of the case, from the bare fact of its being amenable to the superior will of the Almighty, an indispensable requisite of finite perfection in all instances whatsoever.
2. The way of implicit dependence upon God. Until the foul spirit of restless discontent took possession of his breast Adam was sufficed to rest and rely for everything upon the wisdom, power, love and benignity of Him who created him content to know no more than what He taught him, and to exercise his mental faculties and reasoning powers in entire subordination to his Superiors wish, questioning nothing, but taking everything as perfect that came from Him. The knowledge, service and worship of God were the objects of all he thought, saw, or did. Beyond them there was nothing he eared to desire or know.
3. The way of humility. Knowledge says St. Paul, puffeth up, but charity edifieth. What knowledge? Not the chastened, subdued, heaven-taught and heaven-tempered wisdom which guided the soul and enlarged the understanding of Adam before he fell, but that meretricious counterfeit of it--that now delusive light, whose pride-awakening, man-flattering beams, brought first to bear on his foolish heart by the arch destroyer at the fall, allured him to his destruction.
II. How we may obey the command of the text in returning to this way. Whoever in earnest desires to recover his lost innocence, and the forfeited favour of his Creator, and to return to that better land, that state of ineffable bliss and purity, which was the original birthright of us all, are taught in the Gospel of the grace of God that the first step in that direction is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of sinners; which is nothing else than that filial trust or confidence we have already mentioned as displayed by Adam before he fell.
III. The necessity and advantage, as well as duty, of obeying the advice given in the text. (S. H. Simpson.)
The respect due to antiquity
It has been well said by Lord Bacon, that the antiquity of past ages is the youth of the world--and therefore it is an inversion of the right order, to look for greater wisdom in some former generation than there should be in our present day. The time in which we now live, says he, is properly the ancient time, because now the world is ancient; and not that time which we call ancient, when we look in a retrograde direction, and by a computation backward from ourselves. There must be a delusion, then, in that homage which is given to the wisdom of antiquity, as d it bore the same superiority over the wisdom of the present times, which the wisdom of an old does over that of a young man. It is in vain to talk of Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle. Only grant that there may still be as many good individual specimens of humanity as before; and a Socrates now, with all the additional lights which have sprung up in the course of intervening centuries to shine upon his understanding, would be a greatly wiser man than the Socrates of two thousand years ago. But however important thus to reduce the deference that is paid to antiquity; and with whatever grace and propriety it has been done by him who stands at the head of the greatest revolution in philosophy.
we shall incur the danger of running into most licentious waywardness, if we receive not the principle, to which I have now adverted, with two modifications. Our first modification is, that though, in regard to all experimental truth, the world should be wiser now than it was centuries ago, this is the fruit not of our contempt or our heedlessness in regard to former ages, but the fruit of our most respectful attention to the lessons which their history affords. We do right in not submitting to the dictation of antiquity; but that is no cause why we should refuse to be informed by her--for this were throwing us back again to the worlds infancy, like the second childhood of him whom disease had bereft of all his recollections. And so, again, in the language of Bacon, Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken then to make progression. But there is a second modification, which, in the case of a single individual of the species, it is easy to understand, and which we shall presently apply to the whole species. We may conceive of a man, that, after many years of vicious indulgence, he is at once visited by the lights of conscience and memory; and is enabled to contrast the dislike, and the dissatisfaction, and the dreariness of heart, which now prey on the decline of his earthly existence, with all the comparative innocence which gladdened its hopeful and happy morning. As he bethinks him of his early home, of the piety which flourished there, and that holy atmosphere in which he was taught to breathe with kindred aspirations, he cannot picture to himself the bliss and the beauty of such a scene, mellowed as it is by distance, and mingled with the dearest recollections of parents, and sisters, and other kindred now mouldering in the dust, he cannot recall for a moment this fond, though faded imagery, without sighing in the bitterness of his heart, after the good old way. Now, what applies to one individual may apply to the species. In a prolonged course of waywardness, they may have wandered very far from the truth of heaven. And after, perhaps, a whole dreary millennium of guilt and of darkness, may some gifted individual arise, who can look athwart the gloom, and descry the purer and the better age of Scripture light which lies beyond it. And as he compares all the errors and the mazes of that vast labyrinth into which so many generations had been led by the jugglery of deceivers, with that simple but shining path which conducts the believer unto glory, let us wonder not that the aspiration of his pious and patriotic heart should be for the good old way. We now see wherein it is that the modern might excel the ancient. In regard to experimental truth, he can be as much wiser than his predecessors, as the veteran and the observant sage is wiser than the unpractised stripling, to whom the world is new, and who has yet all to learn of its wonders and of its ways. The voice that is now emitted from the schools, whether of physical or of political science, is the voice of the worlds antiquity. The voice emitted from the same schools, in former ages, was the voice of the worlds childhood, which then gave forth in lisping utterance the conceits and the crudities of its young unchastened speculation. But in regard to things not experimental, in regard even to taste, or to imagination, or to moral principle, as well as to the stable and unchanging lessons of Divine truth, there is no such advancement. For the perfecting of these, we have not to wait the slow processes of observation and discovery, handed down from one generation to another. They address themselves more immediately to the spirits eye; and just as in the solar light of day, our forefathers saw the whole of visible creation as perfectly as we--so in the lights, whether of fancy, or of conscience, or of faith, they may have had as just and vivid a perception of natures beauties; or they may have had as ready a discrimination, and as religious a sense of all the proprieties of life; or they may have had a veneration as solemn, and an acquaintance as profound, with the mysteries of revelation, as the men of our modern and enlightened day. And, accordingly, we have as sweet or sublime an eloquence, and as transcendent a poetry, and as much both of the exquisite and noble in all the fine arts, and a morality as delicate and dignified; and, to crown the whole, as exulted and as informed a piety in the remoter periods of the world, as among ourselves, to whom the latter ends of the world have come. In respect of these, we are not on higher vantage-ground than many of the generations that have gone by. But neither are we on lower vantage ground. We have access to the same objects. We are in possession of the same faculties. And, if between the age in which we live, and some bright and bygone era, there should have intervened the deep and the long-protracted haze of many centuries, whether of barbarism in taste, or of profligacy in morals, or of superstition in Christianity, it will only heighten, by comparison, to our eyes, the glories of all that is excellent; and if again awakened to light and to liberty, it will only endear the more to our hearts the good old way. (T. Chalmers, D. D.)
Steadfastness in the old paths
In what respect should we follow old times? Now here there is this obvious maxim--what God has given us from heaven cannot be improved, what man discovers for himself does admit of improvement: we follow old times then so far as God has spoken in them; but in those respects in which God has not spoken in them, we are not bound to follow them. Now knowledge connected merely with this present world, we have been left to acquire for ourselves. How we may till our lands and increase our crops; how we may build our houses, and buy and sell and get gain; how we may cross the sea in ships; how we may make fine linen for the merchant, or, like Tubal-Cain, be artificers in brass and iron: as to these objects of this world, necessary indeed for the time, not lastingly important, God has given us no clear instruction. Here then we have no need to follow the old ways. Besides, in many of these arts and pursuits, there is really neither right nor wrong at all; but the good varies with times and places. Each country has its own way, which is best for itself, and bad for others. Again, God has given us no authority in questions of science. If we wish to boast ,bout little matters, we know more about the motions of the heavenly bodies than Abraham, whose seed was in number as the stars; we can measure the earth, and fathom the sea, and weigh the air, more accurately than Moses, the inspired historian of the creation; and we can discuss the varied inhabitants of this earth better than Solomon. But let us turn to that knowledge which God has given, and which therefore does not admit of improvement by lapse of time; this is religious knowledge. God taught Adam how to please Him, and Noah, and Abraham, and Job. He has taught every nation all over the earth sufficiently for the moral training of every individual. In all these cases, the worlds part of the work has been to pervert the truth, not to disengage it from obscurity. The new ways are the crooked ones. The nearer we mount up to the time of Adam, or Noah, or Abraham, or Job, the purer light of truth we gain; as we recede from it we meet with superstitions, fanatical excesses, idolatries, and immoralities. So again in the case of the Jewish Church, since God expressly gave them a precise law, it is clear man could not improve upon it; he could but add the traditions of men. Lastly, in the Christian Church, we cannot add or take away, as regards the doctrines that are contained in the inspired volume, as regards the faith once delivered to the saints. Other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ (1Co_3:11). But it may be said that, though the Word of God is an infallible rule of faith, yet it requires interpreting, and why, as time goes on, should we not discover in it more than we at present know on the subject of religion and morals? But this is hardly a question of practical importance to us as individuals; for in truth a very little knowledge is enough for teaching a man his duty: and, since Scripture is intended to teach us our duty, surely it was never intended as a storehouse of mere knowledge. Little knowledge is required for religious obedience. The poor and rich, the learned and unlearned, are here on a level. We have all of us the means of doing our duty; we have not the will, and this no knowledge can give. We have need to subdue our own minds, and this no other person can do for us. Practical religious knowledge is a personal gift, and, further, a gift from God; and, therefore, as experience has hitherto shown, more likely to be obscured than advanced by the lapse of time. But further, we know of the existence of an evil principle in the world, corrupting and resisting the truth in its measure, according to the truths clearness and purity. Our Saviour, who was the truth itself, was the most spitefully entreated of all by the world. It has been the case with His followers too. The purer and more valuable the gift which God bestows, far from this being a security for the truths abiding and advancing, rather the more grievously has been the gift abused (1Jn_2:18; 2Ti_3:13). Such is the case as regards the knowledge of our duty,--that kind of knowledge which alone is really worth earnest seeking. And there is an important reason why we should acquiesce in it;--because the conviction that things are so has no slight influence in forming our minds into that perfection of the religious character at which it is our duty ever to be aiming. While we think it possible to make some great and important improvements in the subject of religion, we shall be unsettled, restless, impatient; we shall be drawn from the consideration of improving ourselves, and from using the day while it is given us, by the visions of a deceitful hope, which promises to make rich but tendeth to penury. On the other hand, as we cease to be theorists we shall become practical men; we shall have less of self-confidence and arrogance, more of inward humility and diffidence; we shall be less likely to despise others, and think of our own intellectual powers with less complacency. It is one great peculiarity of the Christians character to be dependent; to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission; to be able to view himself in a subordinate place; to love to sit in the dust. To his ears the words of the text are as sweet music: Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, etc. The history of the old dispensation affords us a remarkable confirmation of what has been argued; for in the time of the law there was an increase of religious knowledge by fresh revelations. From the time of Samuel especially to the time of Malachi, the Church was bid look forward for a growing illumination, which, though not necessary for religious obedience, subserved the establishment of religious comfort. Now, observe how careful the inspired prophets of Israel are to prevent any kind of disrespect being shown to the memory of former times, on account of that increase of religious knowledge with which the later ages were favoured; and if such reverence for the past were a duty among the Jews when the Saviour was still to come, much more is it the duty of Christians. Now, as to the reverence enjoined and taught the Jews towards persons and times past, we may notice first the commandment given them to honour and obey their parents and elders. This, indeed, is a natural law. But that very circumstance surely gives force to the express and repeated injunctions given them to observe it, sanctioned too (as it was) with a special promise. But, further, to bind them to the observance of this duty, the past was made the pledge of the future, hope was grounded upon memory; all prayer for favour sent them back to the old mercies of God. The Lord hath been mindful of us, He will bless us; this was the form of their humble expectation. Lastly, as Moses directed the eyes of his people towards the line of prophets which the Lord their God was to raise up from among them, ending in the Messiah, they in turn dutifully exalt Moses, whose system they were superseding. Samuel, David, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, each in succession, bear testimony to Moses. Oh, that we had duly drunk into this spirit of reverence and godly fear. Doubtless we are far above the Jews in our privileges; we are favoured with the news of redemption; we know doctrines, which righteous men of old time earnestly desired to be told, and were not. Yet our honours are our shame, when we contrast the glory given us with our love of the world, our fear of men, our lightness of mind, our sensuality, our gloomy tempers. What need have we to look with wonder and reverence at those saints of the old covenant, who with less advantages yet so far surpassed us; and still more at those of the Christian Church, who both had higher gifts of grace and profited by them! (J. H. Newman, D. D.)
Religion an ancient path, and a good way
I. The instructive view given of religion.
1. It is an ancient path. The Gospel is coeval with the Fall. All the Mosaic rites and ceremonies were typical of the blessings of the Gospel dispensation, and taught the faithful worshipper to look forward to the Saviour.
2. It is a good way.
(1) This is the way which God Himself, of His infinite wisdom and goodness, hath marked out for us.
(2) Those who walk in it may expect all necessary guidance and direction.
(3) In wisdoms way we have the best of company.
(4) It will afford the purest pleasure, as we advance in it, and will infallibly conduct us to perfect and endless happiness and glory.
II. The duty enjoined.
1. We are to use every endeavour to become acquainted with the ways of religion.
(1) If we are accountable beings, what shall we think of those who seem to have formed a resolution to banish serious reflection from their minds; who plunge themselves into vice, dissipate themselves in pleasure, in vanity, and in every trifle that strikes their imagination; and devote themselves to those things, body and soul, without ever stopping to consider what they are doing, whither they are going, and what the consequences must be of their madness and folly!
(2) To self-reflection we add reflection on the Word of God.
(a) The way therein marked out is a way of holiness and purity.
(b) The superior excellence of the Scriptures, as a rule of life, will be still further evident if we consider their high authority.
2. Our knowledge must be reduced to practice; when we have found the good way, we must walk in it.
(1) We should immediately enter upon a religious course, after due information concerning it.
(2) We should proceed in a religious course with the greatest care and circumspection.
(3) We should endeavour to make continual progress in a religious course.
3. It is our duty to persevere in a religious course, it will not answer a travellers purpose, who has a necessary journey before him, to proceed a little way in it, and then give over, or take a different path that leads a contrary way. So, in the ways of religion, he, and he only, who holds out to the end shall be saved.
III. The import of the gracious promise, by which the duty here enjoined is recommended and enforced. The rest here promised consists--
1. In our being delivered from those uneasy doubts and anxieties of mind which arise from an uncertainty as to the way in which we ought to go.
2. Those who walk in the good way of religion find rest to their souls, as they are thereby delivered from the great cause of inward uneasiness--the sense of unpardoned guilt; or, in other words, from the terrors of an accusing conscience.
3. They who walk in the ways of religion find rest to their souls, as they are thereby delivered from those sources of disquietude which spring from sinful and unruly passions.
4. This good way infallibly conducts those who walk in it to uninterrupted and everlasting happiness in the world to come. (James Ross, D. D.)
Reverence for the old things
Jeremiah was the most unpopular of the prophets. First because he was somewhat of a pessimist, uttering predictions which the events proved true enough, but which were painted in too gloomy colours to suit the tastes of the people. Secondly, because he never flattered. And a third, and even greater, reason for the dislike, was that they regarded him as old-fashioned, out of date, an antiquated, obsolete old fogey, with his eyes behind. He was always harping on the old times when people lived simple lives and feared God. And the people sneered at him as a sort of fossil, as a man who had been born a century too late. The people had a disease upon them which might be called Egyptomania. They wanted to form a close alliance with Egypt, and to adopt all their modes of life, their dress, furniture, luxuries, self-indulgences, political ideas, military system, laws, morals, and religion. There was to be a clean sweep made of all that Israel had loved and believed in and by taking heathen Egypt as a model they would speedily attain to Egypts greatness and splendour. This was the craze against which the prophet set himself, and protested in vain. For there are times when a people are determined to destroy themselves. Are the old paths always Divine, and the new ways always as dangerous as this prophet thought them? The answer has to be qualified, and there are more answers than one. The Bible does not always speak in the same voice about it. If Jeremiah looked back with lingering affection, St. Paul, who had seen the higher truth in Christ, had his eyes in front, and advised us to forget the things which are behind. And a greater than Paul has told us that every wise man will bring out of his treasury things new and old. The man who sneers at everything which is old, and fancies that wisdom always wears a brand new face, has precious little of the latter article himself. The alphabet and the simple rules of arithmetic are as ancient as an Egyptian mummy, but they are not out of date yet. We still need some of the things which Noah and Abraham prized. On the other hand, the man who sets his face against everything new is shutting his eyes to the light.
I. To bind ourselves to the old paths is, for us at least, in many things impossible. We live in the midst of rapid movement and change, and we are carried along by it in spite of ourselves. And if we could do it, it would be paralysing. It would be the end of all healthy life and action. It is the distinguishing feature of Christian nations to be forever casting off the old and putting on the new. It is a dead religion which stands still and makes men stand still. The spirit of life in Christ Jesus urges the world on, away from a dead past nearer to the golden age which is to be. I hardly dare bring before you the things which are going on in China. And it all comes from a blind, brutal, obstinate clinging to the old paths. The world moves on, and the Chinese refuse to move. God in His mercy has brought us out of all that, and given us eyes to see that through the ages one unceasing purpose runs, and the minds of men are widened with the process of the suns. There are a hundred things in nearly every department of life which we do and know and understand better than our fathers. We should never dream of going back in science, machinery, politics, government, freedom of thought and speech, or in religion.
II. To forsake all the old paths is a folly quite as blind and self-destructive as to cling to them all. Wisdom was not born in the present century. It dwelt with God before the foundation of the world, and He gave some of it to men who lived thousands of years before our time. We are cleverer than the ancients in some things, but not in all. The Greek thinkers were superior to the best thinkers of today. We could not now produce such books as Plato wrote, and the Hebrew prophets and psalmists put all our cleverest writers into the shade. We cannot build temples as the men of old built. We cannot paint pictures or carve statues or create things of beauty as they did. We have no Homers and Virgils, Dantes, Miltons, Shakespeares, Bunyans. In moral and religious things many of those greatest men were far in advance of our best, and we can only reach some of their excellence by learning of them and treading in the old paths. In fact, in the greatest things of life the old ways are the everlasting ways, and the only ways of safety. They have stood the test of time. For the momentous questions of morality and righteousness, worship and reverence, sin and human need, God and immortality, spiritual mysteries and things unseen, we have still to sit like children at the feet of those giants of faith, those great souls from Moses to St. Paul, who walked with God and spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. We cannot dispense with the Ten Commandments yet. And as for the Sermon on the Mount, its very perfection is our despair. If you want to find the highest types of manhood, you will stand rather in the old paths than the new; you will look back rather than around you. If we want to know what sin is, we must go to the Bible and the Cross of Jesus Christ, and not to the modem ideas, which often make light of sin and treat it as irresponsible disease. If we want to learn the depth of penitence we must go to the soul-stricken David or the weeping Peter. And if we would see light beyond the grave we must go all that way back and stand with the women and the disciples before an open sepulchre. Yes, and perhaps above all things, if we would learn how to live and love, to endure and to hope, to suffer and to die, it is only in the old Bible paths that we can get the lesson. The new lights will show us how to get money faster, and to make life smoother and more comfortable, but they will not help us to be brave in difficulties, patient in cross bearing, and fearless in the hour of death. (J. G. Greenhough, M. A.)
The Jesus way
You must not be discouraged, said a Kiowa Indian, if we Indians come slow. It is a long road for us to leave our old Indian ways, and we have to think a great deal; but I am sure that all the Indian people will come into the Jesus road for I see that these white Jesus people are here to help us, and I thank them for coming. Tell the Christian people to pray for us. We are ignorant, but we want to be led aright, that we may come into the Jesus road. The quaint Indian expressions are very suggestive. It is indeed a long road to leave our old ways; and when we feel that we are safe in the Jesus road, we should take time to ask ourselves if we are sure we are treading it as we should, if we are sure we are not walking in some path that seems to run parallel with it, but which in reality is leading us farther and farther away. (Christian Age.)
Ye shall find rest for your souls.--
Soul rest
It is the distinguishing mark of the good and old way that in it men find rest for their souls. You may judge between the true Gospel and the false, between that which is of God and that which is of man, by this one test. As by their fruits ye shall know them, so by this one fruit among the rest: Does it bring rest into the soul? If not, it is not of God; but if it brings a clear, sure, true, honest rest into the soul, then it cometh of standing in the good way. Remember that rest was the promise of the Saviour. Come unto Me--not to anything else, but unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I--Myself personally--will give you rest But what next? Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, and ye shall find rest--that is another rest, still deeper, which you find in service. Oh, what a blessed Saviour we follow, who everywhere giveth us rest! Rest is enjoyed by believers now. But you will never find it anywhere else; as in no other form of religion, so in no other form of pursuit. If you follow wealth you will not find rest there. I spoke some time ago with a gentleman whom I believed to own more than a million, and I ventured to say that I should think after a man had got a million, it would not be worth while to have any more, because he could not get through that lot. Ah, he said, I did not know; and, truly, I did not know; but yet I knew enough to perceive that if a man had a million millions he would not be content. And if you go in for health and pursue that with all diligence, as you might readily do, yet even in the best health there is no rest. It is a noble gift; they who lose it know how precious it is; but there is no rest in that. And as in honour, or any earthly thing, of themselves they are the occasion of disquiet; they often are a seed plot wherein thorns grow that pierce us. But there is rest in Jesus, there is rest in a solid, simple faith in Him, but there is no rest anywhere else.
I. In thy good way we find rest, if we walk therein.
1. There is the way of pardon by an atonement. What a rest that brings to the conscience! A crushed conscience is but an echo of a truth. There is that in the nature of God and in the necessity of things, of which the conscience is but a faint echo, and when your conscience tells you sin must be punished, it tells you the truth; there is no escape from that necessity, and because Jesus suffered in our room and stead here is a glorious gate of salvation, but there is no other. So the way of pardon by an atonement gives rest to the conscience.
2. The way of believing the Word of God as being inspired of God, and being our authoritative guide, is a great rest to the understanding, But do you understand it all? No, sir, I do not; I do not want to. I want to love a great deal more, but I do not care so much about growing in that particular direction of finding out riddles and being able to thread the spheres. But if I could love my Lord better, and be more like Him, I would be happy. Well, but you do not understand it, and yet you believe it. Yes, I do; I find it is such a great thing to move my little bark side by side with a great rock, so high that I cannot see the top of it, because then I know I shall be sweetly sheltered there. Well, it is almost as good not to know as it is to know about a great many things, and sometimes better not to know, because then you can adore and consider that when faith bows before the majesty of an awful mystery she pays to God such homage as cherubim and seraphim pay Him before His throne.
3. There is a way which Christians learn of trusting their affairs with God which gives a general rest to their minds. You see, if you are truly a Christian you have not got anything, you have given it all to the Lord. Cannot you therefore trust Him with it? And pray which part of your business would you like to manage yourself? Mark it off and then make a black mark against it, for you will have no end of mischief and trouble there. Oh, happy is that man who leaves everything, soul and body, entirely in the hands of God, and is content with His Divine will.
4. The way of obedience to the Lord gives rest to the soul. He that believes in Jesus obeys Jesus. Oh, if you do right and stand fast in your integrity you shall wear that little herb called heart-ease, and he that weareth that is more happy than a king! and if you can go home at night, and that little bird in your bosom, called conscience, can sweetly sing to you that you have done a right thing, you shall rest in peace. And, mark you, even as to temporal things in the long run you shall be no loser; but if you should be, you will count it an honour to lose for Christs sake and for the right, and in the end, if you lose silver you shall gain gold. The way of obedience to Divine command gives rest to the soul.
5. The way of close communion with Christ is a way of profound rest unto the soul. Once get to be in Him, and to abide in Him, let your communion with Him be unbroken day after day, month after month, and year after year, and ye shall find rest unto your soul.
II. The rest which is found by walking in the good way is good for the soul.
1. There is a rest which rusts and injures the soul; but Gospel rest is of a very peculiar kind; it brings satisfaction, but it never verges on self-satisfaction. Oh, to be satisfied in Christ Jesus! Full, and therefore craving to be fuller; fed, and therefore hungering to have more.
2. Next, the rest that comes with Christ is a sense of safety, but it is not a sense of presumption. The man that is most safe in Christ is just the man that would not run any risks whatever. Secure, but not carnally secure; in safety, but not presumptuous.
3. This blessed rest creates content, but it also excites a desire of progress. The man that is perfectly content to be saved in Christ Jesus is also very anxious to grow in grace.
4. He that rests in God is also delivered from all legal fears, but he is supplied with superior motives for holiness. The fear of hell and the hope of heaven are poor motives to effort; but to feel I cannot be lost; the blood of Christ is between me and the everlasting fire; I am bound for the everlasting kingdom, and by the certainties of the Divine promise as a believer I shall never be ashamed.
III. Rest of this kind ought to be enjoyed now by every Christian. It is enjoyed by many of us, and it is a grievous error when it is not the case with all real Christians. Some of you say: I trust I am a Christian, but I do not get much of this rest. It is your own fault. I will tell you one thing, though--you would find more rest if you walked in the middle of the way. The best walking to heaven is in the middle of the road; on either side where the hedges are there is a ditch as well. I do not care to go to heaven along the ditch, on the outside of the road. Have you never heard the American story of a gentleman who invited a friend up to his orchard to come and eat some of his apples--he had such exquisite apples? But though he invited his friend several times, he never came. At last he said: I wish you would come and taste my fruit--it is wonderful, just in perfection now. He said: Well, to tell you the truth! have tasted it, and I was ill after it. Well, said he, how came that about? Well, as I was riding along I picked up an apple that fell over into the road. Oh, dear, he said, you do not understand it. I went miles to buy that peculiar sort of apple to put round the edge of the orchard; that was for the boys, so that after they had once tasted that particular apple they might not think of coming any farther. But if you will go into the orchard you will find I have a very different sort of fruit inside. Now, do you know that round the margin of religion the trees of repentance and so forth grow--that fruit not over sweet to some palates. Oh, but if you would come inside, but if you would come into the very centre, what joy you would have! Surely, Christians, you have reason enough for delight. What a happy religion that is in which pleasure is a precept! Rejoice in the Lord always is as much a command as Thou shalt keep the Sabbath day. Remember that, and do pray God that you may get into the very middle of the road, know you are there, and keep there year after year by Divine grace, for then you shall find rest unto your souls. Well, then, this rest ought to be enjoyed now. We ought to throw aside these anxious cares of ours; if we do not, in what respect are we better than worldlings? An excursion to heaven is the best relief from the cares of earth, and you may soon be there. Last night a friend living in Colombo, Ceylon, said, Oh, it is a beautiful place to live in. Although it is very hot where we live, yet in a few hours we get up in the eternal snows where we shall be as cool as we wish. That is just what we are here. It is very hot: the cares and trials of life often parch us, but in five minutes we can be up there in the hill country, and behold the face of Him we love. Why do we not oftener go there? (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The bugle call to rest
In nothing has God consulted economy less than in the provision He has made to guard us from danger; and the Divine solicitude to rescue us from ruin is strongly contrasted with our perpetual propensity to rush into it. In the moral constitution of the mind, also, the safeguards against danger are no less remarkable than the provisions for enjoyment. Why is conscience made so acutely wakeful and sensitive, but with a view to guard us against the first approaches of sin? Why is memory made so tenaciously to treasure up the results of past experience and failure, but to repress that inconsiderate eagerness which would hurry us on to ruin? In the Bible God has preeminently placed the strongest guards on the side of danger.
I. The attractive view of religion furnished in this one word rest. God might have made religion a state of penance and bondage, and it would still have been such had we been suffered to escape so as by fire. Instead of this, tie clothes His religion with attractiveness and tenderness.
1. It brings rest to the understanding by the truths it reveals.
2. It brings rest to the conscience by the pardon it imparts.
3. It brings rest by revealing an adequate object on which the affections can repose. The tendency of irreligion is to dishonour and degrade our nature, by confining us to the world and to time; that of real religion is to exalt and ennoble the mind by connecting us with God and eternity. The one leaves us to mourn, with orphaned heart; the other brings God before us as the object most worthy of our affections, and able to meet and satisfy the vast capacities of happiness which His own kindness has originated.
II. Causes of the rejection of religion by the worldly and inconsiderate.
1. A false estimate of themselves and of the evil and danger to which, in consequence of sin, they are exposed.
2. The unsuspected influence of evil habits, and the progressive and hardening tendency of uurepented sin. As Jeremy Taylor puts it: Vice first is pleasing, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then he is obstinate, then he resolves never to repent, and then he dies.
3. The injurious and delusive results of a false and formal profession of religion. Despair is a near neighbour of presumption. The system which is founded in fraud must end in delusion. It fails to satisfy, as it fails to sanctify.
4. Because the period is extremely short in which the voice of God, as a Saviour, can be heard at all. Mercy is like the rainbow which God set in the clouds to remember mankind. It shines here as long as it is not hindered; but we must never look for it after it is night. (Homiletic Magazine.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain The Impending Judgment Announced
The Impending Judgment Announced
v. 16. Thus saith the Lord, rather, "Thus has Jehovah spoken," namely, in the ancient days, when He had shown the children of His chosen people the way of salvation. Stand ye in the ways and see, looking around on all sides, and ask for the old paths, diligently inquiring for the paths traveled in ancient times, where is the good way, the path of salvation, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls, a secure resting-place, with protection from all injury. The picture is taken from the predicament of travelers who have lost the right road and are now anxiously inquiring for the path from which they have wandered. But they said, We will not walk therein, the Jews stubbornly and rebelliously refused to walk the way of salvation pointed out to them by Jehovah.
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v. 17. Also I set watchmen over you, seers and prophets, whose duty it was to point out threatening calamities to the people and thus to lead them to repentance, saying, Hearken to the sound of the trumpet, which was blown for the purpose of rallying the children of Israel around the banner of the true God. But they said, We will not hearken, thus rejecting in the most stubborn fashion even the last warning of Jehovah.
v. 18. Therefore hear, ye nations, the Gentile people everywhere, and know, O congregation, either the entire assembly of the nations which are here summoned, or the faithful few in Israel who still formed the Church of Jehovah, what is among them, what punishment the Lord is about to inflict. And the prophet now addresses himself to a still greater circle of witnesses.
v. 19. Hear, O earth! Behold, I, Jehovah Himself, as He brings out with emphasis, will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, the result of their counsels, the consequence of their evil scheming, because they have not hearkened unto My words nor to My Law, but rejected it.
v. 20. To what purpose cometh there to Me incense from Sheba, that from the coasts and islands of Southern Arabia, and the sweet cane, the calamus, from a far country? the root of which was used in the preparation of the anointing-oil. All external worship without faith of the heart and the obedience of love is an abomination to the Lord, who hates sham and hypocrisy in every form. Cf Isa 1:11; Amo 5:21. Your burnt offerings are not acceptable nor your sacrifices sweet unto Me, because the Lord was not deceived by outward appearances which were not in agreement with the true condition of the heart.
v. 21. Therefore, thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will lay stumbling-blocks before this people, the devices of the enemies which would bring about their ruin, and the fathers and the sons together, both being equally guilty, shall fall upon them; the neighbor and his friend shall perish, all the people without exception being doomed to feel Jehovah’s sentence on account of the depravity which was so generally prevalent.
v. 22. Thus saith the Lord, Behold, a people cometh from the north country, and a great nation shall be raised from the sides of the earth, from its remotest regions, the expression being vague in agreement with the indefinite geographical notions to be found among the Jews at that time. The Chaldean hordes, of course, are meant.
v. 23. They shall lay hold on bow and spear, as weapons of offense, of powerful attack; they are cruel and have no mercy, giving no quarter, determined on merciless extinction; their voice roareth like the sea, in their angry or triumphant battle-cry; and they ride upon horses, set in array as men for war, fitted out most perfectly for the planned invasion, against thee, O daughter of Zion, against Jerusalem and the land of Judah.
v. 24. We have heard the fame thereof, the report which was spread about their prowess, our hands wax feeble, sinking down without a show of resistance; anguish hath taken hold of us and pain as of a woman in travail.
v. 25. Go not forth into the field, in venturing outside of the walls of Jerusalem, nor walk by the way, along the roads of Judah; for the sword of the enemy and fear is on every side. All these facts are set forth as the basis of another appeal.
v. 26. O daughter of My people, the nation which the Lord has chosen for His own, gird thee with sackcloth, the garment of repentance, and wallow thyself in ashes, in an excess of sorrow and grief; make thee mourning, as for an only son, most bitter lamentation, such as was expressed by beating the breast; for the spoiler shall suddenly come upon us.
v. 27. I have set thee for a tower and a fortress among My people, literally, "as a prover," or explorer, and an assayer, one who separates the metal from the dross, that thou mayest know and try their way, testing it out for truth and solid worth.
v. 28. They are all grievous revolters, mutineers and betrayers in the highest degree, walking with slanders, deliberately seeking opportunities to indulge in slandering and reviling others; they are brass and iron, debased and hardened in their opposition to the Lord; they are all corrupters, having only destruction in mind. The prophet continues his figure of the base metals.
v. 29. The bellows are burned, in the long process which was intended to purify the people and produce some amount of gold, the lead is consumed of the fire, or, "out of its fire comes lead," instead of the precious metal which the Lord had a right to expect; the founder melteth in vain, there were no such results as one might have expected; for the wicked are not plucked away, the great mass of the people are dross, worthless metal.
v. 30. Reprobate silver shall men call them, silver so thoroughly mixed with the baser metals as to be worthless for all ordinary purposes, because the Lord hath rejected them. All those whom the Lord has tried in the oven of His test, whom He has found wanting in the qualities which should be found in a true believer, will finally be cast out as base metal.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Yahweh says this
Yahweh says this
It can be stated clearly who Yahweh says this to. AT: "Yahweh says this to the people of Israel" or "Yahweh says this to his people" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)
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Stand at the road crossing ... We will not go
The roads and pathways refer to ways that people live their lives. Yahweh wants the people of Israel to ask what is the good way to live their lives and for them to live that way. (See: Metaphor)
the road crossing
This refers to the place where two roads meet.
ask for the ancient pathways
The ancient pathways represent their ancestors's behavior, how their ancestors lived long ago. AT: "ask about the pathways that your ancestors walked on" or "ask about how your ancestors behaved" (See: Metaphor)
Where is this good way
Possible meanings are 1) "this good way" represents the good way to live. AT: "What is the good way to live" or 2) "this good way" represents the way to live that results in blessings. AT: "Where is the way to what is good" or "What is the way to live that results in blessing" (See: Metaphor)
Then go on it
"Then walk on that path." Going on that path represents living that way. AT: "Then live that way" (See: Metaphor)
We will not go
This represents not living that way. AT: "We will not live that way" (See: Metaphor)
I appointed for you watchmen to listen for the trumpet
Yahweh speaks of his prophets as if they were watchmen who were sent to warn the people of danger. (See: Metaphor)
appointed for you
The word "you" refers to the people of Israel.
to listen for the trumpet
"to listen to the sound of the trumpet." Yahweh speaks of his warning messages to his prophets as if the messages were a trumpet being blown to warn people about the danger that would come. The prophets were to listen to the warning and tell the people about it.
Therefore, nations, listen! See, you witnesses, what will happen to them. Hear, earth! See
These three sentences all are telling the people of other nations to witness what Yahweh will do to the rebellious people of Judah. AT: "You other nations, see what I will do to my people"(See: Parallelism and Apostrophe)
Therefore, nations, listen!
"Therefore, nation, listen to what I am about to say!"
I am about to bring disaster to this people
"soon I will punish these people severely"
you witnesses
"you who are witnesses"
will happen to them
The word "them" refers to the people of Israel.
Hear, earth
The word "earth" represents the people of the earth. AT: "Hear, people that live on the earth" (See: Metonymy)
the fruit of their thoughts
Here the word "fruit" represents results or consequences. AT: "the consequences of their thoughts" (See: Metaphor)
They paid no attention to my word or law, but they instead rejected it
Here "paid no attention to my word" refers to not listening to what God said, and "rejected it" refers to refusing to obey God's law. AT: "They did not listen to what I said. Instead they disobeyed my law" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)
translationWords
Yahweh
good
rest
appoint
watch
trumpet
nation
testimony
earth
fruit
word of God
law
reject
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 6:16-21 The Lord again appealed to the people to…
6:16-21 The Lord again appealed to the people to repent and warned them of the terrible consequences that awaited them if they refused.
6:16 Following the old, godly way of God’s laws (Mal 4:4) would lead to rest for the people’s souls (cp. Matt 11:29).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.