A threatened return from cosmos to chaos.
It is impossible to read this passage without having the first chapter of Genesis brought to mind. Moreover, it was intended that it should be brought to mind. In Genesis 1:1-31. we have the brief, sublime description, impossible to forget, of the advance from chaos to cosmos. Here in Jeremiah we have a very sad and suggestive indication of possible return from cosmos to chaos. These two words, it will be admitted, are often used very loosely. Particularly is this true of the latter. We talk of things having got into a chaotic condition, when if such really were so, it would be a very terrible condition indeed. For what is chaos? It is the state indicated at the very beginning of the Scriptures, the state out of which God fashioned what we call the cosmos or the world. Bear in mind that the creation described in Genesis is not the making of something out of nothing, but the fashioning of formless, empty matter into an orderly collection of appropriate parts and beyond that an innumerable array of living, active organisms. "The earth was without form and void." Strictly speaking, the earth spoken of in Genesis was as yet an ideal thing. "And darkness was on the face of the abyss." As the writer of the narrative conceived it, there stretched out from the formless, empty earth an impenetrable, rayless depth of space. This is chaos, where there is no ray of light, not even the slightest beginning of order, not even the smallest seed of life. But with the moving of God's breath upon the face of the water cosmos begins. Light comes; and then day and night are defined, and heaven and earth, and so on through the familiar procession of God's wonderful works, till cosmos gets its terrestrial crown in the fashioning of man. It is worth while for all who would rejoice in the works and ways of God to get a clear notion of the difference between chaos and cosmos.
Then bearing this difference in mind, WHAT A TERRIBLE PROSPECT JEREMIAH HINTS AT IN THIS PASSAGE! Just by the profit and glory of the ascent from chaos to cosmos in Genesis do we measure the loss and shame of the descent from cosmos to chaos in Jeremiah. It is earth we see, with the men and women, the domestic and social bends, city and country, all occupations of mankind, all that is highest in human attainments; and this aggregation, which comes from man's toiling development of the cosmical elements presented to him, is seen sliding back to chaos again. There can be no mistake about it. Mark, it is not what the prophet hears, but what he sees. "I beheld' is repeated. And looking out he sees not the accustomed scene of life and activity, but the earth without form and void. He looks for the heavens where dwell the sun by day and moon and stars by night, but there is no light of any sort. The mountains and hills, which always were so significant of strength and grandeur to the Hebrew imagination, show signs of being moved away. No man could be seen. There are several words in Hebrew all rendered by the English word "man," but Jeremiah's word here is the same with that in Genesis 1:26. Then, moreover, all the birds of the heaven fly away. Other inhabited and cultivated places have become as the wilderness, but not as an uninhabited wilderness. Note Isaiah 14:23 : Babylon is there described as being made a possession for the bittern. Thus it is indeed desolated, but evidently the birds do not fly away from it. Here, however, even the birds, which so easily flit from place to place, disappear as if they had no hope of making in this place their nests and finding in it their sustenance. Thus every detail points to the chance, the possibility, of Chaos resuming his ancient reign. But now observe—
THERE IS AN ARREST BEFORE SUCH A DEPLORABLE CONSUMMATION. "I will not make a full end." Man the individual and men the social community may slide a long way towards destruction, may be as it were on the brink, without a remedy; and yet God can so act as to arrest, restore, and consolidate anew, with such internal purity and coherency as will defy further lapse. Note the full significance of the use of the word κόσμος in the Greek Testament. It was into the κόμος that the true Light came. John's great directing word to his disciples as he saw Jesus coming to him was, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the κόσμος." Where all should be perfect order, vigorous life, and exuberant fruitfulness, there is discord, contradiction; everything jars, and there is a never-intermitting groan of pain. All this Jesus can take away, and must take away. It is through him that whatever promises and hopes lie in verse 27 are to be carried into effect. This whole passage, therefore, suggests an aspect in which the need of Christ's work and the reality of it may be very profitably considered.—Y.