Balm in Gilead.
I. THE WORLD NEEDS REMEDIES FOR MORAL AND SOCIAL HEALING. Jeremiah regarded the Jews as wounded by the cruel calamities which were to overwhelm them; but beneath the wounds he detected an unhealthy national condition which equally needed healing. Men suffer thus from the external wounds of adversity and from the internal disease of sin. How small a part of mankind can be considered in a thoroughly healthy condition! Men are not only imperfectly developed; they are suffering from positive disorders. The world needs medicine as well as food—the physician as well as the farmer. Nations need healing for political disorganization within and wrongs of subjection to a foreign yoke without. Society sadly requires to be purified, even regenerated. Individual men suffer from the smart of sorrow and the disease of sin—both signs of an imperfect, disorganized condition, needing cure. The one disease which is at the root of all the chief maladies of mankind is moral evil. The forgiveness of sins must come as a healing of sickness (Mark 2:9).
II. MANY PROFESSED REMEDIES ARE FORTHCOMING. Gilead has her balm. Every new physician has his patent nostrum. The world does not suffer from the small number of remedies which have been proposed to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to. It is rather in danger of being poisoned by a superabundance of most incongruous drugs. Every religion brings its own remedy. Philosophy, in its highest ambition, aims at a practical cure of society. Political innovations, social reforms, education, sanitary improvements,—all seek this result.
III. No EARTHLY REMEDIES SUFFICE FOR THE NEEDED CURE. The balm of Gilead is found in abundance, but, alas! it will not heal the smart of Israel. Physicians advise, but their advice is futile. Nothing could effect the deliverance of the Jews in the days of Jeremiah, though lying prophets and astute politicians did their best. No earthly remedy can heal the widespread evil of the world (Isaiah 1:6).
1. Earthly remedies are external. They may change the social order; they cannot cure the false ideas, unregulated passions, and vitiated conscience of which the habits of society are but symptoms. Spiritual disease must be treated with spiritual medicine. The physician for the body can do little in ministering to "the mind diseased." You cannot make men moral by the strictest puritanical legislation.
2. Earthly remedies partake of the character of the disease. Human religions bear on their faces the marks of that very moral corruption which they aim at destroying. Sin can only be cured by something outside the sinful world; sorrow, by something above the scene of human distresses. We must go further than Gilead for the true balm, for Gilead will share with Israel the trouble for which we seek a remedy.
IV. GOD HAS PROVIDED HIS OWN REMEDY FOR THE MORAL AND SOCIAL HEALING OF THE WORLD. Christ is "the good Physician." The miracles of healing which he wrought on the bodies of men were signs of the work he came to effect for their souls.
1. Christ's remedy comes from higher than human sources. The healing of the sinless One is not tainted with the corruption which marks all simply human attempts at cure.
2. Christ's remedy goes to the root of the evil of mankind. His great work is not to effect an external revolution of society, but to cleanse the conscience (Hebrews 9:14) and heal the heart.
3. Individually, healing is brought to all, and the worst cases are just those for which Christ chiefly came (Matthew 9:12). When all other remedies fail, his is most effectual, because it is
4. Society must be healed by the application of Christian principles to politics, to commerce, to literature, to recreation, to domestic life.