Human and Divine confidence.
I. IN WHAT THEY ARE ALIKE.
1. In the assurance with which they are expressed. Here are men, in their worldly wisdom, perfectly certain that the course they have adopted will turn out right. It is always important to notice the assured unquestioning spirit in which men will set out on their enterprises. They do not seem to see the failures, disgraces, and humiliations of others; such overwhelming troubles are not to come nigh them. And all this is great testimony to the use of faith to men. God means men to be confident. The confidence which he ever expresses himself is meant to find a correspondent confidence in us. We need never be dubious in matters of a spiritual kind, however dubious we have to be as to certain external results. If we only act in the right, divinely ordained way, then we can continually be confident that all will come right.
2. In the time of waiting needful to justify the confidence. God speaks words, the truth and profound significance of which it may take not merely generations but even millenniums to make manifest to the whole world. Everything immediately apparent to the outward eye may contradict what he says. And something of his own wisdom and insight into the future he gives to men of the right spirit, so that they may work for results which are to be developed through long periods. He makes it possible for men to go on believing, hopeful and patient through all discouragements, and even to die in the faith that what they have sown others will reap. Thus faith which God makes to stand in the beginning he strengthens and establishes even to the end. And that faith which makes men themselves to utter confident dogmatic words will not be shaken all at once. Time is to try all things—the wisdom of the wise and the folly of the fools, the result of that which is sown to the Spirit and that which is sown to the flesh.
II. IN WHAT THEY DIFFER. In respect of real and deep insight into the future. The man who is confident in worldly wisdom is simply confident in the doctrine of chances. His chance of stability and success is equally good with that of others. Some must fail, but some must succeed. But God would have us ever to understand that success el this sort is only a deferred failure. If men could only see far enough, success and honour and safety would be utterly transmuted into failure, disgrace, and ruin. But God's confidence is based on certain and complete knowledge. The end of all unsettlement and change must be something stable and continuous, and when God sees men reckoning themselves on a true foundation, which after all is miserably brief and frail, he can only assert the truth. If men will not believe, the only thing remaining is to wait. The utter downfall of the Jewish nation from such a height to such a depth was predicted even in the days of their outward glory. The Word of God stands because he can discern the certain exhaustion of purely human resources even when those resources show themselves in exuberant exercise and impressive achievement.—Y.
Jeremiah
Jeremiah 44 - jeremiah-44 - worlddic.com