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The prophet puts before us two highly-finished pictures. In the one, the hot desert stretches on all sides. The fierce "sunbeams like swords" slay every green thing. Here and there a stunted, grey, prickly shrub struggles to live, and just manages not to die. But it has no grace of leaf, nor profitableness of fruit; and it only serves to make the desolation mere desolate. The other carries us to some brimming river, where everything lives because water has come. Dipping their boughs in the sparkling current, and driving their roots through the moist soil, the bordering trees lift aloft their pride of foliage and bear fruits in their season. So, says Jeremiah, the two pictures represent two sets of men; the one, he who diverts from their true object his heart capacities of love and trust, and clings to creatures and to men, "making flesh his arm and departing from the living God"; the other, a man who leans the whole weight of his needs and cares and sins and sorrows upon God. We can make the choice which shall be the object of our trust, and according as we choose the one or the other, the experience of these vivid pictures will be ours.

I. THE ONE IS IN THE DESERT; THE OTHER BY THE RIVER. The poor little dusty shrub in the desert, whose very leaves have been modified into prickles, is fit for the desert, and is as much at home there as the willows by the water courses with their rush vegetation in their moist bed. But if a man makes that fatal choice, of shutting out God from his confidence and his love, and squandering these upon earth and upon creatures, he is as fatally out of harmony with the place which he has chosen, and as much away from his natural soil as a tropical plant amongst the snows of Arctic glaciers, or a water lily in the Sahara. You, I, the poorest and humblest of men, will never be right, never feel in native soil, with appropriate surroundings, until we have laid our hearts and our hands on the breast of God, and rested ourselves on Him. Not more surely do gills and fins proclaim that the creature that has them is meant to roam through the boundless ocean, nor the anatomy and wings of the bird witness more surely to its destination to soar in the open heavens, than the make of your spirits testifies that God, none less or lower, is your portion. As well might bees try to get honey from a vase of wax flowers as we to draw what we need from creatures, from ourselves, from visible and material things. Where else will you get love that will never fail nor change nor die? Where else will you find an object for the intellect that will yield inexhaustible material of contemplation and delight? Where else infallible direction for the will? Where else shall weakness find unfailing strength, or sorrow adequate consolation, or hope certain fulfilment, or fear a safe hiding place?

II. THE ONE CAN TAKE IN NO REAL GOOD; THE OTHER CAN FEAR NO EVIL. (See R.V., ver. 8.) "He cannot see when good comes." God comes, and I would rather have some more money, or some woman's love, or a big business. So I might go the whole round. The man that cannot see good when it is there before his nose, because the false direction of his confidence has blinded his eyes, cannot open his heart to it. You are plunged, as it were, in a sea of possible felicity, which will be yours if your heart's direction is towards God, and the surrounding ocean of blessedness has as little power to fill your heart as the sea to enter some hermetically sealed flask dropped into the middle of the Atlantic. Turn to the other side. "He shall not fear when heat cometh," which is evil in these Eastern lands, "and shall not be careful in the year of drought." The tree that sends its roots towards a river that never fails does not suffer when all the land is parched. And the man who has driven his roots into God, and is drawing from that deep source what is needful for his life and fertility, has no occasion to dread any evil, nor to gnaw his heart with anxiety as to what he is to do in parched times. Troubles may come, but they do not go deeper than the surface. It may be all cracked and caked and dry, "a thirsty land where no water is," and yet deep down there may be moisture and coolness.

III. THE ONE IS BARE; THE OTHER CLOTHED WITH THE BEAUTY OF FOLIAGE. The word translated "heat" has a close connection with, if it does not literally mean, "naked," or "bare." Probably it designates some inconspicuously leaved desert shrub, the particular species not being ascertainable or a matter of any consequence. Leaves, in Scripture, have a recognised symbolical meaning. "Nothing but leaves" in the story of the fig tree meant only beautiful outward appearance, with no corresponding outcome of goodness of heart, in the shape of fruit. So I venture, here, to draw a distinction between leafage and fruit, and say that the one points rather to a man's character and conduct as being lovely in appearance, and in the other as being morally good and profitable. This is the lesson of these two clauses — Misdirected confidence in creatures strips a man of much beauty of character, and true faith in God adorns soul with a leafy vesture of loveliness. "Whatsoever things are lovely, and of good report" lack their supreme excellence, the diamond on the top of the royal crown, the glittering gold on the summit of the Campanile, unless there be in them a distinct reference to God.

IV. THE ONE IS STERILE; THE OTHER FRUITFUL. The only works of men worth calling "fruit," if regard be had to their capacities, relations, and obligations, are those done as the outcome and consequence of hearts trusting in the Lord. The rest of the man's activities may be busy and multiplied, and, from the point of view of a godless morality, many, may be fair and good; but if we think of him as being destined, as his chief end, "to glorify God, and (so) to enjoy Him forever," what correspondence between such a creature and acts that are done without reference to God can there ever be? At the most they are "wild grapes." And there comes a time when they will be tested; the axe laid to the root of the trees, and these imperfect deeds will shrivel up and disappear. Trust will certainly be fruitful. There we are upon pure Christian ground which declares that the outcome of faith is conduct in conformity with the will of Him in whom we trust, and that the productive principle of all good in man is confidence in God manifest to us in Jesus Christ.

(A. Maclaren, D. D.)

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KJV: Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.

WEB: Thus says Yahweh: Cursed is the man who trusts in man, and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart departs from Yahweh.