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—"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;" "therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge."
There is something remarkable, and it may at first sight seem startling, in this. Here is a people separated and set apart from all the other nations of the world to be God's own peculiar people, the depositaries of His revelat on; the witnesses of His miracles; the objects of His especial favour and care; directed by His law; brought nigh to Him by His ordinances; and yet, notwithstanding these extraordinary privileges, declared by Him to be "gone into captivity," and "destroyed, for lack of knowledge."
"We may well then inquire what the ignorance was, through which a people, to whom it was given to know so much, perished; for the inquiry nearly concerns ourselves, who, like them, are God's "peculiar" people; like them, have the light of God's revelations to guide us; like them, draw nigh to Him in His "house of prayer;" like them, have received signal deliverances, and manifold mercies, as a nation, and as a Church, at His hands.
The opening passage of the chapter from which my text has been taken will supply an answer to the inquiry, and clearly illustrate the character of that ignorance: "The Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out … Therefore shall the land mourn." That want then of the "knowledge of God" in Israel, against which the word of His indignation was directed, was in close connexion with the want of truth and of mercy, and had its natural fruits in "swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery." It was the ignorance of those who (as St. Paul describes this same people in the second chapter of his Epistle to the Romans) "rested in the law, and made their boast of God, and knew His will, being instructed out of the law, and yet, through breaking the law of which they made their boast, dishonoured God." It was the ignorance of those who deceived themselves into a forgetfulness of the practical purposes for which their knowledge had been given them: such as was that, in earlier days, of "the sons of Eli," of whom it is written, that they were "sons of Belial,"—"they knew not the Lord:" they knew Him not, that is to say, in their hearts and lives, being ungodly and licentious men; though they could not but know Him in His name, and in His worship; for they ministered to Him day by day in His tabernacle.
