"And this is His Name whereby He shall be called, JEHOVAH OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Therefore, behold the days come, saith Jehovah, that they shall no more say, Jehovah liveth,
which brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but, Jehovah liveth, which
brought up and led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries
whither I had driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land." (Jeremiah 23:6.)

Plainly enough, the passage speaks of the deliverance of the whole earthly people, both of the ten
tribes and the two tribes, and of nothing else. We may take the principle of the promised
restoration of Israel to show how good the Lord is towards us, but nothing more. The truth is that
we have never been driven out of our heritage, as Israel was. We may have failed to appropriate
God’s gifts, we may have abandoned our proper blessings, but there never has been such a thing
as God driving Christians out of their proper place in Christ Jesus.

The whole idea of spiritualizing the prophecies is unsound in principle. You can never apply it in
detail. The theory only lives in a mist. As long as you are in the spiritual fog, you imagine these
passages can be taken in a vague sense, but the moment you observe the precision of the word of
God this delusion is at an end.

In the latter part of this chapter (Jeremiah 23) the value of the word of Jehovah is again insisted
upon very strongly, and in an interesting way. The false prophets, the profane priests, and all the
other dreamers brought forward their words to deceive, but the Lord stands to His own utterances,
and how? Why should they take heed to it? Upon what ground? Upon its own intrinsic power.
"What is the chaff to the wheat?" (Verse 28.) Nutritive value decides.

I never read a tradition that was not manifestly chaff. I never read a thought that was of man that
was not worthless in the things of God. Give me something of God, and the moment my faith lays
hold upon the mind of God I have got the wheat. In other words, the truth of God is not a mere
question of historical investigation, but it is what suits a plain man much better and straightway.
What would become of the poor and the simple if they had to conduct all kinds of long
investigations to find out what the word of God was?

There is one capital way of meeting a man when he is hungry. Give him a piece of bread, and he
knows right well it is bread. He may never have seen that kind of bread before, and may never
have tasted it, but he is convinced it is bread. Give him a piece of board, and he knows it is not
bread. Thus, judged by human learning, a man may be exceedingly ignorant, but there is a sort
of practical test by which God guards even the simplest of His people. "What is the chaff to the
wheat?" The truth of God always commends itself to the consciences of those that hear it.

The hearers may be bitterly prejudiced. They may have their difficulties, but then those difficulties
arise entirely from the strength of their will that blindly cleaves to the thing to which it has been
accustomed; for no man having drunk old wine straightway desireth new, for he saith the old is
better. He is grown used to what he has heard from his childhood, so that even though the Lord
Jesus presents the new wine, the force of old habits and prejudice is considerable. Nevertheless

man has a conscience, and that which is of God, and which reveals Christ to his soul, always finds
an answer in the heart, even though the strength of will may still lead a man unbelievingly to slight
God’s word, to refuse it, and even resist it.

"As newborn babes desire earnestly the pure mental milk of the word, that by it ye may grow up
to salvation, if indeed ye have tasted that the Lord is good" (1 Peter 2:2,3 JND).