Balm in Gilead

"Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?" Jeremiah 8:22

A pregnant question! and asked by the prophet under very peculiar and painful feelings. What read we in the preceding verse? "For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment has taken hold on me." Whence sprang these convulsive pangs, this deep and overwhelming astonishment, which worked so powerfully in the mind of the prophet as actually to distort his features and make his face appear pallid and black? Why was he hurt and wounded in spirit? What was he astonished at? At three things. First, at the hurt of the daughter of his people, at the deep and desperate wounds under which Zion lay languishing; secondly, at the greatness of the remedy which God had provided; and, thirdly, as the malady was so desperate and the remedy so great, why the health of the daughter of his people was not recovered?

In endeavouring, then, to open up the words of the text, I shall, with God's blessing, attempt to show from them,
I. The desperate state of the daughter of God's people.
II. The remedy which God has provided for her desperate condition.
III. The answer the prophet's question, "Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?"

I. The desperate state of the daughter of God's people.

Sin is a damnable thing; and every one of God's people is made, has been made, or will be made, to feel it so. And the more that they see of sin, know of sin, feel of sin, the more damnable will sin appear in their eyes, and with greater weight and power will its dreadful guilt and filth lie upon their conscience.

Now there are but few, comparatively speaking, who have any clear sight or any deep feeling of what sin really is; and the reason, for the most part, is because they have such a slight, shallow, superficial knowledge of who and what God is. But let them once see the purity of God by the eye of faith, let them once have a manifestation of His justice and holiness, majesty and greatness to their soul, and let them, seeing light in His light, have a corresponding sight and sense of the deep and desperate state in which they are as fallen children of a fallen parent, then will they no longer have slight, superficial feelings of the nature and evil of sin, but will so see and feel its hideous and damnable character as to make them cry out with Isaiah in the temple, "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." (Isa. 6:5).

But if we look at the words of our text, it would seem as if the daughter of God's people, that is, the Church of God ("the daughter of God's people" being a Hebrew idiom for God's people), was suffering under wounds so as to need balm, and under a complication of diseases, so as to require a physician. There was work for the surgeon as well as for the physician; deep and desperate wounds which needed balm, and an inward destructive malady which required internal remedies. This is just what sin has reduced the family of God to. God has described His Zion as "full of wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores."

When the Church of God fell in Adam, she fell with a crash which broke every bone and bruised her flesh with wounds which are ulcerated from head to toe. Her understanding, her conscience, and her affections were all fearfully maimed. The first was blinded, the second stupefied, and the third alienated. Every mental faculty thus became perverted and distorted. As in a shipwrecked vessel the water runs in through every leak, so when Adam fell upon the rocks of sin and temptation, and made shipwreck of the image of God in which he was created, sin rushed into every faculty of body and soul, and penetrated into the inmost recesses of his being.

Or to use another figure; as when a man is bitten by a poisonous serpent the venom courses through every artery and vein, and he dies a corrupted mass from head to foot, so did the poison-fang of sin penetrate into Adam's inmost soul and body, and infect him with its venom from the sole to the crown.

But the fearful havoc which sin has made is never seen nor felt until the soul is quickened into spiritual life. O what work does sin then make in the conscience, when it is opened up by the Spirit of God! Whatever superficial or shallow views we may have had of sin before, it is only as its desperate and malignant character is opened up by the Holy Spirit that it is really seen, felt, grieved under, and mourned over as indeed a most dreadful and fearful reality. It is this sword of the Spirit which cuts and wounds; it is this entrance of life and light that gashes the conscience; it is this divine work which lacerates the heart and inflicts those deep wounds which nothing but the "balm in Gilead" can heal.

And not only is a poor convinced sinner cut in his conscience, inwardly lacerated and gashed by sin as thus opened up by the Spirit of God, but, as the prophet speaks, "the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint." He is thus labouring under a complication of diseases. Every thought, word, and action is polluted by sin. Every mental faculty is depraved. The will chooses evil; the affections cleave to earthly things; the memory, like a broken sieve, retains the bad and lets fall the good; the judgement, like a bribed or drunken judge, pronounces heedless or wrong decisions; and the conscience, like an opium-eater, lies asleep and drugged in stupefied silence. When all these master-faculties of the mind, the heads of the house, are so drunken and disorderly, need we wonder that the bodily members are a godless, rebellious crew? Lusts call out for gratification; unbelief and infidelity murmur; tempers growl and mutter; and every bad passion strives hard for the mastery.

O the evils of the human heart, which, let loose, have filled earth with misery and hell with victims; which deluged the world with the flood, burnt Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from heaven, and are ripening the world for the final conflagration! Every crime which has made this fair earth a present hell, has filled the air with groans, and drenched the ground with blood, dwells in your heart and mine.

Now, as this is opened up to the conscience by the Spirit of God, we feel indeed to be of all men most sinful and miserable, and of all most guilty, polluted, and vile. But it is this, and nothing but this, which cuts to pieces our fleshly righteousness, wisdom, and strength, which slays our delusive hopes, and lays us low at the footstool of mercy, without one good thought, word, or action to propitiate an angry Judge. It is this which brings the soul to this point, that, if saved, it can only be saved by the free grace, sovereign mercy, and tender compassion of Almighty God.

These are painful lessons to learn. How trying is bodily illness! To be parched by fever, racked by internal pain, with nerves unstrung, temples throbbing, limbs tottering, appetite gone, are heavy afflictions. Wounds also festering, abscesses gathering, ulcers spreading, cancers eating--what a catalogue of ills this poor flesh is heir lo!

Yet these are but types of the maladies and wounds which the fall has brought into the soul. But as it is one thing to read of disease in books and another to be sick oneself, one thing to walk through the wards of a hospital and another to lie there a dying patient; so it is one thing to know sin by theory and another to feel it by experience. This miserable state, brought upon us and into us by the fall, all the people of God must in some measure feel. It is of no use mincing the matter and saying that a person can be saved by the grace of God and the blood of Christ, without knowing anything of the depth of misery and wretchedness into which he is sunk as the fallen child of a fallen father. We must go down into the depths of the fall to know what our hearts are and what they are capable of; we must have the keen knife of God to cut deep gashes in our conscience and lay bare the evil that lies so deeply embedded in our carnal mind, before we can enter into and experience the beauty and blessedness of salvation by grace.

How the saints of old were led down into these depths! See the tears with which David watered his midnight couch; mark the lamentations of Jeremiah out of "the low dungeon;" hear the groans of Herman "in the lowest pit, in the darkness and the deeps;" listen to the roarings of Job, "poured out like the waters." Were not all these choice and eminent saints of God? And whence their dolorous cries? Was it not sin which forced them from their heaving, labouring breasts? But if this will not satisfy you and show you what sin is as laid on the conscience, see the Son of God agonizing in the garden and on the cross, and then say whether sin be a slight thing, or its burden light or small.

Now it was seeing and feeling this which made the prophet cry, "I am black; astonishment has taken hold on me." When he saw himself so polluted and vile; when he viewed the Church of God pining and languishing with the sickness of sin, his very features gathered blackness; he seemed amazed that man should be what he is; his very soul trembled within him at a sight and sense of God's majesty and holiness; and he could only burst forth in the language of awe-struck wonder, "I am black; astonishment has taken hold on me."

And so it will take hold upon us, when, under divine tuition, we look into our hearts and see the lusts and passions, the unbelief and infidelity, the worldly-mindedness and carnality, the pride and covetousness, with all the hosts of evils that lurk and work, fester and riot, in the depth of our fallen nature. Well may we lift our hands with astonishment that the heart of man can be capable of imagining such depths of baseness, and that sin can so stride over the soul and trample down every promise of a crop.

But you will say, perhaps, "You are too hard upon us; you make us out too bad; and you use such exaggerated language, as if we were all fit only for prison." I admit I use strong language, because I feel strongly; but not exaggerated, because it is impossible to exaggerate the evils of the heart or the depths of the fall.

II. The remedy which God has provided for her desperate condition.

But it would seem that while the prophet was thus almost overwhelmed with a sight and sense of sin, he had brought before him a view of the remedy. He therefore cries out, "Is there no balm in Gilead?" Is the case desperate? Must the patient die of the disease? Must the poor sinner sink under his sins? Is there no hope for him? Say that he has wandered far away from God, forgotten Him, neglected Him, repaid all His favours with base ingratitude, requited all His bounties and mercies with carnality and folly--is there still no remedy? Must he perish under the load of his iniquities and crimes? "Is there no balm in Gilead?" Is the supply exhausted, or has its value ceased?

(1.) But what did this BALM in Gilead literally signify? Gilead was a country beyond Jordan, in which certain trees grew of great value and rarity, from the trunk and branches of which there distilled a highly odoriferous gum, which was said to be of sovereign efficacy in healing wounds. We find that the Ishmaelite merchants to whom Joseph was sold by his brethren were taking some of this balm to Egypt; and when Jacob would propitiate the chief lord of Egypt, whom he knew not then to be Joseph, he bade his sons "take a little balm" with them, as a suitable and acceptable offering. It thus became celebrated for its healing properties; and its very scarcity, the trees growing in no other soil or climate, and consequent preciousness, gave it a still higher reputation.

The prophet, therefore, viewing on the one hand Zion's desperate case, and on the other God's own divinely-contrived and appointed remedy, asks this pregnant question, "Is there no balm in Gilead?" He looked at the hurt of the daughter of his people, and saw her pining away in her iniquities; the veil being taken off his own heart, he saw her like himself, beyond description black and base. But was there no hope for him or her? Must she go down to the chambers of death? Must she sigh out her heart without any manifestation of pardon and peace? "Is there no balm in Gilead?"

Why, the very question implies that there is balm in Gilead; that God has provided a remedy which is suitable to the desperate malady; and that there is more in the balm to heal than there is in guilt to wound; for there is more in grace to save than there is in sin to destroy.

Why, then, should Zion so languish? Why is she so sick and sore? Why so bleeding to death? Why does her head so droop, her hands so hang down, her knees so totter? Why is her face so pale, her frame so wasted, her constitution so broken? What has done all this? Whence this sickness unto death? "Is there no balm in Gilead?" From that far country does now no healing medicine come? Has the balm-tree ceased to distil its gum? Is there none to gather, none to bring, none to apply it to perishing Zion?

But spiritually viewed, what is this precious balm? Is it not the Saviour's blood--that precious, precious blood, of which the Holy Spirit testifies that it "cleanses from all sin?" Look at the words; weigh them well; they will bear the strictest, closest examination. "All sin;" then sins before salvation, sins after salvation, sins of thought, sins of word, sins of deed, sins of omission, sins of commission, sins against light, sins against life, sins against love, sins against the law, sins against the gospel, sins against God--in every shape, in every form, of every name, every kind, every hue, every blackness, one sin only excepted--the sin against the Holy Spirit, which a believer can never commit. "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses," not from some sins, not from many sins, not from a thousand sins, not from a million sins, but "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin."

This is indeed the balm, when the conscience is cut and gashed, bleeding and sore, to allay the hurt, to soothe the pain, to bring together the edges of the wound and to make it graciously heal.

Is there any other remedy? Search the whole round of duties; run through the wide catalogue of 'forms and ceremonies'; examine every cell and nook of the monastery, the convent, and the confessional; weigh every grain of 'human merit' and 'creature obedience'; tithe with the utmost nicety the anise, mint, and cumin of self-imposed observances; hold up the 'coarse hair-shirt', the bleeding scourge, the jagged crucifix, the protracted fast, the midnight vigil, the morning prayer, and the evening hymn, and see whether all or any of these can heal a wounded conscience.

But why do I mention these things? Are there Papists or Puseyites before me? No! But because there really is no middle ground between faith in Christ's blood, and full-blown Popery. As between grace and works, Christ's blood and human merits, there is no real middle ground, so there is no standing ground between experimental religion and Popery, between absolution by Christ and absolution by the Pope. To drive out this Antichrist and bring in Christ is the main work of the Spirit, the grand aim and end of the gospel.

This is the reason why the Lord, in His wonderful dealings with the soul, makes it sink so deeply and feel so acutely. It is to drive out heart-popery. Where was the sword forged which "wounded one of the heads of the beast as it were, to death?" In the cell of an Augustine monk. Popery was first driven out of Luther's heart by the law and temptation; and then smitten down by Luther's hand. But thousands are Papists in heart who are Protestants in creed. How many, for instance, there are who would gladly heal themselves--some by duties, some by doctrines, some by resolutions, some by promises, some by vows, some by false hopes, some by ordinances, some by the opinion of ministers, some by church membership! What is this but a subtle form of Popery?

How many heal themselves in this slight way! and every one will do so until the wound is opened up and deepened by the Spirit of God. Then all these vain and inefficacious remedies are seen in their true light. They do not speak peace to the conscience; they bring no sense of pardon to the soul; the love of God does not accompany them; the fear of judgement is not taken away; the grave has still its terrors, and death has still its sting. All these remedies, therefore, are found in the case of the child of God to be utterly inefficacious, because they cannot heal the wounds, the deep wounds, that sin has made.

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