1. God.

Among the surprises which Jeremiah's own Oracles have for the student is the discovery of how little they dwell upon the transcendent and [pg 351] infinite aspects of the Divine Nature. On these Jeremiah adds almost nothing to what his predecessors or contemporaries revealed. Return to his original visions and contrast them with those, for example, of Isaiah and Ezekiel.

Isaiah's vision was of the Lord upon a Throne, high and lifted up, surrounded by Seraphim crying to one another, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts! the whole earth is full of His Glory! And their voices rocked the Temple and filled it with smoke. Here are a Presence, Awful Majesty, Infinite Holiness and Glory, blinding the seer and crushing his heart contrite. Or take the inaugural vision of Ezekiel—the storm-wind out of the North, the vast cloud, the fire infolding itself, the brightness round about and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber; the rush and whirl of life that followed, wheels and wings and rings full of eyes; and over this the likeness of a firmament of the colour of the terrible ice and the sound of wings like the noise of many waters, as the Voice of the Almighty and above the firmament a Throne and on the Throne the Appearance of a Man, the Appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the Lord. And I, when I saw it, fell upon my face.

In the inaugural visions of Jeremiah there is none of this Awfulness—only What art thou seeing Jeremiah? the branch of an almond tree ... a caldron boiling. That was characteristic of his encounters [pg 352] and intercourse with the Deity throughout. They were constant and close, but in them all we are aware only of a Voice and an Argument. There is no Throne, no Appearance, no Majesty, no overwhelming sense of Holiness and Glory, no rush of wings nor floods of colour or of song.748 Jeremiah takes for granted what other prophets have said of God. But the Deity whose Power and Glory they revealed is his Familiar. The Lord talks with Jeremiah as a man with his fellow.

For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of the Prophet's imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and his revelations of God are subjective and given to us by glimpses in scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the adoring wonder of his prophetic peers.

Again there were the startled recoil of his nature from the terrible office of a prophet in such times, and those born gifts of questioning and searching which fitted him for his allotted duty as Tester of his people,749 but which he also turned upon the Providence and Judgments of the Lord Himself.750 His religious experience, as we have seen, was largely a struggle with [pg 353] the Divine Will, and it left him not adoring but amazed and perplexed. Such wrestling man's spirit has to encounter like Jacob of old in the dark, and if like the Patriarch it craves the Name, which is the Nature, of That with which it struggles, all the answer it may get is another question, Wherefore askest thou after My Name? Morning may break, as it broke on Jacob by Jabbok with the assurance of blessing or as on Jeremiah with a firmer impression of the Will not his own; but no strength is left to glory in the Nature behind the Will. There is a horrified breathlessness about his lines—

From his struggles he indeed issues more sure of God and finally more trustful in Him, as is testified by his fair song on the beauty and fruitfulness of faith, beginning

But even here is none of the awe and high wonder which fall upon Israel through other prophets. Lyrist as he is and subjective, Jeremiah dwells not so much upon the attributes of God on which faith rests as upon the effects of faith in man.

Again by the desperate character of the times he was starved of hope, the hope by which the [pg 354] Apostle says we are saved, which not only braces the will but clears the inner eyes of men and liberates the imagination. As the years went on he was ever more closely bound to the prediction of his people's ruin, and, when this came, to the sober counsel to accept their fate and settle down to a long exile in patience for the Lord's time of deliverance. As we have seen, his intervals of release from so grim a ministry were brief, and his Oracles of a bright future but few. Even in these he does not rise, like the Evangelist of the Exile whom he inspired, to exultation in the Almighty Power of God or to visions of vast spaces of the Divine Providence, or of Israel's service wide as the world. His happy peasant-heart is content to foresee his restored people tending their vineyards again, enjoying their village dances and festivals, and sharing with their long divided tribes the common national worship upon Ṣion.753

Like those of all the prophets Jeremiah's most immediate convictions of God are that He has done, and is always doing or about to do, things.754 From the first Yahweh of Israel had been to the faith of his people a God of Deeds. He delivered them from Egypt, led them through the desert, [pg 355] ever ready to avenge them on any who molested them, and He had brought them to a land of delight.755 By his creative and guiding Word, always clear and potential,756 He had planted them and built them up to be a nation. These were the proofs of Him—ever operative, effective and victorious both over their foes and over every natural obstacle which their life encountered. And being the Living God He still works and is ready to work, would His people only seek where!757 He is awake, watching over His Word to perform it and controlling the nations.758 It is He who has made the earth and gives it to whom He will,759 who prepares the destroyers of His people, who calls for the kingdoms of the North, even for the far Scythians beyond the edge of the world, to execute His purposes.760 He brings the King of Babylon against Jerusalem, and recalls the Chaldeans to their interrupted siege of the city, gives it into their hands and Himself banishes its people.761 He moulds the nations for his own ends, and if they fail Him, decrees their destruction.762 His Word builds and plants but also pulls up and tears down.763 He is always near to guide or to argue with nations [pg 356] and individuals, and to give directions and suggestions of practical detail to His servants for the interpretation and fulfilment of His purposes.764

It was all this activity and effectiveness, with their sure results in history, which distinguished Him from other gods, the gods of the nations, who were ineffective, or as Jeremiah puts it unprofitable—no-gods, nothings and do-nothings, the work of men's hands, lies or frauds, and mere bubbles.765 On this line Jeremiah's monotheism marks a notable advance; for alongside of faith in the Divine Unity and Sovereignty there had lingered even in Deuteronomy a belief in the existence of other gods.766 With Jeremiah every vestige of this superstition is gone, and other gods consigned to limbo once and for all.

Yet Jeremiah's monotheism, like that of all the Hebrew prophets, is even more due to convictions of the character of the God of Israel. We have seen how he dwells on the Divine Love, faithful and yearning for love in return, pleading and patient even with its delinquent sons and daughters;767 but equal to this is his emphasis on [pg 357] the righteousness of the Most High, by all His deeds working troth, justice, and judgment on the earth, which are His delight and the knowledge of which is man's only glory.768 He demands from His people not sacrifices, which He never commanded to their fathers, nor vows but a better life, justice between man and man, and care for the weak and the innocent.769 To know Him is to do justice and right.770 Because the present generation have fallen away from these, and practise and love falsehood, slander, impurity, treacherous and greedy violence, therefore God, being justice and truth, must judge and condemn them: What else can I do?771 The ethical necessity of the doom of the people is clear to the Prophet from a very early stage of his ministry,772 and throughout, though his heart struggles against it. But, if possible, even more abhorrent to God than these sins against domestic and civic piety in themselves, is the fact that they are committed in the very face of His Love and despite all its pleading. With Jeremiah as with Hosea the sin against love is the most hopeless and unpardonable, and this people have sinned it to the utmost.

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Hence most deeply springs the Wrath of the Lord, a Wrath on which Jeremiah broods and explodes more frequently and fiercely than any other prophet: I am full of the rage of the Lord; the glow of His wrath; take the cup of the wine of this fury at My hand and give all nations to whom I send thee to drink of it; the fierce anger of the Lord shall not turn until He have executed it.774 And He does execute it. God's Wrath breaks out in His spurning of His nation, in the hot names He calls it, adulteress and harlot, and in hating it.775 He will not relent nor pardon it, nor listen to prayer for it.776 He says, I must myself take vengeance upon them. I shall not spare nor pity them.777 They will reel in the day of their visitation. He will feed them with wormwood and drug them with poison; He will suddenly let fall on them anguish and terrors; He will take His fan and winnow them out in the gates of the land and as the passing chaff strew them on the wind of the desert; the garden-land withers to wilderness and its cities break down at His presence and before His fierce anger; He will [pg 359] make Jerusalem heaps and cast out the people before His face. He will give them to be tossed among the nations for a consternation, a reproach and a proverb, for a taunt and a curse, in all places whither He drives them: and will send after them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence till they be consumed.778

The modern mind deems arbitrary such immediate linking of physical and political disasters with the Wrath of God against sin. But we have to ponder the following. The Prophet was convinced of the ethical necessity of that Wrath and of its judgments on Judah—he was convinced before they came to pass and he predicted them accurately, from close observation of the political conditions of his world and the character of his people. Granted these and God's essential and operative justice, the connection was natural: What else can I do? It was clear that Judah both deserved and needed punishment and equally clear that the boiling North held the potentialities of this, which were gradually shaping and irresistibly approaching. Moreover, as Jeremiah insists, and as the history both of nations and individuals has frequently illustrated, there is a natural sequence of disaster upon wrong-doing. Be thy scourge thine own sin! Thy ways and thy deeds have done to thee [pg 360] these things. Is it Me they provoke, saith the Lord, Is it not themselves to the confusion of their faces? Wherefore have these things come upon thee?—for the mass of thy wickedness.779 As St. Paul says the wages of sin, not the judge's penalty on sin but the thing it naturally earns, is death. Now one of Jeremiah's most acute and convincing experiences as the Tester of his people,780 is his observation of how all this worked out upon his own generation. Not only were the war, the pestilence, and the captivity, which were about to fall upon Jerusalem, directly and obviously due to the perjury and stupid pride of her rulers; but, as he more subtly saw, the immorality of the whole people had been disabling them, for years before, from meeting these or any disasters except as sheer punishment without place for repentance. Their previous troubles had failed to sober or humble them or rouse them. They would not accept correction, he says of them more than once.781 To the Prophet's warnings that God will judge them, they answer carelessly or defiantly Not He! Instead of yielding to the power which lies in all adversity to cleanse the heart and brace the will they became incapable of shame, indifferent to consequences, and so past praying for.782 And in this they were fortified by [pg 361] the specious dreams and lies of their false prophets, continued to sin, and so fell to their doom, abashed at last but unassoilable.783 If at any time they were startled by disaster, this found them too enfeebled even for repentance by their habitual insincerity or self-indulgence; which made them incapable of truth even under pain, and of a real conversion to God.784 All this is discovered to us by the eyes and the mouth of Jeremiah. What in it is arbitrary? The record is awful, nothing like it in literature. Yet every step is real. We follow a master of observation.

But perhaps the chief glory of our Prophet is that while thus delivering, as no other prophet so fully or so ethically does, the just wrath of God upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people's sin costs God more pain than anger. This no doubt Jeremiah learned through his own heart. As we have seen, with his whole heart he loved the people whom he was called to test and expose, and that heart was wracked and torn by thoughts of the Doom which he had to pronounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel, was the heart of their God. In the following questions there is poignant surprise; an insulted, a wounded love beats through them.

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So, too, when the deserved doom threatens, and in hate He has cast off His heritage, His love still wonders how that can be—

All the desolation of Judah is on Him alone: no man lays it to heart, upon Me is the waste.787 And what we have seen to be the most human touch of all, the surprise of an outraged father at feeling, beneath His wrath against a prodigal son, the instincts of the ancient love which no wrath can quench,

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That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their cumulative effect.

Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of God Jeremiah speaks home to the heart of his own, and of our own and of every generation which loves lies and lets itself be lulled by them. Sin, he says, is no fiction nor a thing to be lightly taken.789 Time for repentance is short; doom comes quickly. Habits of evil are not carelessly parted with, but have their long and necessary consequences moral and physical. No wash of words nor worship nor sacrament can cleanse the heart or redeem from guilt. It is not the flagrant sinner whom he chiefly warns, but those who harden themselves softly. And—very firmly this—forgiveness is not easily granted by God nor cheaply gained by men; God has not only set our sins before His face but carries them on His heart. And therefore, in view both of the Just Wrath of the Most High and of His suffering Love, only repentance can avail, the repentance which is not the facile mood offered by many in atonement for their sins, but arduous, [pg 364] rigorous and deeply sincere in its anguish. All of which carries our prophet, six centuries before Christ came, very far into the fellowship of His sufferings.

I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah's other original contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the Providence of God, and his hope that God would be to Israel what the prophet had bravely tried to be—no transient guest but a dweller in their midst.790 The titles for God which we may assume to have first come from himself are few, perhaps only three: The Fountain of Living Waters, the Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in time of trouble, and Hasidh, or Loyal-in-Love,791 a term elsewhere applied only to men. Sometimes, but not nearly so often as the copyists of our Hebrew text have made him do, he uses the title Yahweh of Hosts, doubtless in the other prophets' sense of the forces of history and of the Universe (the original meaning having been the armies of Israel), sometimes he borrows the deuteronomic Yahweh thy God, or a similar form. But most often (as the Greek faithfully shows us) it is simply the personal name Yahweh (Jehovah) by which he addresses or describes the Deity: significant of the long struggle between them as individuals.

Passing now from the world of nations to the [pg 365] world of nature we observe how little the genuine Oracles of Jeremiah have to tell us of the Divine Power over this; yet the little is proclaimed with as firm assurance as of God's control of the history of mankind. Both worlds are His: the happenings in the one are the sacraments, the signs and seals, of His purposes and tempers towards the other: the winter blossom of the almond, of His wakefulness in a world where all seems asleep; the sun by day and the moon and stars by night, of His everlasting faithfulness to His own.792 All things in nature obey His rule though His own people do not; it is He who rules the stormy sea and can alone bring rain.

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After all neither Nature nor the courses of the Nations but the single human heart is the field which Jeremiah most originally explores for visions of the Divine Working and from which he has brought his most distinctive contributions to our knowledge of God. But that leads us up to the second part of this lecture, his teaching about man. Before beginning that, however, we must include under his teaching about God, two elements of this to which his insight into the human heart directly led him.

First this great utterance of the Divine Omnipresence:

These verses have been claimed as the earliest expression in Israel of the Divine Omnipresence.795 Amos, however, had given utterance to the same truth though on a different plane of life.796

Second, and partly in logical sequence from the preceding, but also stimulated by thoughts of the best of Judah797 banished to a long exile, [pg 367] Jeremiah was the first in Israel to assure his people that the sense of God's presence, faith in His Providence, His Grace, and Prayer to Him were now free both of Temple and Land—as possible on distant and alien soil, without Ark or Altar, as they had been with these in Jerusalem. See his Letter to the Exiles, and recall all that lay behind it in his predictions of the ruin of the Temple, and abolition of the Ark, and in his rejection of sacrifices.798 To Deuteronomy exile was the people's punishment; to Jeremiah it is a fresh opportunity of grace.

2. Man and the New Covenant.

In the earliest Oracles of Jeremiah nations are the human units in religion, Israel as a whole the object of the Divine affection and providence. To his age worship was the business of the nation: public reverence for symbols and institutions, and rites in which the individual's share was largely performed for him by official representatives. The prophets, and Jeremiah himself at first, dealt with the people as a moral unity from the earliest times to their own. The Lord had loved and sought, redeemed and tended them as a nation. As a nation they fell away from Him and now they were wholly false to Him. When Jeremiah first urges them to return, it is of a public and general [pg 368] repentance that he speaks, as Deuteronomy had done; and when his urgency fails it is their political disappearance which he pronounces for doom.

But when the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of new truths and new hopes. Among these there is none more potent than that of the immediate relation of the individual to God. Jeremiah never lost hope of the ultimate restoration of Israel. Nevertheless the individual aspects of religion increase in his prophesying, and though it is impossible to trace their growth with any accuracy because of the want of dates to many of his Oracles, we may be certain that as he watched under Josiah the failure of the national movements for reform, inspired by Deuteronomy, and under Jehoiakim and Ṣedekiah the gradual breaking up of the nation, and still more as his own personal relations with the Deity grew closer, Jeremiah thought and spoke less of the nation and more of the individual as the object of the Divine call and purposes.

One has travelled by night through a wooded country, by night and on into the dawn. How solid and indivisible the dark masses appear and [pg 369] how difficult to realise as composed of innumerable single growths, each with its own roots, each by itself soaring towards heaven. But as the dawn comes up one begins to see all this. The mass breaks; first the larger, more lonely trees stand out and soon every one of the common crowd is apparent in its separate strength and beauty.

It seems to me as I travel through the Book of Jeremiah that here also is a breaking of dawn—but they are men whom it reveals. There is a stir of this even in the earliest Oracles; for the form of address to the nation which has begun with the singular Thou changes gradually to You, and not Israel but ye men of Israel are called to turn to their God.799 As the Prophet's indictments proceed his burden ceases to be the national harlotry. He arraigns separate classes or groups,800 and then, in increasing numbers, individuals: brother deceiving brother and friend friend; adulterers each after the wife of his neighbour; the official bully Pashhur, Jehoiakim the atrocious and petty in contrast to his sire the simple and just Josiah, the helpless and ridiculous Ṣedekiah, the bustling and self-confident Hananiah801—with [pg 370] the fit word and in sharp irony Jeremiah etches them separately, in the same vividness as the typical figures of the harlot watching for her prey like the Arab robber in the desert, the fowler crouching to fling his net, the shepherds failing to keep their scattered flocks, the prophets who fling about their tongues and rede a rede of the Lord.802 Jeremiah has answered the call to him to search for the man, the men beneath the nation.803

Then there are his readings of the heart of man into which he more deeply thought than any other prophet of Israel: his revelation of the working of God in the soul of man, its Searcher, its only Guide and Strength; his stress upon individual responsibility and guilt, and on the one glory of man being his knowledge of God and the duty of every man to know God for himself and not through others; and his song of the beauty of the personal life rooted in faith, evergreen and yielding its fruit even in seasons of drought. Such passages increase in the Oracles of Jeremiah. Not ceasing to be the patriot, the civic conscience of his people, he busies himself more with the hearts, the habits, the sins and the duties towards God of its individuals. Like Christ he takes the deaf apart from the multitude and talks to him of himself.

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The individual soul rooted in faith and drawing life from the Fountain of Living Water, independent of all disaster to the nation and famine on earth—could not be more beautifully drawn.

Now all this advance by Jeremiah from the idea of the nation as the human unit in religion—Deuteronomy's ideal and at first his own—to the individual as the direct object of the Divine Grace and Discipline was promoted, we have seen, by the dire happenings of the time, the unworthy conduct of the people, their abandonment by God, the ruin of the State and of the national worship—which cut off individuals from all political and religious associations, leaving to each (in Jeremiah's repeated phrase) only his life, or [pg 373] his soul, for a prey.812 But all these could have furthered the advance but little unless Jeremiah had felt by bitter experience his own soul searched and re-searched by God—

unless through doubt and struggle he himself had won into the confidence of an immediate and intimate knowledge of God. At his call he had learned how a man could be God's before he was his mother's or his nation's—God's own and to the end answerable only to Him. He had proved his solitary conscience under persecution. He had known how personal convictions can overbear the traditions of the past and the habits of one's own generation—how God can hold a single man alone to His Will against his nation and all its powers, and vindicate him at last to their faces. In all this lay much of the vicarious service which Jeremiah achieved for his own generation; what he had won for himself was possible for each of them. And sure it is that the personal piety which henceforth flourished in Israel as it had never flourished before, weaving its delicate tendrils about the ruins of the state, the city and the altar, and (as the Psalms show) blooming behind the shelter of the Law [pg 374] like a garden of lilies within a fence of thorns, sprang from seeds in Jeremiah's heart, and was watered by his tears and the sweat of his spiritual agonies.

* * * * *

We are now come to a confluence of the streams we have been tracing—the prophecy of the New Covenant. This occupies no incongruous place, following hard as it does upon that of the eating of sour grapes—individual inspiration upon individual responsibility. But we cannot off-hand accept it as Jeremiah's own; the critical questions which have been with us from the beginning embarrass us still.

The collection of Oracles to which that of the New Covenant belongs, Chs. XXX, XXXI, was not made till long after Jeremiah's time; it includes, as we have seen, several of exilic or post-exilic origin.814 But so do other chapters of the [pg 375] Book, in which nevertheless genuine prophecies of Jeremiah are recognised by virtually all modern critics. The context therefore offers no prejudice against the authenticity of the prophecy of the New Covenant, XXXI. 31-34. But the form and the substance of this have raised doubts, so honest and reluctant as to deserve our consideration. Duhm starts his usual objection that the passage is in prose and a style characteristic of the late expanders of the Book. We may let that go, as we have done before, as by itself inconclusive;815 the prophecy may not have come directly from Jeremiah's mouth but through the memory of a reporter of the Prophet, Baruch or another. More deserving of consideration is the criticism which Duhm, with great unwillingness, makes of the terms and substance of the prophecy. He objects to the term covenant: a covenant is a legal contract and could hardly have been chosen for the frame of his ideal by so pronounced an anti-legalist as Jeremiah. The passage “promises a new Covenant—not a new Torah but only a more inward assimilation of the Torah by the people, and emphasises the good results which this will have for them but betrays no demand for a higher [pg 376] kind of religion. If one does not let himself be dazzled by the phrases new covenant and write it on the heart then the passage tells us of the relation of the individual no more than Deuteronomy has already regarded as possible, XXX. 11 ff., and desirable, VI. 6-8: namely, that every man should be at home in the Law and honestly follow it.” He continues: “it is impossible for me to hold any longer to the Jeremian origin of the passage. I find in it only the effusion of one learned in the Scriptures who regards as the highest ideal, that every one of the Jewish people should know the Law by heart.”

But in his resolve “not to let himself be dazzled” has not Duhm gone to the opposite extreme and seriously under-read the whole spirit of the passage—besides showing as usual undue apprehensiveness of the presence in the text of a legalist at work?816 The choice of the term covenant for the frame of his ideal was not unnatural to Jeremiah nor irrelevant to his experience and teaching. Formally the term may mean a legal contract; but it is open to a prophet or a poet to use any metaphor for his ideals and transform its mere letter by the spirit he puts into it; and after all covenant is only a metaphor for a relation which was beyond the compass of any figure to express. Yet it was a term classical in [pg 377] Israel and most intelligible to the generation whom Jeremiah was addressing. Its associations, especially as he had recalled them,817 had been those not of the Law but of Love. It was not a contract or bargain but an approach by God to His people, an offer of His Grace, a statement of His Will and accompanied by manifestations of His Power to redeem them. One might as well charge Jesus with legalism in adopting a term sanctioned by God Himself, and so historical, sacred and endeared to the national memory. Nor need Torah, or Law, be taken as Duhm takes it in its sense of the legal codes of Israel, but in its wider meaning of the Divine instruction or revelation. Further the epithet New applied to Covenant was most relevant to the Prophet's and his people's recent sense of the failure of the ancient covenant, as restated and enforced in Deuteronomy. In spite of the excitement caused by the discovery of the Book in which it was written, and the recital of its words throughout the land, the Old Covenant had failed to capture the heart of the people or to secure from them more than the formal and superstitious observance of the letter of its Torah. Was it not a natural antithesis to predict that His Torah would be set by God in their inward parts and written on their hearts? How else (will Duhm tell us?) than by such phrases could the Prophet [pg 378] have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law of God “by heart” (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in harmony with the rest of the Prophet's teaching. He had spoken of God's will to give His people a new heart to know Him;818 he had taught religion as the individual's direct knowledge of God;819 he had won this himself from God directly without help from his parentage, his fellow-prophets or priests or any others; he had most bitterly known also how weak the word of one man is to teach his countrymen this knowledge and that it can only come by the inward operation of God Himself upon their spirits; and he had made as clear as ever prophet did that God's pardon for sin was the first, the necessary preliminary to His other gifts. Nor is the fact that the New Covenant is to be a national one alien to his teaching: Jeremiah never lost hope of his nation's survival and restoration.

Thus the passage on the New Covenant brings together all the strands of Jeremiah's experience and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the political debris of the times, into one fair web under a pattern familiar and dear to the people. [pg 379] The weaving, it is true, is none of the deftest, but whether this is due to the aged Jeremiah's failing fingers or to the awkwardness of a disciple, the stuff and its dyes are all his own.

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This is, as has been said, a prophecy of Christianity which has hardly its equal in the Old Testament.825 It is the Covenant which Jesus Christ the Son of God accepted for Himself and all men and sealed with His own blood.

And yet not even in this prophecy of Jeremiah, in which the individual soul is made to feel that God created it not for its family nor its state nor its church but only for Himself, is there any breath of a promise for it after death. The Prophet's eyes are still sealed to that future. The soul must be content that her strength and peace and hope are with God.