leep; 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.

Even the stork in the heavens
Knoweth her seasons,
And dove, swift and swallow
Keep time of their coming.
But My people--they know not
The Rule of the Lord.

I have set the sand as a bound for the sea,
An eternal decree that cannot be crossed.
Are there makers of rain 'mong the bubbles of the heathen?
Art Thou not He? ... all these Thou hast made.(793)

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:

I am a God who is near,
Not a God who is far.
Can any man hide him in secret,
And I not see him?
Do I not fill heaven and earth?--
Rede of the Lord.(794)

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 Judah(797) banished to a long exile,
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