The Pulpit Commentary on Jeremiah 48:11

The Pulpit Commentary · Joseph S. Exell and contributors · Public domain

Wine on the lees.

This is a figure of a people left for ages in a condition of ease. They are like wine settled on its lees, unchanged and unpurified.

I. IT IS BAD FOE A PEOPLE TO REMAIN LONG IN A CONDITION OF EASE.

1. Evil is not purged out. The wine is still on its lees. In times of quiet we settle down contented with ourselves as well as with our surrounding. We say—Why disturb the air with cries for change while all is still and calm and dreamy as a summer noon? The old ruin stands unshaken in the fair weather. But presently the tempest rises, the wind howls, and the broken walls tremble to their foundations. Then we see that repairs must be executed or a new building erected.

2. Progress in good is stayed. Wine should improve with keeping. But of this wine it is said, "His taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed." Progress needs the stimulus of conflict. Trouble promotes reflection and urges to improved action in the future. "Woe unto you when all men shall speak welt of you!" (Luke 6:26).

3. Corruption and decay are induced. Ease means stagnation, and stagnation decomposition. If the vital functions are arrested, the body will not remain like a marble statue. Very soon other actions are set up, and the quiet of death gives place to a horrible scene of rapid corruption. The stagnant soul becomes the dead soul, and this a mass of moral rottenness.

II. THE EVILS OF A CONDITION OF EASE BELONG TO ALL CLASSES OF LIFE.

1. The nation. Moab had lived for ages amongst her hills and fertile fields beyond the surging tide of the world's restless changes which swept along the western side of the Jordan between Egypt and the northern nations. She was not the better for this isolation. Wars, invasions, revolutions, turn out to be ultimately serviceable to the cause of human progress.

2. The Church. The Middle Ages, when the Church was all-powerful and at ease, were the dark ages of Christendom. The disturbance of the Reformation was a new birth to the Church, in the good of which even the Roman Catholics shared by the stimulus it brought to zeal and the check it put on the paganizing spirit prevalent in Italy in the fifteenth century.

3. The individual Christian. In times of ease we tend to become worldly, and our devotion cools. Trouble drives us to prayer and wakens the deeper instincts of the soul (Hebrews 12:11).

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