Jeremiah 11:5

(Verse 5.) In order to fulfill the oath that I swore to your fathers, I will give them a land flowing with milk and honey, just as it is on this day. The fathers seem to receive, as the sons receive; and the promise to Abraham is fulfilled in his descendants. However, we must understand the land flowing with milk and honey metaphorically as representing the abundance of all things, as Virgil says in Eclogue III. Let honey flow for them, let the rough bramble bear cinnamon. And again: And everywhere he restrained the wines flowing in the rivers.

This was the reason why He sent not Jeremiah only into Egypt, but also Ezekiel into Babylon, and they did not refuse to go. For when they found their Master love the people exceedingly, they continued themselves to do so likewise. Much as if a right-minded servant were to take compassion upon an intractable son when he saw his father grieving and lamenting about him. And what was there that they did not suffer for them? They were sawn asunder, they were driven out, they were reproached, they were stoned, they underwent numberless grievances. And after all this they would run back to them.… And for the people of the Jews, Jeremiah has composed Lamentations in writing. And when the general of the Persians had given him liberty to dwell securely, and with perfect freedom, wherever he pleased, he preferred above dwelling at home the affliction of the people, and their hard durance in a strange land.

What then does God promise me? "You shall be to me a people, and I will be to you a God." He is not the God of all, but only of those to whom He grants Himself, just as He granted Himself to that patriarch to whom He said, "I am your God," and again to another, "I will be your God," and concerning others, "I will be their God." When, then, do we attain—I speak of each individual—to God being our God? But if you wish to learn whose God He is and to whom He grants the invocation of Himself, "I," He says, "am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob." And the Savior, expounding this very thing, says: "God is not the God of the dead but of the living." Who is the dead? The sinner, who does not have the One who said, "I am the Life," the one who has dead works, the one who has not yet repented from dead works, concerning which the apostle says: "Not again laying a foundation of repentance from dead works." If, then, "God is not the God of the dead but of the living," and we know who is the living one—that it is he who lives his life according to Christ and abides with Him—then, if we wish that God may be ours, let us renounce the works of deadness, that He may fulfill His promise which says: "And I will be to you a God, that I may establish my oath which I swore to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey." For observe that He says: "I will establish my oath which I swore to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey," as though He had not yet given them "the land flowing with milk and honey." For this is not the land which God promised "flowing with milk and honey," but it is that one concerning which the Savior taught, saying: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

Then to what was said beforehand by the Lord the prophet answers—to the words "Cursed is the man who will not hear the words of this covenant"—and he says: "And I answered and said, So be it, Lord." What is "So be it, Lord"? Cursed is he who will not abide in the words of this covenant.

Here the Prophet teaches us, that the Jews, though they continued to profess God's holy name, were yet wholly perfidious, and had departed altogether from the law. The import of this discourse is, that the Jews gloried in the name of God, and yet were violaters of his covenant, for they had broken their faith pledged to God, and wholly cast aside the doctrine of the law.