Warning to an Apostate Nation
Jeremiah
Let's have a word of prayers as we begin our study tonight. Thank you Father for the privilege of praise just singing through that song simply and wonderfully stating that we adore You and we adore the Son and the Spirit. To have the great privilege of offering your praise and knowing that it's accepted because we have accepted Jesus Christ, is indeed a cause for joy. As we come to the word now Lord, we pray too that we would receive your word as well as You have received us. That we sinners who have been received by You a Holy God would be willing to receive Your holy word to us. Open our hearts and our minds to understand and our wills to respond. In Christ's name. Amen
We're looking tonight at the book of Jeremiah. At this point, you can open your Bible to Jeremiah the 1st Chapter and just settle for a minute and we'll be examining various portions of scripture in a few seconds. We live in a day when God is completely ignored. Men plunge head-long into vice, busy giving full expression to their reprobate minds. In our own country justice is breaking down. Standards are being perverted. God has been replaced by money, sex, and human ego. It seems to me that man has gone beyond the bounds that God set and stands on the edge of an eternal night. Our nation as, for the most part, forgotten God. I would have to say that worse than that, they pretty much mock God.
As the scripture says, we could say of us there is no fear of God in them. Evil abounds in our society and sadly has even filtered its way into the church. I really believe as I shared with you in our last study together that we've gone too far. Too far in the church and too far in our nation, and I think we face a divine judgment in these days. The prophet Jeremiah faced the very same kind of time. He faced the nation on the brink of a disaster. And this was not just any nation, but the nation of Israel specially loved, specially chosen, specially made the objective of God's plans and purposes in reaching the world, and yet this nation had rejected God. And because they had rejected God, God was going to come against them in a very severe judgment. And Jeremiah was the prophet of doom.
Jeremiah is the one who brings to them the word of God just before the judgment comes to pass. It could be summed up perhaps in Jeremiah Chapter 5, verses 22-23. This is what it says. "Fear ye not me saith the Lord. Will ye not tremble at my presence who have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree that it cannot pass it and though its waves toss themselves yet can they not prevail. Though they roar, yet can they not pass over it. But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart. They are revolted and gone."
Now that it is very graphic language. It is true of Judah and I offer you the thought that it is also true of America. What is Jeremiah really saying? Well, the first thing that comes to mind as you look at the verse is this, he is saying does not my majesty cause you to fear me. The first statement of verse 22? Are you not in awe of a God who can bound the sea with a strip of sand? And no matter how fierce the sea becomes and no matter how pounds and beats upon the shore, it knows its limits and it is restrained.
The almighty power of Jehovah God is so clearly manifest in the works of His creation, Paul said, that man is without excuse if he doesn't see God in creation. Now that is essentially what Jeremiah is saying. Your mind shall be stirred to realize the creative power, the providential majesty of God and should melt your will into worship and obedience when you know that God controls the elements. The pride of the waves is stayed by the hand of God.
Spurgen said, "I can scarcely conceive a heart so callous that it feels no awe or a human mind so dull and destitute of understanding as fairly to view the tokens of God's omnipotent power and then turn aside without some sense of the fitness of obedience." Spurgen is saying I can't conceive of someone who can see God's power in the world and then turn his back on that God. You must be in awe of a God who controls the sea. Is all this no lesson for men? How can we sin against the greatness of such a God and yet Jeremiah says "still my people are a revolting and a rebellious people." Have they forgotten that the same God that stops the roaring of the sea and confines it to its limits is the same God who have stopped the roaring of a sinful man and confined that man within a certain tolerance.
The sea knows its bounds. It's one up on man. This is the great lesson. Man shakes his puny fist in the face of Almighty God and forgets that it is God who controls everything. Poor, puny man, the little creature I could crush like a moth, says God, will not be obedient to me. My people are a revolting and a rebellious people. The go astray. And I think there's a most insightful thought here. He says that "I have placed the sand for the bound of the sea." How amazing it is sand is anything but formidable. Sand can be picked up and it drips through your fingers.
You can pick up a handful of it and throw it at somebody and its harmless. Sand can be moved around. Sand is not particularly strong, and yet with one simple little band of sand God controls the raging, roaring of the mighty oceans of the earth. God in affect is saying this, something stronger than sand I have given my people. I have given my people Israel my promises, my word, my covenant, my love, my forgiveness, but all of the strength of all of my love and all of my covenants and all of my promises have not been able to restrain their roaring and they are rebellious and have overstepped their bounds.
Man, you see, is not like the sea. The sea knows its limits, man doesn't. And man oversteps the bounds. Man breaks beyond the categories that God has given. Even Adam man innocent, man without sin overstepped his bounds. How far worse is sinful man? And so this is the thrust of what Jeremiah is saying throughout his great prophecy. My people are a revolting and a rebellious people and they have not considered mighty God. They have gone too far.
Now Jeremiah's time was the time of the holocaust. Jeremiah was 80 to 100 years later than Isaiah. Everything that Isaiah said was going to happen did happen at the end of Jeremiah's time. Isaiah, you remember, had said that judgment was coming and Jeremiah says it's here. Jeremiah says the Babylonians are going to arrive and the Babylonians are going to slaughter you. And the Babylonians are going to take you into captivity and that is exactly what happened. Jeremiah stood on the edge of the holocaust. Jeremiah was the prophet of the end of the glory days of Israel.
The late Dr. Morehead said it was Jeremiah lot to prophecy at time when all things in Judah were rushing down to the final and mournful catastrophe. When political confusion was at its height, when the worst passions swayed the people's hearts and the most fatal counsels prevailed to see his own people whom he loved with the tenderness of a woman plunge over the presuppose into the wide weltering ruin, that was Jeremiah's lot.
Jeremiah was the prophet of Judah's midnight hour. Isaiah prophesied at 11 o'clock and Jeremiah prophesied at midnight. Jeremiah preached for 42 years, 42 years. During the reign of five kings Jeremiah preached. The first of those kings was a man named Josiah. And if you've read the Old Testament you know that Josiah was a good king. And near the end of the reign of Josiah there was a period of reformation in Judah. A period of great revival, if you will. And Josiah, you know, went to the high places where all the idols had been erected, to the groves where the people had worshipped the false gods of the pagans around them. And Josiah led a great reformation and he tore down the high places and he demolished the idols and he removed idolatry from the land of Judah. He was a great reformer.
But before all of this happened, the prophet Huldah said this, "Josiah, you will lead a reformation with no permanent results. All of your efforts will not last beyond your lifetime. And the reason is this, the people will follow you because they are attached to you as a person, not because they are truly attached to God. And so the revival in Judah was a revival based upon Josiah, not on God. Josiah was a charismatic celebrity. He was an attractive human being and the people followed Josiah through a reform and the moment Josiah died the reform ended.
Oh how that speaks to our time. I'm afraid that what looks like a revival and a reformation in our country is nothing but a preoccupation with certain celebrities. I wonder to myself whether all that's being said in the name of Christianity isn't an attachment to certain personalities. Marty Brewer gave me a tape this last week from Gordon McDonald who pastors a Grace Fellowship back in Massachusetts. And he was saying this similar thing. He was saying if you don't think this is so, mark down who speaks at the great conferences and conventions in America when Christians gather together, beauty queens, famous athletes, rich people, presidents of big businesses, movie stars, famous musicians.
We are celebrity conscious. Much of our evangelism is based upon some celebrity getting in front of a group and saying this is what happened to me. Wouldn't you like it to happen to you? Or some speaker who has charisma about him who can move people to follow himself. And I fear that what we're seeing today intending to call revival is nothing more than a preoccupation with certain famous people. I questioned whether it has any lasting value at all.
Josiah was followed by a man Jehoahaz. Jehoahaz was only on the throne for three months and he was bad. He was followed by Jehoiakim. And Jehoiakim, you'll be sad to know, put back all the idolatry that Josiah tore down. Put it all back. He was an appalling man. He was an evil man. And he brought the people back to every form of corruption and idolatry that Josiah had eliminated just three months before.
Jehoiakim was followed by Jehoiakin who also only ruled for three months and he was bad and then the fifth of the kings in Jeremiah's life was a man named Zedekiah. He was a vacillating, cowardly weakling who saw the nation swiftly sliding down the slide of depravity into ruin and extinction and couldn't do anything about it because of the evil of his own life. Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiakin, and Zedekiah, five kings. A phony revival and four bad kings and then came the holocaust.
And Israel was slaughtered and led into the Babylonian captivity where the Bible says they hung their harps on the willows because they had no more song to sing. The glory days were gone. Their land was decimated. For 42 years Jeremiah preached. Listen to this, for 42 years it got worse. Jeremiah preached during the time of Josiah because Jeremiah knew what Huldah knew. That it wasn't real revival. That it wasn't a real reformation. It was fassad. And he knew what was coming. He knew the inevitability of the judgment.
And he wasn't fooled by what appeared on the surface to be a revival. As I look at our own country today, I have to feel a little bit like a Jeremiah. I see a lot of activity around the concept of Christianity, but I question its validity. I'm not sure its really centered on God. I'm afraid its centered more on personalities. I believe we stand near a holocaust in our own country, and I believe this quasi reformation will have little lasting results.
We'll look at the church. If this were a true revival, there would be such a running abounding over-running attitude of righteousness that we would all be caught up in it, because true revival always results in righteous living, always. I don't necessarily see that as I look at the church. I look at the church, I see divorce, I see the break up of homes. I see no commitment to care for the children. I see an encroaching materialism. I see gluttony. I see the desire for fame. I see a success madness. All of these factors I see in the church belie the fact that there's a genuineness to the revival.
I feel we're a doomed society hell bound, godless, on the edge of night. Now you say well, I'm a Christian, John, and so are you. Where do we fit in? Are we to take part in this world? Are we to buy the world's fair, laugh at the world's jokes? Sit, smile at its entertainment? That's what we've been doing in the church. What did Jeremiah do? How did he get along in a dying nation? How did he confront an apostate people? Well, let's find out.
And I want to talk to you tonight out of Jeremiah on the responsibility of the godly in an ungodly day. The responsibility of the godly in an ungodly day. How to live on the edge of the holocaust. How to live in a doomed society. Three things to recognize, all right? Number one, a divine mandate, a divine mandate. What is to be our position in this society, a godless, humanistic, atheistic, materialistic, indulgent society. What is it to be in a society where there is religious tokenism and even a bone now and then thrown at Jesus Christ? How are we to live in that society? Are we to get engulfed in it? Are we to buy what its selling? If not, how are we to view ourselves.
Number one, we are to know we have a divine mandate. And this is the first reality facing Jeremiah in his dying nation. Chapter 1, Jeremiah Chapter 1. Jeremiah had to face this fact people, and I want you to get this that he was called out of that society. That he had a divine mandate that lifted him out of that society. He was to preach judgment. That was his calling. I think we've been way, way too soft on this. We want to receive everybody. We want to water down our evangelism so people can get in who don't even believe the right thing. We want to accept anybody who lets out the word Jesus from between their lips.
We don't want to condemn anybody. We want to make sure we soft soap and cajole and pamper everybody so nobody gets offended because in the name of love we might lose them. Now nobody loves more than God and nobody loves more than Jesus and nobody in the Old Testament that I can find loved more Jeremiah. At least nobody cried more, but nobody preached a stronger message of judgment either.
You see, he had to realize that he had to preach to the issue of the day. That he couldn't bypass it. In the name of love or anything else. He had to confront that evil society where it needed confrontation. People often say to me, you know, I have this so and so person and I know they're doing this, but I just feel that I better not say anything because they might get offended. Whoever sold us that hunk of bologna? Where did we ever get that?
Not from Jeremiah. Three features can be seen in Chapter 1, verses 4-10 that lead us to comprehend his divine mandate. Three features to tell us he was set apart for God's service. First, he was prepared by God, verse 4. "Then the word of the Lord came unto me saying, before I form thee in the womb, I knew thee. And before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." Now stop there.
Now that's a pretty hefty bit of information for Jeremiah to handle. Before you were born I knew you. Before you were born I sanctified you. Before you born I ordained you a prophet of the nations. Jeremiah, your life has one intention. You are to be set apart from these people to speak to these people. And by the way Jeremiah gives messages not only to Judah, but to all of the nations surrounding as well.
He as a prophet to the nations prepared by God before he was ever born. First of all, before I formed thee means before he was conceived God knew him. That's predestination. That's for ordination. God knew him, set His love on him, called him, before he was conceived. Before he ever came out of the womb, he was ordained as a prophet.
Now listen, an artist who wants to make a beautiful piece of sculpture finds a suitable piece of marble to shape. God doesn't do it that way. God creates the marble to start with. God doesn't pick up the pieces of what you are and make you into what He wants you to be. He starts from before you were ever born, to set in order what He has for your life.
God gives the biography of Jeremiah in eleven short Hebrew words when he says "before you were conceived I knew you. Before you came out, were born, I sanctified you and ordained you a prophet to the nations." There is a life history that begins in the timelessness of eternity past as God begins to set things in motion for the creation of this prophet. And it ultimately ends when this age is over and Bibles are no more and the prophet is silenced.
What a man, a man for a crisis. When we face a crisis, we think of a program when God faces a crisis, He immediately thinks of a baby. Because God uses people, people ordained by His own sovereign decree. Now Jeremiah had to know at the very beginning that he was especially appointed by God to be separated from the system to be a voice for God. And I want to tell you why this is important. Dean Millman said this, "Whoever does not have a sense of being predestined by God to service will never work nor ever has worked any revolution for God." I agree with that.
"Further," he says, "he who is destined for such a great work, must have a full conviction that God is acting directly, immediately, consciously, and therefore with irresistible power upon him and through him. He who is not predestined, who does not declare, who does not believe himself predestined as the author of a great movement for God, he in whom God has not manifestly sensibly avowedly working out his pre-established designs will never be saint or reformer."