Be God's Family
S3 E37. Jeremiah: Bringing Hard News
This is the Be Gods Light podcast with Ben Greenbaum and Mark Elsasser. Back in 2022, we spent an entire year looking at the life of Jesus from the Gospels. And then in 2023, we explored the rest of the New Testament from Acts to Revelation. And here this year in 2024, we're taking a deeper look at the Old Testament, starting at the very beginning of the year with Genesis. And now we're up to the, well, virtually the end of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And there's a prophet who speaks to them for the last 40 years. And his name is Jeremiah. And that's who we're going to take a look at today. You spent some time with Jeremiah, didn't you Ben? Like on a big old long Bible study with the people? How long was, how long did it take you to get through Jeremiah with the Bible study? Well, we're not through it yet. Yeah. Oh, you're not done? I thought you guys were about done. No, in fact, I think tomorrow we're edging into the last half of the, I think it's around 48 maybe, we're in Jeremiah right now. So yeah, we've been on Jeremiah for, and I don't know, it's been like six, seven, eight months. What's the one aha moment from Jeremiah so far that people in your Bible study have said, whoa, that's in there or that's something we should pay attention to anything jump out before we get this straight weeks? I don't know. We studied Isaiah for like a year before we hit Jeremiah. So they're sleep still. I hope not. Sorry, but no, but the, I think relative to, you know, Isaiah's word to the people, Jeremiah obviously coming in as a prophet about 100 years after Isaiah dealing more with the immediate threat of Babylon, there is that sense of like, well, I want the people listen to him. How can they not listen, listen to him? I think the other part though with Jeremiah, the book of Jeremiah is so much more personal than Isaiah. And so we hear God speaking through Isaiah to, you know, to the nations, to Judah, to Jerusalem, to the nations even surrounding them. But, and you have this one kind of really like personal moment in Isaiah six, when Isaiah is before the throne, in the throne room of God, but Jeremiah is so personal to where you experience Jeremiah's heart in the presence of ministry in real time as he's bringing God's word to the people as he's struggling and wrestling with his own concerns, with his own laments, with his own disappointments as he seeks it. That's why Jeremiah is oftentimes called, you know, the weeping prophet. And, but I think that's one of the things that has, has captivated the hearts of those as we have have studied a Jeremiah and the real threat that Jeremiah felt he was under, even as God continues to promise to preserve a Jeremiah's life, but within the context of Jeremiah, he's got, you know, prophet friends who were being killed because they dared speak God's truth to the kings, to the priests, to the people. And so, so yeah, that's one of the things that I love. I mean, Jeremiah is a pastor. Jeremiah is probably my favorite prophetic book because you see so much of Jeremiah's heart. Isaiah seems to be more a man of words and Jeremiah, a man of action. Is that because you're a man of action that you like so much? Yeah, I mean, Jeremiah, God does call him to some interesting actions throughout the, throughout his time in ministry. But again, like seeing Jeremiah, like seeing his heart for the people that he's ministering to them, because I mean, Jeremiah desperately wants them to repent, but also Jeremiah's lament in the presence of the hardship that he faces because you get to see the hardship and the struggle. You get to see Jeremiah himself persecuted within the context of the book. And so, so yeah, that interplay between living into his calling, seeking to be faithful to his calling, struggling sometimes in that calling as he brings the word to the people. But yeah, I love, I love Jeremiah. I love the interplay between Jeremiah and the people. You know, there's one spot near the end of the book of Jeremiah that I don't know if we'll get to and coming podcast or not where the Babylonians have come in. The Babylonians have exiled people. There's a group that are living in Jerusalem that God has allowed to stay in Jerusalem. And God's called them to stay in Jerusalem. And God promises like things will go well for you to stay here. And the people come to Jeremiah and they ask of Jeremiah, inquire of the Lord if we should go to Egypt or not. So they come and they actually ask Jeremiah if they should go to Egypt or not. Jeremiah inquires of the Lord. He goes back to me and says, no, God says, do not go to Egypt. - Matter settled. - Stay in Jerusalem, right? - Matter settled, it should be. And then the people are like, you're lying to us. We're going to Egypt and you're coming with us, you know? - You're looking for confirmation bias that you get it and we're out of here on your way. - So I just, I love Jeremiah because watching real active ministry play out in real time and seeing people's response to it, seeing his response in that, it's a great book to read. It's informative for me as a pastor, honestly. - Well, hopefully the next few weeks will be that powerful for all of us as we look at his life. Three weeks, we'll look at the early chapters this week, then the middle chapters the next time, and then some of the ending chapters before, of course, we cannot cover it all, but we'll hit some of the highlights maybe along the way. Jeremiah was a prophet in the southern kingdom of Judah in those last 40 years before the exile to Babylon, and he was a contemporary of the prophet Zephaniah, which we talked about last week, and also Habakkuk, who was asking the question, why is there wickedness and why do those wicked people go unpunished? So there's a lot happening in the prophetic world at the same time that Zephaniah is speaking. So let's take a look now, also, like think about the kings, he starts then with good king Josiah and ends with horrible kings Zetakiah and a bunch of bad kings in between. This is just a snippet about his interaction, Jeremiah's interaction with the kings. It says in 2nd Chronicles 35 verse 35, when King Josiah died, it says Jeremiah composed laments for King Josiah, and to this day, they have the writing of it, all the male and female singers commemorate Josiah in the laments. Of course, Jeremiah wrote lamentations, so he was good at writing these things, they're going to capture the feeling of people who were in grief. And then if King Zetakiah, the last king before the conquest, it says in 2nd Chronicles 36, 12, Zetakiah did evil in the eyes of the Lord his God, and did not humble himself before Jeremiah, the prophet, who spoke the word of the Lord. So we can see that Jeremiah is interacting with these kings on a very vivid basis, and in one of them, he's writing a lament for his death. He was the good king, the last good king, and then the last king, period, who was a rotten guy, it says he could have listened. He could have humbled himself before Jeremiah and listened to the word of the Lord, but he didn't, and therefore the nation was conquered. So Jeremiah was in the midst of it. He was in the mix. I mean, he wasn't just some guy off to the side saying, "I'm not going to get involved in politics because I'm a preacher." He was in the throne room. It sounds like a few times. So it's maybe something that we can learn from along the way. Okay, let's take a look at a few of the things. I don't know which ones. I'm going to say feel free to jump to anything that you want as well, because there's just simply too much to cover in Jeremiah in these three weeks. But let's take a look at his call, first of all, for reforming the ways. What were the ways, well, we learned this last week, they had been involved in some nasty forms of pagan and idolatrous worship. And so in Jeremiah 7, let's start with Jeremiah 7, it says this is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Stand to the gate of the Lord's house and their proclaimed this message. Hear the word of the Lord. All you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says. And here it is. Reform your ways and your actions. And I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. It's almost like Ben there saying, because we are members of a church, because we have the temple in Jerusalem, nobody can touch us. We have God's temple. We can do whatever we want, but nobody can touch us. Verse 5 of Jeremiah 7, if you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place. In the land I gave your ancestors forever and ever. In my former life, previous years, I studied computer science when I was at Purdue, and even worked as a computer programmer for a hot second, for six months before I went to seminary. And one of the things I remember the most, not a lot, it's been so many years ago, but remember the most about writing code is the if then statement. If tada dot, then dada dot, and if you meet the criteria of the if, then do what the program says. And if there was a single thing missing on the if side, the then wouldn't happen. It could be like a letter that's wrong, a comma that's wrong, anything that could have been, this is way back in the day when it was punch cards, brother. That's that's how we used. Have you heard of those punch cards? That was when computer programming was was for the the brave. Yeah, I have no clue what you're talking to about or referring to I did have a punch card when I used set the clock in at my first job. But yeah, nobody was gonna let me code anything. And yeah, I can't even yeah, I can't even wrap my head around what it looked like for you as a computer programmer in the early 80s, like what that meant. Yeah, it was it was a different thing. I never actually saw what you would consider a computer until my senior year. So it was a desktop computers first time I'd ever seen one. Were you like using an abacus before that or kind of yeah, the computer was just off in some other room. It was it was a big old machine off in some room that I don't know, I think Oz was in there. So he was I don't know what was happening in there, but we you feed these punch cards through a machine. Nonetheless, there was this if then. So the statement in verse five, if you really change your ways for six, if you do not oppress the four foreigner or the fatherless or the widows. And then later, if you do not follow other gods, verse seven, then I'll let you live in this place. And so I look at that like God is is saying, not of this program, but God is saying, here it is. These are requirements. You got to meet these conditions. And if not, then you don't get to live in this place. And indeed, they didn't. Many of them were deported to go live in exile. Yeah, here's my question. I mean, my pond rings about this. So often the if side is laid out right before us. We just know, and it might not be even from God. Like if you treat your spouse with respect, then, you know, if whatever the thing would be. We know an advance that it's not going to go well for us when we don't do the if side, the then side won't work out the proper way. When we look at the God's covenant, a language in the Old Testament, one of the things we have to look at is it an unconditional covenant promise that God has offered. Like the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional. This is what God's going to do. The Mosaic covenant is conditional. God said, obey the law, then you'll get to live in the land, glorify me, you will live in the land. And God presents them the law, that which is good, right, and holy, and they were supposed to live under the constraints of the law. And even within that context, God recognizes that they're not going to live it out perfectly. So he provides the atoning sacrifices. He provides a means of mercy and grace to offer forgiveness. I mean, he's offered them really his unconditional forgiveness by providing these atoning sacrifices to the people, which obviously image what Christ is going to once and for all do in the future. But God has made it clear to them. And that's one of the crazy parts, you know, reflecting back on Deuteronomy, which we studied earlier in the years, God's, is Moses bringing the laws, God's bringing the law to the people through Moses. In the midst of bringing the law, God just basically says, I know that when you get into the land flowing with milk and honey, you'll forget about me. And that's what the people have done. They still in some ways verbally attest to this relationship with God, in some ways image it because they go to temple on Saturday, and yet their life is far from him to where the nation itself is just this mass of dysfunction, to where the people in power are abusing their power, they are pressing people, to where those living in the land on the whole, are living outside of God's covenantal law and living for themselves, offering sacrifices to Baal, to Mullah, whomever. And so we see the dysfunction that it has reaped and what it's caused within the context of the nation. So you have a people that are no longer seeking after God at all. And not even, it's this, they're not just not seeking after him. There's like no element of thankfulness or recognition of what God has done on their behalf. False sense of security. Yeah. And I think that's why even coming out, one of the commands to the Israelites outside of this idea about meditating on the law day and night, to keep it before you, to keep the commands of God before you, to teach that to your children. It was also to reflect upon God's redemptive work in the past. And so one of the commands, the constant commands that has been given to the people of Israel was to, you know, meditate on the law and don't forget what God has done for you. And so living from a posture of humility, as we talked about last week, but also this posture of Thanksgiving, recognizing that we are not in the land absent God. And so God has redeemed us. He has loved us, let us then go and live for him. And so the lack of Thanksgiving, the lack of understanding of where their life and blessing has flowed from, they've taken God for granted. They've kind of removed him from the equation now believing and living as if again, he lives for their good pleasure rather than they for his and the relationship they have completely and utterly distorted. And even in their distortion, God continues to pursue them. You know, he continues to call the prophets to come and preach this message of repentance to which, to which they respond honestly by increasingly hardening their hearts. You know, that's what they call the judicial hardening. It's like a people whose hearts are already hardened to the truth when presented with the truth. They just harden their hearts even more live in even greater active rebellion. And that's what they're, that's what the people have done here. They seem like they're doing exactly that in their crowd. We've got the temple, the temple of the Lord temple of the Lord down in verse 10. They say we're safe that there's false sense of security, which says we're safe. It goes on to saying verse 10, safe to do all these detestable things. And down in verse 15, the Lord says, I will thrust you from my presence. He's continually trying to draw them back and draw them back and draw them back. And they don't want to listen. So there's going to be a price to be paid. Now, you think maybe they're going to listen. Maybe this will be the one that gets through. But instead, they shoot the messenger. They, they turn on Jeremiah and we're skipping all the way to chapter 11. There's a lot in Jeremiah for the reader listener to read, I should say down in Jeremiah chapter 11, verse nine, then the Lord said to me, Jeremiah speaking, the Lord said to me, there is a conspiracy among the people of Judah and those who live in Jerusalem. So he knows that they're going to turn on him is a plot against him. He even says it down in verse 18, the Lord revealed their plot to me. So there's a lot, a lot in there because he, he'd spoken these things and said, you can't have your false gods, your bales, you can't do this. And rather than listening to the message, they, they take the prophet, the messenger, and they say, we're going to plot against you. And it's just the beginning. I mean, Jeremiah goes through a bunch in his life. We don't like to hear hard news, do we? We, when we hear hard news or convicting news, or someone that steps into our lives and speaks a hard truth to us, it's, it's maybe a human tendency rather than just owning up to it to say, well, you must be flawed as the bringer of the message. And I'm not going to listen. I will put the blame on you. So they, these guys plot against Jeremiah, but it's kind of a normal behavior for humans to not listen. Yeah. I mean, there are immediate posture when we're kind of called on the carpet is defensiveness. We see this immediately in the garden after Adam and Eve are caught in their sin, you know, and God questions them and Adam blames God because God's the one that put that woman in the garden with him. He blames Eve, he blames the serpent. It's this immediate posture of defensiveness. Again, rather than humility, rather than really truly seeking, what is the, what does God want of me? And seeking, I think that's where again, for the, for the follower of Christ, our, the, again, the disposition of our heart being one of humility, one of thankfulness, but also being one that is, is seeking to grow in the likeness of Jesus Christ. And so those words that we get, sometimes those words of rebuke can be the sweetest words that anybody will ever speak to us, those words of correction, because they offer an opportunity for the spirit to sanctify us. And so that's where we need to allow a, we need to allow for those words to enter in, just to, to contemplate them, to think upon them and turn away from that defensive posture, which again, as you said, you know, is just kind of the disposition of humanity because we, it's a way of protecting and guarding our heart. I can't be the one who's wrong. And so, you know, we saw it in the garden, we see it here in Jeremiah's, Jeremiah's delivering the truth, the people have turned on them. We see it in the New Testament, obviously with Jesus, Jesus is bringing truth that gets him nailed to across. We see it with the Apostle Paul, Paul in Galatians, as he's speaking to the people, as he's offering this word of correction, because they have absolutely compromised the gospel message. And Paul is speaking this word of correction to the church in Galatia. And he starts to talk about their affection for him. And then, I think it's in chapter, yeah, it's in chapter four, he starts to talk about their affection that they once had for him, you know, and just the depth of their love for him. And then he says, have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? And that's, that's the, you know, oftentimes we, we just want to rationalize our way around that which God has presented to us. And, and that's, that's the thing. Like when we come to the word of God, and sometimes people will try to, again, rationalizing away with the word says, it's almost like some folks, even, you know, self-proclaimed Christians will come to the word with this sense of skepticism. And look, we need to read the word within its context, its historical context. We need to read the word within the scope of the genre that it's being presented in. Is this a proverb? Is this a, this is a historical narrative? Is this a, you know, we need to be able to, is this apocalyptic literature? We need to be able to, to read the word through the lens, but not come to it from a position of skepticism. But again, that position of humility seeking to live under its authority. And it's mind-boggling to me how self-proclaimed Christians who say the desire of my heart is for Jesus Christ can come to the word. And when God has presented something plain and clear, especially related to his holy ethic, his kingdom ethic, that we would kind of thumb our noses up at it, just his mind-boggling to me. But that's where we get ourselves in trouble. That's where the people of Judah have gotten themselves in trouble. Because rather than looking at God's commands, they have violated them all from one to ten. They have violated all of them. Here's the thought experiment. What if the, we woke up in the morning and our first prayer was, God today, bring me someone who will speak truth into my life. Show me scripture that will speak truth into my life. Reveal to me any ways that are dark or hidden from you or whatever. That's not how we typically pray. We typically say, bring me somebody who will make my life better or show me scriptures that will lift me up or make me be encouraged. We post things and look for how many likes we get and how many people that will agree with us. I mean, that's our natural bent. And it'd be a really interesting thought experiment, more than that, maybe to practice, to say, "Lord, would you bring me somebody who loves me enough to speak the hard truth into my life and make me humble enough to listen?" It's a hard thing to do, harden Jeremiah's day, hard enough that they made a plot against him, a conspiracy. And his life was going to, I mean, from a physical point of view, get worse and worse and worse, yet he remains faithful to God. Let's just go to Jeremiah 13, and we're kind of skipping through Jeremiah, and we'll close off with this little, one of his actions that he takes. Jeremiah 13, verse 1, "This is what the Lord said to me, "Go and buy a linen belt and put it around your waist." Take it as a brand new linen belt, but do not let it touch water. So I bought a belt as the Lord directed and put it around my waist. Then the word of the Lord came to me a second time, "Take the belt you bought and are wearing around your waist, and go now to Paroth and hide it there in a crevice in the rocks." So I went and hit it at Paroth as the Lord told me. So then he's got this belt, he took it off, it's linen, and he puts it down inside the rocks. Verse 6, "Many days later the Lord said to me, 'Go now to Paroth and get the belt I told you to hide there.' So I went to Paroth and dug up the belt and took it from the place where I had hidden it, but now it was ruined and completely useless." Verse 8, "Then the word of the Lord came to me. This is what the Lord says. In the same way I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem, its capital city. These wicked people who refuse to listen to my words, who follow the stubbornness of their hearts, and go after other gods to serve and worship them, will be like this belt, completely useless. For as the belt is bound around the waist, so I bound all the people of Israel and all the people of Judah to me." Declares the Lord, "To be my people for my renown and praise and honor, but they have not listened." This has been one of many times when Jeremiah does an action to accompany his words. I mean, God told him to go do this activity. So people are watching him, 'I got a new belt and he's whatever he puts it on.' Whoa, cool belt. I don't know. They must have noticed it, and then he takes it and sticks it in the ground and it comes back. I mean, it's all moldy and yucky and it's this image of how God feels about his people. He's bound to himself to his people and his people have just chucked it, chucked the relationship and said, "I'll hide you, God, in the crevice that I have to you." And God said, "It's not going to work in my relationship with you." What do you see in this picture story of Jeremiah's action that helps us understand people better and helps understand God a little bit better along the way? And maybe what also do you see like for us an action that we might take in our lives? Any of those ideas, you pick one or two or three of them and say, "This is what this kind of conveys that I see in my life." Yeah, I think honestly the closing verse there where the Lord declares that He has declared to the people that they're going to be my people for my renown and praise and honor. God has set the nation apart to that end, to be my people for my renown and praise and honor, but they have not listened. And I think how does that apply to our lives in the 21st century is the body of Christ, because God has set us apart through the work of Christ to be His people for His renown and His praise and His honor. The question is, are we listening? Or are we so sometimes hard-hearted to the Word of God? Or we've hardened ourselves in certain positions or certain beliefs that we're unwilling to listen to God's Word? And that's where again the church itself exists as a sanctifying community. The nation of Israel was supposed to be a sanctifying community. They were supposed to be a light to the other nations around them, imaging the kingdom of God, God's eternal kingdom. It's the same thing for us. And so with that, again, coming into life together with the posture of I want to grow in relationship with God, I want to be renewed into the image of Christ. And what does that mean? That means, again, humility. That means thanksgiving. That means a willingness to listen to a brother in Christ or sister in Christ, if they bring a word of correction to me, of somebody who would come to me and open the Word to me and say, hey, there's an area of your life that I do not see that is aligned with the Word. Do you see that? But that willingness, again, to go all in, not to be cliche about it, but to go all in for Jesus Christ, which means that the prayer of my life is going to be Lord through the power of the Spirit, create within me a heart that loves what you love and despises what you despise. And it's really, I mean, I don't want to say it's simple, but the disposition itself is simple. It's straightforward nonetheless. Right. God says, here I am. And here's what my best for you. Do you want to live under my best or what you deem to be your best? And it's, it's pretty straightforward in our lives. I think that's, that's what I'm hearing you say. I would agree with that. Well, there's a lot more in Jeremiah. Next time we will kind of get some of the middle chapters and see what Jeremiah has to say to us in those. And as we, as we are progressing through his life, remember, like the nation of Judah is coming to an end. So pressures are mounting and they're, they're building up and imagine, like, sometimes we hear in our own lives and our own communities, own families, our own nation, when we think, oh, things are just related to boiling point, but God never, ever, ever gives up. So we'll pick up on Jeremiah, some of the middle chapters next time. Folks, if you want to jump in deeper, go to our church's website, fishersumc.org, or find the app and click on the BeGod's light link that will take you to more elements in this year-long study of the Old Testament. And if you want to stay up to date with our podcasts, we encourage you to follow and rate wherever you get them. Until next time, thanks for listening, and God bless.
Mark Ellcessor and Ben Greenbaum begin a three-week exploration of the book of Jeremiah, prophet to Judah as they were threatened then conquered by Babylon.