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This is the voice of Wilbraham. The Eastern Christadelphian Bible School presents one of a series of Bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 convocation at Wilbraham. Brother Edgar Willey of Kenwick Staffordshire, England has chosen as his theme, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Us. Here is Brother Willey as he begins the first address entitled, It is nothing to you, all ye that pass by, collapse of an age. Well, brethren and sisters, I'm sure your minds are either absolutely stupefied with all the material that you've been thinking about so that you will have a little nap while I talk, or else the mental activity that you've been having so far has so invigorated you that you're all set for another dose. Whichever way it is, I hope we're going to have a good time together studying Jeremiah, Jesus, and Us. And you'll notice that I've given this a title, not just the book of Jeremiah, because I'm not interested in books. Books are only a means to an end. Even the Bible is a means to an end and not an end in itself. We're interested in people. We're interested in being what the Lord Jesus wants us to be. And the whole purpose of the Bible is to lead us to Him. Jesus said to the Pharisees, Ye search the Scriptures for in them ye think ye have eternal life, but ye will not come to me of whom they speak. So the object of the whole of the Bible, Old and New Testament alike, is to bring us to Him. And to bring us to Him. You know, putting all the emphasis in the different places that you can put it. So that's why if we're going to study a book of the Old Testament, a book which superficially considered could almost be rather tedious to read because of its frequent denunciations of sin, the object is that we may be the more prepared in our minds to receive Jesus, and that we might in our lives reflect Him. Jeremiah is a means therefore for us to lay hold of Jesus, is a means for Jesus to lay hold of us. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is able to make us wise under salvation, said Paul to Timothy. But he didn't stop there. The Scripture he was speaking of was the Old Testament. He said the Old Testament is able to make you wise under salvation, but he didn't stop there. He added those seven words of which I spoke last year, through faith which is in Christ Jesus. The Old Testament prepares you for Jesus. The Old Testament leads you to salvation if you see it all in the light of Jesus. I used to read the Old Testament as the Old Testament. I used to read it on its own without sufficient regard to Jesus. Oh, I'd look around for some types and that kind of thing now and again. But essentially now I read the Old Testament that I might, A, know my need of Jesus more, and B, so that I might see the qualities which Jesus brings out perfectly. You can't read the Old Testament without being continually conscious of Jesus. And the Bible is not just a solid block of final statements, propositions that have dropped down out of heaven. It's all divinely inspired, but not every sentence you read in the Bible is equally authoritative. Now what do I mean by that? That could be misunderstood, couldn't it? Well, when Job justifies himself, I've just been speaking about him with the younger teenagers, when Job justified himself by God, those words are in the Bible, aren't they? But we know that what he said wasn't right and he had to learn better. What the three friends said was equally wrong and they had to be humbled. And so it is with Jeremiah. Remember, we haven't just a solid block of prophecies, a solid block of statements, all of which are equally true, but we have a living man, struggling, seeking to find the light, seeking to do the right thing, encountering God. And it is the record of his encounter that we are to look at this week. And God's encounter with men is in two particular phases. One, his encounter with men is in Israel. And the human side of the encounter, when men say wrong things, is all part of the means whereby we are instructed. And the second great means and focal point of the encounter is in Christ, to which the first encounter with Israel was leading. And in order to get the benefit from these inspired scriptures, we've got to try and get into the skins of these men. This is something that I think we're learning as a community, not to treat the Bible as a mass of verses, handy for playing what I've called before here, spiritual ping pong. The verses in the Bible are to be seen against the total context of each particular subject, each particular biography, each particular poetry book, proverb book, whatever it might be, it's all to be seen against the total background. And so when we're reading the lives of men like Jeremiah, we're to get into their skins, we're to share their progress, we're to share their struggles. I know just what Jeremiah meant, we say to ourselves, I know just how he feels. And we share his doubts, we share his hopes, we share his fears, we share his muddles, because he does get into some muddles sometimes, we share his wrong attitudes, because although overall he was a right man, sometimes his attitudes weren't right, like when he said, Lord, take my enemies and kill them off. That contrasts with, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But you can understand how he felt, and of course there's a certain truth in it, in that God is a God of judgment, and he will deal with his enemies, and with the enemies of his servants. Nevertheless, Jeremiah stands there in contrast to Jesus, rather than in comparison. And so his mind gets cleared on various points. He moves right through his life story, from a situation where he was involved in Israel's national worship, to a situation where he realized that worship was a thing of the heart and within. That of course is Jeremiah's greatest contribution to the whole of the Bible story, that he is the one that comes out with this inward New Covenant idea, that living in Christ and Christ in us is the heart of Christianity, although of course he didn't put it in those terms, but he put it in the terms of the New Covenant, Jeremiah 31, I will put my law in their hearts. That was said in the end of an age, when temples were crashing down, when the Chaldeans stood at the gates of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem was about to be burnt, then this man learned that true worship was in spirits and in hearts. So, this is how God speaks to us, through the experiences of men. Much more exciting than if he'd have just dictated mechanical statements, much more exciting than if he'd just given us commands from heaven all the time, but he speaks in the human situation. If I say nothing else this week, but to get a little glimmering of this point over, God speaks in the Bible in the human situation. He speaks in the clash of emotions, and he speaks to us, in a way that a mere law book never could have done. Now in order to do this, in order to extract from a book like the book of Jeremiah, an understanding of the person, we've got to do some work. We've got to do some study, study with an objective. We've got to try and get the historical context. We've got to say to ourselves, well what was Jeremiah doing, and what was Israel doing? And also as we get that historical context and set Jeremiah in his times, then having got him in his times, and got him in his circumstances, we're able to move into our own times and our own circumstances. And what Jeremiah says about Israel, and the specific title I've given to today's talk, is, is it nothing to you who pass by the collapse of an age? So Jeremiah lived in the collapse of the Jewish age. We live in the collapse of a Gentile age. And all the emotions that Jeremiah had about Israel, I'm going to suggest that we ought to have about fellow man today. You may find this a little new, in that we tend to shut ourselves off from the world and say, well the world's going to destruction, let's try and save one or two, but don't let's think about the world, it's wicked. Well that is true of course, the world lies in wickedness. But so did Israel lie in wickedness, and yet Jeremiah still cared. Jeremiah cared about his wicked Israel. And we ought to care about this wicked world, because this wicked world of which we speak so impersonally, consists of people, people like you and me. People with feelings, people with emotions, people with God-like capacity, which God-like capacity they're not using. Now hearts should bleed for mankind, just as Jeremiah's bled for Israel, because Israel is presented to us in the Bible as what I would call a kind of a microcosm, a little version of the whole of the world. And God didn't only love Israel, God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, and that is the message of the New Testament. So that it is right that we should read Jeremiah's words in the light of the New Testament, where the Gentiles are brought into the picture. And when we read sad words coming rung from the heart of Jeremiah, we should share his mood toward Israel. Only our mood should be toward all mankind. So that's a very important thing as we go along. And all the time the Lord Jesus Christ himself is the crucible, the crucible which transforms all experience. The Old Testament is the key to that crucible we are led to Jesus. Now the other thing that I want to say before getting into the topic fully, I thought it was worthwhile just making these general points, though we'll often come back to them. I'll probably have that piece of paper in front of me and come back to these thoughts from time to time. But there's just one or two other points that I want to make, and that is the book of Jeremiah is largely poetry. He was a poet. And when you have truth expressed in poetry, you have it expressed in a way where you can't use it with lawyer-like precision. This is a mistake that theological people arguing sometimes make. They take a piece of divine poetry and they treat it as if it was legalistic prose. And if you do that sort of thing, you can prove that in Bible days and in the kingdom, the forests are going to clap their hands. Well, we all know just what that means. It's the same with the book of Revelation. All kinds of weird and wonderful things have been done with the book of Revelation because we haven't recognized sufficiently that it is divine poetry, divine creative arts. To recognize that from time to time, we'll need to come back to that point. And as I say, be prepared to find that Jeremiah said some wrong things. And part of our test as we study is to be thinking around it and be sympathetic to Jeremiah. In other words, when Jeremiah does say something wrong, say, oh, well, we know better than him. If we know better than him, it's because his life is recorded. And it's quite a wonderful thing, I think, as we try to explore the labyrinths of another human mind. Now, because Jeremiah stands in the collapse of this age where Judah's kingdom was going to be destroyed, I think we can say that the future of God's religion and therefore the future of Christianity was at this stage some 600 years before Christ in the hands of two men under the divine providence in the hands of Jeremiah and Baruch. Baruch was his short-hand typist. Well, that's what he'd have been today. He was a menuensis, I think is the word used. He used to write it down when Jeremiah said it all and then he'd write it out neatly and multiply copies of whatever it was that Jeremiah said. Jeremiah and Baruch stood alone and as the kingdom of Israel in the past collapsed, as the temple was burnt, as Jerusalem was destroyed, as successive waves of Jews were taken into captivity, either into the Chaldean land, Babylon, or down into Egypt, these men maintained the truth, the truth, that God's purpose is to dwell in men's hearts, in men's lives. They maintained that truth. They made it available for succeeding generations. And the prophet who brought us the message of the new covenant is surely one of the most important that ever could have been. Now in order to help us to get our bearings, I've given you those two pieces of paper, which you can obviously take with you. And all we're going to do now is really just get our bearings. You could say in a sense that this is not going to be the most interesting of the talks, but without this talk, we shan't be able to sort our way through. Jeremiah was born in the year approximately 642 years before Christ. He was called to the ministry, while quite a young man, in the year approximately 626. Now that's really quite young, isn't it? What's it make, 6 from 12 is 16, isn't it? It really is young. That's when he's first called and he says, look, I'm too young for this. You can understand him saying it, can't you? And he was called at a time when the whole of the Middle East was in a state of threat from a northern invader. And this northern invader was the Scythians, Gog of the land of Magog, Rosh, Meshach and Tubal. We've all heard of those from Ezekiel. These are the Scythians. We call them the Russians today. And they were a barbarian horde who came hurtling down around about the year 630 and onwards onto the whole of the Middle East. They even caused trouble to Assyria. And it was through that trouble that the Scythians caused to Assyria that Assyria really went out of the picture and Babylon came in. And they came right down the seacoast of Palestine and right to the gates of Egypt. And all Jerusalem said, oh dear, they're coming here. But in fact, they didn't come up into the hills of Jerusalem. So that was the Scythian invasion. And Jeremiah has a lot to say about the Scythian invasion when he talks in his early chapters about the northern invader. It was the Scythians that he was talking about. In fact, they didn't come. And people therefore said to Jeremiah, Jeremiah, you said the Scythians were coming. They didn't, did they? So he was made to look a bit silly. But he hadn't actually said the Scythians. He'd said the northern hosts, as I'll show you tomorrow. He'd said the northern hosts. And so later on, twenty years later, he was able to say, when Babylon came down, there you are, I told you the northern hosts would come down. You just thought I meant the Scythians. I didn't know what I meant because I was speaking for God. Now we know what I meant. Because the Babylonians came down. Twenty years. There's a lesson there somewhere, isn't there? When we reckon we know all about the signs of the times and we've got the answers, we haven't always got the right answers because the mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding shore. And so although Jeremiah looked a bit silly because everybody thought he meant the Scythians when he said these northern armies were coming down, in fact, it was the Babylonians and that was twenty years later. So bear that in mind because this is what gave him such a bad reputation and so upset him when the people he loved showed such an unhappy attitude to him. So there he was in this collapsing civilization. And on the sheet which says possible order of the book of Jeremiah, you've got an approximate list of the right order of the book of Jeremiah. Now that I'm going to explain, that's a problem. You see, if there's any book of the Bible that's in the wrong order, it's the book of Jeremiah. It's hopeless. But I'll tell a little story about it which perhaps if in the kingdom we meet Baruch we'll be able to find out whether my theory is right. But I guess to get the feeling that Baruch had been putting all the sheets together, collating them, I think Donald calls it, he used that word to me last night, anyway, and he'd been collating all these sheets that he'd written on of all various Jeremiah's experiences and prophecies and so on. And he put them all on the table there in the right order, and then he went out to see somebody or something and left the door open and a wind came. And it blew them all over the place. He comes and says, oh dear, oh dear, and I've just got those in the right order. The trouble is I can't remember the right order now. And he picks them all up in the best order he can, and that's how the book of Jeremiah got in the order it was. Well, I wouldn't know. But it's like that. And that wouldn't be against inspiration, you see, because God hasn't arranged to give us books in the right order. Neither has he always arranged to tell us who wrote them. For example, the Epistle to the Hebrews, somebody asked once who wrote it, and somebody else said God only knows. Because we always say, because our Bible says, the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews, but I think most of us realize that it's probably unlikely that Paul wrote it, and there's some influence on it, but it doesn't matter. God wanted that Epistle to be sent, and it's a very important Epistle. So it is with the Psalms. We know that only a minority of the Psalms probably are written by David. So God hasn't arranged for things like authorship and order, to be right, but he's arranged for us to have what he wanted us to have. And I reckon there's a challenge in things being in the wrong order, because it makes you look at the internal hints. It makes you engage in a spiritual detective work to try and get the right order. And of course, while you're engaging in this detective work, and really all I can do this week is just open the sample case and share a little bit with you, because you've really got to do the work yourself. It's the only way you can get the benefit from it, and I shan't have time to do more than just scratch the surface. But by this sort of detective work, you get into the whole situation. You get into the moods and the feelings of the people concerned. And so this is what we have. A book that is hopelessly out of order. And so with the aid of about two dozen different commentaries, and trying to find the common basis, and then putting them all away and just reading the book for myself, that's my best effort for the right order, for things to be in. And the particular sequence of events with approximate dates is on the other piece of paper. Now the great events that we've got to look at to get this order, and you get it from Kings and Chronicles, is to recognize the situation back as far as the time of Hezekiah, which is in the late 800s BC, where you had a good king upon the throne. Then you remember how he had 15 years added to his life, and as a result of that, a baby was born of the name of Manasseh. And Manasseh reigned for 60 years. And in those 60 years, he so corrupted Israel, or particularly Judah, the two tribes, that things never got right again. And we should be seeing some of the things that were wrong. We should be saying, well, what can this mean to us today? Things never got right again. And you have therefore this situation of a long reign, when the temple wasn't used, when there were even idolatry, and even temple prostitution was taking place, where immorality was actually engaged in as a religious activity. You know, people liked that kind of a religion because it gave them an excuse for all the bad things they wanted to do. That was the state that Israel had got to. When they had trouble, they'd even offer their children in sacrifice to other gods. But of course, they still worshiped Yahweh, the God of Israel, as well. They didn't realize that he was the only one. They shared God and the other bales of the local countryside. And then came the young king Josiah, who also at a very young age, around about the age of 18, said, we're going to put this thing right. He did it in a highly dictatorial manner, because after all, he was king. He said, you're going to do as you were told, Judah, and you're going to come up to the temple, and you're going to clean it out, and you're going to worship God. When the king said that, they said, ah, well, I suppose we'd better do as we're told. But it was skin deep, this Josiah Reformation, which I've got down around about 621. This Josiah Reformation was so skin deep, that in various places Jeremiah has to say that they're really only pretending to come back. They're not coming back properly. For today, I'd better use my King James a bit, because I'm going to use the Living Bible paraphrase for some of the more lively parts, so that you get the feel of things. But in chapter 3, you get an example of the way in which this Reformation… Let's go to verse 8, chapter 3, verse 8. I might cross-reference to here if I think it comes over well. Yeah, I think I will have this Kenneth Taylor version, verse 8. Yet she, Judah, took no heed, even though she saw that I divorced faithless Israel. But now Judah too has left me, and given herself to harlotry, for she has gone to other gods to worship them. She treated it all so lightly. To her it was nothing at all, that she should worship idols made of wood and stone. And so the land was greatly polluted and defiled. That was the situation that had existed in the Manasseh time. Then afterwards, verse 10, this faithless one returned to me. This is the Josiah Reformation. But her sorrow was only faked, the Lord God says. Well, it comes over, doesn't it? Her sorrow was only faked. What's it say in the King James? She didn't turn to me with her whole heart, but feignedly, said the Lord. So there was a, as far as most people were concerned, the King said you've got to turn, so they turned. But it was only faked. It hadn't gone to the heart. Which of course is the whole message of Jeremiah. And so, the Reformation went on, and eventually a book was found, a scroll as they tidied the temple up. And this scroll was the scroll which included much of Deuteronomy. The King said, why this is marvelous. Don't know how long it had been there, but there it was, this scroll of Deuteronomy, they'd forgotten all about it. When he read it, he said it wasn't so marvelous, because it said that Israel were in real trouble, because as they had so far turned from God, there wasn't much hope for them. That's what it looked like as he read Deuteronomy 28. And so the King put aside all his dignity, and he himself went and stood on the platform, and read from the book of Deuteronomy to the people. He really rubbed it home to them all, that they got to change their ways. It was a great period of spiritual activity. And Jeremiah in fact, did at this time, didn't go round and help in connection with this Reformation. I think we read about it in chapter… Well, never mind which chapter it is. We'll be going to that tomorrow. I must resist the temptation to look into too many chapters today, because I want to give you the general background. In one of those early chapters, around 8, 9, 10, 11, he goes round and he says to all the people, come back, come back, come back. So Jeremiah did join, oh yes it is, it's chapter 11. The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, so he goes out on a missionary tour, hear ye the words of this covenant, and speak unto the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Cursed be the man that obeyeth not the words of this covenant. So Jeremiah does join in. Does join in trying to get people to come back to this covenant. But he just doesn't seem to be so prominent as you'd expect. And Josiah must have been a little disappointed to hear Jeremiah saying it was all fake. Because it wasn't faked as far as Josiah was concerned. But as far as most of the people were concerned it was. Well then great things were happening on the political scene. And round about 609 BC, the King of Egypt, Niko, comes to the throne. And he decides he's going to do battle with the Chaldeans. Because there were always two political parties, not the Democrats and the Republicans in Israel, but there were three really. But the two main ones were the pro-Egypt party, the ones who said let's go to Egypt. And the others were the pro-Assyria or Babylon party. They said let's be friends with Assyria, let's rely on them. And then there was a little party, a smaller political party, the follow God party, the trust in God. And you get this in Jeremiah chapter 2 verse 18, these two parties, where Jeremiah rebukes both of them. He rebukes both the Democrats and the Republicans. He rebukes, as indeed he would if we were here today, no doubt. And you get this in Jeremiah chapter 2 verse 18, these two parties, where Jeremiah rebukes both of them. He rebukes both the Democrats and the Republicans. He rebukes, as indeed he would if we were here today, no doubt. Or if I were in England I'd say the Conservatives and the Labour, or the Tories and the Socialists. Well here it was the Egypts and the Babylonian parties. And so God says in 2 verse 18, now what hast thou to do in the waters of Egypt to drink the waters of Sihaw, that's the river Nile. Or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria to drink the waters of the river, that's the river Euphrates. What are you doing, what do you mean by it, he's saying, constantly getting yourself mixed up with these two nations. Why don't you depend upon God? And so Josiah decides he's not going to allow the Egyptian king to come across to go and fight the Babylonian king and he gets killed. One of the puzzles of the Bible, why such a great good man as he should have been allowed to be killed. Well, one writer says that he was taken away from the evil that was to come so that he shouldn't see it. Anyway, he was killed in this battle when the Egyptians came up and then there was a king Jehoahaz that just reigned for three months and then Pharaoh Nicco put on the throne king Jehoiakim. And he was a terror, he really was. He was a selfish man whose whole approach was if I'm alright Jack, that's all that matters. We know the approach. He was a man who there he was living in the midst of a doomed nation and all he could bother about was building his ivory palace and using forced labor to do it. You read about this in Jeremiah 22 where Jeremiah says to him, Woe to you king Jehoiakim, 22 verse 13. Woe to you king Jehoiakim, for you are building your great palace with forced labor. By not paying wages, you are building injustice into its walls and oppression into its door frames and ceilings. You say, I will build a magnificent palace with huge rooms and many windows paneled throughout with fragrant cedar and painted a lovely red. Then verse 15 is absolutely a magnificent verse and I think the way it's translated in this paraphrase is marvelous. Having said this, you say to yourself that you're going to have it paneled with fragrant cedar and painted a lovely red. He then goes on, but a beautiful palace does not make a great king. Why did your father Josiah reign so long? Because he was just and fair in all his dealings. Was not this to know God? That's lovely, isn't it? See the actions of Josiah, fair dealing, concern for others. He saw to it that justice and help was given to the poor and the needy and all went well for him. This is how a man lives close to God. Was not this to know me? So that's Josiah being contrasted with this new king Jehoiakim who just concerned himself with building up a luxurious palace for himself. And all the time the Babylonians were knocking at the door and the nation was doomed and he knew it. Instead of recalling them to God, he just got on with his own selfish interests. So that's Jehoiakim. And in the time of Jehoiakim, right at the beginning, Jeremiah really starts getting prominent. In chapter 7 tells you how he goes and stands one day outside the temple. You know, what would happen if somebody came and stood outside your meeting room? A brother said, but not put any ecclesias in, otherwise you might think I'm getting at somebody. So he went and said, ex-land ecclesia is corrupt. And you came and found somebody outside your meeting saying that. I think the arranging brethren would soon be on to him and say, you go away and don't interrupt with our worship. Well actually that's what Jeremiah did. Or to put it on another plane, St Paul's Cathedral is a very big church that you've no doubt heard of in England. Well it's something like Billy Graham going and standing outside St Paul's Cathedral when the royal family have gone there and saying, British religion is corrupt. You know, and they wouldn't like it. He can do that all right at the White City Stadium, they don't mind him doing it there. But if he went up to St Paul's Cathedral and did it, he wouldn't be very popular. Jeremiah, right at the beginning of Jehoiakim's reign, goes and stands in the gate of the Lord's house, chapter 7 verse 1, and says, Hear ye the word of the Lord, all ye of Judah that enter into worship. Well you see, Josiah had got them into the habit of going there to worship, and so they were still going. And he says, verse 3, The Lord of hosts, the God of Israel says, even yet, if you quit your evil ways, I'll let you stay in your own lands. Don't be fooled by those who lie to you, and say that since the temple of the Lord is here, God will never let Jerusalem be destroyed. That's what people were saying, it's all right, the temple's here, so everything's going to be all right. It's all right, we're Christadelphians, so we're going to be all right. See, Jeremiah pricks the bubble of religious self-confidence. That's what Jeremiah does. He could do it for us, but sometimes we need that bubble to be pricked. Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord of these, we're all right. Do you remember how the disciples said to Jesus, Look at this temple, and Jesus said, One stone won't be left upon another. That's how he started. Well, for that, because you also read about this in chapter 26, they put him on trial for his life. They said it was treason, they said it was blasphemy against the king. But he's still got enough friends to stop him from being executed. And so he escaped from being executed, and he had to go and hide. Then, what he did, but he got hold of Baruch. He said to Baruch, Look, I want you to sit down there for a few days, and take down everything I've ever said. So he took down all the things that he'd said in the time of Josiah, all the things that he'd said during the three months of Jehoahaz, and all the things that he'd said so far during the reign of Jehoiakim. And Baruch wrote them all down. Now, says Jeremiah, you toddle off to the temple area where all the people are, and you read that scroll. And so all the things that Jeremiah had said 20 years earlier, in the time of Josiah, he now reads them. He says they still apply. You're still wicked, you're still evil, you still think you're all right, and you're not, and trouble's still coming. Those are the chapters that sometimes seem so tedious, as you read them one after the other. All the people say, anybody know what Baruch's up to here? I wonder why they let him get away with that. And then the rulers came along. They listened. They said, you know, this is serious, this is. Because if he's right, we're in for trouble. So they went after the king. They said, Baruch, you come with us. And so, before they went to the king, they got him to read it again to them. And they said, look, Baruch, they went too bad, you see, they were half and half. You just make yourself scarce, you disappear. You go and find Jeremiah, and both of you clear out and hide in the country somewhere. You just get out of the way. They just gave him an hour to get out of the way, and then they went to the king and said, look, we've got a scroll here from Jeremiah. We read about this in the 36th chapter. We know what he did. He said, all right, read it. And he sat there. I often wonder what sort of a look was on his face. Was it a sort of, one of those sort of looks? You can't tape that, can you, Howard, what he looked like? Or did he look fierce? Wait till I get my hands on Jeremiah. Or did he just, I think, probably this is what he did. He just looked supercilious with a grin on his face. You know, one of those sort of looks. Supercilious, we'll see about that. One of those sort of looks. I think that's what he did, because he got his penknife out, and it was the winter, and they got a fire there, and they just tore it up, bit by bit, this scroll, and threw it on the fire. But you can't burn God's Word. Men have tried to again and again, you know how they did in the time of Tyndale, tried to burn his translations of the Bible. You can't get rid of God's Word. Because Jeremiah and Baruch, in their hiding place, Jeremiah just dictated it all again, and the significant words are put, and he added much more also. There's humor in the Bible, you see, and he added much more also. Many like words thereunto. And that, I think, really, that scroll, is how the book of Jeremiah came to be written, because all of it was spoken at first. This gives us little hints as to how the Bible came together. So it all got written down. Well, Jeremiah sends a few messages to Jehoiakim then, and says, you're going to have a donkey's funeral, you are. When you put it in that sort of language, you realize the kind of living courageous things that were said, and they weren't all that very polite either. Needless to say, Jehoiakim wasn't very pleased at being told he was going to have a donkey's funeral. And nevertheless, he never got him. In 598, during an invasion by Nebuchadnezzar, 598 B.C., Jehoiakim died. And the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, put his uncle on the throne, Zedekiah. I may have got my relationships wrong there, we'll have to look that up anyway. Put a relative on the throne, a man named Mataniah, who became known as Zedekiah. Now, we've all heard of Zedekiah because he was the last king of Judah. We all remember, for a little while, just for three months, there was Jehoiakim, but I don't count him. You know, it was brother of Jehoiakim, Zedekiah was uncle to Jehoiakim. That's got it right. One of the other sons of Josiah. Jehoiakim was taken into Babylon, and Zedekiah was put on the throne as a puppet king to do the will of the king of Babylon. He was put on his oath. And when you make an oath, when you make a solemn promise, God expects you to keep your promise. And so, here comes this man, bound to keep his oath and obey the king of Babylon. And he wasn't a bad guy, I was going to say, this Zedekiah, get him corrupted by American speech. And he was an easygoing sort of person. If he'd have lived in another period, he'd have been rather a nice sort of man. You'd have liked him. Not like Jehoiakim, who's sort of a horror Jehoiakim is. The trouble with him, he could never stick to anything for five minutes at a time. He was always blown this way and that way. Do you remember that occasion when Jeremiah was put in the well? And he didn't really want to put him in the well. It was the arranging brethren of the day, the elders, they wanted to put Jeremiah in the well. Well, let's see, Israel is kind of the ecclesia of those days. We don't put people in wells now, but we sometimes do wrong things in our ecclesial life. And in the 38th chapter of Jeremiah, when these elders, when these leaders came to him, because Jeremiah was saying, don't fight Babylon, Babylon are coming against you, it was very unpatriotic talk. Don't fight Babylon, he said. And all the time these princes were plotting to try and get rid of Babylon, plotting all the time. And so they went to the king when they heard Jeremiah saying these things. Verse 4 of Jeremiah 38, Sir, this fellow must die. This kind of talk will undermine the morale of the few soldiers we have left, and of all the people too. This man's a traitor. He's quite modern, doesn't he? So King Zedekiah agreed. All right, he said, do as you like, I can't stop you. What a thing for a king to say, I can't stop you. And then in comes bounding Ibed-Melech, the Ethiopian, the colored man, he says, you'll die if you leave him there. So Zedekiah says, all right, then go and get him out. That's the character of Zedekiah. He means well. As one person said, he was all wishbone and no backbone. I thought that was rather good, all wishbone and no backbone. And you know, one feels sorry for him, and yet there it is. If he hadn't got much backbone of his own, he should have surrounded himself with people who had got backbone, so that they could sort of help him and strengthen his hands. He was always a bit careful about Jeremiah. When Jeremiah was in prison, they would call him to come and give him advice. Well, the Babylonians were there, and they would come to the gates, and then they'd go back because of some problem. Every time they went back, all the Jews in Jerusalem say, oh, Jeremiah's wrong. After all, they've gone. Jeremiah says, don't you be too sure. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. They're coming back. Of course, back they did come, and eventually, Jerusalem fell in the year 587 or 586. In that very year, Jeremiah showed his faith in ultimate restoration by buying a field just outside Jerusalem. Jeremiah was in and out of prison all the time. The Babylonians were backwards and forwards, but at last, in 586 BC, Jerusalem was captured. Jeremiah's sons were slain, his eyes were put out, and he was taken blind to the city of Babylon. And just a few Jews were left there under a sort of governor named Gedaliah. And there was a rotten man named Ishmael. You read about this in 40, 41, 42, 43, 44 of Jeremiah, who assassinated Gedaliah. And all the Jews that remained took fright. Jeremiah says, don't worry. You just stay here. It'll be all right. Oh, no. But you see, the trouble was, Jeremiah didn't get an answer for about a week, and they got impatient during that week, so they mobilized themselves, and they all ran down to Egypt. And that's where we lose sight of Jeremiah. Still saying, why is it that down here in Egypt you have to do what the Egyptians do? Why can't you stick to God, even though you're in captivity? You haven't got a temple now, but you could have God dwelling in your heart. That's the finest temple of all. So Jeremiah passes from the pages of history, still at it, still rebuking, still giving them hope, still telling them that the true worship lies in the heart, not in temples made with stone. In the inward reaction, not in the outward conformity. In real love of God, not in faked religion. Well, that perhaps will do for this morning, to give us the general background of Jeremiah, and what we're going to do for the rest of the week, God willing, is look more into the situation, and also get to know the heart of the man himself. Shall we close this morning's proceedings by remaining seated, and just bending our heads in a little word of prayer? Our Father in heaven, we thank thee for thy word. We thank thee for the fact that we hold it in written form, and can have fellowship with great men of old like Jeremiah, and through him with Jesus. We thank thee for the lesson that when all about us is shaking and collapsing, we can still have trust in thee, even though we understand not thy ways always. So Father, write thy law in our hearts, and grant that thy son the Lord Jesus may dwell in our hearts richly by faith, and that we may be privileged to see the final restoration of all thy glorious things in a day soon to come. Through Jesus we beseech thy guidance. Amen. Amen.

Transcript

This is The Voice of Wilbraham. The Eastern Christadelfian Bible School presents one of a series of Bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 Convocation at Wilbraham. Brother Edgar Willie of Canock Staffordshire, England has chosen as his theme, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Us. Here is Brother Willie as he begins the third address entitled, The Temple of the Lord of Peace, The Dangers of External Religion. I think we're really getting into Jeremiah now, aren't we, and getting the feeling of the times that we've seen how that the situation in which we're working is the time when a whole age, when a whole system of things was collapsing. We've seen how there are parallels between that collapsing age and the age in which we live. And I suppose we could ask ourselves, how do we feel as we look around upon an age which could so quickly disintegrate and collapse, do we feel rooted in that age or could we let everything go, all the material things that we value, could we let them go just loosely and lightly? That's a question for all of us to answer, isn't it? Well we've been seeing how God sent Jeremiah into the situation, but not totally by saying who are Jeremiah, here's a message, go and give that exactly as I've given it, but many of the messages of Jeremiah came through the crucible of his own experience, and all the time we've been looking at the experiences of Jeremiah and the teaching of Jeremiah to see how it showed need, human need as he portrayed the sins of Israel, and the great need is for forgiveness. We've heard the voice of God pleading with Israel, even in the midst of rebukes that they would turn and know the calm and the peace that forgiveness can give even when everything looks as if it's just in disaster. We've shared with Jeremiah some of the heartache, and we're going to share more of it tomorrow, that he felt as he looked around upon his people facing this disaster. And we've seen that the one thing that God cannot forgive is the man who doesn't want to be forgiven. And looking at it this morning, I came across three passages, three little verses in some of his earlier talks, because we were looking at his earlier speeches yesterday, the ones that he made in the time of King Josiah, the good king who engineered this reformation and ran this wonderful Passover feast. And yet Jeremiah had to keep on saying, yes, it's a wonderful reformation, but it's all skin deep. It's faked. Josiah meant well, but the people, they only did it because the king wanted them to, and they wanted to keep in his good books. In some of those earlier speeches, one of them is the fifth chapter and the twelfth verse, where I wanted to show that the one thing that God can't forgive is the person or the one person that God can't forgive is the person who doesn't want to be forgiven. That is, so long as he's in that state, and the whole purpose of prophecy was to bring them into the state where they wanted to be forgiven. The whole purpose of putting the spotlight on sins is not that we may rejoice in iniquity, not that we may feel better than the sinner, but that we may bring each other to a recognition of need where we want that forgiveness. And so this insensibility to the voice of God is brought out in the fifth chapter and the twelfth verse. Verse 11, The people of Israel are full of treachery against me, says the Lord. They have lied and said, he won't bother us. No evil will come upon us. There will be neither famine nor war. They were quite insensible to what the prophet had said. They became complacent. They said, since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued till the present. We can get just the same. We can say, oh, it's all right, there's plenty of time to put that right. So that was one form of insensibility, that things look so real. Even in a collapsing age, things look so substantial, but they're not really. Then in chapter six and verse 10, Jeremiah says in a little prayer, you know, one of these little prayers, he keeps on shooting at God. Six verse 10, But who will listen when I warn them? Their ears are closed and they refuse to hear. The word of God has angered them. They don't want it at all. Closing the ears, refusing to hear, not wanting to be told and therefore not wanting to be forgiven. And chapter six, verse 17, I set watchmen over you who warned you. Listen for the sound of the trumpet. It will let you know when trouble comes. But you said, no, we won't pay any attention. Insensibility to the voice of God. Now, Jeremiah didn't just stand on his pedestal and look down at Israel. He knew that he was down in the evil with them. And so in chapter 17, where our yesterday's title came from, where in verse one, my people sin as though commanded to, as though their evil were laws chiseled with an iron pen or a diamond point upon their stony hearts or on the corner of their altars, sin chiseled into their hearts. That's the exact opposite of the new covenant. The new covenant is God chiseled into their hearts. This was sin chiseled into their hearts. And Jeremiah goes on in verse five, cursed is the man who puts his trust in mortal man and turns his heart away from God. Verse seven, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and has made the Lord his hope and confidence. Those are the two, there's only two religions in the world, you know, or you might say there's hundreds, there's only two, only two mainstreams of religious thought. One is trust in man and the other is trust in God. You know, when you go back to the Reformation and you had the mighty Catholic Church, they for penances and indulgences and all the rest of it, that was justification by trust in mortal man, trust in things you did. And Luther stood up, whatever may be the deficiencies of some of his doctrines and so on, he stood up with his cardinal doctrine, blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, who does know that he can't do it himself and who knows that the Lord alone can bring him through. And all this was there way back in the writings and the words, because originally they were words of the prophet Jeremiah, but Jeremiah doesn't stand up on his pedestal and pretend that he's not involved. He says from the depth of his own experience in the ninth verse, the heart is the most deceitful thing there is. Now it doesn't mean the other man's heart, it doesn't mean something called theologically human nature. We do a lot of talking about human nature, but it should mean my human nature and your human nature. The heart is the most deceitful thing there is and desperately wicked. No one can really know how bad it is. That's a problem isn't it? Only the Lord knows. He searches all hearts and examines deepest motives so that he can give to each person his right reward according to his deeds, according to how he has lived. So Jeremiah knew that he was on the same level as the rest of them, that his heart was no more reliable than their hearts, that his motives were being searched by the living God. And this is what marks the humility of the true prophet, for we have prophets now. A prophet isn't somebody who miraculously foretells the future, but he foretells the word of God. And when our exhorting brethren exhort, or our speaking brethren speaking, they are for the moment of their speaking, if they speak according to the truth, they are the modern equivalent of prophets. They are speaking forth the word of God. And if when they speak, they forget that the heart is the most deceitful thing there is and that means them too, then they are not truly giving the word of redemption. You see this is the marvel of redemption. When the Lord Jesus Christ came down into the evil and shared it with us, that's how he was able to save us from it because he shared it with us and that's how he's still able to keep saving us and bringing us along because he remembers what it was like to be down in the evil with us. So these prophets prefigure and point forward to Jesus because of their own personal involvement in the sin of the people. Now I want to move on to the time of Jehoiakim. On your little sheet of paper Jehoiakim is the man who really virtually comes to the throne after Josiah is killed. And we start off his reign, as I was mentioning in the opening talk where we got our bearings, with Jeremiah. Now remember the situation, Josiah has only been dead three months when Jehoiakim comes to the throne around about 608 BC. Jehoiakim hasn't had time to show whether he's a good king or a bad king yet or whether he's going to be a half and half king like Zedekiah was later on. And the reformations in full swing, they still all go up to the temple and everybody feels real good because they've never had such a religious bean feast for years. And there they are all going up to the temple and feeling that things are bound to be alright now. And that is the situation where you remember I mentioned the other day that Jeremiah went up to the entrance of the temple and told them not to trust in the temple of the Lord but to quit their evil ways. In verse four of chapter seven, don't be fooled by those who lie to you. Don't be fooled by those who lie to you and who say that since the temple of the Lord is here, God will never let Jerusalem be destroyed. You may remain here under these conditions only if you stop your wicked thoughts and deeds and are fair to others. Notice the kind of behaviour. See they might go up to the temple. They might be very diligent in their worship and the title that I've given to this talk today is the temple of the Lord are these, the curse of external religion. The curse of external religion where we put our trust in the outward things we do. It's right that we should exhort one another to get along to the meetings and be regular in our attendance because much benefit can come through fellowship with others. If we depend on that and think that because we're regular in our attendance, therefore we've got our passport to the kingdom. I once remember a brother saying some people think that the name Christadelphian is a passport to the kingdom of God. The name Christ is, even the name Christ if it's but an empty thing and not a power that changes our lives, then it's a mere kind of token. It doesn't mean anything. But notice how Jeremiah gets right to the heart of what true worship is. True worship has its outflow in action. It has its start in thought. If you stop your wicked thoughts, verse five, and deeds and are fair to others. So we might have the most marvelous ecclesial hall and I've seen a lot of ecclesial halls in this continent and in England and some of them are very beautiful halls. Some of the meetings that meet in those beautiful halls are very beautiful meetings as far as one can tell. It doesn't necessarily go together. So stop your wicked thoughts. That's where things start and then thoughts lead to deeds. And deeds involve being fair to other people. And that isn't a quality that we as a community are over noted for, you know. You know, sometimes it does you good to step out of yourself and see yourself as others see you. No doubt Alex McKay could recite for us Burns' poem about wood to God, the gift he gives to see ourselves as others see us. I can't say it in Scottish. This was a poem that Burns wrote when he went to church one day and he saw some bug crawling up a lady's hat in church and he went home and he wrote this poem. If only she sat there all in her best clothes and thought she was great and there was this filthy insect crawling up her hat and perhaps there's a kind of a moral there somewhere. So it does us good sometimes to try and see ourselves as others see us. And because we are conscious of the many principles of religion that we've been privileged to learn, we sometimes, even in argument with others, take unfair advantage of them, give them a cannon full of scripture passages where our superior dexterity leaves them at a disadvantage. Well, they go away and say, I can't answer you, but they're not convinced either. So it's much better to take it steady and win through to their hearts in our preaching. There are even deeper ways where we are not fair to others. Is every business meeting that ever happens in an Ecclesia fair in the judgments that are put forward? Well, that's a question for each Ecclesia to answer for itself. And stop exploiting orphans, widows and foreigners. And stop your murdering and stop worshipping idols as you do now to your hurt. Then and then only will I let you stay in the land that I gave to your fathers to keep forever. And verse 8 gives you the key to it. You think that because the temple is here that you will never suffer. Don't fool yourself. Now how do you think that came about? Well, we haven't time to go into it now, but sometime if you read back into Isaiah, you'll find that there are many passages there in the time when Sennacherib and the Assyrians were surrounding the city of Jerusalem, where Isaiah was told to prophesy and guide them and to say, it's all right, the Lord is with you, the Lord is in his temple, he'll keep you. So they were able to go thumbing back in their Bibles, as you might say, and they were able to say, look, it's all right, these people in Jeremiah's time, Isaiah said it would be all right, as long as the temple's here, it's all right. So we will say, ah yes, but Jeremiah says it isn't all right. Ah, but Isaiah said. So they even played spiritual ping pong in those days. And they threw texts of scripture, they threw Isaiah against what Jeremiah was saying. And Jeremiah was only saying it, but Isaiah had it all been written down several hundred years. So you never can get away without the task of thought and careful and right division of scripture. So he says, just because you think the temple is here, that's no reason why you should regard it as a kind of a talisman. Do you really think that you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, and worship Baal and all these new gods of yours, and then come here and stand before me in my temple and chant, God will save us, this is external religion. God will save us, only to go right back to those evil things again. Is my temple but a den of robbers in your eyes, for I see all the evil that is going on there. Jeremiah, Jesus, what did Jesus say? When the zeal of God's house had eaten him up and he went in and saw them using the temple precincts as a kind of marketplace for getting ill -gotten gains. He went back to this verse, he said, my house should be a house of prayer for all nations, that was from Isaiah, but you've made it a den of robbers, as the New English Bible puts it, a robbers cave. Go to Shiloh, he says, the city I first honored with my name, and ask where the sanctuary is that was then at Shiloh, as I did to Shiloh, so I will do to this temple. So running right through this is the warning, the warning that it's thought and action in Christ for us, not a reliance upon the external things which make up our religious life, whether they be good things or bad things, and there are many external things we must It's quite right that we should have a statement of faith that sums up what we believe, but as one brother once said, in an exhortation, a statement of faith is a fine servant, but a very bad master. And obviously over the years, Ecclesias have learned how to handle those who are weak. There was a time when somebody weakened on some point when down came the chopper and out they went. Now, Ecclesias have learned to be patient and take things a stage at a time, so that even a thing like the statement of faith can be a bolstering up of our pride, have we not? The Birmingham amended a statement of faith is not all well in our midst, therefore. And that may be a substitute for real action. So let's be like the Lord said, these ought you to have had and done, and not left the others undone. The other many things, regular services, youth work, all these things are good and necessary and proper, but nothing earns us the kingdom, nothing gives us the right to feel that all is well. If you can only read the prophets like that so that it isn't just a message, you know, we sit there and say, can't understand Israel how they did all these things, then says Paul led him that thinketh he stand, take heed lest he fall. That's the thing to remember, that we and Israel are alike and we must learn from what their prophets said to them. Well, now there's an interesting phrase in relation to this external religion and it's important that we should get this emphasis that Jeremiah has on external religion, because later on we're going to come on in our last talk to internal religion, which is the real heart of Christianity. There's an interesting three verses and this paraphrase that I'm using, the Living Bible, rather helps you with it in chapter seven and verses twenty-one onward, see, because the external worship in their days was largely this matter of going up with the sacrifices and so on. The Lord of hosts, the God of Israel says, away with your offerings and sacrifices. It wasn't offerings and sacrifices I wanted from your fathers when I led them out of Egypt. That was not the point of my command. I think that's rather good because it's often puzzled people, you see, in the King James version, I spake not unto your fathers nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices. Well, he did, didn't they, during the Exodus, he did give them instructions about sacrifices. Of course, you could say, well, he didn't give them instructions straight away. It waited a few months before he gave them the instructions. I don't think that's what it means. But he's saying the key word is concerning with a view to. He didn't instruct them with a view to. They weren't an objective. It wasn't offerings and sacrifices I wanted from your fathers when I led them out of Egypt. That was not the point of my command. He told them to offer sacrifices, but that wasn't the point. But what I told them was, and this was the point, obey me and I will be your God and you shall be my people. Only do as I say and all shall be well. So the external things that he gave them were to help them, but they weren't the point. In the breaking of bread, our most holy ceremony that is still left to us along with baptism, the only ceremonies that we have and precious they are. The point of them is whether they lead us to Christ. The point of baptism is whether it is indeed an act of personal commitment to the living Lord and that weekly remembrance, the point of it is not, oh we've been there, we've broken bread, we've drunk wine, but whether we have experienced a little bit more being crucified with Christ as we partake of that bread and we partake of that wine. So we're in this same situation with Israel that in this, remember he's saying all this standing outside the temple and he's saying to them, God doesn't just want sacrifices and offerings, that wasn't the point of it. And of course people would misunderstand it and some people would think that he was saying that they weren't necessary at all. Just you know as if you really wanted to misunderstand me, you could say that I just said that we didn't have to have a statement of faith or you could say that I just said that it didn't matter about breaking bread. And you all know I haven't said that. I've said we can treat these things as if they were kind of magic talisman to ensure our acceptance with God. But Jeremiah is getting over the very evident thought that these things go deeper than the external acts. And the institution that we build, see institutions are good servants and bad masters. So often in the history of religion men have built up institutions and the institution has become the everything. And the purpose for which the institution was set up has been lost sight of in a morass of externalism. Well now let's see if it's just one of two others in this temple speech that we want to look at. The eighth chapter, as he stands still by this temple gate giving them their message, he has a further installment, didn't necessarily only do this once, and this is at the beginning of the time of Jehoiakim. Once again give them this message from the Lord, says God. Verse five of chapter eight, verses four and five. When a person falls he jumps up again. When he's on the wrong road and discovers his mistake he goes back to the fork where he made the wrong turn. But these people keep along on their evil path even though I warn them. I listen to their conversation and what do I hear? He listens to our conversation, brethren and sisters, and what does he hear? Is anyone sorry for sin? Does anyone say, what a terrible thing I've done? No, all are rushing pell-mell down the path of sin as swiftly as a horse rushing to battle. This is vivid language, isn't it, brethren and sisters? We know the answer, as hymn 308 says, we make the answer now. We know the answer when God listens to our conversation, whether we are conscious of our sins or whether we go pell-mell downhill, so real and so related to the great puzzle of Christian living, whether it's church or personal relationship with God, or church and personal relationship with God, with the one helping the other, but the personal relationship with God being the key. Well now, time beats me every time because obviously it's only possible just to give just a little bit of this. I think I better leave this particular speech, but you read it through at your leisure, and incidentally, as you read it, notice the mood even when he got back home after making this temple speech in chapter 8, verse 18, and you know, when I was very young, and I was in one of these small Christadelphian splinter groups, one of these small fellowships, there were only a few of us, we looked at the big Christadelphian fellowships, and we used to say, it's our duty to put them right, and I remember going once when I was about 18 to the big meeting in London of one of the still small fellowships, but one of the larger smaller fellowships, and they've got a meeting of some 500 there, and I remember taking these leaflets and giving them out, the people came out and got insulted, threatened with the police and all sorts of things, you know, it was rather funny when Christadelphians threaten other Christadelphians with the police. I know what I was giving out was certainly not very helpful material, I know that now, but after I'd been insulted and one thing and another, understandably, I went back home and I felt that good, you know, I'd done duty for the Lord, giving out these leaflets in that corrupt Christadelphian community that met there in London. How did Jeremiah feel when he went home? Chapter 8, verse 18, my grief is beyond healing, my heart is broken. In fact, aren't we on yesterday's theme, you can't escape it in Jeremiah. This is the point of it, never rejoicing in inequity, my heart, my grief is beyond healing, my heart is broken. Then he goes on, verse 21, I weep for the hurt of my people, I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief. Then again, chapter 9, oh that my eyes were a fountain of tears, I would weep forever, if I got enough tears in my eyes, I'd never stop crying, he says, I would sob day and night for the slain of my people. And then in the next breath, he says, oh that I could go away and forget them. You see, it's so human and real, isn't it? The way these conflicting emotions jockey for position in his mind and live in some wayside shack in the desert, for they're all adulterous, treacherous men. So there are these two emotions going between them, one and the other. Then verse 10, he's back on it, sobbing and weeping, I point to their mountains and pastures, for now they are desolate without a living soul. He can see the enemy coming down, he can see that everything's going to be absolutely disastrous and his sobbing starts again. Well now, it wasn't very long before Jehoiakim showed what kind of a king he was going to be. And as I told you the other day, and as you no doubt know, he began to build up his expensive palace. You know, let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. So he builds up this expensive palace and that's where the passage that I read you the other day, and I'm not going to read it again, I'm just putting it in its context, where he says, your father Josiah cared for the poor, was not this to know me, but you Jehoiakim, you were not bothered about the poor, you were just using them to build up your terrific house. And Jeremiah does many, many things in those first three years of Jehoiakim's reign to try and teach Israel how they might get away from a mere external religion into a religion which touches their hearts and shapes their ways. It was in that connection that he went on a trip one day down to the potter's house, you read about it in the 18th chapter, this is in the time of Jehoiakim, as far as you can tell, you remember how I told you on the first day, I reckon it was almost as if Barak had lost all the sheets in Jeremiah's room and put them back in the wrong order, so if this may not have been in Jehoiakim's time, but he went down to the shop where the clay pots were made, I saw this two years ago down at Stillbridge village, where there's one of the exhibits is of an old potter's shop, and there's this man making these pots very, very rapidly on the potter's wheel, and actually while we were there, I went down with Ralph and Clara Hinsley and we looked at this man and we said, oh look, he's just got some clay that he's done wrong, just like Jeremiah did, and no doubt you've seen that kind of thing somewhere or other, and what was the meaning of it? The jar, verse 4, chapter 18, the jar that he was forming didn't turn out as he wished, so he kneaded it into a lump and started again, and then the Lord said, oh Israel, can't I do to you, as this potter has done to his clay, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand. As long as the clay stayed soft, able to be molded, then he could remake them, as he remakes us. Now, whereas clay, it's either soft or isn't soft, we as clay and Israel as clay can make up our minds to be soft and moldable, so as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are we in his hand. And so, Jeremiah then, the next day or a few days later, having told the story, perhaps he stood by a potter's wheel and said to the people, hey, come around here and have a look at that, see what he's just done, the people said, oh yes, he's remolded it, that's it, that's what you are, you're clay, you let him remold you. He's getting away from mere externalism to inner change, let him remold you. Now, the next day, what's Jeremiah doing today? He's got a clay jar, it's been there now in the oven and it's hard, as we say, it's hard baked, you know, you say of somebody who's not very given to change, somebody that you can't influence very much, you say, he's hard baked. We all know what that means. And so, Jeremiah takes this hard baked clay jar and he hurls it, no doubt in the front of a crowd, into the valley of Hinnom and tinkle, tinkle, bang, bang, they hear it cracking up into pieces. He says, that's pretty nearly where you are, Israel. You're either still able to be molded or you're hard baked, too far gone. And that's the only man that God won't forgive, as we've said several times, the person who doesn't want to be forgiven, the person who isn't willing to be molded, the person who can't change. As Brother John Carter says in the epistle to the Romans, there comes a time in a man's biography when at last he who will not change, cannot change. And that's the man that God can't forgive, because he doesn't want to be forgiven. And another interesting thing in this two talks about the two different kinds of pots that Jeremiah gave in the time of Jehoiakim is that, and I'll just leave this with you for deeper thought, in the 18th chapter, after he'd been down to see the soft clay that could be molded, he gives an interesting principle of prophecy that I'd be interested if you'd think about and tell me what it means sometime. Not because I want to know what you think in the sense of, you know, teacher asking class as it were, but because I'm not sure what it means and I want to have the benefit of your opinions. God says whenever I announce that a certain nation or kingdom, verse 7 of chapter 18, is to be taken up and destroyed, then if that nation renounces its evil ways, I will not destroy it as I had planned. And if I announce that I will make a certain nation strong and great, but then that nation changes its mind and turns to evil and refuses to obey me, then I too will change my mind and not bless that nation as I had said I would. What it's saying is that prophecy is conditional, that the purpose of prophecy is to get people to change their minds, and if people do change their minds, then God will change his mind like he did with Jonah and Nineveh, and Jonah didn't like it when God changed his mind and decided not to destroy the Ninevites. Now the problem is just where to fit that in, because obviously we use the prophets and we say the Bible says that this is going to happen, and we use this, and this is part of our Bible preaching. And it's right that we should preach like that, but somebody could come back and say yes, but Jeremiah 18 says that if people change, then God won't do it. Now does that mean that if in the result of gospel preaching, some of the nations changed, that God would delay his judgment a bit longer? Some brethren have said that, and that raises other puzzles, doesn't it? Don't be frightened of puzzles, think them through, they're good things to do at Bible classes. However, there's an obvious sense in which some prophecies are conditional, and if the nation listens to the prophecy, then it doesn't come to pass until they stop listening to it, because there's such a downward curve in human nature that even if they do repent for a time, they usually slip eventually, maybe that's the answer. Well, that's no time to go adding problems, but I thought I'd like to just drop that one out. Now I want to come back to the penknife episode in the fourth year of King Jehoiakim, and probably this is as far as we can go today, having a look at the actual situation that Jeremiah experienced with Jehoiakim on this occasion when he wrote down in a scroll all the things that he'd been saying up till then. This is 25th chapter actually as well as 36th, keep your finger in both. You were well ahead of me there, you'd gone on to 36th, which is where the penknife episode is, but I just want to give you the background of the penknife episode, because I think it links in with chapter 25. By the way, that temple speech that we talked about just now, where he stood by the temple, that links in with chapter 26. Can't go back on that and prove it, but if you look at the material in chapter 26 of Jeremiah, where verse 2 says, stand out in front of the temple and make an announcement to all the people of the Lord, you find that chapter 26 just gives you the bare bones of what chapter 7 and possibly 8 and 9 give you in some detail. This is the way to study it, to sort of get these crisscrosses of things, and I hope I've given you enough in those notes of which there's still a number of copies if you've lost yours or anything like that to do some of this crisscrossing. What happens in chapter 26 after that temple episode, he gets put on trial because he's so insulted the nation and the king by what he has done, and you know how some wanted to kill him, but in the end, some people spoke up for him and he wasn't killed, he wasn't executed. That's chapter 26 which relates with chapter 7. Now chapter 25 in the time of Jehoiakim relates with chapter 36 and the penknife episode when the scroll that Baruch had written down was torn to shreds by the king as he sat there with his supercilious grin on his face, which I will not attempt to imitate again. The 25th chapter, and this is interesting because it tells you what was in this scroll. The message for all the people of Judah came from the Lord to Jeremiah during the fourth year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, son of Josiah. This was the year Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon began to reign. For the past 23 years, Jeremiah said, from the 13th year of the reign of Josiah, son of Amon, king of Judah until now, God has been sending me his messages. I have faithfully passed them on to you, but you haven't listened. Again and again through the years, 23 of them, he'd been at it 23 years now, that means 16 plus 23 is 39 now. Each time the message was this, turn from the evil road you are traveling and from the evil things you are doing. But verse 7, you wouldn't listen, you've gone ahead. So now trouble's coming. And in verses 8 and 9, he tells them where the trouble's coming. He says for 23 years, I've been telling you trouble's coming. I've been telling you about a northern army. You thought it was going to be the Scythians. I did too, but it wasn't. Now I can tell you who it's really going to be. And so 23 years after he first started giving these prophecies, he tells them who it's really going to be. Verses 8 and 9, chapter 25. Now the Lord God of hosts says, because you have not listened to me, I will gather together all the armies of the north under Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. I have appointed him as my deputy. You can tell that's an American translation, can't you? My deputy. And I will bring them all against this land and its people and against the other nations near you. And I will utterly destroy you and make you a byword of contempt forever. Notice, by the way, the way in which language is used, God says he will utterly destroy them. And yet in a sense, he doesn't mean it because he's never utterly destroyed Israel or made a full end of them. This is poetic language, the language of permitted exaggeration. I think the English teachers call it hyperbole. This is often used. You must never argue from a poetic figure of speech, otherwise you get into trouble and difficulties. And so this 23 years worth of work is written down into that scroll and chapter 36 tells you all the hubbub of activity that occurred about it. We referred to it. Let's just have a glance at it now. Let's see why God said, write it all down in a scroll. And don't you see how important it's been to us in our day, because the Book of Jeremiah is such a key book. It's the bridge between the Old and the New Testament, because it takes us away from external religion to inward religion. It takes us away from code law to a living spirit. It takes us away from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. That's the work of the Book of Jeremiah. How important it was then to get it written down. And if it hadn't been for the fact that God had said, now I want you to write it all down and have it read to the King. We shouldn't have got this earlier part of Jeremiah. All the things that we've been reading so far were all written down in this scroll. It must have taken them weeks while Jeremiah said, now I remember, and this is where God no doubt inspired his memory to be good, that in the second year of the reign of King Josiah, do you remember Bayrukh, that time when we went up to such and such a place, and I told them this. Ah, it's coming back. This is what I said. No doubt didn't get it word perfect. God wasn't concerned about that. He was concerned with the message. Perhaps he'd even got some notes of what he said. Who's to say that the prophets didn't make notes of what they wanted to say? See, we say divorce them and make them just kind of mechanical robots, just saying what God wanted them to say. Perhaps he consulted his notes that he'd got of this. Perhaps he kept a diary. I don't know. Whatever he did, he sits there and he says, you remember that occasion. Now, this is the thing we said then, wasn't it? And God aids him the way that God does, and Baderick takes it all down. Chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, chapter six, they all get taken down. Do you remember that time just a year or two ago when we went down to the potter's wheel? We must put that down in this scroll. I went down to the potter's wheel and there he took the lump of clay that was soft and made it again into a vessel as it pleased him. And so he went on. He writes all this down. And the keynote, verse two, chapter 36, get a scroll and write down all my messages against Israel, Judah and the other nations. Begin with the first message, God says, back in the days of Josiah and write down every one of them, giving them his instructions. Why? What was the purpose of it? Perhaps when the people of Judah see in writing all the terrible things I will do to them, they will repent and then I can forgive them. That's what we've been saying all the week, isn't it? Perhaps when they see it in writing, there is a sense in which writing hits you a bit. The spoken word is powerful but it's gone, isn't it? Or it used to be before they had tape recorders and things like that. Even then you've got to turn the tape recorder on and so on. You've got a little book in your pocket. You can read it. You can see it and the words stand out. There's power in the written word. Perhaps when they see it in writing, and if you have a discussion with somebody or you're making a contract, let's have it in writing, you say. When they see it in writing, all the terrible things I will do to them, they will repent. Then I can forgive them. Something God can't do. He can't forgive people who don't repent. He can't forgive people who don't want His forgiveness and His whole activity from Genesis to Revelation, from the time of Adam, right through through the Lord Jesus Christ to our own time, the whole activity of God is bent to getting people to repent so that He can forgive them. So Jeremiah sent for Baruch. Nowadays, he'd have got on the phone and say, Baruch, could you come and stay with me a week or two? I've got a lot of writing for you to do. And as Jeremiah dictated, Baruch wrote down all the prophecies. And when all of it was finished, Jeremiah appears to have been a kind of a, not necessarily in custody, but he was having to hide after the things he'd done recently in this temple preaching. So he stays out of the way. He says, you read the scroll in the temple. And again, why? Verse 7, perhaps even yet they will turn from their evil ways and ask the Lord to forgive them before it's too late, even though these curses of God have been pronounced upon them. It's never too late until it is too late. And when's that? When we've become so hardened that we cannot repent. So his object is God's object to get them to ask the Lord to forgive them. Did you ever realize? I didn't until I've been standing here. I have not realized till this very week how full the book of Jeremiah is of the subject of forgiveness. That explains, of course, how when we come to Jeremiah 31 and we come to the new covenant, we're going to find that the purpose of the new covenant of this inward religion, which Jeremiah is putting over, is that their sins and iniquities may be forgiven. And so we know the story after it had been read several times. It must have taken a long while, two or three hours to read it. At last it's read in the king's palace and at last it's put on the fire. But you can't destroy the word of God. So verse 27 of chapter 36, after the king had burned the scroll, the Lord said to Jeremiah, verse 37, chapter 36, get another scroll and write everything just as you did before. And say to this king, the Lord says you burned the scroll because it said the king of Babylon would destroy this country and everything in it. And now the Lord adds this concerning you, Jehoiakim king of Judah. He shall have no one to sit upon the throne of David. His dead bodies shall be thrown out to the hot sun and the frosty nights. And I will punish him and his family and his officials because of their sins for they wouldn't listen to my warnings. Verse 32, then Jeremiah took another scroll and dictated again to Baruch all he'd written before. Only this time the Lord added a lot more. And of course we've got quite a lot of that lot more in our book of Jeremiah. And there we must leave it, having seen the curse of the religion which is purely external, the curse of a situation where because the religion is external, people's hearts are not softened and God cannot remould them. So just bend our heads in a closing word of prayer. Our Father in heaven, we thank Thee for this study. We thank Thee for the words that come echoing down the ages to us. And we would beg of Thee to take us as we are and mold us by the power of Christ into the shape of Christ through Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Transcript

This is the voice of Wilbraham. The Eastern Christadelphian Bible School presents one of a series of Bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 convocation at Wilbraham. Brother Edgar Willey of Canock Staffordshire, England has chosen as his theme, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Us. Here is Brother Willey as he begins the fourth address entitled, I am in anguish, I write in pain, bearing the sins of others. Well, we resume our study of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, not just the book, but the man. Jeremiah, not just as Jeremiah, but as he brings us to Jesus. And Jeremiah, not just as Jeremiah, but also as he through Jesus enlarges our own experience and brings us into closer fellowship with God. And over the last three days, if you remember, we had a general survey and then we went into the early speeches and talks that Jeremiah made in the time of Josiah when this Reformation was being engaged in. And in spite of the enthusiasm that Josiah the King was putting into it, Jeremiah had to come forward with an unpopular message. Just talking to the youngsters, I realized what a tremendous thing that was for Jeremiah and the way in which he said at the beginning, Oh Lord, I am too young. We worked out that he was only 16. Quite something to start telling a nation that their ways were evil when he was only 16 himself. We may have got our sums wrong, but at least it enables you to know why he said, Lord, I am too young for this. And nevertheless, he pursues his course. Well now, we're going to go over the whole sweep of his various periods, but much of what we will say today will be in the Jehoiakim period. Yesterday we looked at the Jehoiakim period, didn't we? And we saw Jehoiakim with the temple speech. Somebody asked me how I could be sure that Chapter 7 and Chapter 26 both record that temple speech when Jeremiah stood by the gates of the temple and told them it's all very well for you to say the temple, the temple, the temple, but you're just trusting in externals instead of trusting in the living God. The reason I say that I believe, but of course you remember that wind that blew all the papers all over the place. Well, you know, it may not have happened that way, but this idea that the book of Jeremiah is so far out of order so you can only just gather hints together and try to put it in order for yourself. And I've tried to give a bit of help in those handouts that you've got of which there are still more copies here for you to get afterwards if you want. Jeremiah 7, one of the great messages in the full speech, I think we've got the full speech that he did at the temple in Jeremiah 7 and in verse 14 he says, Therefore will I do unto this house which is called by my name wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. So he refers back to what happened to the sanctuary at Shiloh and says that just as Shiloh was moved out, so will Jerusalem be moved out. And likewise in chapter 26 where he's told to say the same things, verse 2, stand in the court of the Lord's house, he's been told to stand in the same place, and speak unto all the cities of Judah which come to worship in the Lord's house all the words that I command thee to speak. And then I think in chapter 26 all you've got is a little summary of what is presented in fuller detail in chapter 7. And so he says, verse 6, if you don't listen, then will I make this house like Shiloh and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth. So chapter 26, verse 6, tied in with chapter 7, verse 14, suggests that it's the same occasion. And if it's the same occasion, it fits in because it comes right at the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim when the reformation would still be there, they'd still be going up to the temple. And in that way it's probably the best way to bring those two together, but there are other views. Now if this is the case, then the long speech recorded in chapter 7 is what caused them to put him on trial. And the priests and the prophets said to the princes and the people, verse 11, this man is worthy to die, for he hath prophesied against this city as you have heard with your ears. And that's interesting, the way the people grouped, it was the priests and the prophets, the false prophets, who ganged up against him, but it was the people and the princes who came out on his side and said, no, you don't kill him, he might be telling us some truth. And the prophets, of course, they're in our pursuance of our object of trying to get a picture of the living characteristics of people. You haven't got to think of false prophets as people who said, ah, let's go out and make an easy penny now, let's see if we can go and get some merchandise by saying the things that people want to hear. It's more subtle than that. They probably kidded themselves into believing the message they gave, and as I said yesterday, they would use prophecies like the prophecy of Jeremiah, of Isaiah, where Isaiah in a different period had promised that they would be cared for. So people don't really sit down and say, I'm going to be apostate, but they get led into it, which of course is the great danger of any sort of apostasy, it's more subtle. And they still believed in Yahweh, the God of Israel did these prophets, but they thought that their interpretation of what God was doing was a better interpretation than the interpretation of Jeremiah. And of course people prefer the popular message than the unpopular message that Jeremiah was giving. Well now we saw these unpopular messages, we saw him in the Josiah period, stressing that the sin of Judah was written with an iron pen, and showing to them their need for redemption. And then we saw yesterday this reliance on external means of worship and saying to themselves that this was the way in which salvation was to be had, and regarding their outward activities as a kind of passport to the good things that God might have. And right through there is the defect with the Josiah reformation and with the reign of King Jehoiakim, there is a defect, the early part of Jehoiakim's reign, that they were trying to organize people into being good. Organization is necessary and it clears your life for example, but you can never organize people into being good. Their goodness has got to be caused to spring forth from within. And this is the great work of Christianity, the great work of the new covenant to ensure that God's mind is molding a person so that a new power is generated from within. And this is the whole failure of externalism, the whole failure of trying to organize people into behaving themselves, instead of them learning to depend on the spirit of the living God. Well now, what I want to do now is to turn to the personal feelings of Jeremiah, some of which we have seen. Under the heading, fourth talk, I am in anguish, I writhe in pain, bearing the sins of others. And if we are concerned about others, then there will be a price to pay. You know, preaching isn't just giving a nice lot of answers to difficult questions. Preaching is really yearning to see the other person come round. And teaching in the Ecclesia, if you can use a different word, preaching, preaching those outside, teaching, teaching those inside. But it's the same emotion, it has a cost, if we are going about it in the spirit of the master. And there will be times when we feel deflated, there will be times when we feel elated, there will be times when we wish we hadn't got the duty to preach and to teach, and there will be times when we feel real sore inside for the unresponsiveness of people. And in Jeremiah we have all these emotions going. So what I thought today would be, we perhaps be helped if we gathered together what I have called the confessions of Jeremiah. These little bits that he puts in, which show how he felt about it, which illustrate what a burden it was upon his shoulders as he wrestled with the sins of Israel. This is an attitude here, and all we're talking about all this week is attitudes. Attitudes to preaching, attitudes to teaching, attitudes to seeking to save that which is lost. In other words the spirit of the Lord Jesus is largely in Jeremiah mixed occasionally with some of the perhaps natural reactions that he felt from time to time which are absent in the Lord Jesus because his spirit was never one of personal vengeance. Although of course he is a great judge, is the Lord Jesus Christ, and he does spend quite a bit of time talking about judgment to come. Well now let us drop in then, it doesn't matter which period these are, though the first few are in the period of Josiah. And let us, even though we may have mentioned some of them before, let us listen to Jeremiah pleading with God, telling God how fed up he is with the task he has, because you remember that little thing that was put in the Wilbraham Wayfarer yesterday about prayer, let us approach boldly unto the throne of grace, how it's a wonderful thing to have a friend that you can say absolutely anything to, and such a friend we have in Jesus, such a friend we have in God. And while blended with reverence, yet it is a fact that we are invited to approach boldly unto the throne of grace. And the way Jeremiah, he is so uninhibited, he says just anything to God, almost to the point that you think now, just a bit careful Jeremiah, fancy talking to God like that. But if it's how he felt God knew anyway, so by sharing his feelings, even his wrong ones with God, then God could do something about it to help mold Jeremiah. This is much better than just using formal kind of words and saying to God the kind of things we think that he, as the great God of heaven and earth, ought to be having from us. Give him our heart, give him the wheat, yes, let him have the chaff as well so that he can blow it away. That's just what Jeremiah did. And 4th chapter, 10th verse, in the midst of his early preaching against those Israelites who were being warned by the invasion of the Scythians, we know how we've said it actually didn't come to pass, the Babylonian invasion for another 20 years, in the midst of it, verse 10, Then I said, but Lord, the people have been deceived by what you said, for you promised great blessings on Jerusalem, yet the sword is even now poised to strike them dead. He's having a struggle, is Jeremiah. He says, Lord, you've made me tell them these unpopular things, yet earlier it was you who inspired Isaiah to say that things were going to go well. You know, Lord, you really led them up the garden path. That doesn't sound exactly reverent, but you see, we have these thoughts, we have our doubts and we have our fears and our ambiguities in the understanding of God's ways, and we bottle them up. And any psychologist will tell you it's bad to bottle a thing up, better bring it out into the open, and that's what Jeremiah did. And God didn't say, Jeremiah, you mustn't accuse me of deceiving. He dealt with the situation and led Jeremiah to understand how that he wasn't deceiving them. He led Jeremiah to a better understanding. Then in verse 19, of course, comes the title of this particular talk. My heart, my heart, I writhe in pain, my heart pounds within me. I cannot be still because I have heard, O my soul, the blast of the enemy's trumpets and the enemy's battle cry. I didn't mean to say at this stage they were outside Jerusalem, but by his inspired poetic imagination, he could see the terrible disasters that were going to come as if they were already there. And his heart just thump, thump, thump, thumped as he thought of it. He loved his people so much. When did our hearts last thump, when we tried to plead with somebody to go the right way and forsake the wrong way? Because real preaching and real teaching can leave you absolutely, particularly personal teaching. In one sense, it's easier to talk to a big group of people. It's when you're engaged in personal evangelism and personal guidance work, one with another, that the real pressure comes in our own day, I think. And you can be very tired after an activity of that kind when you're sort of wrestling for the soul of others. That's what Jeremiah was doing. This is what the Lord Jesus is. That's why he sometimes is quite tired, but he still went up in a mountain apart to pray and frankly tell God the help that he needed. Now in the eighth chapter of Jeremiah, still in the possibly here in the early Jehoiakim period, either end of Josiah beginning Jehoiakim. And in the fourteenth verse, we have the sort of problem that he was faced with. The people will say, why should we wait here to die? Come, let us go up to the walled cities and perish there. For the Lord our God has decreed our doom and given us a cup of poison to drink because of all our sins. We expected peace, but no peace came. We looked for health, but there was only terror. So again, Jeremiah looks out with the people upon this dreadful situation. And we did actually quote this either yesterday or the day before, but we're trying to bring them all together. Verse eighteen, Jeremiah says, My grief is beyond healing. My heart is broken. The Lord Jesus Christ is absolutely there, isn't he? Think of the things that Jesus said. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I don't think we need to go into any very complex explanations of what the Lord Jesus said on the cross. He felt the full weight of his involvement with human sins. He felt the full desolation of separation from God. Although he knew his father still loved him and cared for him, he felt because he knew sin as no other did, he felt what it was like to be cut off from God as he was about to be cut off from God in the act of death. And so from his heart there comes what sounds almost a criticism of God. My heart, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And Jeremiah and Jesus have so much in common in these various attitudes that they have, seeking to understand what God is doing, seeking the forgiveness of God. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. I plead for them, says Jeremiah. Recognizing the inevitability of judgment. In the case of Jeremiah, with a bit of bitterness. In the case of Jesus, without bitterness. And yet he could say, good were it for that man if he had not been born. Or, ye generation of vipers. John the Baptist said that, Jesus said it. Oh, you faithless generation. So Jesus wasn't all sugar, it wasn't even all forgiveness. Although the purpose in accusing them was that they might be brought to forgiveness. To keep the Lord Jesus in our minds as we listen to Jeremiah. Keep ourselves in mind in our work with each other and with those outside. And we will have the mood of the heart of God being brought to us. So Jeremiah says, my grief is beyond healing. My heart is broken. Listen to the weeping of my people all across the land. Where is the Lord? they ask. Has God deserted us? Verse 21. I weep for the hurt of my people. I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief. Chapter 9 is the chapter which begins with him wishing he'd got more tear ducts. Because the feeling he's got, the heaviness in his heart. There aren't enough tears in his tear ducts. To express the heaviness of heart he feels. That's why you get, oh that my eyes were a fountain of tears. I would weep forever. Beautiful touching poetry, you know. I would sob day and night for the slain of my people. For the consequences that their sin was bringing. And then as we saw on one of the days in the next breath. Oh that I could go away and forget them. Oh that I could but I can't, he's saying, you see. And live in some wayside shack in the desert for they're all adulterous, treacherous men. And the particular feature of the treachery that he brings out here is their use of their tongues. Their gossipy ways, their untrue ways. The ways in which they were stabbing one another in the back with words. So that you couldn't rely or trust upon anyone. There was no one that you could feel was a complete friend to whom you could pour out anything. Because anything you said was likely to be taken down and used in evidence against you. As they say in the British police force. And so that was the mood of Israel at that time. That was the mood in the time of the Lord Jesus Christ. When he said, was it not written, a man's foes shall be his own household. And so often it is written of the Lord Jesus Christ that they watched him. Verse 10. Sobbing and weeping, says Jeremiah. I point to their mountains and pastures. For now they are desolate without a living soul. Already the captivity hasn't come yet. But the invasion that is threatening has caused them to come out of their farms and tend to go into the cities. Gone is all the lowing of cattle. Gone the birds and wild animals. All have fled and he knows that worse is to come. And I will turn Jerusalem into heaps of ruined houses. And Jesus said, the day will come when the forts will be mounted against Jerusalem. And there shall be not one stone standing upon another. And so he says, verse 12. Lord I know you've told me to give these messages. Lord I know it's my duty to do so but I wish I could understand it all. Who is wise enough to understand all this? We want a bit of that humility when we're preaching and when we're seeking to help one another. Realize the limitations of our understanding. Who is wise enough to understand all this? Where is the Lord's messenger to explain it? Why is the land a wilderness so that no one dares even to travel through? You see the prophets weren't machines. They give the message. And then they think about the message. And of course Peter says, doesn't it, it was revealed to them that they prophesied not for themselves but they prophesied unto us. In other words many of the things they said had a hidden message pointing to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as they sort of scratched their heads about the very things they said in prayer, little prayers that would go up, Lord I've told him but what did it really mean? And God didn't give the answer by just sort of winding up a little message in their heads or by sending an angel clad in shining white, here you are Jeremiah, this is what it meant. No, they had to learn through the experiences. So God gave them answers by experiences and he expected Jeremiah to use his head and think about the experiences. And this is what it's all about. Christianity isn't just a nice little package that you've got it and you've got it once and for all. We have to exercise our minds. And this is what our ecclesial Bible classes should give us the opportunity to do, to exercise our minds where we needn't be frightened of bringing out our problem and together we help to iron it out. Let us go for a less fearful atmosphere in our ecclesial life for it. In that way we will get the help that the living Lord Jesus is ready to give us. So he says, Lord who is wise enough to understand this? And he seeks to understand, he seeks to grow in grasp. Well now that was the ninth chapter, still apparently in the period of Josiah or ordinary Jehoiachim. Now in the tenth chapter, Jeremiah's losing his confidence. After all you've got to have some confidence as well as humility. God given confidence. And a job like Jeremiah got took a lot of confidence, but the confidence was not in himself. So let's go in at verse 18 here. Oh I like verse 17 in this version. This is Jeremiah talking, verse 17, chapter 10. Dramatic language isn't it? And then verses 19 and 20 should be as it were in quotes. And these are the things that Judah says. Let me rebuild my house. That's an imaginary way of showing Israel troubled by the things that are coming upon them. And Jeremiah picks up his ears, verse 22 he says, Listen, hear the terrible sound of great armies coming from the north. I can hear them on the march in his poetic imagination. And then he says, still the unwilling prophet. Oh Lord, I know it's not within the power of man to map his life and plan his course. So you correct me Lord, but please be gentle. Don't do it in your anger, for I would die. Pour out your fury on the nations who don't obey the Lord, for they have destroyed Israel and made a wasteland of this entire country. I know we use that as a text, it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. It's quite a correct text to use, but what Jeremiah is saying, Lord, I don't understand where I'm going. I don't understand where Israel is going. I know we can't sort things out for ourselves. It's not within the power of man to map his life and plan his course. But Lord, I know you're correcting me and training me and chastising me. And of course, no chastisement for the present seemeth pleasant, says God. But don't pour out just fury on Judah, Lord. Can I please make a point, Lord? He says, you're destroying Judah and Israel, but what about the wicked nations around? They're really worse, Lord, aren't they? So here's Jeremiah now pleading for Israel. And before long, he's back to the opposite of pleading for them. Well now, Chapter 11, we looked at pretty thoroughly, because that was the place where there was this conspiracy. This conspiracy where they were going to put Jeremiah to death, and that was the time when the very Jeremiah who'd said, Lord, don't kill Judah off, now says, do kill them off, at least in Anathoth. One or two have commented on this, and it's right, this is one of the sort of problems you can think about. See, the record is inspired. That does not mean to say that everything Jeremiah said was always the best thing to say. And yet, even when he is saying, Lord, they deserve this, that and the other, as one brother put it yesterday to me, in a sense, Jeremiah was a bit ahead of God himself, because in the end, God did bring judgment to bear, but always with mercy, with a remnant left. Now, definitely into the reign of Jehoiakim, this seems to be the period when Jeremiah, if you remember, when he sent that scroll, which the king cut up with the penknife, he was shut up, it says. Now that either means he was in prison, and this translation takes it he was in prison, or it means he was keeping out of the way so that he didn't get in prison. I think it's the latter, that he was keeping out of the way so that he didn't get in prison. So he got a lot of time on his hands, because he couldn't go out in the streets and preach, because he'd have got arrested, and it's this when he got really depressed. One of the antidotes to depression is to be up and be doing. Activity, that gets rid of depression, but here, Jeremiah couldn't engage in much activity, he'd got to be out of the way, in hiding. And so it was at this time that he felt particularly upset, and in verse 15, he still sends messages to them, verse 15 of chapter 13, speaking of Israel and Judah, Oh, that you were not so proud and stubborn. There's still this note of pleading in it, this note of wishing they were different, not this note of rejoicing in equity. Then you would listen to the Lord, for he has spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God. Perhaps Baruch smuggled this message out and took it to them. Give glory to the Lord your God before it is too late, before he causes deep, impenetrable darkness to fall upon you, so that you stumble and fall upon the dark mountains. Then when you look for light, you will find only terrible darkness. Do you still refuse to listen? Then in loneliness my breaking heart shall mourn because of your pride. My eyes will overflow with tears because the Lord's flock shall be carried away as slaves. He's depressed, he loved his people. In loneliness. He's depressed, he loved his people. In loneliness. You can be lonely in a crowd even in this mood. In loneliness my breaking heart shall mourn because of your pride. That's the spirit of Jeremiah. The 14th chapter gives you the occasion of a famine that had arisen, a temporary famine. These things happened if there was a bad harvest and of course the prophets always saw these things as judgments and Jeremiah prays. This is one of his prayers where he isn't saying punish them, where he's saying, Lord don't punish them. And notice how these brethren of old times, like Daniel, like Nehemiah, like Ezra, they associated themselves with the sin of the people. They didn't put themselves on a pedestal. One never likes to hear an exhortation where a brother says to the brethren and sisters, you do this. Or where somebody writes an article and sends it round and says, the trouble with the brotherhood today, or the trouble with you today, not that people usually write, they usually say the brotherhood, but they treat it as them. Them and you. If we're going to criticise, we should say us. The trouble with us today is us and so. Because we're all involved. Any troubles that there are, any failures to live up to the standards in Christ Jesus, we each make our little contribution to the fact that we're not overcoming our problems. Even if we're not contributing to the problem, if we're not contributing to the overcoming of the various problems, then in that way we are involved. And we should therefore never criticise the brotherhood, them, you, but us. And that is the spirit that Jeremiah shows here in chapter 14, verse 7. Oh Lord, we have sinned against you grievously. And Jeremiah's a bit like Moses and he says, yet help us for the sake of your own reputation. Oh hope of Israel, our saviour in times of trouble. Why are you a stranger to us, as one passing through the land who is merely stopping for the nights? It's a discussion with God, where he's asking God why it is that God is so absent from Israel. May I comment on verse 8? Oh hope of Israel, our saviour in times of trouble. It was for the hope of Israel that Paul was bound with a chain. We sometimes use this phrase, the hope of Israel, to describe the promises made to the fathers, the promises made to David, as fulfilled in the restoration of Israel and the final establishment of the Kingdom of God. There is a sense, of course, that is what Israel hoped for. But have you noticed, and this was pointed out by Brother Alfred Nichols in an editorial in the Christadelphian some 18 months ago, have you noticed that here in Jeremiah, the hope of Israel is a person, the one in whom Israel had hope. Oh hope of Israel, our saviour in the time of trouble. So that when it says on the Christadelphian that we are a community based on the hope of Israel, it doesn't just mean based on certain doctrines about the coming Kingdom, although those are included in it, but it means we are a community based upon the one who Israel were looking to come and save them and who know that he has come. Even the Lord Jesus Christ is here in the sense of the living Christ working in us and will come. So the phrase the hope of Israel is a very personal one about the saviour God manifested in the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh hope of Israel, our saviour in the time of trouble. That just in passing is one of those lovely little expressions that you get in the writings and words of Jeremiah. And God then says to him, I don't know how God says these things to him, whether it's just a consciousness within himself, I'd rather suspect it wasn't an angel being sent. Verse 11, the Lord told me again, don't ask me any more to bless this people, don't pray for them any more. Now things are pretty dreadful when that's said. And then he says, verse 13, Then I said, O Lord God, God said, then I said, then he said, then I said, to Jeremiah, prayer is a conversation with God. And we don't know, perhaps you might have some clues that I've missed as to how these answers came. But for us, prayer is a conversation with God. So you say to God about a particular situation, Lord, please help so-and-so in their problem. Please help this situation to improve. Please grant that the light of truth may get into so -and-so's heart. And you pause and you think right round that situation. Then a scripture pops into your mind that's relevant to it. Can't that be one of the ways in which God actually answers prayers? Have you never had the experience where as a result of your praying, you had a very definite sense of a certain scripture being more meaningful than you've ever noticed it before? You've gone and followed that scripture. Is that how the Spirit of the Living Lord works? Very often in our own day. Aiding the black words on the white pages with some living power. Well, I don't know exactly how the conversation worked out in Jeremiah's case, but I'm sure we ought to think of prayer more as a living conversation between us and the Lord Jesus Christ and the Lord God. I always bring Jesus and God together in this because we can never pray without being conscious of the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. And personally I'm not too worried about technicalities as whether prayer should be addressed verbally to God or whether you can ever say, Lord Jesus. Certainly Stephen said, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit when he was being stoned. And there are other instances where Jesus is addressed by name in prayer. God and the Father and the Son are so united that I don't think we need be pernickety about that. That's why I'm quite happy about hymns that directly address Jesus because he is so closely involved in the person and work of the Father. Well, the whole point of course is that we can only give specimens of these and so the conversation goes on, the prayer goes on and we get God admitting that he himself feels upset about the circumstance. And you almost get the feeling in this prayer in chapter 14 that the God of heaven and Jeremiah are having a good cry together about the circumstances of Israel. If only into our prayers we could get that sort of feeling then these confessions of Jeremiah, as they're sometimes called, will have got into our lives. And of course they're there, aren't they, all the time in the New Testament when Paul says, making mention in my prayers, making mention of you in my prayers, making mention of you in my prayers, making mention of you in my prayers. He must have been on his knees or whatever posture he sat in or stood in, and whenever he prayed he must have been praying a long while all the people he had to mention as he thought of all the problems that people had got. And so Jeremiah likewise making mention of Israel in his prayers. Now in the 15th chapter we have another one of these very personal chapters. God says, verse 6, You have forsaken me and turned your backs upon me. Therefore I will clench my fists against you to destroy you. I am tired of always giving you another chance. God's got patience that gets exhausted in the end, or near to it as it were. And then, verse 10, Jeremiah says, because he gets tired of all the nasty things people are saying against him as he gives these unpopular messages, What sadness is mine, my mother? Oh, that I had died at birth, for I am hated everywhere I go. I am neither a creditor, soon to foreclose, nor a debtor, refusing to pay. Yet they all curse me, you know, two people that are unpopular. Somebody you owe money to, or somebody who owes you money. That's what he's saying there. That's where the King James Version sometimes wraps it up and you don't see the humorous point. Well, it's grim humor. He says, I don't owe them any money and they don't owe me any money, yet they hate me just as if I did. I wish I were dead, he says. Well, that isn't right. But who of us are going to say, Jeremiah, that was very wrong of you to wish you were dead. Same, of course, with Job. These people really got right down to rock bottom. And at times in our lives we do. And when we do, then it's a comfort to know that in the Scriptures we have the examples of those who also have hit rock bottom. And in heaven we have one who himself, for our sakes, hit rock bottom and went right through the valley of the shadow of death. Because he brings together and welds the experiences of all these people of all ages into one. Well, let them curse, says Jeremiah. Lord, you know how I have pleaded with you on their behalf? How I have begged you to spare those enemies of mine? See the kind of seesaw of Jeremiah's thought? He says, you know, I've begged you to spare those enemies of mine, because on another occasion he didn't. He begged God to kill those enemies of his. Then Jeremiah replied, verse 15, after God had told him there's a lot more trouble round yet, Lord, you know it's for your sake that I am suffering. For your sake I have borne reproach. They are persecuting me, because I have proclaimed your word to them. Don't let them kill me. Rescue me from their clutches, and give them what they deserve. This helps us, doesn't it, to understand that we are never going to achieve a nice steady platform in the truth where everything is going to go along like that. We're going to be down and we're going to be up. We're going to be down and we're going to be up. And the Lord looks in pity and mercy upon us, knowing exactly all about it, having told us that this is what the Christian life is about, even before you could call it the Christian life. And then in the midst of this, Jeremiah says, your words are what sustain me. They are food to my hungry soul. They bring joy to my sorrowing heart and delight me. How proud I am to bear your name, O Lord. He goes from one thing to the other, doesn't he? Wish I were dead. Lord, you know how I want you to spare them. Lord, I wish you'd kill them. Lord, I'm full of joy because of your word. Verse 17. I have not joined the people in their merry feasts. I sit alone beneath the hand of God. I burst with indignation at their sins, yet you have failed me. Oh, Jeremiah, when is he saying that to God? Yet you have failed me in my time of needs. This is a bit of the char that needed blowing out what Jeremiah said. But he said it. God didn't hold it against him, the fact that he said it. He was honest and uninhibited with God. Yet you have failed me in my time of need. You have let them keep right on with all their persecutions. Will they never stop hurting me? Your help, God, is as uncertain as a seasonal mountain brook. That's what that verse means. Sometimes it's a flood and I get plenty of help from you. And sometimes, like that brook, it's as dry as a bone and I get no help from you. And then the Lord replied. Have you ever felt, I think when we pray those sort of prayers, we probably don't ever put them into words like that, but we sit there or we kneel there or we go for a walk in the countryside and we're thinking that way. And then in some way or other the Lord replies to us. Perhaps we get into touch with a brother or sister who lifts our soul or rebukes us when we need it or we read some portion of scripture that happens to help us at the time. But anyway, whatever way God answered Jeremiah, this is what he said in this translation. The Lord replied, Stop this foolishness and talk some sense. Only if you return to trusting me will I let you continue as my spokesman. You are to influence them, not let them influence you. That's that verse which says, you return to them, not them to you, whichever way round it is. But the meaning of it is, you are to influence them, not let them influence you. Don't let them get you down, Jeremiah. You keep at it, otherwise they won't let you work for me. And Jeremiah just said, I wish you didn't let me work for you, Lord, because it gets me down. I mean, it's hard to sort of, what we're trying to do is, we're trying to really look inside a man's mind. And the comfort we get out of this is, that the next time your mind's like a seesaw, and in my own experience, I know that'll happen within a week, you'll think of Jeremiah and you'll be encouraged. And remember that the Lord Jesus Christ, although he never sinned in thought or deed or word, yet nevertheless had these ups and downs and these seesaws himself. And sometimes he was depressed and sometimes he was joyous. Chapter 16 tells you how Jeremiah was instructed not to marry and have children, to be a sign to Israel that the time was not a time of joy, but it was a time of considerable sorrow. Chapter 17, we can read for ourselves. That was chapter 16 where he was told he couldn't marry. Again, how he was told, we don't know. It might have been that just God made it so evident to him that the time was inappropriate, that the sort of job he'd got was not one that would enable him to live an ordinary life, just as the Lord Jesus Christ had to forego the normal happinesses of normal human life. In chapter 17, at verse 15, well verse 14, Lord, you alone can heal me, you alone can save, and my praises are for you alone. Men scoff at me and say, what is this word of the Lord you keep talking about? If these threats of yours are really from God, why don't they come true? Because at this particular time, Babylon hadn't arrived and hadn't captured Jerusalem. Lord, verse 16, I don't want the people crushed by terrible calamity. That's the other side of him. The plan is yours, not mine. It's your message I've given them, not my own. I don't want them doomed. Lord, don't desert me now. You alone are my hope. Bring confusion and trouble on all those that persecute me. You see, I don't want them doomed. Bring confusion and trouble on all those who persecute me, but give me peace. Yes, bring double destruction upon them. Then the Lord said, Jeremiah, stop all this, go and do some work. And he sends him off at this particular stage to go and make one of his rare appearances. Perhaps the king wasn't around at the time, and although it does say, this is at the gate where the king goes out, and then at each of the gates, so perhaps he was now to take a risk and go forth. Although, of course, there's always this problem of the pages that blew all over the place that we're never quite sure what order we're in. Now, that's chapter 17. I see the time is gone, so I must just pick up just one final one of these confessions, and then we'll pick up finally with one tomorrow. Chapter 20. This is Jeremiah in the stocks. So he's now come out of his hiding, and he's been arrested. Verse 2, Pashua, the priest in charge of the temple of the Lord, arrested Jeremiah and had him whipped. I wonder what that says in the King James version there. Smote him, you see. You think smote him just smacked his face or something. Had him whipped. I mean, that's the sense of the word. And put in the stocks, because it brings you to somebody else who was put in the stocks, doesn't it? Paul, for example, at Benjamin Gate near the temple. He left in there all night. I don't know what time of the year it was, whether it was hot or cold, but either way, it wasn't very nice. And the next day when Pashua finally released him, Jeremiah said, Pashua, the Lord has changed your name. He says from now on to call you the man who lives in terror, for the Lord will send terror on you. So he's still quite courageous. And as for you, Pashua, you and all your family will become slaves in Babylon and die there. That's his courage. Straight out of the stocks and back at it again. Then verse 7. He gets on his own again. Then I said, Oh Lord, you deceived me when you promised me your help. I have to give them your messages because you're stronger than I am. He couldn't hold back. But now I'm the laughing stock of the city, mocked by all. You've never once let me speak a word of kindness to them. That's a wonderful insight into the character. He didn't like this kind of thing. He wished he could say these things. And it fits in with the King James Version. For since I spake, I cried out, I cried out, violence and spoil. What he's really saying, The only thing you've let me say is unpleasant things, Lord. So this paraphraser puts it the other way around. You've never once let me speak a word of kindness to them. Always it is disaster and horror and destruction. And no wonder they scoff and mock and make my name a household joke. People are saying, Ha, there's old Jeremiah again. He's at it again. Jeremiah, you got a good message today or is it the same old bad one? That's the kind of thing he had to put up with all the time. There's one where they made a pun on the burden of the Lord. What's the burden of the Lord today, Jeremiah, they said? You'll feel it as a burden in due course, Jeremiah answered them back. Verse 9, he's praying to God. And I can't quit, for if I say I'll never mention the Lord, never more speak in his name, then his word in my heart is like fire that burns in my bones and I can't hold it in any longer. Yet on every side I hear their whispered threats and I'm afraid. We'll report you, they say, just as they watched for Jesus. Even those who were my friends are watching me, waiting for a fatal slip. He'll trap himself, they say, and then we'll get our revenge on him, just as they said of Jesus. O Lord of hosts, verse 12, who knows those who are righteous and examines the deepest thoughts of hearts and minds, let me see your vengeance on them, for I have committed my calls to you. There's a mixture there of something which is quite correct and proper. God will have vengeance on his enemies with a little bit of the personal irritation. Therefore, I will sing out in thanks to the Lord. What? Jeremiah thought you were fed up and miserable. I will sing out in thanks to the Lord. Praise him, for he has delivered me, poor and needy, from my oppressors. I don't think that's in the right place, that verse, somehow. Perhaps this was a bit that got, because it goes on. Cursed be the day I was born. Cursed be the man who brought my father news that a son was born. Let that messenger be destroyed like the cities of old which God overthrew without mercy. Terrify him all day long with battle shouts, because he did not kill me at my birth. Oh, that I had died within my mother's womb, that it had been my grave. Why was I ever born, for my life has been but trouble and sorrow and shame? Maybe, as these have all got out of order, that he sat a bit like that and then realized he was up the wrong line and said, verse 13, Therefore I will sing out in thanks to the Lord. Praise him, for he has delivered me, poor and needy, from my oppressors. There's comfort, isn't there, in a man like this? A real, live man who battles with the problems of life, who's given a burden almost too heavy to be borne, to speak the unpopular word of God to men, to grieve over the sins of Israel, to find his heart throbbing as he fondly gazes upon the people he loves, to be tossed to and fro by all the tumultuousness of human emotion, now fierceness, now tenderness, now love, now anger, now nearly hatred, now depression, now rejoicing, all these things. But all the time he's got his safety valve, all the time he knows he can go in prayer. Even all those years before the Lord Jesus Christ, Jeremiah approached boldly under the throne of grace to find help in time of need. Shall we just briefly do that, brothers and sisters, bending our heads? Our Father, we thank Thee for the company in which we have been this morning as we have meditated upon the inner experiences of Thy prophet of old, which mirror the experiences of the Lord Jesus Christ and all Thy faithful saints of all time. Help us, Father, to take this privilege that Thou hast given us of prayer, that we may walk with Thee in all our ups and all our downs, that we may sometimes stand on the mountaintop and rejoice, and when we fall into the trough of depression and despair, we may remember that Thou art a pity in God and that the Lord Jesus Christ has been touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Bless us, guide us, and give us strength as we walk hand in hand with Thee through life in Jesus Christ, our Savior, the hope of Israel. Amen.

Transcript

This is the voice of Wilbraham. The Eastern Christadelphian Bible School presents one of a series of Bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 convocation at Wilbraham. Brother Edgar Willie of Canock Staffordshire, England has chosen as his theme Jeremiah, Jesus, and Us. Here is Brother Willie as he begins the fifth address entitled A Lamb to the Slaughter, Suffering the Just for the Unjust. Right, well now yesterday we were talking of the inner experiences of Jeremiah. Just to remind you where we've gone this week. First we started with a general survey and we had a look at the whole picture and then we began to break it down. First we looked at Jeremiah's work as a preacher and prophet in the Josiah period when Josiah was trying to put things right and yet it fell to the lot of Jeremiah to say, yes we know you're trying to do things right but for most of you it's just a fake. And then we went on to the period of Jehoiakim and we saw Jeremiah rebuking merely external religion, people who relied on the temple. And we saw how right through his period of rebuking Israel yet in himself he felt nothing but compassion. He shared God's attitude of compassion towards Israel or Judah as he prophesied these prophecies of doom. And then we went on yesterday and we saw the real heart of the man, how he felt himself utterly torn apart by this bearing the burden of others' sins. Because as we saw him bearing the burdens of others' sins we saw him really involved as the Lord Jesus Christ is involved in the cares and the sins, although not a sinner, the Lord Jesus, of those he came to save. And we saw in all this a kind of idea as to what sort of attitude we should have towards fellow men and towards our brethren and sisters. An attitude of concern, an attitude of compassion, not a sugary sort of attitude, firm by all means, but the heart of God is one that longs for people to repent. He's there to forgive them if only they'll reach out their hand to receive such forgiveness. This has been the spirit of everything we've seen all this week. And particularly yesterday when we were looking at Jeremiah we saw all the kind of ups and downs that belonged to his personal communion with God. He prays to God just as he feels. He doesn't put on special fancy prayers, but he shares his inmost thoughts, good and bad alike. And in one prayer we found he could contradict himself and move from, I wish I were dead, to, I will praise the Lord. If we got those verses in the right order in the end. And this is how we should treat prayer. As the opportunity to approach boldly under the throne of grace without fear, with godly reverence, and yet with a frankness that God appreciates. Because when we are frank with him then it builds up a kind of relationship with him which is so helpful to our spiritual well-being and it forges the bond. This of course is what happened in Jeremiah's case as we saw all these ups and downs. Lord save Israel, Lord kill them off. Lord I plead for Israel, Lord rebuke them. And so there was a continual seesaw. And likewise with the Lord Jesus. There were times when he said, Oh ye of little faith, how long shall I be with you? Even his tremendous patience was sometimes sorely tried by the blindness and slow of heart to believe which those around him evinced. And there's nothing wrong with that. That was not a sin on the part of the Lord Jesus at times to feel just a little impatient with the extreme insensibility that they manifested. Well now we are moving on out of the realm of Jeremiah's inner mental sufferings to what the outward cost was. We've seen the inward cost. We now want to move to the outward cost. And I've entitled today's talk, A Lamb to the Slaughter, Suffering the Just for the Unjust. Now in this particular period, which falls in the period of Zedekiah, the weak king who was brought on the throne after Jehoiakim had died. And what year was it? 598, Jehoiakim dies. 597, the siege of Jerusalem where Koniah, who was only king for three months, Jehoiakim or Koniah, he surrenders and he's taken into captivity into Babylon. And Zedekiah, another one of the sons of Josiah, is made king and he's put on a solemn oath not to rebel. And Jeremiah's great task during this period is now not merely to teach, instruct, guide on moral and spiritual principles of behaviour in Israel, not merely to rebuke them and denounce and warn, but he is now involved in the politics of Israel. I say Israel, I obviously mean Judah, but the words are interchangeable in a sense. Now Zedekiah, as we saw the other day, is a weak character. And therefore, of course, all the strong characters of the land had their chance to try and work their will upon the king. Where there's a weak ruler, then all the princes tend to want to get in on the act and have their own way. Now Jeremiah himself had built up such fame as a result of his scroll and its treatment at the hand of Jehoiakim, as a result of his many arguments with the king, as a result of his rebuke of the king for his seeking of luxury that he's now quite a figure. He's now no longer a mere young man and a young upstart. He's a man that people feel they've got to reckon with. They may not like him, but they can't ignore him. And it is interesting that in this period, as I say, we don't get any of these prayers where he seems to be in doubt. He seems to have reached now somewhere in his, where would he be, mid-fifties, mid-fifties, he seems to have reached a kind of stability in his own emotional life, though no doubt he still have his ups and downs because you go on having them all your life. But he's more of a father figure in Israel, more settled in himself, and yet his message is still the same. And then there's this weak character, Zedekiah, the man who said when they wanted to put Jeremiah down that sewage tank, that was the time when, which chapter is it, chapter 38, they went to the king and said, Sir, this fellow must die, chapter 38, verse 4. So King Zedekiah agreed, verse 5, chapter 38. All right, he said, do as you like. I can't stop you. You remember, we talked about him on Monday. Later on, Ebed Melek came along and said, look, he'll die down there. So Zedekiah says, all right, go and get him out. So there's no stability in this man. And it set me thinking when I was preparing these talks about the character, because if we've got a rather weak and undecisive character, we can't help it. You know, some people are born tough, some people are born sensitive. You can't make a sensitive person out of a tough one, and you can't make a tough one out of a sensitive one. Now, what we ought to try to do, I think, because we are talking about Jeremiah, Jesus, and us, what we ought to do is we ought to be absolutely honest with ourselves. Don't try and kid ourselves we're tough if we're not. Don't try and kid ourselves we're rather sensitive if we're not. Just face up to whether we're strong characters or weak characters naturally. If we recognize that we're not particularly strong characters, and it's only a minority who are, and you might even say, thank goodness it's only a minority who are strong characters, because strong characters also create problems, don't they? You know, somebody say, I like so and so, he's a real strong character, and somebody else will say about the same person, I can't stand so and so, he's so stubborn. It all depends on your point of view. But if you feel you're the sort of person that finds it difficult to make decisions and say, this is what we'll do. If faced with a problem of the disciplines of life, you find it difficult to stick your neck out and be tough, and so you find yourself getting trodden on a little bit, then you think, oh, how am I going to handle this situation? And you find yourself going into shell of it. Well, that's your temperament. You can't help that, that's what you've inherited. And that was Zedekiah's sort of situation. But there is something we can do about it. Having recognized it, that's stage one. Stage two is to seek the only source of strength, which lies in God, which lies in the Lord Jesus Christ. And to daily say, Lord, I know I'm not a strong character, but you can make me strong. You can go with me all the way, please do. And surround yourself with good, strong friends who have a dose of compassion in them as well, not strong, impatient friends, otherwise they'll get on your nerves, and sort of get the right sort of advisors and the right sort of helpers through life. And that's just what Zedekiah didn't do. He tried to go it in his own strength, but his own strength was weakness. He had no idea of choosing the right friends, and he just went which way these various princes pushed him. And I think this is quite an important little character study that's worth bearing in mind, because we can't all be strong and tough, and many of us find that our lives are a kind of a contradictory mix-up of moments when we're strong and show forth a bit of unexpected strength of character and moments when we're weak in our expression of our character. God takes us as we are. God forgives us our sins, and like the potter's wheel, he'll mould us if we'll let him mould us. In that sense, not having too strong a character is an advantage, because if you're letting the right power mould you, then the moulding will take place effectively. Well, I don't want to spend too much time on Zedekiah, but I thought it was important just to say those few things. Now, as soon as Zedekiah gets on the throne, bound by this oath to be faithful to the king of Babylon, he starts being swayed by the princes who want to get him to break his oath and get together an alliance, a kind of United Nations for the defeat of Babylon. And so an arrangement happens, we read about it in the 27th chapter, whereby a conference is held at Jerusalem. I don't suppose the king thought up the idea, he wasn't that original, but some of his princes arranged this conference. And the first thing I've got to do is to ask you to make a change to the King James Version. And you might only want to do it in pencil until you've checked it. But there is no doubt at all, you know how our statement of faith says, the Bible is wholly inspired except for errors of transcription and translation. Well, this is an error of both transcription and translation, I would think. Verse 1 of chapter 27 should read, In the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah. Now, it must be that, because if you read through the first three verses in the King James Version, in the beginning of the reign of, well, we'll say blank for the moment, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, came this word unto Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Thus saith the Lord to me, Make thee bonds and yokes, and put them upon thy neck, and send them to the king of Edom, king of Moab, king of Ammonites, king of Tyre, king of Sidon, and by the hand of the messengers, which come to Jerusalem, unto Zedekiah, king of Judah. So they could hardly be coming to Zedekiah, king of Judah, if it was in the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim. So it was quite obvious that some scribe, copying at some stage, copied the wrong name in there, and it got into the particular manuscript that the translators were working from, and all the later translations, except, strangely enough, the living Bible that I'm using, put Zedekiah in. I think you can take it, that's not me dabbling in higher criticism or anything like that. It's simply a straightforward matter of an obvious misprint, so obvious that the text itself gives it to you. Anyway, you can check that for yourself. So this is in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah, and all these kings have come to, or they've sent their messengers, they've sent their foreign secretaries or ministers of state, or state secretary, you call him over here, the man who deals with foreign affairs, I think, and they come from Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Sidon. And Jeremiah is told to make a yoke, you know, like the milkmaid, not the meter maid. The milkmaid used to wear when she went taking the milk when she'd been milking the cows, or they wear yokes where they still need to get a couple of buckets of water from a well. So he puts this yoke on. The yoke was a symbol of slavery, same as you have a yoke on animal when you're guiding the animals through the field before tractors came along anyway. And so it was a symbol of servitude and slavery. Jeremiah was to put this yoke on, and moreover, he was to send some copies of it, some further versions of it, to all these ambassadors that had arrived at Jerusalem. And what in effect he was saying was, this is what is going to happen. You are all going to have to serve the king of Babylon. There's no problem at all if you serve the king of Babylon. But if you try to go it alone and fight the king of Babylon, then great trouble will come to you. Don't listen to the false prophets. Verse 13, for example, of chapter 27, why do you insist on dying, you and your people? Why should you choose war and famine and disease, which the Lord has promised to every nation that will not submit to Babylon's king? Don't listen to the false prophets who keep telling you the king of Babylon will not conquer you, for they are liars. You will yet be carried away to Babylon. He keeps on saying that to them. So that's his great message. Now, you can guess that didn't make him exactly popular. And so in the same year, the first year of Zedekiah, it was necessary that Zedekiah send some ambassadors up to Babylon to assure the king of Babylon that in spite of this conference that he'd heard about, everything was all right and they were behaving themselves and they weren't going to revolt. And when Jeremiah heard that this contingent of people were going up to Babylon, he said, will you take a letter for me? And he sent a letter to the Hebrews that were in captivity already. You know, Ezekiel and Daniel would be among them there. And chapter 29 is that letter. You have a letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament that hasn't got its author signing it. And you have a letter to the Hebrews in the Old Testament. And this letter to the Hebrews is chapter 29 of Jeremiah, where he sends this letter to warn them not to plot, to get back, but to settle down. And in this letter, he tells them, verse 5, and this is important to our understanding of the religious development of Jeremiah's thought. He says, build homes there in Babylon and plan to stay. Plant vineyards for you will be there for many years. Marry and have children. And then find mates for them and have many grandchildren. Multiply, don't dwindle away. And work for the peace and prosperity of Babylon. Pray for her, for if Babylon has peace, so will you. The Lord of hosts, the God of Israel says, don't let the false prophets and mediums who are there among you, fool you. Don't listen to the dreams that they invent. For they prophesy lies in my name. I have not sent them, says the Lord. The truth is this. You will be in Babylon for a lifetime. Seventy years, says, doesn't it? Well, a lifetime is the kind of idea of it, because it isn't an exact time cycle, because you could never be quite sure when the seventy started anyway. You will be there for a lifetime, but then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised and bring you home again. And then there's that lovely verse that I mentioned on Sunday, because this was in our readings. For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. And so he writes this letter to them, that's just a specimen from it, saying now look, don't plot, you settle down. You're going to be there for the rest of your lives, and you're going to bring up children and grandchildren there in Babylon. You can still serve God there. You can pray to God. You can have a personal relationship with God. Now you see the progress that's being made. Israel right through their history had tended to think of religion as a thing of temples, sacrifices, outward observances. And true it was that God had required these observances as a kind of visual aid to assist them in their way to Him. But they tended to get hung up on this system of visual aids and external laws and think it was everything. Now Jeremiah is saying, you're there in Babylon. You can serve God just as well in Babylon as you can in Jerusalem. In fact you, because you're there, can serve Him better in Babylon than trying to get back to Jerusalem, which is about to go into captivity anyway. So he's teaching them that they can settle down in this Gentile country. Even pray for it. Even help to build up its prosperity by working hard for the Babylonians, becoming part of the Babylonian society, but still keeping their hearts for the God of Israel. Now this is very much the situation in which Christians are in, in whatever land they may live. They work in that society. They don't partake in the political schemings of that society, but they work. And they work for its good. And they pray for it. As Paul said to Timothy, pray for kings and for rulers that you may live peaceful lives. Just as Jeremiah said, in the peace of Babylon you shall have peace. So we're very much in our sort of situation. Here we live. God hasn't got a physical, political kingdom on the earth, but we are part of the spiritual kingdom of God. In whatever particular country we might live, whether it's the United States, in the Caribbean, or in England, we're to settle down and just go on our normal way, not being revolutionaries to try and turn the state in which we live upside down, but waiting for God's good time to put the matters finally right. Meanwhile, we are at no disadvantage at all because we haven't got a temple. We are at no disadvantage at all because we haven't got outward sacrifices, because we have the inner religion, which is independent of any outward human state. And that's the great message of Jeremiah, which will come to its climax in our talk tomorrow. That's the great thing. The state might dissolve, but that didn't hurt the truth. In fact, it was when the state of Judah dissolved that the real truth was liberated. When the state of Israel was no longer there, when Judah was no longer there, when the temple was no longer there, then there was nothing to lean on of flesh. They could only lean on the arm of God. And so, in a sense, it was a good thing that the state dissolved, that they might be liberated into the fullness of the truth. And that's the message of this little letter to the Hebrews in Jeremiah 29. And funnily enough, it's the message of the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament because he's saying, look, Judah is going to be overthrown, speaking of the way in which the Romans were going to come away and destroy Jerusalem, and not one stone would rest upon another in the temple. He says, therefore, let us go without the camp bearing his reproach. And right through the epistle to the Hebrews, the writer is telling them not to be part of the Jewish state then because that Jewish state was going to be dissolved. They had got to be part of the Christ system of things, and they had got to be part of the New Covenant. And he quotes the New Covenant about four times in the epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, they had to be part of that New Covenant whereby God would write his law in their hearts of which more tomorrow. So, that's the situation of this letter that went. Now, it's interesting just in passing, if you want to make a note of it, that in the 24th chapter of Jeremiah, which we won't turn to, in order to convey this thought, that there was no disadvantage to be in captivity in Babylon, Jeremiah likens the people who'd gone into captivity unto good figs, good fruit. And those who stayed behind in Jerusalem, on the whole, he likened them to bad fruit, naughty figs, I think it calls it in the King James Version. Now, you see, what he was saying was there was more possibility of bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit, or the fruit of the Spirit, as the New Testament would call it, in captivity in Babylon, where they weren't tempted to be involved in the externals of temple worship and Jewish politics. So he says, they're the good figs, the one that have gone into Babylon. These that are way back here in Jerusalem, they're the bad figs. And there's no doubt the cream, the spiritual cream of the race did go into the early captivity. And then eventually, of course, all of them went into captivity. Now, in the 28th chapter of Jeremiah, Jeremiah is once more preaching that, and this will be about 595, and, well, actually he isn't preaching, but a man named Hananiah, a false prophet, comes to the temple where Jeremiah is and says, it's all right now, the King of Babylon's going home, and within two years, all the temple treasures will be back in Jerusalem, and everything's going to be all right, and King Jeconiah, Jehoiakim, will be back on the throne. And Jeremiah said to Hananiah, in front of all the priests and people, verse 6, Amen. May your prophecies come true. I hope the Lord will do everything you say, and will bring back from Babylon the treasures of this temple with all our loved ones. I wish it were true. They were sincere. But listen now to the solemn words I speak to you in the presence of all these people. The ancient prophets who preceded you and me spoke against many nations, always warning of war, famine, and plague. So a prophet who foretells peace has the burden of proof on him to prove that God has really sent him. So great is human sin, it isn't very often that God sent a prophet along to say everything's going to be all right. So if you really are a prophet, you better prove it. And then he went up to Jeremiah and he roughly took that yoke off his neck that he was still walking around, and he smashed it on the floor, and said, Thus will the yoke of the king of Babylon be broken. Jeremiah goes off, and all the people very excited at all this goings on in Jerusalem. And they think, Ah, that's one up to Hananiah, that's one in the eye for Jeremiah. You know, ordinary folk, they'd be talking these ways. And Jeremiah goes off, and he comes back next day, perhaps it was, and all the crowds say, Jeremiah and Hananiah are face to face, they're going to have another row. We love things like that, so up they come to see what's going on. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, says Jeremiah. It's a yoke of iron now, not a yoke of wood. And listen here, Hananiah, verse 15, The Lord has not sent you, and the people are believing your lies. Therefore the Lord says you must die, this very year your life will end, because you have rebelled against the Lord. And sure enough, says this translation, two months later Hananiah died. Imagine the sensation that caused, and how more than ever, Jeremiah is in this period of his life, a figure to be reckoned with, a public figure, one that they're rather frightened of. Well now unfortunately, the situation gets worse, more and more plotting goes on, and Jeremiah has to say to them, as these various armies keep on pitching outside Jerusalem and laying siege, these Babylonian armies, he just has to say to them, look, you must really listen to me, you're not going to get anywhere with this plotting. And so remembering how these pages got blown into the wrong order in my imaginary picture, one next has to go back to Jeremiah 21. Remember these are the outward sufferings of Jeremiah, as he is led as a lamb to the slaughter, suffering the just for the unjust. King Zedekiah sent Pascha, Zephaniah the priest, to Jeremiah and begged. Now this is the weakness of Zedekiah, you see he's still got a soft spot for Jeremiah, and he sends these people along to ask this, Jeremiah, this is in verse 2 of chapter 21, ask the Lord to help us, for Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, declared war on us. Perhaps the Lord will be gracious to us and do a mighty miracle, as in olden times, and force Nebuchadnezzar to withdraw his forces. Jeremiah replies, he's always so firm and straightforward, go back to King Zedekiah, tell him the Lord God of Israel says, I will make all your weapons useless against the king of Babylon, I myself will fight on the side of the king of Babylon, I will send plague in the city, and finally tell King Zedekiah that he himself will be taken into captivity. Verse 8, tell these people the Lord says, take your choice of life and death, take your choice of life or death, stay here in Jerusalem and die, slaughtered by your enemies, killed by starvation and disease, or go out and surrender to the Chaldean army and live. Tell these people the Lord says, take your choice of life and death, take your choice of life or death, stay here in Jerusalem and die, slaughtered by your enemies, killed by starvation and disease, or go out and surrender to the Chaldean army and live. Now that is treacherous talk. You've got to try and understand the position of the Jews. Here they were, their nation threatened by an enemy. And here's the most prominent man in their midst, Jeremiah, now an elder statesman almost, saying surrender. It isn't even like the Vietnam War situation, which is a sort of containing effort where America went into it out of fear of communism to try and keep communism out by going and fighting it on its own territory. This is a situation where a country is surrounded by enemies like England was in 1940 with nobody left on their side. And if anybody had come up and publicly said at that moment, let us surrender to Hitler, he wouldn't have been a very popular person. In fact, of course, people like Oswald Mosley in England were saying that and they were put away in jail so they couldn't make any trouble. Of course, that's exactly what happened to Jeremiah. Looking at it from the human point of view, you can see that he looked a most unpatriotic person. And that hurt him because really he was the most patriotic of them all because he knew what God required and he knew that this judgment that was coming upon them was a judgment of God, that they had earned it and deserved it and they must take their medicine. And therefore he says to them, go out and submit to the King of Babylon who's surrounding your city. Well, needless to say, they didn't like that at all and this was the first of a series of encounters where he got himself extremely unpopular and from time to time got himself into prison. Now the next great thing was that when this particular siege was going on around about 588, 87, around about that time, this is when the rest of our episodes are all in that period, they decided they'd better clean up their ways at last. And they made a great solemn ceremony to set free all the slaves in accordance with the law of Moses and not use fellow Israelites as their slaves. So they were all set free. They all felt pretty good. Now God will go with us because we've done something he's told us for a change. And that was fine. There was a bit of a bother with the King of Egypt further up north and the King of Babylon found he needed that army that was around Jerusalem. So he ordered the army that was around Jerusalem to leave. And everybody says, there we are, the lords, Jeremiah's wrong, look, they've gone. We're delivered. And great rejoicings took place just of course as it happened in the time of AD 70 when the Roman armies withdrew for a little while. That's when the Christians were to flee to the mountains. Similarities right through this situation. But they were to still keep their trust in God. God had said that the Babylonians were going to take them, but now they looked at the appearances as so often we do. So they said, right, that's all right. And then somebody said, well, it's pretty easy now. Hey you, you're my slave, you come back. Hey you, you're my slave, come back. Before you knew where you are in a few days, all the people who'd let the slaves go had got them back. And so it was that in the 34th chapter this message came from Jeremiah. Every time Jeremiah comes in with the unpopular message, you see, it was King Zedekiah who'd ordered this business. Let's just read it in verse 9 of chapter 34. King Zedekiah had ordered everyone to free his Hebrew slaves, both men and women. He had said that no Jew should be the master of another Jew, for all were brothers. The princes, verse 10 of Jeremiah 34, and all the people had obeyed the king's command and freed their slaves, but the action was only temporary. They changed their minds and made their servants slaves again. That is why the Lord gave the following message to Jerusalem. And so he goes on in this message and says, now you remember how I delivered you out of slavery and said you were to be my slaves, therefore you're not to have fellow Jews as slaves. And you remember how when the siege was tough, you did the right thing, I'm just summarizing it, it is now as soon as the siege is lifted for a little while, you think it's alright and you go back to doing the wrong thing. You are oathbreakers and God hates oathbreaking. God is truth. You are liars and oathbreakers and you will suffer from it. And what is more, King Zedekiah who led you in this solemn covenant and who now lets you weakly drift away out of it, he too will suffer. And I am summoning back the Babylonian armies. They've only gone temporarily. Back they came. And it's in that period when they came back that Jeremiah receives his prophecies of chapter 32 and 33. Prophecies of a re-gathering. I've no time to look at them at the moment. Prophecies of a re-gathering of Israel. Prophecies of a time when the Levites and the throne of David would be made permanent. There's a problem there of biblical interpretation how the Levites were to be made permanent in view of what the New Testament has to say about the Levitical priesthood giving way to the Melchizedek priesthood. But I'm afraid we haven't time for discussing that problem. But it's a remarkable thing that God always in the midst of sorrow gives to the saints comfort. And so it was in the midst of all this topsy-turvy world in which he lived in the midst of all these problems that he was faced with Jeremiah is given a message of peace and a message of hope and a message of comfort that there would be a re-gathering. And initially of course this would refer to the re-gathering at the end of the 70 years but there are undertones and echoes of a wider re-gathering and a full establishment of God's people. Then you come to chapter 38 where in more ways than one Jeremiah touches bottom. This is the occasion of the being put in the sewage tank. And the particular situation that had happened was that Jeremiah was stepping up his constant speaking to them. Well actually it starts in 37 and during this period, chapter 37 really starts the episode, during this period when the army wasn't right round them, Jeremiah decided to go and see if he could go and lead a quiet life way back at his hometown. So verse 11 of chapter 37, when the Babylonian army set out from Jerusalem to engage Pharaoh's army in battle, Jeremiah started to leave the city to go to the land of Benjamin to see the property that he'd bought because that's what happened in the midst of the siege before it was lifted, he bought a field. He decided as the siege had been lifted he'd go and see it. It was a great act of faith. The man who bought a field in the middle of a siege, people would say he was crazy but he was showing his faith in the ultimate purpose of God to restore again that which had been lost. He decided to go and see it and see if he can live there and be quiet there. But as he was walking through the Benjamin gate, a sentry arrested him as a traitor, claiming he was defecting to the Babylonians. The guard making the arrest was Erija, son of Shelemiah, grandson of Hananiah. He got family interests in this matter. That's not true, Jeremiah said. I have no intention whatever of doing such thing. But Erija wouldn't listen. He took Jeremiah before the city officials. They were incensed with Jeremiah and had him flogged and put into a dungeon under the house of Jonathan the Scribe, which had been converted into a prison. Kept in there for several days. Eventually, King Zedekiah sent secretly, secretly, to see Jeremiah. Jeremiah comes through an underground passage and says, have you got any recent messages from the Lord? Do you see this shilly shallying man? The man who got a wishbone instead of a backbone, as we said on Monday, is King Zedekiah. Have you got a message from the Lord? Couldn't stand up and show some real go. Timidly, he pursues his course. Yes, there is a message, says the new Jeremiah, because he's a tougher man now, is Jeremiah. Yes, there is a message. You shall be defeated by the King of Babylon. That's it. And Jeremiah then said, and now while I'm here, what about my imprisonment? What have I done to deserve it? What crime have I committed? And the King said, look, I'll arrange for you to not go back to that dungeon. I'll put you in the palace prison. You'll be more comfortable there, and I see you'll have some rations every day. So to the palace prison he goes. And at the palace prison, he has opportunities where he can still tell people and still get messages out. And all the messages he's getting out are, submit, submit, surrender, surrender, surrender to the King of Babylon. It is God's will that this state shall be dissolved. So that is what causes the rulers to say, let's get rid of him. But they didn't want to execute him. So they thought of this horrible idea of putting him in this well. Really, that's too nice a word to describe it. Putting him in this well. There was no water in it, but there was a thick layer of mire at the bottom, and Jeremiah sank down into it. Then we have the bold action of Ebed-Melech, who arranges for this large group of people to pull up this man who was submerged in the mire. And Jeremiah, again, is returned to the palace prison. These are the ups and downs of his experiences. Zedekiah again says, have you got any advice for me, Jeremiah? He's in his wit's end. You feel a bit sorry for the man. Why didn't he do something to get some good friends around him and stick his neck out and risk it? He probably didn't sleep much at night, poor Zedekiah, if we can just for once have a bit of pity for him. Jeremiah still says the same thing. You refuse to surrender, you're in for trouble. And you'll be personally in trouble. Why don't you take a stand, man? Be a man, Zedekiah. That's what Jeremiah was saying to him all the time. You won't get into their hands. If only you'll obey the Lord, your life will be spared and all will go well for you. But if you refuse to surrender, then it's all quite hopeless for you. Then Zedekiah says in chapter 38, verse 24, Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, on pain of death, don't you tell anyone what you've just been telling me. Don't you tell anyone that you've been saying these things with me and that we've been having this chat. Verse 25, and if my officials hear that I talked with you and they threaten you with death unless you tell them what we discussed, see the timidity of the man? He doesn't say, if anybody gets onto you, just wait, I'll deal with them. No, he's not that sort of man. If any of the officials hear that I talked with you, just say that you begged me not to send you back to the dungeon in Jonathan's house for you would die there. Sure enough, verse 27, it wasn't long before all the city officials came to Jeremiah and asked him why the king had called him. So he said what the king had told him to and they left without finding out the truth for the conversation had not been overheard by anyone. You haven't got to go making any excuses for Jeremiah and say, oh, he told a half lie then. Yes, he did. People do things like that in extremity. God, in his purity and perfection, wants truth all the time. But he isn't just down on people for every little mistake they make in a difficult situation. Of course, no doubt it was partly true. He had discussed this matter of not going back to the dungeon, but he concealed the full truth. There are times, perhaps, when you don't tell all. In fact, sometimes it's the kindest thing not to say everything that's in your mind to somebody. But I wouldn't try to either justify or criticize Jeremiah for that. He simply did what the king had told him and didn't tell them the whole story. Well, it wasn't very long when the siege was really hotted up. It's here that we must leave today's talk. Zedekiah and all his soldiers realized that the city was lost when the army came right in, the Babylonian army came right in through the middle gate. And there were the chief leaders of the Babylonian army sitting there in the gate of Jerusalem. And King Zedekiah fled through the night, went out through the gate between the two walls at the back of the palace gardens and across the fields toward the Jordan Valley. That's 39 verse 4, verse 5. But the Babylonians chased the king, and they caught him on the plains of Jericho, brought him to Nebuchadnezzar, who was at Ribla, further out north, where he pronounced judgment upon him. The most cruel judgment it was. The king of Babylon made Zedekiah watch while they killed his children and all the nobles of Judah. Then he gouged out Zedekiah's eyes and bound him in chains to send him away to Babylon as a slave. That was Zedekiah. What of Jeremiah? The Jeremiah who had suffered throughout this intense period. But notice the difference between yesterday and today. There's something strong about Jeremiah in today's story. He sort of matured and he knows where he stands and he sticks it out with much less timidity. We don't know what hidden prayers he was constantly saying, of course. He's a strong and public character compared with yesterday in the time of Jehoiakim where he's a more timid and upset character, compared with his very early years when he feels he's totally inadequate for it because he's only a youth. But now he gets a brief reward. Nebuchadnezzar told Nebuchadnezzar Aden, verse 11, to find Jeremiah. See that he isn't hurt. Look after him well and give him anything he wants. That was what the king of Babylon said. Because he was being a politician, he liked Jeremiah because Jeremiah had been saying submit. So he regarded Jeremiah as a kind of ally in Jerusalem. And so it was that they went and looked for Jeremiah and you find that in chapter 40 they found him in all the columns of prisoners that were waiting at Ribla to be sent to Babylon. They went through all the lists of the names of the prisoners and the captain called for Jeremiah, chapter 2, chapter 40 rather, verse 2, chapter 40. The Lord your God has brought this disaster on this land just as he said he would. That's remarkable, isn't it? News of what Jeremiah had said had travelled all the way to Babylon. For these people have sinned against the Lord. That's why it happened. Of course that was clever of Nebuchadnezzar to catch on with what the message of Jeremiah had been. He says, now I'm going to take off your chains and let you go. If you want to come with me to Babylon, fine. Verse 4 of chapter 40. If you want to come with me to Babylon, fine. I'll see you're well cared for. If you don't want to come, don't. The world is before you, go where you like. Quite a remarkable thing that was said to Jeremiah in this message from King Nebuchadnezzar. If you decide to stay, he says, then return to get Eliah. I've appointed him governor of Judah and stay with the remnant he rules. But it's up to you, you go where you like. Then Nebuchadnezzar gave Jeremiah some food and money and let him go. What did Jeremiah decide? It would be rather nice to go to Babylon because there it would be rather nice to be with the best sort of Jews, the good things who've already gone to Babylon. No. No, that would be selfish. I'll stay with this little lot here. They might need me. And so in the hour of great disaster, he stays with the people who didn't deserve his presence. This is what the Lord Jesus Christ did in being associated with men. He didn't count it something to be grasped back to seek equality with God. He involved himself in the affairs of men. And ourselves, sometimes people get upset about what goes on in their particular Ecclesia. What do they do? Stomp out in a rage or do they stay? And help and strengthen the things that remain. Well, that's what Jeremiah decided to do. He thought not of his own comfort, but only of his people. And so there for today, we leave him, staying with the remnant after the rest have been taken into captivity. And tomorrow we'll draw the final lessons of the new covenant out of this whole story. Meanwhile, just bending our head in a closing word of prayer. Father in heaven, if it should be thy will that any or all of us should in the days that remain have to endure any kind of suffering, help us to be strong as thy servant Jeremiah. Help us not to compromise with evil. And help us to boldly proclaim thy word, yet always in compassion. And let us feel for one another and feel for mankind. And let us not get separate and uninvolved, but let us be involved with one another, showing compassion and love. Help us one of another. Grant that the great day of sin's captivity may soon be over. Grant that we may be among the redeeming of the Lord, who shall come with singing unto Zion. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Transcript

This is the voice of Wilbraham. The Eastern Christadelphian Bible School presents one of a series of Bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 Convocation at Wilbraham. Brother Edgar Willie of Canucks Staffordshire, England has chosen as his theme, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Us. Here is Brother Willie as he begins the sixth and last address entitled, A New Covenant, The Indwelling Lord. My topic today, the title I've given it, is The New Covenant, The Beauty of the Indwelling Lord. In a sense, it's going to be an attempt to sweep up some of the pieces that are left over, but to weave together the overall impression that we want to leave. So The New Covenant, The Beauty of the Indwelling Lord is our theme. Now yesterday, we did leave Jeremiah in the hands of the King of Babylon and being told, you go where you like. If you want to come to Babylon, that's fine. If you want to stop here in Israel with the few that are going to remain behind, well, that's fine too. You do just what you like, Jeremiah. This is quite a different sort of atmosphere from the atmosphere that Jeremiah had experienced for some time. And the King of Babylon gave him credit for having given to Israel the message that the Lord was with the King of Babylon. Naturally, that was a very popular message from the point of view of the King of Babylon. And so Jeremiah is in that situation that he can either go into the comparative comfort of Babylon and desert his people, or he can stay with his people in their hour of direst need. And he decides, as you would guess from the kind of man we've seen he is, to stay with his people in their hour of direst need. Now, what happened next, just to put the record straight, was that Gedaliah, you read about this in chapter 40, and these are not familiar chapters. We all know the story about Jeremiah being put in the sewage tank and pulled out by ropes. We all know the story of him having been arrested when he went to see his field. We all know the story of how he bought a field in the middle of the siege and all that kind of thing. There's some seats down the front here, quite a few. And we know these stories, but the stories that we meet from chapter 40 onwards, I don't think we're quite so familiar with them. So just to put the record straight, what happened was the few people that were left remaining, the few thousand or thousands who were allowed to remain, were put under a Jewish governor named Gedaliah, and Misbah, not Jerusalem, was made the headquarters. Now, as is usual with situations like this, there were envies and bitterness, and a certain Ishmael was sent to assassinate Gedaliah. I think Gedaliah is rather a nice sort of a chap. Somebody came along to him, one named Johanan, you read about this in chapter 40 verse 14. As soon after Johanan, son of Korea and the other guerrilla leaders, came to Misbah to warn Gedaliah that Bayalus, king of the Ammonites, had sent Ishmael, son of Netanyah, to assassinate him. But Gedaliah wouldn't believe them. Gedaliah was a nice, kindly, trusting sort of man, evidently. Then Johanan had a private conference with Gedaliah. Johanan volunteered to kill Ishmael secretly. Why should we let him come and murder you, Johanan asked. What will happen then to the Jews who have returned, that little group that was still there? Why should this remnant be scattered and lost? But Gedaliah said, I forbid you from doing any such thing for your lying about Ishmael. Ishmael was apparently a fairly respectable and respected person, and Gedaliah just won't believe it. All that attitude of trust in one of his colleagues cost Gedaliah his life. In the October, Gedaliah arrived with some other officials, and Gedaliah invited them to dinner, invited Ishmael to dinner. While they were eating, Ishmael and the ten men in league with him, chapter 41 verse 2, suddenly jumped up, pulled out their swords, killed Gedaliah, and slaughtered all the Jewish officials and Babylonian soldiers who were in Misbah with Gedaliah. On the next day, before the outside world knew what had happened, eighty men came up to Misbah, and they wanted to engage in some act of worship there. When Ishmael met them, because he didn't want them to get hold of the story that Gedaliah was killed, he killed a lot of them, except ten of them who promised him some money. And it's through them that the message got back of the terrible assassination and murder that had taken place in Israel, in Judah, by the hand of this bloodthirsty Ishmael. Now that brings us to chapter 42, because Ishmael himself is then dealt with, and the folk who are still with Johanan come to Jeremiah, and they say, this is a problem. When this gets back to the king of Babylon, we're in real trouble again. So they said, verse 2 of chapter 42, please pray for us to the Lord your God, for as you so well know, we're only a tiny remnant of what we were before. Beg the Lord your God to show us what to do and where to go. That's chapter 3 of 42, rather nicely translated, it's something that we ought constantly to do. Beg the Lord your God to show us what to do and where to go. The way we're in, we may walk and the thing that we may do, but put in more crisp English, show us what to do and where to go. So if you can't think what to pray sometime, Lord, what do you want me to do and where do you want me to go? And so they ask him to make this prayer, all right, Jeremiah said, I'll ask him and I'll tell you what he says and I'll hide nothing from you. And then they said to Jeremiah, may the curse of God be on us if we refuse to obey whatever he says we should do. He had this nice comfortable month or two with no great problems facing him, and he's still held in respect, but a disaster has hit Judah, and he is asked to pray. And God doesn't always answer prayers straight away. They'd promised they'd obey. How does God answer the prayer? We're not told. Did he answer by a little voice inside Jeremiah? Did he answer by a message, an angel? One gets the feeling from the whole book of Jeremiah that the method would be fairly normal. It wouldn't appear miraculous. And it might even have involved Jeremiah in having to do some sorting out and thinking himself to interpret the indications and the signs that he was getting. Anyway, it took him 10 days. 10 days later, the Lord gave his reply to Jeremiah. So Jeremiah called Johanan and the captain of the forces. Now, of course, men are impatient. During those 10 days, they couldn't wait upon the Lord, but they thought up their own scheme and had come to a decision to go down to Egypt. So we're on the opposite side to Babylon, of course. Jeremiah says, you sent me to the Lord, the God of Israel, with your request. And this is his reply. Stay here in this land. Do the risky thing. Take God at his word. The king of Babylon, will he come and punish you for what Ishmael did? Don't worry about it. Leave that in my hand. You stay here. And if you do, I will bless you and no one will harm you. Now, Johanan, now you little remnant of Jews, can you take God at his word? God says, I'm not going to let anybody harm you. You stop here. For I am sorry for all the punishment I have had to give you. That's lovely, isn't it? It's like the father who says, this hurts me more than it hurts you. And little boys don't always believe that when their fathers say it. But here is God really saying that. I am sorry for all the punishment I have had to give to you. And I don't want to give you any more. So if you'll just stay here, stay put, trust, nothing will happen. Don't fear the king of Babylon anymore. For I am with you to save you and to deliver you from his hand. When we read things like this, we are reading an attitude of mind. An attitude of mind that comes echoing down to our own time. Remember our series is Jeremiah, Jesus, and us. An attitude of mind which depends not on our own clever scheming, which is what John was now engaged in, but which depends upon a living trust in a living Lord. In our case, the living God and the living Lord Jesus Christ. Then he says, but if you refuse to obey the Lord and say, we will not stay here and insist on going to Egypt where you think you will be free from war and hunger and alarm, then this is what the Lord replies, O remnant of Judah. If you insist on going to Egypt, the very war and famine that you fear will follow close behind you and you will perish there. And he says quite a lot more like that. And as he's talking, Jeremiah becomes aware that they're looking, you know, I feel very well. We've made our plans now. We're going down to Egypt. And Jeremiah sees this in their faces and he says, never forget the warning I've given you today. If you go, he can see that's what they've got it in their mind. It'll be at the cost of your lives. For you were deceitful when you sent me to pray for you and said, just tell us what God says and we will do it. And today I've told you exactly what he did say, but you won't obey it any more than you did at other times. Therefore know for a certainty that you'll die by sword and famine and disease in Egypt where you insist on going. And they haven't even told him yet. You can just see it in their faces. And when Jeremiah chapter 43, this is, had finished giving this message from God to all the people, Azariah and Johannin, chapter 43 verse 2, and all the other proud men said to Jeremiah, you lie. The Lord our God hasn't told you to tell us not to go to Egypt. Baruch, the son of Neriah, has plotted against us and told you to say this. So Baruch must have been a fairly significant person in their eyes and be killed by the Babylonians or be carried off to Babylon as slaves. So they refused to obey the Lord and stay in Judah. And they went down to Egypt and they said, what's more, Jeremiah and Baruch, you're coming with us. We're not leaving you behind. And anyway, there was no sign that Jeremiah wanted to stay behind. Even after this act of rebellion, he still wanted to be with his people. And we last see him in the 44th chapter of Jeremiah, giving a message to them after they'd settled down in the cities of Migdol, Tapanis and Memphis, and throughout southern Egypt even. There was quite a few thousand of them. And he's giving them a message because they even there decide to go and worship Egyptian gods because they come to the conclusion that Yahweh, the God of Israel, hasn't helped them very much. So they might just as well worship the Egyptian gods. And so right to the end, he's pleading, he's praying, he's warning, and saying, if only you'll listen to the word of God, even here in Egypt, it will still go well with you. He's still showing that compassion, that mood of pleading that springs from him all the time. And that really basically is the end of the story of Jeremiah who lived through a collapsing age and saw the nation he had loved and still love shattered, saw the whole community broken up, the man who lived in a collapse of an age and yet still kept his faith in God. And when one lives in a collapsing age, when one lives in a time of trouble, there's one little exhortation that came especially for Baruch, the great secretary who helped Jeremiah write down all his messages, who in particular wrote down that message for King Jehoiakim, which King Jehoiakim cut up with a penknife. And that's found in the 45th chapter of Jeremiah. We've done five chapters in Jeremiah in 10 minutes. But I bring this one in because it's particularly interesting. You see, when you look around upon the world and we often give lectures and tell our friends that we live in perilous times and that it is in a time like this that the Lord Jesus Christ will return, what we are saying is that we live in the period of the collapse of an age. Now, in one sense, we are part of that age, we run our businesses, we go to work, we go to college and all that kind of thing in that age. What's going to happen to us when all about us is disintegrating, if we do come to live in such a period? It could be very, very sharp if there comes a clash between the communist civilization and the western civilization, even though it's going to meet on the mountains of Israel. There will be a time of worldwide distress such as never has been. We may well find that all the comforts and the standards and the things we were used to and the nice, comfortable sort of life that we've become accustomed to isn't there anymore. Or we may find, as brethren found during the last war, that Korea suddenly got chopped off. I found that in my own case. Any idea I ever had of going to university just got chopped off in the middle of it. It took many years to catch up the lost time, but never mind one, they'll get through with the help of God. Now, Baruch was quite an ambitious young man, or comparatively young man, rather older now. And even before this situation, because 45, chapter 45, really belongs to roughly the time when Baruch did his writing for that scroll which Jehoiakim cut up. It doesn't belong to the period we've just been talking about, although it comes after it in the book. This is the message Jeremiah gave to Baruch in the fourth year of the reign of King Jehoiakim. And I reckon the situation was that after the king had cut up the scroll with his penknife and they told Baruch to go and hide, Baruch said to himself, that's torn it, I'll never be anybody in Israel now because I've got to stay in hiding. And in this collapsing civilization, his idea perhaps of becoming one of the king's ministers was hopeless now, he'd lost it. And so this was the message that was given especially for Baruch. Oh Baruch, the Lord God of Israel says this to you, you have said, woe is me, don't I have troubles enough already? And now the Lord has added more, I am weary of my own sighing and I find no rest. But tell Baruch this, the Lord says, I will destroy this nation that I built, I will wipe out what I established, not all the people but the nation. Are you seeking great things for yourself, are you ambitious Baruch? Don't do it, for though I will bring great evil upon all these people, I will protect you wherever you go as your reward. You've done a good job Baruch, you've worked for Jeremiah, you've produced these scrolls, you could go far, you could become an important official, but that wouldn't do you any good because tutor is going to collapse. So don't seek great things for yourself. So while it is very proper to settle about your career, I would address myself to younger people particularly here, to take the necessary examinations, get the necessary qualifications and get them out of the way while you're young so that you can provide not only for your family but you may contribute to the work of Christ, yet never get settled on ambition in this world. The age is going to collapse, then remember what God said to Baruch, don't seek great things for yourself. So that when the thing you've set your heart on collapses, you've got treasure in heaven and not upon earth. So you see how these little tidbits even, a short chapter with five verses comes echoing down through the Lord Jesus who told us to seek first the kingdom of God to us and gives us a message, seek not great things for yourself. Now during this period, so we now come on again back to where we were, very difficult isn't it to keep in the right order with the book of Jeremiah because I had to just slip back 20 years and now we come back again to where we were before Ishmael assassinated Gedaliah and for just a few months, Jeremiah had the opportunity with the aid of God and under inspiration to think through the whole of his ministry and God gave him the most wonderful words in the Old Testament, you know where they are in Jeremiah chapter 31, and he thought through all the things that he had said, he thought through all his experiences. If I can just imagine him sitting there in misper on a sunny day in the early autumn of this particular year of disaster when for a moment there was a breather as we might say, just a little pause, he would look back and this will enable us to look back with him and just revise what we've been doing this week. He would look back to the period when he was 16 when he was called to the ministry when he said I am too young, yet nevertheless God had strengthened his mouth and he stood up and told Israel of their sin. At a time when Josiah was busy on this reformation of trying to improve things to Jeremiah, a young man felt the unpopular task of saying yes that's all very well what Josiah is doing but as far as most of you are concerned it's just a fake, your hearts haven't changed, you're very busy going up to the temple, you're very busy with sacrifices, you've had a marvellous Passover but it hasn't penetrated your hard hearts. Now it was a very difficult message for a young man to give because the older ones would say listen to him the young up starts and so it was that Jeremiah spotlighted to Israel sin's reality, he showed them their personal need of deliverance from sin, shows us that need, he showed them even in that early period that they were living in an unstable world that was about to collapse and that only in God personally had they any stability. Through Jeremiah God pleaded, this pleading went on into the period of Jehoiakim when for example he went up to the temple, this is all very well for you to say the temple, the temple, so much bricks and mortar, God wants hearts, hearts in which he dwells and God pleaded through Jeremiah, God showed love and concern and longed for their repentance, longed to forgive them and only one thing could impede his forgiveness if they didn't reach forth their hand to receive it. We saw Jeremiah a young man and a slightly less young man pointing out the danger of mere institutional religion as distinct from personal religion and we saw Jeremiah deeply involved in this personal religion, we saw him the day before yesterday pouring out his heart in all his ups and his downs, now almost accusing God of letting him down, now pleading for his people, now wishing his people were punished drastically, now cursing the day of his birth, next praising God for being with him, we saw him in all his ups and downs, never gloating over the sins of others, sometimes feeling very very severely the cost of witness because when you get involved with other people there is a cost and we all ought to be willing to have that cost, not in dollars but a cost in inattention, in really feeling the feelings of others and weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice as they are always in the New Testament and these New Testament phrases come alive in the light of even Old Testament circumstances where these same experiences were experienced and so Jeremiah lived on as a middle -aged man into the time of Zedekiah and here he is after all it's over looking back he thinks of the rough time he had of it in the of Zedekiah he thinks how there the institution of Israel began to simply drop to pieces in the time of a weak king and he looks back at the way in which the king said all right put him in the well I can't do anything about it get him out of the well if he's going to drown them a king you know our little phrase that we had the king who got a wishbone instead of a backbone and he thought of king Zedekiah wished if only Zedekiah could have been a little stronger but still it wasn't the king of Babylon had come and that was all gone Jerusalem temple burnt no sacrifices now no real proper organized worship no feast days no new moons what was left was personal relationship with God that was unhindered even as Jeremiah had told them in his letter to the Hebrews in captivity personal relationship was there all the external props had been removed no temple no law no institution just individuals seeking the voice of God and seeking in their lives to carry it out and this is the great contribution really of Jeremiah this is the way in which he bridges the testaments the old testament in the main is the period when God had a kingdom on the earth and this bridges us over to that period when God has no political organization on the earth at all he has a kingdom those people who belong to his kingly dominion the kingdom of people in whom he reigns he will for a short time have a political kingdom upon the earth to finalize his purpose but even then the kingdom of God is not meat and drink but righteousness joy and peace in the holy spirit the object of God's kingdom is and will be the transformation of the individual so that at the end of the thousand years we read then shall the son deliver up the kingdom to the father and God shall be all in all the purpose of the final stages of the kingdom of God is that God may be everything in everybody so that the earth may behold a people in whom God dwells personal relationship and although God has worked through political institutions such as Israel his kingdom in the past and although for a thousand years he will again work through a political arrangement centered on Zion it is ultimate and final purpose is still with people transformed by the power of what he has done for them in writing his law in their hearts legalism sacrifices institutions are all temporary crutches leading at last to a personal permanent relationship with God and it's Jeremiah who above all along with some of the later psalms and a few of David's earlier ones because David had great spiritual insight that brings this message over in the old testament and shows us what abides when all else is shaken out of existence this applies even in our personal lives in our lives we have our Christadelphian meetings we have our wonderful privilege of fellowship of which Wilbraham is a wonderful example we're most grateful and we're going to enjoy every minute of it while God grants it but even things like this we must try and let the Lord so mold us after the example of Potter but if these wondrous privileges were withdrawn we could still live in a personal relationship with the living God and the living Lord Jesus Christ this is indeed the message of Jeremiah now the message as he thought about it all and as he saw the way in which the institutional religion had departed it dawned on him God inspired him to realize that in a sense it was a good thing it had happened because when the institution Israel temple sacrifices and so on had been removed the few people who still managed to walk without the crutches of the external really realized the purpose of God and found their inward relationship with him and Jeremiah is led to prophesy to instruct the few Israelites around him in the fact that this is what God was ultimately going to do with the whole of Israel so you have the 31st chapter of Jeremiah and I'm going to stick to the familiar King James version here because we're not here I've used this because of the action the way in which we've got the feel of the uh but here in Jeremiah 31 we have a prophecy in this case we've learned haven't we this week that prophecies are not just foretelling the future they are something more than the foretelling of the future they are a telling forth from God through a man but there are future elements in prophecy and this one is a picture of a day when Israel will be restored verse 4 and thou shalt again be adorned with thy tablets and shall go forth in the dances of them that make merry there would be a day when Israel would be settled in the land verse 10 the second part he that scattered Israel will gather him and keep him as a shepherd doth his flock for the Lord redeemed Jacob and ransomed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he therefore shall they come and sing in the height of Zion and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord for the wheat for the wine for the oil for the young of the flock and of the herd and their soul shall be as a watered garden and they shall not sorrow anymore at all so there is picture of a time when Israel will be reformed now this was partly fulfilled and only partly fulfilled in the time of Joshua's irreparable Ezra and Nehemiah we read about that in the book of Ezra the book of Nehemiah the book of Haggai and the book of Zechariah that was partly fulfilled but not completely and he goes on in this context of speaking of a restoration of Israel and a building up of what had been plucked down he goes on in the 31st verse to say these famous words the new covenant behold the days come said the Lord that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand there's a father leading a child by the hand like brother Dillingham led his child by the hand to recite to us yesterday behold the days come it won't be like when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt which my covenant they break although I was an husband unto them said the Lord but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel not going to be like the law of Moses where it was on code law tablets outside you written down in a book written on stone outside you not going to be like that this should be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days said the Lord I will put my law in their inward parts and write it in their hearts and will be their God and they shall be my people that little phrase occurs about 60 times in the Bible I will be their God and they shall be my people it's the word of personal relationship I will be their God and they shall be my people you find it in the promises to Abraham and I will be a God unto them close inner personal relationship I'll write my law not on stones outside them but hearts inside them and they shall no more teach every man his neighbor and every man his brother saying no the Lord won't be a kind of institution ultimately for they shall all know me there'll be an inner awareness not just know about me but know me that intimate word that's used in marriage Adam new eve his wife the most intimate of words a complete unity they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest of them said the Lord for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more here is the climax of forgiveness here is the climax of the mood that Jeremiah had worked in throughout he'd worked in a mood of forgiveness God wants you to turn oh Israel do turn he says now their day is coming when all these institutions having been stripped away Israel will be reformed without them because God's law will be written on their hearts in a new covenant now although this chapter is a chapter which speaks of the reforming of Israel the restoration of Israel and therefore we would be a bit inclined to just say oh this is all in the future and it hasn't happened yet the plain fact is we all know that this has already started being fulfilled it certainly does not refer to what's going on in Israel at the moment it certainly will happen to Israel who are in the land and who may yet come to the land after they've become if you like Christians when they have looked upon him whom they pierce and they have mourned for him and it will happen to all mankind who survive the judgments of God after they too have become Christians or true Israelites but it's already happening to us the new covenant is for us a present reality we have no institutions or we've got a few little institutions that we've organized for ourselves a few committees and that kind of thing we have a ranging brethren and we have our ecclesiast but they aren't very glorious when compared with Solomon's glory with his temple and the sacrifices of Israel of old we're just little groups of people struggling on through the wilderness we have no national institution we stand in the very much like those people who wet by the waters of Babylon with one big difference that we have no need to weep because we have this new covenant and our whole message of the new testament is to tell us how this new covenant works for us there's just the recognition right through the new testament of course that it's going to work for other people too when the Lord Jesus returns but the great thrilling message of the new testament or new covenant as we really ought to call it is this relationship which we as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ have with the living God whereby his law gets written in our hearts now we have no doubt have we that the new covenant is in you may say well how can it be in force even though you know it is because the new testament says so when people aren't flowing together on the heights of Zion yet well when the Christian church was formed that was the forming of the new Israel you know a general goes and fights a battle he loses his battle he loses his army so he goes back to his own country and he gets another army that's his reformed army it's the same army it's got different people in it but it's still called the same army so it is that God through Christ reformed Israel without a lot of institutions without a nation he reformed Israel in the church and so for 2 000 years God's Israel has been in its reformed state in the church and to that is going to be added Israel transformed and the whole of mankind who survived the judgments of God also transformed and that's going to be the climax of the picture and God all in all but it's the new covenant that has reformed us when Jesus instituted the last supper he said this is the blood of the new covenant shared for the remission of sins and he was quoting when he said remission of sins he was quoting from verse 34 of jeremiah 31 in hebrews chapter 8 that new testament letter to the hebrews written in the collapse of an age if you ever wanted to follow this study up of jeremiah further you read jeremiah side by side with hebrews and see the way in which the writer of the hebrews is saying look your world is collapsing your jewish world is collapsing you're soon going to have no temple you're soon going to have no religious institutions but you will have Christ Jesus Christ the same yesterday today and forever you will still have a high priest not a high priest who can go into a temple for you upon the earth but you'll have a high priest in heaven who is ever able to make intercession for you so he shows them that as the in the visible things of the jewish commonwealth this is a letter to the hebrews i might just as well be speaking about jeremiah he shows them that when the visible things collapse and visible worship departs they still have their personal relationship with God through the living Lord Jesus Christ their high priest who is seated at the right hand of God and it is his living power that will write God's law on their hearts and so as he speaks of the passing of the old covenant as the writer to the hebrews speaks of the collapse of the jewish system just as jeremiah had done six or seven hundred years previously so he speaks of the new covenant and speaking of Jesus he says but now verse six chapter eight now chapter eight verse six now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry Jesus has by how much also is he mediator of a better covenant which was established upon better promises for if that first covenant had been faultless then should no place have been sought for the second for finding faults with them that's the old covenant written on tables of stone he said and then he goes and quotes jeremiah 31 because it was absolutely the right passage for the writer to the hebrews to quote your institution is about to depart you will be left with nothing outward everything inward he goes on verse 13 in that he first old now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away and it did in ad 70 even that rebuilt herod temple vanished away and then likewise in the tenth chapter we have the man after he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever sat down on the right hand of god this is a very important doctrine the work of the ascended lord jesus it's one we neglect we talk about his past ministry we talk about his sacrifice we talk about his resurrection we talk about his coming again we don't talk enough about the present work of the lord jesus at the right hand of god from henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool he's in charge all power in heaven and earth he's the one who's doing the writing on our hearts if only we'll let him he's the one who says behold i stand at the door and knock if any man come unto me i will open you and i having direct relationship with the lord jesus christ in heaven for by one offering he perfected forever them who are sanctified whereof the holy spirit also is a witness to us for after that he had said before this is the covenant i will make with them they are he quotes it again jeremiah 31 he added that's how the new english bible puts it and their sins and their iniquities will i remember no more and the writer to the hebrews adds the added thought that if your sins are forgiven in jesus then you no longer need human institutions like sacrifice and offering and the levitical priesthood to lead you to god because you have jesus at the right hand of god therefore he says verse 19 having therefore brethren boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of jesus by a new and living way a living way not on dead tables of stone not dead animals a new and living way a living lord which he hath consecrated for us through his veil through the veil that is to say his flesh he died and having an high priest over the house of god let us draw near that's the message that comes echoing from these two from jeremiah and the writer to the hebrews singing a duet down the ages let us draw near near the word offerings temples institutions governments they didn't bring israel near even though they were god appointed but the personal work of the lord jesus christ the mediator of the new covenant that brings us near let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith not trembling and fearing because we have in the new covenant i will forgive their sins and iniquities and as i said last sunday which was really part of this series last sunday's exaltation god wants to forgive only one thing can stop him forgiving that's if we don't want to be forgiven if we don't hold out our hands stretched in pleading to receive what he pleads us to have let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience yes christ has done the sprinkling we don't just make up our mind to be righteous the righteousness we receive is through the power of the living lord and our bodies washed with pure water when in baptism we committed ourselves to this living lord let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering for he is faithful that promised and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works and so the writer to the paul picks it up into corinthians 3 and speaks of the way in which we look into a mirror and behold the living jesus and are transfigured from one degree of glory to another and the new testament piles up passage after passage which tells us of the vast resource that we have in jesus of the vast power that can be generated in our lives to transform them so that we need not look back to the time of solomon and say weren't they lucky then all the wonderful institutions they've got the temple and all that and here we are scattered about in little eclesius we no need to envy anything external at all we have a friend in heaven we have a great high priest who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities who embodies in himself all the pleadings of jeremiah who made it possible for this new covenant to be made with us who is himself supervising the work of god's law being written on our hearts let us then rejoice brethren and sisters in the privileges of the new covenant which jeremiah as he sat there in those few peaceful months in the time of gedaliah perhaps and contemplated the collapse of everything that he had seen and yet found peace in his heart as he looked forward to the coming of the new covenant we hope to meet jeremiah one day in the fullness of the kingdom and we'll be able to tell him perhaps how greatly he helped us how he showed us our need for redemption as he told israel their sins how he showed us the futility of human and outward props and led us to seek the inner peace that comes from christ and god grants that in the next few months perhaps now and again we may reflect on these meditations we've had together on jeremiah that we may apply these principles to other characters as well and get to know them as people stripping them off of all these halos that we put around them and realizing that they were men of like passions with ourselves and particularly may we rejoice in the next few months and perhaps till we meet again either in the presence of the lord or perhaps at wilbrahim next year god grant that we may resolve that we are going to let this living lord jesus come more into our lives not as a theory not just as a doctrine though doctrines there must be but as a living person with whom we have a living relationship so that he may be our comrade all the journey long so we just bend our heads in prayer our father we thank thee for the wonderful vision we have been given through the medium of thy prophet of old jeremiah we thank thee that through his rebukes thou has shown us our sins and our need for redemption we thank thee that through his experiences as he wrestled in thy presence we have learnt to approach thee boldly knowing that thou will understand our ups and our downs and when we are down thou wilt lift us up and when we are on the high places thou wilt sometimes lift us down that we may learn that all our strength is from thee we thank thee from the example of courage that we have seen the man who withstood a whole kingdom with an unpopular message we thank thee above all father that this work together this week has shown us that when all around us collapses when this world seems so unstable we have in thee a rock and we have in the lord jesus one upon whom we can lean we thank thee that thou has taken him into heaven at thy right hand we thank thee that from thy throne and from him there streams forth power the power of thy new covenant oh grandfather that through jesus christ our lord thy law may indeed be written on our hearts and that thy will may become our will and we may be built up and prepared for our final reunion with him and grant lord that soon we may see him as he is and become completely like him through jesus christ our living lord amen