Audio Archive

Location:Eastern Christadelphian Bible School (1971)
Topic:Jeremiah, Jesus and Us
Title:Collapse of an Age
Speaker:Wille, Edgar
Source: archive.moorestownchristadelphians.org |

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 kenick staffordshire england has chosen as his theme

jeremiah jesus and us

here is brother willie as he begins the first address entitled it is nothing to you all ye that pass by

collapse of an age

my brother and sisters

i'm sure your minds are either

absolutely stupid 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 uh 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 you search the scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life but she 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 unto 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 unto 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 i know my need of jesus more and be 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 they had to be humbled and so it is with jeremiah 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're 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 uh 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 a 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 models because he does get into some muddle 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 him 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 uh 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

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 because 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 caldeans 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 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 it's study with an objective we've got to try and get the historical context we've got to say to ourselves well what 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 as the specific title i've given to today's talk is is it nothing to you who passed 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 ha 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 godlike 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 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 wrung 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 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 so 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

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 six hundred years before christ in the hands of two men

under the divine providence in the hands of jeremiah and baruch barrack was his shorthand typist well that's what he'd have been today he was a a menuencis i think is the word use he used to write it down when jeremiah said it all and then he write it out neatly and multiply copies of whatever it was that jeremiah said jeremiah and bayruck 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 calden 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 six forty-two years before christ

he was called to the ministry while quite a young man

in the year approximately six to six

and that's that's really quite young isn't it what's it make six from 12 is six it's 16 isn't it

it really is young

that's when he's first called and he 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 a state of threat from a northern invader and this northern invader

was the scythians gogu of the land of magog rosh meshech and tubal we've all heard of those from ezekiel these were the scythians we call them the russians today and they were a barbarian horde who came hurtling down round about the year 630 and onwards under the whole of the middle east they even caused trouble to assyria and it was through that trouble that the scythians called to 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 norman northern hosts as i'll show you tomorrow

he said the northern hosts

and uh so later on 20 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 20 years there's a lesson there somewhere isn't that 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 sure 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 20 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 uh 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 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 i forget the feeling that barrack had been putting all the sheets together collating them i think donald calls it he used that word to me last night anyway uh 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 the wind came and it blew them all over the place and he comes and says oh dear oh dear and i 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 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 it's like and that wouldn't be against inspiration you see because god doesn't 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 epistle of fall to the hebrews but i think most of us realize that it's probably unlikely that paul wrote it though he may have had 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 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 really got to do the work yourself it's the only way you can get the benefit from it and i shouldn'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's 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 uh 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 like 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 worshipped 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 round 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 are 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 oh well i suppose we better do as we're told

but it was skin deep this josiah reformation which i've got down round about 6 21.

this josiah reformation was so skin deep that um in various places

uh jeremiah has to say that uh they're really only

pretending to come back they're not coming back properly

for today i 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 you get the feel of things but in chapter three you get an example of the way in which this uh

demons this reformation

let's go at verse eight chapter three verse eight

and i might cross reference to here if i think it comes over well

yeah i think i will have this uh kenneth taylor version verse eight

uh 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 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 to say in the king james she didn't turn to me with her whole heart but faintedly

saith the lord so there was a as far as most people was concerned 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 causes 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

you 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 go round

and help in connection with this reformation i think we read about it in chapter

hmm

i'll never mind which chapter it is uh we'll be going to that tomorrow i must resist the temptation to look into too many chapters today actually because i want to give you the general background but in one of the chapters one of those early chapters round uh 8 9 10 11

he goes round and he 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's 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 nico

comes to the throne and he decides he's going to do battle with the caldeans because there were always two political parties not the democrats and the republicans in israel but it was there were three really but the two main ones were the pro-egypt party the ones who said let's let's go to egypt and and the others were the pro-assyria or babylon party they said let's be friends with with the syria let's 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 in review 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 reviewed well as indeed he would if we were here today no doubt

or if i were in england i'd say the conservatives and the and the labor or the tories and the socialists

uh 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 saiho that's the river nile or what is 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 jehoiah has that just reigned for three months

and then pharaoh nico put on the throne king jehoiah kim and he was a terror he really was

he he was a selfish man whose whole approach was if i'm all right 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 13.

woe to you king jehoiakim for you are building your great palace with forced labor

by not paying wages you are building in justice 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 fragrance cedar and painted a lovely red and 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 jehoia kim

and um

in the time of jehoiachim right at the beginning jeremiah really starts getting prominent in chapter seven 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 and said

but not put any ecclesias in otherwise you know you might think i'm getting at somebody so he went and said uh ex-land ecclesia is corrupt

and you came find somebody outside your meeting saying that the arranging brethren is soon beyond him so you go away and uh don't interrupt without worship well actually that's what jeremiah did or to put it on another plane

saint paul's cathedral is a very big church that you've no doubt heard of in in england

well it's something like billy graham going and standing outside saint 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 some 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 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 is 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 because 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 are these we're all right 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 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 still got enough friends to stop him from being executed and so he escaped from being executed he had to go and hide

and then what he did but he got hold of bayrock he said to bayer look i 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 said during the three months of jehovah has and all the things that he'd said so far during the reign of jehoiakim

and barak wrote them all down

now says jeremiah you cuddle off to the temple area where all the people are and you read that scroll

so all the things that jeremiah had said 20 years earlier in the time of josiah now reads them it 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 bay rick's up to here 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 and they said barrack you come with us.

and uh so before they went to the king they got him to read it again to them

and they said look barrick they weren't 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 so 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 right read it 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 take that kenya howard what he looked like

or did he look fierce

wait till i get my hands on jeremiah

or did he just i 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 those sort of looks i think that's what he did because he got his pen knife 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 know how they did in the time of dyndale tried to burn his translations of the bible you can't get rid of god's word

because um jeremiah and barrack in their hiding place

jeremiah just dictated it all again and the significant words are 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 they're unto

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 it 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

uh and nevertheless he never got

he never got him in 598

during an invasion by nebuchadnezzar

598 bc jehoiakim died

and the king of babylon

nebuchadnezzar put his uncle on the throne zedekiah

i may have got my relationships wrong there we have to look that up anyway put a relative on the throne a man named matanaya who became known as zedikaya

now we've all heard of zedikar because he was the last king of judah we all remember well for a little while just for three months there was jehoia kin but he i don't count him it was brother of jehoiakim zedikai was uncle to jehoiakim that's got it right

one of the other sons of uh

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 uh to believe to to keep your promise

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 zedikaya getting corrupted by american speech

and um 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 is a sort of a horror jehoiakim is the trouble with him he could never stick to anything for five minutes at a time

it was always blown this way and that way you remember that occasion when jeremiah was put in the well

and uh

he he didn't really want to put him in the well it was the

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 because 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 at all don't fight babylon he said

uh and um 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 it 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 milik the ethiopian the colored man says he'll die if you leave him there so jeremiah zetticai 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 uh and you know it's uh i feel 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 they could sort of help him and strengthen his hands and

he was always a bit careful about jeremiah when jeremiah was in prison he'd secretly call him to come and give him advice well the babylonians were there and they would come to the gates then they'd go back because of some problem every time they went back all the jews in jerusalem says oh jeremiah's wrong after all they've gone jeremiah said don't you be too sure don't count your chickens before their hats 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 gedelia and there was a rotten man named

ishmael you read about this in 40 41 42

43 44 of jeremiah who assassinated get a liar and all the jews that remained took fright jeremiah said 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 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 and 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 by ways always

so father write thy law in our hearts

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

Location:Eastern Christadelphian Bible School (1971)
Topic:Jeremiah, Jesus and Us
Title:Dangers of external religion
Speaker:Wille, Edgar
Source: archive.moorestownchristadelphians.org |

Transcript

this is the voice of wilbraham the eastern christadolphian bible school presents one of a series of bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 convocation at wilbraham

brother edgar willey of canac 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 are these

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 not uh totally by saying you 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 uh 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 12th 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 and 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 6

and verse 10

jeremiah says in a little prayer you know one of these little prayers he keeps on shooting at god

six verse ten 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 6

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 1 my people sin as though commanded to as though their evil were laws chiseled with an iron pane or 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 uh jeremiah goes on in verse 5

cursed is the man who puts his trust in mortal man and turns his heart away from god but verse 7 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 really there's only two only two mainstreams of religious thought one is trust in man and the other is trusting god you know when you go back to the reformation and you had the mighty catholic church there standing 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 maybe 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 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 that doesn't mean the other man's heart it doesn't mean something called theologically human nature you know 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 forth tells 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 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

jehoiakim is

the man who really virtually comes to the throne after josiah is killed

and um 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

the 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 all right 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 4 of chapter 7 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 behavior

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 exalt 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 that 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 thoughts

if you stop your wicked thoughts verse 5

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 well it doesn't necessarily go together so stop your wicked faults that's where things start and then thoughts lead to deeds

and deeds

involve being fair to other people and that isn't the quality that we as a community are over noted for you know

you know it sometimes does you good to step out of yourself and see yourself as others see you no doubt alex mckay could recite for us burns his poem about wood to god the gifty gears 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 i i perhaps there's a kind of a moral there somewhere uh 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 a religion that we've been privileged to learn we sometimes even in argument with others take unfair advantage of them and give them a cannon full of

of of scripture passages where our superior dexterity leaves them at a disadvantage well they go away 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 have time to go into it now but sometimes if you read back into isaiah

you'll find that there are many passages there in the time when sinacrab 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 and 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 to 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

and 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 up and he went in and saw them using the the temple precincts as a kind of marketplace for getting ill-gotten gains he went back to this verse he said my house shall 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 there are many external things we must have 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 went down came the chopper and out they went now eccles 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 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 we 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 his 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 an interesting three verses and this paraphrase that i'm using the living bible rather helps you with it in chapter 7 and verses 20

21 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 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 christ you could say well he didn't give him instructions straight away it waited a few months before he gave them the instructions i don't think that's what it means

what he's saying the key word is concerning with a view to he didn't instruct them with a view to they weren't unobjective 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 points 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 why so we're in this same situation with israel that uh 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 because 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 well then 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 or two others in this temple speech that we want to look at

the the eighth chapter

uh 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 5 of chapter 8 verses 4 and 5.

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 pill mail down the path of sin as swiftly as a horse rushing to battle this is vivid language isn't it brothers and sisters

we know the answer is him 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 pale male 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 uh

time uh beats me every time because obviously it's only possible just to to to give just a little bit of this and

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 uh small crystal delphian splinter groups one of these small fellowships and we were only a few of us we looked at the big crystal delphian 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 called threatened with the police and all sorts of things you know it was rather funny when chris adelphians threatened other chris adelphins 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 in 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

yesterday's theme you can't escape it in jeremiah

this is the point of it

never rejoicing in iniquity 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 nine 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

is it 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 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 the 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're not bothered about the poor you're just using them to build up your terrific house

and uh

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 barrack could 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 uh he went down to the shop where the clay pots were made i saw this two years ago down at stilbridge village where there's a one of the exhibits is of an old potter's shop and uh 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 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 jarvis 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

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 is 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 uh 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 here come around here and have a look at that see what he's just done people said oh yes yes he's he's remolded it that's it that's what you are you clay you let him remold you he's getting away from mere externalism to inner 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 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

and 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 that's the only man that god won't forgive as he 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 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 the seven 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 but 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 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 time they usually slip eventually maybe that's the answer right 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 pen knife episode in the fourth year of king uh jehoiakim and probably this is as far as we can go today having a look at

the actual situation that uh of

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 36 keep your finger in both

you were well ahead of me there you'd you've gone under 36 which is where the pen knife episode is but i just want to give you the background of the pen no net pen knife episode because i think it uh it links in with chapter 25. by the way that temple speech that uh we talked about just now

where he stood by the temple that links in with chapter 26

i can't go back on that and prove it but if you 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 criss-crosses 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 criss-crossing and

what happens in chapter 26 after that temple episode he could gets put on trial because he 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 seven now chapter 25

in the time of jehoiakim relates with chapter 36 and the pen knife episode when the scroll that barrack 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 um

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 ji hoyakim 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 amen 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 23 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 eight and nine he tells them where the trouble is coming and he's 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 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 until 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 how important it's been to us in our day because 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 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 bayrak 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 should 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 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 in the way that god doesn't frederick takes it all down chapter two chapter three chapter four chapter five chapter six it all gets taken down do you remember that time just a year or two ago when we went down to the potter's wheel we was put that down in this scroll and 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 so he went on he writes all this down

and the keynote verse 2 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 him 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 this when they see it in writing you know 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 but 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 you know and if you have a 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 re 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 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 barrack nowadays he got on the phone saying hey rick 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 barrack wrote down all the prophecies and when all the all of it was finished and jeremiah appears to have been a kind of a

in 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 again why verse 7 perhaps even yet they will turn

for 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 till 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 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 red 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 27

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 body 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 barrack 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 although we must leave it having seen the curse of the religion which is purely external

the curse of a situation be where because the religion is external people's hearts are not softened and god cannot remold 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

Location:Eastern Christadelphian Bible School (1971)
Topic:Jeremiah, Jesus and Us
Title:I am in anguish
Speaker:Wille, Edgar
Source: archive.moorestownchristadelphians.org |

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 cannock staffordshire england has chosen as his theme jeremiah jesus and us

here is brother willie 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 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.

now 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 enables you to know why he said lord i am too young for this

uh and uh

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 and 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 uh 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 so 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 seven and so he says verse six 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 uh 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 the people grouped it was the pre the priests

and the prophets the false prophets who ganged up against him but it was the people and the princes

who came out out on his side and said no you don't kill him uh 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 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 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 where god 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 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 uh god might have

and uh right through there is the defect with the josiah reformation and with the reign of king jehoiakim there is a a defect the early part of jehoiakim's reign that they were trying to organize people into being good

organizations necessary and he 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 um

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're 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 illustrates 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 uh perhaps uh 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 the 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

while blended with reverence yet it is a fact that we are invited to approach boldly under the throne of grace and the way jeremiah he's so uninhibited he says just anything to god almost the point you think now just a bit careful jeremiah when's he talking to god like that but it was 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 fourth chapter tenth verse

in the midst of his uh early preaching against those

israelites who were being warned by the invasion of the scythians we know how we 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 as jeremiah his lord you you 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 you've really led them up the garden path

now you know 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 uh a thing i 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 enemies trumpets and the enemies battle cry 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 thumped thumped 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'll 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 said that's why he sometimes was 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 uh in the eighth chapter of jeremiah we're still in the jose in the

possibly here in the early jehoiachim period either end of josiah beginning jehoiakim and in the

14th verse

we have the uh sort of problem that uh 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

and 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 18 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 you know 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 nine

is the chapter which begins with him wishing he'd got more tear depths

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 it's 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 their all adulterous treacherous man 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 they of his own household and so often as 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 the invasion that is um uh threatening has 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 faults 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 cladding shining white who 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 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 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 jehoiakim now in the 10th chapter

jeremiah's losing his confidence

and after all you've got to have some confidence

as well as humility god given confidence in a job like jeremiah got took a lot of confidence

but the confidence was not in himself so let's go in at um

verse

18 here

oh i like verse 17 in this version this is jeremiah talking verse 17

chapter 10

pack your bags he says get ready now to leave the siege will soon begin

it's dramatic language isn't it for suddenly i'll fling you from this land and pour great troubles down at last you shall feel my wrath

and then verses 19 and 20 should be as it were in quotes and these are the things that judah says

desperate as my wound my grief is great my sickness is incurable but i must bear it my home is gone my children have been taken away i will never see them again there is no one left to help me rebuild my house

that's an imaginary way of of showing israel troubled by the things that are coming upon them

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 o 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 cause 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 jesus 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 this was 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 said lord don't kill judah off now says do kill him off at least in anathor one or two have commented on this

and it's right that 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 pen knife he was shut up it says now that either means he was in prison and this translation takes it was imprisoned 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 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 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 um

he felt particularly

particularly upset

and

in uh

verse 15 he still sends messages to them uh verse 15 of chapter 13

speaking of israel and judah oh that you were not so proud and stubborn still this note of pleading in it this note of wishing they were different not this note of rejoicing iniquity then you would listen to the lord for he has spoken give glory to the lord your god and perhaps barrack 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 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 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 what people usually write they usually say they're brotherhood

but they treat it as them

them and you if we're going to criticize

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 criticize 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 o hope of israel our savior 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

o hope of israel our savior in times of trouble

it was for the hope of israel that paul was bound with a chain and 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 is that is what israel hoped for but have you noticed and this was pointed out by brother alfred nichols in an editorial in the christiadelphian 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 savior in the time of trouble so that when it says on the christodolphian 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 savior god manifested in the lord jesus christ oh hope of israel our savior 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 anymore to bless this people don't pray for them anymore

now things are pretty dreadful when that's said

and um then he says verse 13

then i said o lord god you notice it god said then i said then then he said then i said to jeremiah prayer is a conversation with god

and we don't know and it might 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

and so you 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 your 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 the father and the son are so united that they don't think we need people 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 uh 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 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's are 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 your prayers 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 wherever he whatever posture he sat in or stood in 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

uh 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 likes 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 sure am i that was very wrong of you to wish you were dead

same of course with joe 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 them on their behalf with you on their behalf how i have begged you to spare those enemies of mine see that the kind of see-saw of jeremiah's thought

he says you know i 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

see this this helps us doesn't it to understand that 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 didn't he wish i would date 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 is he saying that to god yet you have failed me in my time of need this is a bit of the cha 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 like see 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 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 you return to them uh not 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 we're trying to really look inside a man's mind and the comfort we get out of this is 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 see saws 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 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 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 uh would enable uh him to live an ordinary life just as the lord jesus christ had to forgo 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

see i i i don't want them doomed

bring confusion and trouble on all those who persecute but give me peace

yes bring double destruction upon them

then the lord said jeremiah stop all this go and do some work and and he sends him off at this particular stage to

go and make a one of his rare appearances perhaps the king wasn't around at the time uh and uh 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 there's always this problem of the pages that blew all over the place so we're never quite sure what order we're in now that's chapter 17

uh i see the time has gone so i must just pick up just one final one of these confessions and then we'll um 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 two pashur 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 uh smote him you see he thinks 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 him there all night

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

pasha 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 pashu 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 seven

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 you couldn't hold back but now i'm the laughingstock 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 could say these things and it's quite 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

so people are everything ah there's old jeremiah again he's at it again jeremiah you've 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 was 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

she'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 am afraid we 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 oh 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 shot 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 that 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 born 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 has 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 utter 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

Location:Eastern Christadelphian Bible School (1971)
Topic:Jeremiah, Jesus and Us
Title:A lamb to the slaughter
Speaker:Wille, Edgar
Source: archive.moorestownchristadelphians.org |

Transcript

this is the voice of wilbraham

the eastern cristadelphian bible school presents one of a series of bible study classes originally delivered at the 1971 convocation at wilbraham

brother edgar willey of canic 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 uh yesterday we were talking of the uh

inner experiences of jeremiah just to remind you where we've gone this week first we started with a a general survey

and uh we had a 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 oh 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 in the 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 other 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 brothers and sisters an attitude of concern an attitude of compassion not 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 it forges the bond and 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're 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 um

what year was it uh

598 jehoiakim dies 597

the siege of jerusalem where

konaya who was only king for three months joha kin or konaya he surrenders and is 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 behavior 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 uh um where would he be mid 50s mid mid 50s he seems to have reached a kind of stability in his own emotional life though no doubt he still have have his ups and downs because you go on having them all all your life but he's a he's a 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 when they wanted to put

jeremiah down that sewage tank

that was the time when uh

which chapter is it 13 38.

they went to the king and said sir this fellow must die die chapter 38 verse 4.

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 he bet milit came along and said look he'll die down there so zeddika 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 of 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 if 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'd if we were 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 the somebody say ah 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 but if you feel you're you're 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 and then you think oh

how am i going to handle this situation and you find yourself going into shell a bit well that's your temperament you can't help that that's what you've inherited and 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 mold us if we'll let him mold us in that sense not having too strong a character is an advantage because if you're letting the right power mold you then the molding will take place effectively well i don't want to spend too much time on on zika but i thought it was important just to say those few things now

as soon as uh 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 to get him to break his oath and get together an alliance a kind of united nations for the defeat of babylon

and so there's a 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

the first thing i've got to do is to ask you to make a change to the king james version and uh 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 down 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 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 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 zedikaya 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 sent their messengers they 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 milk maid not the meat maid the milkmaid used to wear when she went to taking the milk when she'd been milking the cows or they wear yolks where they still need to get a couple of bucket buckets of water from a whale and so he puts this yoke on the yoke was a symbol of slavery same as you have a yoke on animal when you're uh 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 some further versions of it to all these ambassadors that had arrived at jerusalem and one in effect he was saying was this is what is going to happen you are all going to have to serve the king of uh 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 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 zedikaya

it was necessary that zedekiah sends 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 generally when jeremiah heard that this contingent of people were going up to babel and 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 five 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 70

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 70s 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 say 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 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 uh 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 peaceable lives just as jeremiah said in the peace of babylon you shall have peace and so they were 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 over 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'd got to be part of the christ system of things and they've 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 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 spirits 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 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 uh and this will be about 5.95

and um

well actually he isn't preaching but a man named hannah naya 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 jekynia konaya jehoiakim will be back on the throne

and jeremiah said to hananiah in front of all the priests and people verse six

amen may your prophecies come true i hope the lord will do everything you say and we'll bring back from babylon the treasures of this temple with all our loved ones

i wish it were true it was 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 king the king of babylon be broken

jeremiah goes off and all the people very excited at all these goings on in jerusalem

and they think ah that's one up to hannah naya that's one in the eye for jeremiah you know i mean ordinary folk they'd be talking these ways and jeremiah goes off

then he comes back next day perhaps it was and all the crowds say jeremiah and hannah and i are face to face they're going to have another row because we've loved things like that so up they come to see what's going on

thou set 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 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 seeds 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 pashua

uh zephaniah the priest to jeremiah and begged so this is the weakness of jeremiah of zeddikai you see he still got a 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 babylons 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 caldean 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 caldean 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 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 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 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 5

88 87 round about that time

this is when when the rest of our episodes are all in that period they decided they 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 uh that was fine and 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 ah jeremiah is wrong look they've gone we're delivered

and great rejoicings took place

just of course it happened in the time of 1870 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 no they looked at the appearances 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 here you you 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

uh this um

uh

message came from jeremiah

every time jeremiah comes in with the unpopular message you see is king zedekiah who ordered this business

um

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 he says now as soon as the siege is lifted for a little while you think it's all right you go back to doing the wrong thing you are oath breakers

and god hates oath breaking god is truth you are liars and oath breakers and you will suffer from it and what is more king zedekiah who led you in this solemn covenant and who now lets you weekly 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 and 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 regathering 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 regathering and a full establishment of god's people then you come to chapter 38.

we're 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 uh constant

um

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 live 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 was 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 it 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 and be quiet there but as he was walking through the benjamin gate a century arrested him as a traitor claiming he was defecting to the babylonians the guard making the arrest was erija son of shella maya 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 and eventually king zedekiah sent secretly secretly

to

see jeremiah and jeremiah comes through an underground passage and uh says have you got any recent messages from the lord you see this chilly shallowing man the man who got a wishbone instead of a backbone as we said on monday this king zedekiah if he 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 then i see you 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 uh 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 milik

who arranges for this large group of people to pull up this man who was submerged in the maya and jeremiah

again

is returned to the palace prison these are the ups and downs of his experiences zedekiah again says have you got the advice for me jeremiah is it his wits in you feel a bit sorry for the man why didn't he do something to get some good friends around him and and stick his neck out and risk it he probably didn't sleep much at night for zeddy kyle 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 uh 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 and if anybody gets onto you you'd you'd just wait i'll deal with them no you're not that sort of man he says if any of the officials here 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 well you haven't got to go any 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 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

zedikaya 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 gates 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 riblar further up north where he pronounced judgment upon him the most cruel judgment it was the king of babylon made zedekiah a 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 zeddika

what of jeremiah the jeremiah who had suffered throughout this intense period but notice the difference between yesterday and to date there's something strong about jeremiah in today's story he's sort of matured and he knows where he stands and he he sticks it out with much less timidity

we don't know what hidden prayers he was constantly saying of course

he's 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 nebushar 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 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 riblar 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 traveled all the way to babylon for these people have sinned against the lord that's why it happened of course that was clever of of nebuchadnezzar to catch on with with what the message of jeremiah had been and 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 chapter 40. if you want to come with me to babylon fine i'll see you 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 a liar 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'd be rather nice to go to babylon because there it'll be rather nice to be with the best sort of jews the good figs 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 at 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 helpers one of another grant that the great day of sins captivity may soon be over grant that we may be among the redeemers of the lord who shall come with singing unto zion in jesus name amen

Location:Eastern Christadelphian Bible School (1971)
Topic:Jeremiah, Jesus and Us
Title:The new covenant – the beauty of the in-dwelling Lord
Speaker:Wille, Edgar
Source: archive.moorestownchristadelphians.org |

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 canic 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 tonight 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 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 was 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 diarist 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 diarist need

now uh what happened next just to put the record straight was that gedelia 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

uh and we know these stories but the 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 get a liar and misper 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 get a liar i didn't get a liar i was rather a nice sort of a chap

somebody came along to him one named joe hannon you read about this in chapter 40

verse 14

uh soon after johannan son of korea and the other guerrilla leaders came to misbah to warn get a liar that baeles king of the ammonites had sent ishmael son of nephaniah to assassinate him but get a liar wouldn't believe them

gedelia was a nice kindly trusting sort of man evidently then johannan had a private conference with gedelia johannan volunteered to kill ishmael secretly why should we let him come and murder you johanna 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 get a liar said i forbid you from doing any such thing for your lying about ishmael ishmael was apparently a fairly respectable and respected person and get a liar just won't believe it well that attitude of trust in one of his colleagues cost gedelia his life and uh in the october

gedelia arrived with some other officials and get a liar invited them to dinner invited ishmael to dinner and while they were eating ishmael and the 10 men in league with him chapter 41

verse 2 suddenly jumped up pulled out their swords killed get a liar and slaughtered all the jewish officials and babylonian soldiers who were in misbah with gedelia 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 and when ishmael met them

because he didn't want them to get hold of the story that get a lie 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 johannan

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 in 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 asked 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 honest 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 now god doesn't always answer prayers straight away they'd promise 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 well one gets the feeling from the whole book of jeremiah that the method would be fairly normal it wouldn't appear miraculous 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 ten days

ten days later the lord gave his reply to jeremiah so jeremiah calls johannan and the captain of the forces now of course men are impatient during those ten days they couldn't wait upon the lord

but they thought up their own schemes

and had come to a decision to go down to egypt

who were 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

take 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 johannen 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 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 such as johannes 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 alarms then this is what the lord replies a 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

um that's all 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 you can see that's what they've got it in their minds 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 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 johannes 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 bayruk the son of niriah has plotted against us and told you to say this so barrack 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 barrack 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 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 tapanese and memphis and throughout southern egypt even there's 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 loved 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 bayrock the great secretary who helped jeremiah write down all his messages who in particular wrote down that message for king ji hoyakim which king jehoiakim cut up with a pen knife 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 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 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 live in 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 he's going to meet on the mountains of israel there will be a time of worldwide distress such as never has been and 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 his brethren found during the last war that careers suddenly got chopped off

i found that my own case any idea i ever had of going to university just got chopped off in the middle of it took many years to catch up the lost uh lost time but never mind one still gets through with the help of god now barrack was quite an ambitious young man or a comparatively young man rather older now

and

even before this situation because 45

chapter 45 really belongs to roughly the time when uh baruch did his writing for that scroll that 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 had cut up the scroll with his pen knife and they'd told barrick to go and hide barracks 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 lost it and so this was the message that was given especially for bayrak o bayrak 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 barak this

the lord says i will destroy this nation that i built i will wipe out what i established that's not all the people but the nation

are you seeking great things for yourself are you ambitious beric 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 baeruk you've worked for jeremiah you've produced these scrolls

you could go far you could become an important official but i wouldn't do you any good because tudor 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 if 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 tit bits 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 it's 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 get a liar 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 misbah 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 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'd stood up and told israel of their sin at a time when josiah was busy on this reformation of tying to trying to improve things

to jeremiah a young man felt fairly unpopular task of saying yes it's all very well what josiah's doing but as far as most of you are concerned is 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 marvelous passover but it hasn't penetrated your hard hearts that 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 sins 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 and says 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 oh as a middle-aged man into the time of zeddikaya and here he is after all it's over looking back

he thinks of the rough time he had of it in the reign 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 whale i can't do anything about it get him out of the well if he's going to drown i'm 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

who wished if only zedekiah could have been a little stronger but still it wasn't the king of babylon had come now it was all gone

jerusalem temple burnt no sacrifices now

no real proper organized worship no feast days no new moons

what was left

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 a 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 yet his 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 we have our christadelphian meetings we have our wonderful privilege of fellowship of which will abraham is a 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 mould us after the example of jeremiah's potter that 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 action 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 tabrets and shall go forth in the dances of them that make merry

so 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 hath 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 any more at all

so there is a picture of a time when israel will be reformed now this was partly fulfilled and only partly fulfilled in the time of joshua's irababal 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 saith 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 wasn't husband unto them set the lord but this shall be the covenant that i will make with the house of israel

it's 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

it's not going to be like that

this shall be the covenant that i will make with the house of israel after those days saith 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 know the lord

won't be a kind of institution ultimately

for they shall all know me they'll be an inner awareness

not just know about me but know me

that intimate word that's used in marriage adam knew 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 saith 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 the day is coming when all these institutions having been stripped away israel will be re re-formed

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 uh that kind of thing we have a ranging brethren and we have our

well they aren't very 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 situation very much like those people who wept by the

waters of babylon with one big difference that we have no need to weep

because we have this new covenant and the 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 force you may say well how can it be in 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 and 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 two 2000 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 to 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

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 6 chapter 8

now

chapter 8 verse 6. 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 thoughtless then should no place have been sought for the second for finding fault 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 set a new covenant he hath made the first old now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away and it did in ad70 even that rebuilt herod temple vanished away and then likewise in the tenth chapter

we have the same idea

where he says verse 12

speaking of jesus

this 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 hath 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 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 in a 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 that's 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 not sunday's excitation 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 so the writer to the hebrew picks up the new covenant paul picks it up in two corinthians three 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'd got the temple and all that and here we are scattered about in little ecclesias

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 gedelia perhaps and contemplated the collapse of everything that he had seen and yet found peace in his hearts 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 wilbraham 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 no 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

shall 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 learned 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 that will 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 the 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 lead

we thank thee that that has taken him into heaven at thy right hand we thank thee that from thy throne and from him their streams forth power the power of thy new covenant o grant father 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