Print Entry | Print Entry with Comments
The Second of Two Lenten Sermons
Last week, we glimpsed in on the prophet Ezekiel, who God was instructing as to the expectations the Lord had of His prophets. This week our reading takes us to the book of Jeremiah chapter 20. Here we encounter Jeremiah, not so much in a theological sense, as in a personal one. We find Jeremiah, newly released from a day in the stocks and in the throes of a bout of depression. The Geneva Bible notes for this section of Scripture merely state:
“In this appears the impatiency which often overcomes the servants of God when they do not see their labours profit, and also feel their own weakness.”
That Jeremiah might be depressed should be no surprise. See, Jeremiah, like Ezekiel, spoke to a people in decline. A people much like ours. These people did not want to listen to the Word of God, much less obey it. They placed other gods above the Lord God. They defiled the Temple with a refusal to repent. They oppressed one another, and their religious leaders led the charge. So it is in our nation today. So it is that the godly speak the messages of God and hardly any listen.
Even when people do listen, such as in the case of Charles Haddon Spurgeon who was often called “the prince of preachers,” there can be despondancy. Spurgeon suffered horribly from gout and had episodes of severe depression. Arnold Dallimore wrote in a biography of Spurgeon:
“What he suffered in those times of darkness we may not know ... even his desperate calling on God brought no relief. ‘There are dungeons’, he said, ‘beneath the castles of despair.’”
The work of the Lord can be tough on men, and although our Lord will grant us strength a plenty to sustain us, He is not obligated to make it easy. Indeed, in Scripture we find Elijah fleeing to desert and cave, Paul suffering his thorn in the flesh, David crying out to God in regard to his enemies, Job crying out in his misery, John the Baptist, in confinement, sending word to the Christ asking, “Is it truly you?” Scripture is full of men who are great men, but they are just men with weaknesses much as our own.
If we look at the life of Jeremiah we find that really only four people listened to him. There was Baruch the Scribe, Ebed-melech an Ethiopian eunuch (foreshadowing the eunuch in Acts), the short term governor of Judah, Gedaliah and Daniel who read his work in Babylon. Four people is not so many for a lifetime career, but there it is. That is what God allotted him. It wasn’t that Jeremiah wasn’t faithful, not that at all, for Jeremiah was a prophet of great perseverance. He had every reason, from a human standpoint, to give up and yet never did. But just because he did not see the harvest does not mean that there wasn’t one. Who knows how many Jeremiah has inspired to stand fast over the intervening centuries.
Archaeologists digging in the remains of a school for imperial pages in Rome found a picture dating from the third century. It shows a boy standing, his hand raised, worshiping a figure on a cross, a figure that looks like a man with the head of an ass. Scrawled in the writing of a young person are the words, “Alexamenos worships his God.” Nearby in a second inscription: “Alexamenos is faithful.” Apparently, a young man who was a Christian was being mocked by his schoolmates for his faithful witness. But he was not ashamed; he was faithful.
As with Alexamenos, Jeremiah was remarkably faithful in the face of ridicule. The fire in his bones could not let him forget, could not let him be silent, in regards to the One he served. This is so even in the depth of the depression in which we encounter him this evening. Tonight we have a reading from a man living in a cycle of culture much like our own. Short of a massive revival in this nation, we may all well, to varying degrees, partake in the cup of Jeremiah. He is our brother, the prophet Jeremiah, whose suffering words the Holy Spirit considered important enough for us to hear. This is the wail of a man of God standing against the tidal wave of a corrupted culture and as equally corrupt and false religion. Let us hear with open hearts our brother, Jeremiah.
The reading tonight is divided into three pretty distinct sections. In the first Jeremiah questions the validity of his call. Remember, after all, that Jeremiah is looking around at this point and recalling that God commissioned him to “root up, tear down, to destroy and demolish, to build and to plant,” and well on into his career there is precious little, actually none, of the building and planting to be seen. To put this dejection into further perspective we only have to look two chapters back, to Jeremiah 18, where we read God’s Word to Jeremiah regarding the people:
NKJ Jeremiah 18:9 “And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, 10 “if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will relent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it. 11 ” Now therefore, speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the LORD: “Behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you. Return now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.” ’ ” 12 And they said, “That is hopeless! So we will walk according to our own plans, and we will every one obey the dictates of his evil heart.”
Jeremiah had a great love for his people, and it pained him horribly to watch what was occurring. It is a mood that many an American can relate to in our time as we hear our culture utter those same words.
Jeremiah feels as if the Lord has seduced him, or more accurately forced him to prophesy, deceived him even because he sees nothing come from all his labor. Jeremiah was so dejected that he decided to just shut up. To quit. The pain of ridicule would drive him to silence and he would neither speak of God nor utter His Words again. Yet as much as he might will it, Jeremiah could not. He says that God’s Word was in his heart like a burning fire, shut up in his bones. It was such that it took effort for him to hold back and not speak. And he could not. Even though his enemies stood all around waiting for him to slip, he could not remain silent. The Word of God will not be contained.
In our second section beginning with verse 11, Jeremiah seems to shift gears. He is almost preaching to himself, needing to be reminded in the midst of frustration and depression that God is indeed sovereign. He pleads his case before the Lord and although we are not told that God answered his prayer specifically, Jeremiah speaks with confidence and assurance that comes from knowing the nature of God and His faithfulness. Ultimately, this might have made things easier for Jeremiah, or it simply might have been a momentary lull in his despondent mood where he is reminding himself not to worry. The Word does that, you know. It sneaks up on us when we are weak, ragged, or in despair. Did you ever have Scripture come unbidden to you at such a time? Did it give you the precise comfort that you needed to endure the trial of the moment? So too, are the reminders of the Lord with Jeremiah.
The third section of the reading heads back into darker territory once again. Jeremiah, who cannot rightly under Jewish law curse either God or his parents, in the depths of turmoil rather curses the day of his birth and then even goes as far as to curse the man bringing the news of his birth to his father, because the man did not kill Jeremiah in the womb. Jeremiah bemoans his birth and wonders why he should have been born to a life of toil, sorrow, and shame. In case we are tempted to accuse Jeremiah of having a pity party here, keep in mind that his life was, humanly speaking, composed of precisely those things, toil, sorrow, and shame.
Depression can be like drowning where a man comes up for a gasp of air only to sink back under its dark surface once again. God allowed Jeremiah to suffer so. We do not know why. It might be that it was preparation for what was to come; it might have been so that those of us looking at Jeremiah later could see him as a man, like us. A godly and faithful man sustained by God in a hard time. We do well to recall that when later the Babylonians came to Jerusalem, they accorded Jeremiah a respect that his own did not. We would also do well to remember that the fate of those who failed to heed the Word of God during the conflict with the Babylonians was often far worse than that of Jeremiah, both in this life and most assuredly in the next. Jeremiah would one day find rest and peace. Those who scorned him, God’s prophet, and in doing so scorned God, have an eternity devoid of either peace or rest.
If such things as came to Jerusalem come to us, will we hold up as well as our dear brother Jeremiah? Will we be able to stand in the face of ridicule and scorn? By the grace of God we will. How are we doing so far? How is the fire in your heart? Do you feel it in your bones? Are you unable to hold it in?
The fire in Jeremiah’s heart, that one he saw as a burden in our reading, was actually what kept out the cold. Judah was in the grip of a spiritual freeze. Permafrost had formed on the hearts of even the priesthood of the day, rendering their hearts as hard as stone itself. And where their hearts were frozen, cold to God, and dead even, Jeremiah’s was all toasty, warm, and very much alive. Still the fire that burned in him could not be contained. Can ours?
Jeremiah’s fire cried out against the abuses of his religious leaders, against the idolatry of a nation. Jeremiah, as well as Ezekiel, was a watchman. For Isaiah 21:6 states: “For thus has the Lord said to me: ‘Go, set a watchman, Let him declare what he sees’.” Jeremiah did; he was a faithful watchman. Depressed and ragged, but a faithful watchman nonetheless. Are we? Or are we afraid to speak?
In certain churches pastors preach “peace, peace” where there is no peace. We, they tell us, are to accept the winds of culture as the breath of the Holy Spirit. The Bible, for them, is an old, dusty tome and not relevant to our modern times. They say that we are more evolved now and no longer need to believe those fairy tales. That Bible is not the Word of God; it only contains the words of God, as if that were a small thing. That their feelings are a better barometer of what God wants than Scripture. In essence, for these, the voice of the people is the voice of God and whatever aberrant thing the people want is okay with God. I was involved on an internet forum recently where a question was raised as to whether common law marriage (in this case they meant just living together) was acceptable to God. One woman had been living with the same man for many years and commented that she figured it must be okay with God because she did not feel bad about what she was doing. Her feelings, not God’s revealed Word, were the arbiter of truth. Is there then a line, a place, where such a person would consider that although they are perfectly comfortable themselves that God might not be? Looking around us today, it appears not to be the case and we have whole professed Christian denominations operating under the same illusion, or should I say delusion. They preach peace and harmony with a world that hates Christ, instead of the return of the King. Does this stir the fire in us? Does it make God’s Word working in us restless?
Others worship a little itty bitty god of their own making, a god that can be stopped in his tracks by our merely thinking negative thoughts, or so they teach. Their god is, on those days we are thinking positively and have properly banished our negative thoughts—well, their god is like some Prozac-popping Santa Claus ready to grant our every desire. Or so they teach. Does this false teaching in the name of our Lord stir the fire in our heart? Does it yearn to get out?
Why do I mention these? Am I just a contentious malcontent picking on others professing the name of Christ? No. Recall that the greatest opposition to Christ and His truth began not with the Romans, but with the Pharisees, those to whom the truth had been delivered and yet they rejected it.
Outside of the church there are troubles a plenty. Our culture is feeding our children to Molech through encouragement of abortion and other parental abdications; our teens to Ashtaroth with today’s emphasis on wanton sensuality, fertility, and violence. Our adults squander the Christian capital that made the life they have today possible and spit on the God Who provided it. We are in many ways, especially spiritually, indistinguishable from Jeremiah’s Judah.
If Jeremiah was here today, we would be confused. Here he would stand tired, ragged, depressed, and yet the very embodiment of being “on fire for the Lord”. We tend to think of people “on fire for the Lord” who are hopping around all energetic, speaking fast, like Tony Robbins on crack. But then there is Jeremiah who from what Scripture tells us could not have had less of an air of a motivational self-help presenter if he tried. What a violation of our modern expectations. Yet, Jeremiah was truly on fire for the Lord in a way few will ever be. The Word of the Lord burned in his heart, burned in his bones. He tried to contain it, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t hold it, and the Word of the Lord burst forth from him and he continued to pronounce the Lord’s Word in Judah.
We have it easier than Jeremiah did. We have the book. We can present God’s Word to a dying world. We can read it. But even so, we also need the Word in the way Jeremiah had it. Can you look at our dying world and contain the fire or like Jeremiah is it hard to hold it in? If you are not burning up, then this Lenten season come to the Lord and ask him to set you ablaze. Will it be glamorous? Oh, no. Will it be financially lucrative? Sorry, afraid not. Will it make you more comfortable? Probably not in any way you imagine. But if you are willing, open your heart and ask.
Pray. Pray that you, me, our parish, our denomination, the Church militant all be set ablaze with the fire that Jeremiah could not contain. Pray we be ablaze until we overflow, until we explode in a way unseen since the beginning of the Church. Let us prepare the way for the return of the King. May we all burn like Jeremiah – and be lights to lighten the Gentiles.
Amen.
Previous Entry:Are You a Faithful Watchman? Next Entry:Before Abraham Was
