“The Coming Judgment”
Jeremiah 11:1-17
This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
“Listen to the terms of this covenant and tell them to the people of Judah and to those who live in Jerusalem. Tell them that this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Cursed is the one who does not obey the terms of this covenant— the terms I commanded your ancestors when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the iron-smelting furnace.’ I said, ‘Obey me and do everything I command you, and you will be my people, and I will be your God. Then I will fulfill the oath I swore to your ancestors, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey’—the land you possess today.”
I answered, “Amen, LORD.”
The LORD said to me, “Proclaim all these words in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem: ‘Listen to the terms of this covenant and follow them. From the time I brought your ancestors up from Egypt until today, I warned them again and again, saying, “Obey me.” But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubbornness of their evil hearts. So I brought on them all the curses of the covenant I had commanded them to follow but that they did not keep.’”
Then the LORD said to me, “There is a conspiracy among the people of Judah and those who live in Jerusalem. They have returned to the sins of their ancestors, who refused to listen to my words. They have followed other gods to serve them. Both Israel and Judah have broken the covenant I made with their ancestors.
Therefore this is what the LORD says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them. The towns of Judah and the people of Jerusalem will go and cry out to the gods to whom they burn incense, but they will not help them at all when disaster strikes. You, Judah, have as many gods as you have towns; and the altars you have set up to burn incense to that shameful god Baal are as many as the streets of Jerusalem.’
“Do not pray for this people or offer any plea or petition for them, because I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their distress. “What is my beloved doing in my temple as she, with many others, works out her evil schemes? Can consecrated meat avert your punishment? When you engage in your wickedness, then you rejoice.”
The LORD called you a thriving olive tree with fruit beautiful in form. But with the roar of a mighty storm he will set it on fire, and its branches will be broken. The LORD Almighty, who planted you, has decreed disaster for you, because the people of both Israel and Judah have done evil and aroused my anger by burning incense to Baal.”
I have been working on this sermon longer than any sermon I have preached for years. This Scripture has been on my heart for some time. I have been a little slow in developing it - for one thing – it’s a little negative. It also has taken quite a bit of research. But now Palm Sunday and Easter is over. It’s time, I think.
In my daily devotional time I have been reading Jeremiah in my Old Testament portion of them for over a month. So I have been soaking in this book and in his words. Jeremiah has been called the “Weeping Prophet” because his heart is broken for his people. It is his job and calling to call his wicked people back to their God. They have more than wandered away. They have willfully and purposefully rejected God.
You need to understand that these were God’s special people. Of all the people of the earth God has chosen them to bless and to be the means of bring salvation to the earth. He brought them out of slavery with miracle after miracle. He led them to a land that was “flowing with milk and honey”. He made a covenant with them. “The Abrahamic covenant found in Genesis 12-17 is known as the "Covenant Between the Parts" in Hebrew, and is the basis for the covenant of circumcision in Judaism. The covenant was for Abraham and his seed, or offspring, both of natural birth and adoption.
In Genesis 12–17 God grants Abram and descendants land but does not place any stipulations on the promise. It is unconditional. In other words, no matter what – this land will always be Abraham’s descendants land.
By contrast, Gen. 17 contains the covenant of circumcision which is conditional. The condition is obedience.
• To make of Abraham a great nation and to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him and all peoples on earth would be blessed through Abraham.[Gen 12:1–3]
• To give Abraham's descendants all the land from the river (or wadi) of Egypt to the Euphrates.[Gen 15:18–21] Later, this land came to be referred to as the Promised Land or the Land of Israel, however the land specified by the Abrahamic covenant also includes the modern nations of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and several other nations in the Middle East.
• To make Abraham the father of many nations and of many descendants and give "the whole land of Canaan" to his descendants.[Gen 17:2–9]
• Circumcision is to be the permanent sign of this everlasting covenant with Abraham and his male descendants.[Gen 17:9–14]
Covenants in biblical times were often sealed by cutting up an animal, with the implication that the party who breaks the covenant will suffer a similar fate. In Hebrew, the verb meaning to seal a covenant translates literally as "to cut" and circumcision was a physical sign that you were in this covenant with God. Now Israel had broken covenant with God. This is what God says,
“Those who have violated my covenant and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me, I will treat like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces. The leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the court officials, the priests and all the people of the land who walked between the pieces of the calf, I will deliver into the hands of their enemies who want to kill them. Their dead bodies will become food for the birds and the wild animals.”
Jeremiah 34:18-20
So Israel had broken covenant with God and Jeremiah had the unpleasant task of warning them of the coming fulfillment of the consequences of their actions. There were three things in particular that offended God and broke the covenant with Him.
First, was they were guilty of innocent blood.
“For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.” Jeremiah 4-5
It is hard to believe that a people could become so hard hearted that they could burn their children up as a sacrifice to a god – but that is what they did. They took the innocent, defenseless little newborn babies and killed them in such a horribly painful way.
But before you condemn them understand that we have killed nearly 55 million babies through abortion – most of them because of unwanted pregnancies; many of them partial birth abortions. This procedure is usually performed during the last trimester - up to the end of the ninth month. The woman's cervix is dilated, and the abortionist grabs the baby's leg with forceps. Then he proceeds to pull the baby into the birth canal. The abortionist then delivers the baby's body, feet first, all but the baby's head. The abortionist inserts a sharp object into the back of the baby's head, removes it, and inserts a vacuum tube through which the brains are sucked out. The head of the baby collapses at this point and allows the aborted baby to be delivered lifelessly.
Is this graphic and grotesque? Yes, it is! Is it painful for the baby? Yes it is! It is not an embryo or fetus, but it is a baby. Jeremiah wrote,
“The word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1:4-5
God could say the same thing to each of us. He knows us before we are born. That baby in the womb is a baby – not a lump of matter. And we are guilty of shedding innocent blood. Do you think we will get away with that? I don’t think so. God, who did not spare his chosen people, will not spare us. Judgment is coming to America, folks. Jeremiah writes,
“But if any nation does not listen, I will completely uproot and destroy it,” declares the LORD.” Jeremiah 12:17
Jeremiah weeping, begs his nation to repent, and many Christian today are weeping for the unborn and calling for our nation to repent.
Jeremiah also warns them of judgment coming because, secondly, of their sexual practices. He says,
“People from many nations will pass by this city and will ask one another, ‘Why has the LORD done such a thing to this great city?’ And the answer will be: ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD their God...”
Jeremiah 22:8-9
Part of the covenant with the Lord had to do with sexual sin. At the top of the list was homosexuality. God said,
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.”
(NKJ, Leviticus 18:22)
“If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.” (NKJ, Leviticus 20:13)
Notice that this sin was called an “abomination”. All sin is rebellion and all sin is bad – but this sin was singled out as an “abomination” to God. Those that support this sin are quick to attack the Word of God. And I suppose part of the issue IS about the Bible. “Can we trust it? Can we believe it?”
I believe so - and so did thousands of martyrs who died for it. I believe you can bet your eternal future on the accuracy of its pages. Those who support homosexuality HAVE to attack it because it is so clear in it’s descriptive of homosexuality as sin. A couple of cities were destroyed because of it – Sodom and Gomorrah. And the major sex act of homosexuals is named after one of those cities.
Let’s look at a couple of New Testament Scriptures that deal with homosexuality,
“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator- who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (NIV, Romans 1:25-27)
“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
(NIV, 1st Corinthians 6:9-11)
The Bible is pretty clear that homosexuality is wrong. Is it any worse that any other sin? No. Jesus lumps them together when He says,
“What comes out of you is what defiles you. For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile you. (TNIV, Mark 7:20-23)
All sin comes from the heart. All sin is rebellion against God. The form that rebellion takes, whether it is adultery, fornication, or homosexuality, is merely the result of the heart. Jeremiah said,
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9
Changing the result without changing the heart does no good. Changing the heart will change the sinful action.
Our county is coming under judgment because, as a society, we have voted to toss God out of our land. We have voted to clearly do that which we know God abhors – both abortion and same sex marriage. God said to His people,
“When you tell these people all this and they ask you, ‘Why has the LORD decreed such a great disaster against us? What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the LORD our God?’ then say to them, ‘It is because your ancestors forsook me,’ declares the LORD, ‘and followed other gods and served and worshiped them. They forsook me and did not keep my law. But you have behaved more wickedly than your ancestors. See how all of you are following the stubbornness of your evil hearts instead of obeying me.”
Jeremiah 16:10-12
God’s judgment was coming on the land because of abortion and homosexuality – but also because these people had rejected God; they rejected His rules and regulations; they rejected His covenant with them. America has done the same. What Jeremiah proclaims over Israel – he proclaims over America.
But as I read through the Book of Jeremiah, from beginning to end, I see God pleading, begging, inviting His beloved people back to Him. Again and again He pleads with them to return so He can bless them. But they stubbornly go on their sinful way.
God is pleading with our country, too. But, like, Israel, we are hanging in the balance. Abortion is a law of the land. Many states have legalized same sex marriage. Many states are requiring these sinful practices be taught in school to our kids. God has been removed from our legislative halls and from our courtrooms. We are raising a country of selfish, rebellious, hedonistic people who tolerate everything but God and Christianity.
So what are we going to do about it? Let me suggest a few things.
First, Humble yourself. That means to admit our sin. Realize that we are far from God and in danger of judgment. We aren’t used to humbling ourselves. In the old days people would put on burlap material and throw dirt and ash on themselves as a sign of humility. We need to get rid of all pride.
Secondly, if there is any rebellion in your heart – get rid of it. Repent. Turn from your sin. Maybe you are not guilty of any of these sins I mentioned today – but any sin hinders your prayer life and robs you of spiritual power.
Thirdly, speak the truth – in love. It does no good to be a radical, angry judgmental religious nut. But DO speak out. Stand up for the right – but always do it in love. Join rallies and protests against these sins. Do what you can to turn our country back to God.
Fourtly, Pray. We need to make this a matter of prayer. We need to really seek God’s face about the sins of our country. Pray daily for our nation. Join with others in praying for our country.
Folks, God so badly wants to forgive and restore. He does not want to destroy us. He does not want to bring judgment on us. He says,
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the LORD...” JEREMIAH 29:11-14
God has wonderful plans for us. He WANTS to prosper us. He WANTS to give us hope. He LONGS to give us a fantastic future. He yearns for a loving relationship with us. Will SEEK Him while He can still be found.
SONG
