Bihk Studv

.
Jeremiah
Judgment and Rc. toration
b)J M a.lll
Pan \'Ill
The
The Preaching
of Judgment .
(Jeremiah 6).
A . . (6:1-8) 'i'he Siege of Jerusalem
Foretold . . . . . . . .
1. (6:1) Judgment. js:cert;lin jl()w, .
because of Judah's lmpenitency. All .
that is left for J eremiiili is to tell. the
people to tun for their .lives .from. the.
judicial deSttucliol)' and occupation of
Judah by evil Babylon from !he norjh.
. 2. (6:2} Judah, weakened and frail
because of her .aduiterj, ,,;ill be:ea$.y
prey. Spiritual !mlaciation eco-
norriic and military emaciation. And
miliwy strel)gth wi!h
0
ut sp)ritl1al 'aiid
moral strength is not enough t.Q guar-
antee the security of a tlRtion.
3. (6:6) Jehovalr himSelf conun.ands
Babylon 10 destroy and punish Jerusa-
lem for bet. sins.
4_ (6:7) Jerusaieni kept
"fresh" sins against God daily. H.e saw
her as full of disease, causing him to
ll,lrn away from her and to make her a
desolation. . ..
5. (6:8) Jeremiah never . gives up
hope. Even at this late
can still be saved through repentance.
But as it is, the "heart" of Gpd. is
alienated in revulsion from ihose who
claim to worship him, bnt who actually
deny him by their disobedience to \lis
covenant law.
B. (6:9-15) The Pathetic Condition
of the City
I. (6:9),Having raised up Babylon
to glean his vineyard, Judah, Jehovah
calls Jeremiah to glean Judah through
his preaching--to preach as a grape--
gatherer gleans the vines after the main
gathering has taken place . . He was to
make sure that there was no one in
Jerusalem who had not heard !Us divine
Preaching tbe wheat
from the chaff--it is a savor of life unto
life to some and. a savor of death unto
dear,h to others. .
2. (6:10) Jeremiah complains that
his gleaning no No one
want< to hear or is able to and
believe the message from God, because
of the impediment pf apostasy in tlle
heart Preaching was repulsive 10 them.
In our culture; generally, the words,
"preacl)er" and ''preachipg" and "ser-
mon" also have negative connotations.
Even "preachers" prefer the word "minis-
ter" or "pastor" 10 "preacher." This is so
because people do not want a message
from God that will assess them, convict
them and govern them.
3. (6:11) Jeremiah becol'(leS so
Wlited with Jehovah in oneness of feJ:.
lowsbip, desire and auitude, that
his understanding of Jehovah's anger for
Judah caused him tO be unable to re-
sttain his holy anger. So he preached
the wrath of God to Judah and through
his preaching the wralh of God
was poured out on every class, level and
age of the city's life. This tells us some-
thing about the power of preaching;
When judgment fin,Uiy came, it was so
comprehensive that it affected everyc
body regardless of age, sex, race or na-
tiortal origin.
4. (6:13) Jerusalem's society anci
economy were dominated by envy,.
greed, deception and materialism. This
general dishonesty was encouraged by
her dishonest, inflationary monetaly
policies.
5. (6: 14) The breacb between Jeho-
vah and Judah required immediate and
radical treatment. Instead, the religious
leaders gave superficial treatment with
empty and untrue preaching. In the
meanwhile, Judah's rebellion sum-
moned the forces of judgment. "The pro-
phets and priests of the day dressed the
nation's wounds, but skin-deep only.
Nor did they have any sense of shame
for the loathsome deeds they perpe-
t:rated. -Thompson
6. (6:15) Jerusalem was so hardened
in her that she no longer felt
shame and had forgotten how to blu.sli.
She l)ad become totally inset)sitive to
the evil into which she had fallen.
"Continued active involVement iii. evil
has a way of dulling thc. conscience un-
tU a point is reached when all aWareness
of.evil is lost." -Thompson
C. (6:16-2)) The Brokenness of a
Disobedient Life
1. Jeremiah constantly called Judah
back 10 the "ancient paths" of God's
c;ovenant, which, if she walked in t11em,
would bring blessing and peace. BU:t
Judah rejected Jehovah's law and Im-
agined .that he would accept her elabor-
ate ritual in the place of obedience 10
ws law.
2. Judah deliberately would not sub,
mit 10 the preaching of the word of
God, so God brought disaster on her for
.that very reason--for refusing ro listen
to and obey the preaching of the word
of God. l11e nations of the earth are
called to wimess this, and to apply 1:0
The Counsel of Cb:ikedon, August, '1988

themselves the lesson God is about to
teach in the punishment of his people.
The nations of the earth are expected by
God to obey his revealed law. If God
puf!ished his special nation for her law-
lessness, what will he do to the other
nations of the world because of their
lawlessness?
3. Rituals and ceremonies, however
ornate and correct, when divorced from
faith and obedience, are worthless to
Gocl, Isa. 1:11; Mic. 6:7,8.
4. As his judicial response to Jeru-
salem's sin, Jehovah himself placed ob-
stacles in Judah's path, so she would
stumble over them and be condemned
for her sin. John Calvin gives this help-
ful comment on verse 21: "He means
by these words, that however they
might conspire together, they would yet
be. exposed to the same punishment.
For when sons follow the examples of
their fathers, they think themselves
innocent; and also when any one has
many associates, he thinks himself safe
in his licentiousness. As, then, consent
or society hardens the ungodly, so that
they fear not the . wrath of God, the
prophet on this account includes sons
with their fathers, and a neighbor with
his friend, as those who were to perish
together, and without any difference." If
anyone tries to escape judgment, God
Will cause them to stumble and be over-
taken by judgment
D. (6:22-26) The Terror from the
North Foretold
1. (6:22-23) Cruel and ruthless
Babylon will come relentlessly upon
Jerusalem, sounding like the roaring of
the sea. A terrifying picture.
. 2. (6:24) Judah is as defenseless as
a woman in labor against a fully equip-
ped soldier.
. 3. (6:25) There is no protection any-
where. Terror is everywhere.
4. (6:26) The only thing left for
Judah to do is to mourn as one would
mourn over the death of an only soil.
Israelite families wanted sons to guaran-
tee the perpetuation of the family. No
sons-no future.
E. (6:27-30) The Prophet as Assayer
of Judah
1. God calls ieremiah, through his
preaching, to search for precious metal
among the dross of Jerusalem. He is to
be the assayer and tester of Judah's con-
duct He was an "overseer" of the na-
tions, 1:10, and "assayer" of Judah.
This is how the church, through its
confession of faith and its faithful
preaching, uses "the keys of the king-
dom," Matt 18. It applies the sifting
judgment of God revealed in his word to
the actions of men and nations, thereby
determining and manifesting and differ-
entiating the wheat and the chaff, the
gold and the dross, the Christian and the
anti-christian.
2. "By preaching to them the Law
of God in its fullest implications, its
inexorable demands, its threats of des-
truction, death, and damnation for all
transgressors, and by proclaiming the
Gospel of the coming Messiah, the
Lord our Righteousness, he was to puri-
fy, to renew the wicked nation, to cause
it to return to God, to be re-established
as the Lord's own. At the same time he
was to separate from this holy nation
all those who would refuse to
His Word, reject. the Law of the Lord of
unalterable justice and righteousness,
and despise the Gospel of the Lord of
unchanging mercy and grace." -Laetsch
3. Jeremiah's assessment: "All of
them are stubbornly rebellious." "The
ref'ming process might succeed in the
realm of metallurgy, but among there-
bellious and corrupt men of Judah, who
were professional covenant-breakers, no
refining process was adequate to deal
with their intractable wills. The people
of Judah were hopelessly impure metal,
altogether slag, and beyond the refining
process."-Thompson.
The Hopelessness of
Orthodoxy Without Christ
(Jeremiah 7:1 - 8:3)
I. (7: 1-15) TIIE TEMPLE SER-
MON: TIIE PROMISE OF REPENT
ANCE
A. (7:1-7) The Promise of Repen-
tance
1. (7:1)Jeremiah is called by God
to stand in the door. of .the temple and

preach a sermon to all who come to
worship. The Hebrew and the Greek
words for worship both teach . us that
the worshipper of Jehovah, as he wor-
shipped, acknowledged God's supremacy
and sovereignty over him, and he recog-
nized his own dependence and personal
need for submission to his sovereign
Lord. Worship involved the willing ac-
knowledgment of Jehovah's lordship
and glad acceptance of his covenant pro-
mises and demands. Judah failed to wor-
ship in thjs way.
2. (7:2t) Jeremiah's message may
be summarized in this manner: Judah,
amend your ways, turn from your sins
to Jehovah, and he will continue to
dwell with you in the Temple. God's
covenant promises belong only to ana-
tion which keeps his commandments
faithfully, Deut. 7:12-15.
3. An integral part of renewed faith-
fulness to the Lord is a turning from
deceptive preaching to faithful, pro-
phetic preaching.
B. (7:8-11) The Futility of Ritualism
1. Judah had a misdirected faith. She
presumed that the very existence of the
Temple in Jerusalem guaranteed Jerusa-
lem's indestructibility. As a result there
was a wide-spread preoccupation with
purity and exactness of ritualistic wor-
ship, but no concern for the ethical de-
mands of the covenant. Judah made the
mistake of separating covenant privi-
leges from covenant responsibilities,
which Judah also narrowed. To put it in
New Testament language: A person can-
. not enjoy the benefits of Christ's cross
without bowing before the claims of
Christ's crown.
2. When a nation neglects its duties
to Jehovah, in truly obeying the f':lrst
four commandments, it will invariably
neglect the last commandments,
which represent our responsibilities to
each other. The profound concern for
human welfare, so powerfully expressed
in the Mosaic.legislation, Deut. 14:29;
24:19-21, is ignored by a people who
has changed gods.
3. The source of all of Judah's social
sins was this change of gods, 7:9. By
believing in E!aal, the people of Judah
were worshipping "The Lie;'' or "The
The Counsel of Chalcedon, August, 1988
Deceiver." Jeremiah teaches us here that
there is no rational justification for
worshipping any other than Jehovah.
This claims exclusivity for Jehovah's
revealed religion.
4. Regardless of Judah's supersti-
tious and irrational faith in the temple
itself, rather than in the Lord of the
temple, the temple, and care in ritual-
istic accuracy would offer no shelter for
covenant-breakers from the searching
eyes of Jehovah.
5. "Placing one's trust in the pos-
session of orthodoxy received by tradi-
tion from the fathers, or in the correct-
ness of ritualistic forms, or in the pray-
ers one speaks, or in the services at-
tended, or in the offerings given, is in
God's sight a form of idolatry, no mat-
ter whether committed in Judah or in
America, by Jews or pagans or (Presby-
terians), and is the same abomination to
the Lord in the twentieth century after
Christ that it was in 600 B.C., and will
meet with the same judgment that canie
upon Israel and Judah." -Laetsch
C. (7:12-15) The Example of Shiloh
1. God showed Judah that he is not
bound to a particular locality or to a
particular structure, by reminding them
of Shiloh. In the days of Eli, God was
worshipped in a temple there, where the
ark was housed for a time. It was once
the place where Jehovah made a
"dwelling place for his name," but the
Philistines destroyed it because of its
wickedness. This powerful proof that
concern for purity of worship, void of
concern for purity of life and thought in
general does not guarantee security. God
will dispense with Judah as he did with
Shiloh. Sacrifice and psalms could
never be accepted as a substitute for
loyal obedience to Jehovah.
2. God finally casts Judah away be-
cause they have persistently rejected the
preachers God sent to them calling
them to faith, repentance and obedience.
3. Judah "had so completely for-
gotten the saving acts of Yahweh that
there was no strong motivation to
obedience." -Thompson. Ethics will not
last long without a redemptive/regenera-
tive base. Christian ethics is impos-
sible without Christian theology. The
The Counsel of Chalcedon, Angnst, 1988
modem conservative wants the first
without the latter--all to no avail.
II. (7:16-20) THE CULT OF THE
QUEEN OF HEAVEN: THE FUTIL-
ITY OF PRAYER
A. (7:16-17) The Prohibition of
Prayer
Jeremiah is deprived of intercession
for Judah. The time for intercession for
Judah is over. What a sad time!
B. (7:18-19) The Worship of the
Queen of Heaven
1. "The cult of the Queen of Heaven
was a rejection of Yahweh's sole
sovereignty as the supreme Lord of the
covenant." -Thompson. It leads to the
feminization of life, the disappearance
of manly leadership, the creation of a
matriarchal society, and the degrading of
morals in general.
2. This rejection was a provocation
of Jehovah, because nothing brought
out the insincerity, insensibility and
incorrigibility of Judah more clearly
than this allegiance to another monarch.
The most critical issue, therefore, in
America today is this: who is our
sovereign and source of law: Jehovah or
man?
3. The Queen of Heaven is probably
Astarte or Ashtoreth, a Semitic
goddess, the Ishtar of the Babylonian-
Assyrian cult; the Mother goddess, the
mistress of Bel-Marduk, the goddess of
the star Venus. She was the goddess of
sensuous love.
C. (7:20) The Wrath of God
The righteous judgment of God was
certain, because of the incorrigibility of
Judah. They had ample opportunities to
repent.
ill. (7:21-28) THE CONDEMNA-
TION OF FAITHLESS RITUAL: THE
STUBBORNNESSOFTIJDAH
A. The Blasphemy of Sacrifice With-
out Faithfulness
1. God is not rejecting his sacrifi-
cial system. He is stressing the point
that his essential covenantal demand
was faith in the God of covenant pro-
mise and obedience to his covenant law,
rather than a mere performance of
rituals, divorced from this faith and
obedience.
2. Compare Isa. 1:10-17; Hos. 6:6;
Amos 5:21-25; Mic. 6:1-8.
3. "Any hope of God's blessing for
the future depended on their walking in
the way that God commanded them,
that is, the blessings of the covenant
were available only to those who
walked in accordance with the demands
of the covenant." -Thompson
B. The Deterioration of Covenant-
Breaking
1. Deliberate rejection of covenant
obligations inevitably leads to deterior-
ation, 7:24.
2. Jeremiah describes Judah inver-
ses 25-26 as a nation which does not
obey the voice of God nor accept cor-
rection. This is an apt description of the
U.S.A. in 1987. The restoration of per-
sonal or national faithfulness is im-
possible without submission to gospel
preaching.
3. " .... to affmn that the prophets
rejected the whole sacrificial system is
to go beyond the evidence. It was not
the system as such that was rejected but
the operation of the system, which di-
vorced sacrifices from obedience and
took them out of the covenantal setting
in which they found their whole ra-
tionale." -Thompson
IV. (7:29-34) THE VALLEY OF
HINNOM: THE TERMINATION OF
JOY
A. (7:29-30) The Cutting off of Ju-
dah's Hair
1. The long hair of the Nazarite was
a sign of his consecration to the Lord,
Numb. 6:2-8. The cutting off of hair
signified the abandonment of this con-
secration, Judg. 16:15-22. God had re-
jected that idolatrous generation.
2. Judah had sunk so low in her
idolatry that they had introduced images
and rituals in the Temple that involved
ritual prostitution and other fertility
rites.
B. (7:31) The Introduction of Human
------------------------------------------------ ~ e ~
Sacrifice
1. The high place at Topheth, was a
place of pagan worship and of human
sacrifices, II Kings 23:10.
2. How could God's people ever ima-
gine that the sacrifice of their children
on altars of false gods was pleasing to
Jehovah? The children of believers are
to be consecrated to the Lord, to whom
they belong, Exod. 13:2; 22:29; 34:19;
Numb. 3:13; 8:17. How can today's
professed Christian ever think it is
pleasing to God to sacrifice their chil-
dren to the gods of humanism on the
altars of public schools?!
C. (7:32-34) The Holocaust and the
Death of Joy
1. Because the people of Judah dedi-
cated themselves and their children to
false gods, God would send an invading
army to slaughter them. In that day
"Topheth would be. so full of corpses
that many bodies would not be buried at
all but would lie in the open for the
scavengers of the air and the earth to dis-
pose of. For the body to remain un-
buried and to become food for carrion
birds and scavenging beasts was an un-
speakable horror."
2. The place of Judah's illegal sanc-
tuary was the place of their burial and
of the desecration of their co:rpses.
V. (8:1-3) THE WORSHIP OF
ASTRAL DEITIES: THE REIGN OF
DEATH
A. The Adding of Insult to Injury
Babylonian invaders in their defeat
of Judah opened the graves of those
leaders who had been slain and scattered
their bones out before the sun, moon,
planets and stars. Jeremiah makes clear
that these were viewed as astral deities
whom the people of Judah "loved and
served," whom they "followed after,"
whom they "consulted" and "worship;.
ped." How far Judah had fallen! Con-
sider the pre-occupation of America
with horoscopes, astrology, etc. No
help was received from them for Judah
then. And no help will be received from
them for America today.
(Continued on page 24)
Teacher Applications
Soliliclited
Chalcedon Christian School, in north
AUanta, is seeking teacher applications
for the 1988-89 scfiool year. Pre-school,
. early & later elementary, middle & high
school positions are available.
Applicants must be experienced,
Reformed (holding to the system of
doctrine taught in the Westminster
Confession o[Faith)
1
committed to
Chiist and to Christzan education.
Chalcedon
Christian School
P.O. Box 888022
Dunwoody,. GA 30338
(404)
Robert T. Lester, Administrator

Appalachian
Conference
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September 23 & 24, 1988
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Speakers:
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Jeremiah- Cont. from page 16
B. The Death-Wish of Judah.
The covenant family is now
evil family." In exile, they would prefer
death to life "either because circum-
stances were so bad in foreign lands, or
because the memory of those last days
of Judah's downfall was too much to
bear." -Thompson. Today in the United
StateS, a leading cause of death among
black reen-agers is murder by black teen
agers; and a leading cause of death
among white teen-agers is slrlcide. God
said in Proverbs 8: "those who hate !112
love death." In most major in
America there are more abortions than
Jive births. D
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Pagt 24
The eowoseJ of Chakedon. August, 1988