"Covenantal Justice: Guarding the Gates " Part 5

Father, I thank you for blessing us this morning by grabbing hold of our attention and elevating our gaze to the right hand, to your right hand, where Christ reigns. We thank you that we have a Savior who saves to the uttermost.

We thank you that we have a King who rules in righteousness and a high priest who intercedes in holiness, and the great prophet who always tells us the truth, and a wonderful counselor who is full of all wisdom.

We thank you for giving us your Son, we thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit, we thank you for giving us your Word, and giving us to one another, and I pray this morning, in this time that you have ordained, that you would use your Word to work your will in our.

Lives.

I ask that you would free us from the entangling sins of idolatry, that you would free us from the ensnaring sins of injustice, that you would increase our worship of you, purify our hearts, and lead us to love each other rightly, for the glory of Christ.

And it's for his sake that we pray, amen. Well we're going to finish our look at verses 1 -9 of Jeremiah 22. It's been a long look and part of it has been just me trying to wrap my head around what God is saying in his Word about the themes of loving others rightly.

And honestly when we come to the Scriptures, very often we have to be careful of pride that will make us think we already know what it says, we already know what it means. Very often we're just carrying along a lot of baggage of preformed ideas that we plaster on top of the text and we think we know what it means.

So sometimes it's necessary to slow down. I hope you've seen how we've slowed down to look at these verses and it's not necessarily because this passage is remarkably intricate and deep, it's because your pastor is remarkably ignorant and dense.

And whenever I hit something that I've not spent a lot of time thinking about, I don't want to rush through and give you some sort of cookie cutter idea, some sort of party line because I just don't know enough about that theme.

And so thank you for your patience and this morning I pray that God will let us work carefully through the rest of this passage and it will be an encouragement and a help to us. But again, remember the theme of these nine verses can be summed up in this way, that God through his prophet is talking to the royal household of Judah, talking to the house of David, and this is his message in essence, there will either be justice in your gates or judgment on this house.

And that's what verses one through nine is all about, there will either be justice in the gates or judgment on this house. And so once again I ask you to stand in reverence to Christ who is revealed in Jeremiah 22 verses one through nine.

Thus says the Lord, go down to the house of the king of Judah and there speak this word and say, hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah, who sits on David's throne, you and your servants and your people who enter these gates.

Thus says the Lord, do justice and righteousness and deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of his oppressor. And also do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

For if you men will indeed perform this thing, then kings will enter the gates of this house, sitting in David's place on his throne, riding in chariots and on horses, even the king himself and his servants and his people.

But if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that this house will become a desolation. For thus says the Lord concerning the house of the king of Judah, you are like Gilead to me, like the summit of Lebanon.

Yet most assuredly, I will make you like a wilderness, like cities which are not inhabited. For I will set apart destroyers against you, each with his weapons, and they will cut down your choice of cedars and throw them on the fire.

Many nations will pass by this city and they will say to one another, why has the Lord done thus to this great city? Then they will answer, because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, their God, and bowed down to other gods and served them.

This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated.

Beck and I got married in 2004 in December, December 17th, is that right? And very soon after that, we moved to Memphis and looked for a church to go to, and we ended up at Southwoods Baptist Church, and they were very kind to try to support me in my calling to the ministry, and they let me get up and preach one night.

And my very first sermon that I preached at Southwoods Baptist Church had a lot of stuff. It had a lot of research, and it had a lot of notes, and it had a lot of, maybe not a lot of application, but it had a lot of interesting facts, and it had a lot of drama as I preached on the wrath of God on a dark and stormy night, and the lightning was lighting up the stained glass windows, and the thunder was feeding back through the sound system, so it was very impressive, but it did not, I mean, it had a lot of stuff, but it did not have Christ.

I did not preach Christ, though he is bright and clear and deep and loud in Numbers 25. And that was Pastor Phil's biggest critique of my sermon, and there were a lot of things to critique, but that was his biggest critique, so he didn't preach Christ.

A lot of stuff, but that was a fatal, fatal flaw. Land of Judah had a lot of stuff. Land of Judah in Jeremiah's day had a lot of stuff, had a lot of wealth, had a lot of people, had a lot of history. They had the temple on Mount Zion in the holy city.

They had the law, they had the prophets, they had all of this history of God revealing himself to them. They had a lot of stuff, but what they did not have was the fear of the Lord, and that was their fatal flaw, their fatal folly.

They did not have the fear of the Lord. And, indeed, this is the fatal folly, the fatal flaw of every nation of mankind. We see this time and time again, that because we are in sin, because we are dead in trespasses and sins, that the end result, that the sum explanation for what our problem is, according to Romans 3, verses 10 through 18, when you get to verse 18 after that big, long list, it just comes down to this, is that they did not fear the Lord.

There's no fear of God before their eyes. You think a nation with a lot of stuff, a nation with a lot of wealth, a lot of resources, a lot of freedom, a lot of diversity, a lot of opportunity, a lot of charities, a lot of religion, would be a nation with a lot of righteousness, but no, we don't have the fear of the Lord in our nation, and there's a lot of things wrong in our nation because we do not fear the Lord, and there's just no coming back from that fatal flaw.

There's no way around it. That has to be restored, and as I read through verses 4 through 9, especially where we're going to put our attention this morning, it seems to me that the point of this passage is this, that doing justice to others depends on doing reverence to the Lord, that doing justice to others depends on doing reverence to the Lord.

Now, we've talked about, under the heading of justice and the gates, we've talked about the word of the King of Kings to the King of Judah, that everything depends on God's word being heard by the King on David's throne, and that the task of kings is simply this, to mediate the authority of God, not to rule by their own authority, but to rule by God's authority, to mediate that to the people.

And now, we're going to talk about the gates, the importance of the gates, the gates of kings, and you'll see this in verse 4, and the word of the Lord through Jeremiah puts this challenge before the kings of Judah, for if you men will indeed perform this thing, then kings will enter the gates of this house, sitting on David's throne, on David's place, on his throne, riding in chariots and on horses, even the king himself and his servants and.

His people.

You also see an emphasis on the gates in verse 2 at the end, where the people are being addressed, when the king is being addressed, and his servants and his people, all those who enter these gates, and at the end of verse 3, you see the term, the language, this place.

So in 2 and 3 and 4, the attention is on the gates, the space where the walls don't come quite together, and there's a gate. These gates were plenteous within the city of Jerusalem, and of course you'd find a gate at the front entrance of every town and walled village throughout all of Judah.

What's the point? Why in this passage that God is calling his people, primarily the kings and those with him, to do justice, to do righteousness, to love other people rightly, why in the passage like this is there an emphasis on the gates?

The gates were the places where judgment, where justice, was rendered. And it makes a lot of sense why that would be. But let's just think about the basic use of gates. We have four gates at our house, four gates at our place, we keep all of them locked.

We're not, you know, inhospitable, but we use them all at least once a week, and our front gate we use almost every single day, and all manner of folks are welcome through the front gate and are given access, and we replaced the battery in the doorbell, so it works now, for those of you who thought we were ignoring you.

But we keep it locked, because there's all kinds of manner of folks that are not welcome.

Through that gate.

We prefer that Flower Girl not dig up any more of our front garden, or steal any of our hanging plants. We just prefer that that would not happen. And we prefer that 6 '6", 250 pound jobless Joe would not lose his temper on our front porch when we ask him to leave.

And so there's all sorts of people we don't want through that gate, but there's all sorts of people we do want through that gate, and you see that a gate is the intersection of access and refusal. A gate is the intersection of access and refusal.

No admittance except on party business, for those of you who know what that means. This was the case in Judah. As you walked through the city of Jerusalem, you would come to one gate after another, and even though the gates might be open during the day, there would usually be a sentry at every entry to remind you that this was the intersection of access and refusal.

And we should remember that all around the gates, all around the gates, you would have the relationships of society. The markets would spring up around the gates, heralds would cry the news of the day at the gates, the elders of the people would sit at the gates.

And particular to our passage is this concern for justice and righteousness. The people of Israel had been organized a long time ago to have a just and righteous society. They were having trouble working that out when it was Moses leading the people through the wilderness, and Moses was trying to hear all the cases of justice of the day.

After all, he is the lawgiver, and he understood the law of God, and so he was trying to provide justice for all the people and all their concerns, and his father-in-law Jethro saw what he was doing and said, boy, you're going to kill yourself.

Stop it. You need to organize the people in such a way that here is a faithful man of integrity who appreciates the law, and he's going to hear the issues of these 10 families. And if you all can't figure it out, then here's another guy who's in charge of 50 families, and you can bring the case to him, and if he can't figure it out, you just move up the chain until you come to Moses, who will settle the really big, thorny, sticky issues and organize a system of justice.

Well, that was still there as part of the life of Judah, and you would have the elders in a village sit at their front gate, and maybe there was some issue, and they tried to solve it, but they really couldn't figure it out, so they'd send it on to Jerusalem, and then there would be some elders there who would try to solve it.

And if you can't solve it, it keeps on going through the gates of Jerusalem all the way to the highest court of the land, which is the gate of the king's house, the supreme court of Judah. And when God wants to talk about whether or not justice and righteousness is being done in the land of Judah, he's going to have a talk with the king, because the king presides over the supreme court of the land at the gate of his own house, and it's a question of access and refusal.

God wants justice and righteousness to be administered in the gates, but what about.

The needy?

What about these people we've already talked about at length? The poor, the stranger, the orphan, the widow, the innocent. Would a foreigner find justice at the king's gate? Could an orphan plead his case there?

How about a widow?

Would the poor man who happened to be oppressed be delivered from the hand of his oppressor? Would the blood of the innocent be preserved at the first, and if necessary, avenged at the last in the gate of the king?

And God says, if so, if there is justice and righteousness being done in the land, and it begins with the king, and that influences everything else in the land. If it's the case that justice and righteousness are done in these gates, as long as these gates remain open to the needy, they remain open for the kings and his nobles and his people to pass through.

See the promise in verse four? As long as righteousness and justice is done in these gates, these gates get to remain open, and look at the stability of the kingdom. There's going to be strength in the royal house.

There's going to be a blessing amongst his nobles and the people. The land will know the favor of God, yet it all depends on whether or not the king of Judah, who sits on David's throne, will listen to the word of the Lord that came down from God's throne in the temple.

Will the king and his people fear the Lord and obey his instructions? Would they obey him? Would they fear the Lord? If they did, then they would be concerned about doing justice and doing righteousness and hearing and giving access to even the needy that are easily ignored.

But remember, a gate is an intersection of access and refusal. An open gate invites, and a locked gate deters. And remember, the basic reason you close a gate is to keep people out. You don't want them to have access.

And gates in this time function as instruments of defensive warfare, keeping the subject safe inside. And typically, on either side of the important gates were towers and often barracks full of soldiers and even some high windows through which defensive weaponry could be deployed.

And when those gates were closed, access was denied. No one should get in, even if enemies would try to get in. And the idea was that they could not get in. And again, our passage is not about the construction of gates, but their purpose, and particularly the fact that at the gates were these venues of justice and righteousness, and would justice.

Be done?

Would righteousness be done? And the severest test case to see if justice and righteousness would be done would be in the examples of the needy. When there's nothing in it for the judge, nothing in it for the elders, would they be concerned about justice and righteousness then?

Or would the gates be shut off to them? Would justice be denied to the needy? Kings and nobles and elders might close off the courts to those who were especially troublesome. Many are the problems of the poor.

Strange are the complaints of the foreigner. Hopeless are the complaints of the orphans. Complicated are the problems of the widows. Silent are the complaints of the innocent dead. But should it be the case that the gates were closed to the needy, if the sentinels of the gates refused the needy, if they were treated like enemies, then God promises that the kings, his nobles, and his people would also no longer have access to those gates, and they would be destroyed as God's enemies.

And he says in verse five, but if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that this house will become a desolation. And again, you see the motivation, therefore, is to fear the Lord, is to fear the Lord.

If the kings and the servants and the people of Judah would fear the Lord and believe his word and do reverence to him, then they would do righteousness, then they would do justice to those around them.

Here's what's true. Whether we lock our gates or even have a fence at all. We are continually pressed to answer the questions about fairness, righteousness, and justice in our relationships, aren't we?

To protect our marriages, to shepherd our children, to arrange our priorities, even to secure our Sabbath rest. And for many other good reasons, we give access and we make refusal every day in our relationships with other people, don't we?

Sometimes we wonder, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing? I've got to make these decisions of access and refusal and am I doing the right thing? How many times have we struggled each in our own mind or belabored in conversation with our trusted loved one, whether or not we've been fair with someone?

Have we done these people right? The truth is we're called to love each other rightly and often we wonder if we are in terms of access and refusal. But we need to be very careful at this point because a great deal of false doctrine is built on the foundation of guilt feelings.

A whole lot of false doctrine is built on the foundation of guilt feelings. False teachers tap into guilt feelings to gain credence for their false doctrine. So what's true is that we're concerned about righteousness and justice in our relationships, but here's where we're wrong.

Whether we're thinking up on the lines of social justice or just about our personal relationships in the everyday context, we're absolutely in the wrong when we make our decisions granting access and making refusal based on man fearing man.

That's where we're wrong. Do we not know? Have we not heard? We live in the last days. Evil men and imposters grow from bad to worse deceiving and being deceived and because lawlessness increases most people's love grows cold and this is all to remind us that the affirmation of man is not the determination of right.

Just because men affirm it doesn't mean that it's right. How do we get right? Even as the king and the servants and his people were to submit to the word of God, the highest word from the throne of God, even as they were to obey him and fear him and follow his instructions, believing his promises of blessing and cursing, his description of the covenant.

So we do are to fear the Lord if we are to love others rightly and specifically we fear the Lord through faith in Jesus Christ. Do we not know who he is? He's the king of kings. He's the revealer of God's highest word.

Christ himself is the judge of all mankind and when he returns upon and he will sit upon his throne, he will separate the sheep from the goats. He's going to have some things to say about how we loved others and loved him.

And let us remember that he himself is the covenant keeper and in the entirety of our salvation depends on Christ's faithfulness to God in our place. So let us not fear man, let's fear Christ. And let's remember Ephesians 5 21 says, let us be subject to one another in the fear of Christ, not in the fear of one another, but in the fear of Christ, not in reverence to man, but in reverence to God himself.

And so to get right, we must repent from fearing man. And how do we live God's way? We we focus upon Christ and follow Christ. And when we do that, and we put our attention upon his authority, we are freed from immorality into holiness.

We are freed from deceptions into truth. We are freed from folly into wisdom. I think we're going to be less and less confused about how to love others rightly when we make Christ the guardian of our gates.

And it's not about how so and so will feel, how it'll make me feel. It's about how would Christ have me love this person in front of me right now. We need to think about the ways in which his own character determines our charter.

Zechariah 8 16 through 17, these are the things which you should do. Speak the truth to one another, judge with truth and judgment for peace in your gates. Also, let none of you devise evil in your heart against one another and do not love perjury.

For all these things are what I hate, declares the Lord. You see, our treatment of others is based on what the Lord loves and the Lord hates. Not based on what we love and hate or what they love or hate, based on what God loves and hates.

And so doing justice to others depends on our doing reverence to God. Let's look at verses five through nine. As we consider the promise of judgment upon the house. There has to be justice in the gates or there's going to be judgment on the house.

Let's look at verses five through nine. There's the promise in verse five. Look at this again. But if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that this house will become a desolation.

What does it mean when God swears by himself? It's not very common in the word. It's not very common in scripture. But when we find it, it should really cause us to stop and pay attention. God also swears by his own name to save his people.

To be faithful to the covenant as we find in Hebrews. But here, God swears by himself in a promise of judgment. When God swears by himself, it makes us aware, it brings to our attention, it makes us aware that all the weight of God's infinite glory is set in motion to accomplish his word.

And there is no equal or opposite force to deter his fulfillment of that word. Grabs our attention. And God promises here, desolation. He promises to make this house a ruinous pile of rocks amidst a wasteland in the middle.

Of a desert.

And you wonder how in the world could he do that? He's talking about the house of David. He's talking about Jerusalem. He's talking about Judah. Does he not favor them and love them? This is the point of the poetry in verses six through seven.

Notice the poetry. For thus says the Lord concerning the house of the king of Judah, you are like Gilead.

To me.

Like the summit of Lebanon.

Gilead.

Lebanon.

That's like saying from the east to the west. Or perhaps saying from the fruited plain to purple mountain majesty. Gilead caught the eye of three tribes. Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh. It was a place of livestock and fertile plains and lush fields.

And so God speaks of its worth. He speaks of its value. And he says, though you are like Gilead, a beautiful, fruitful, precious land, nonetheless, I will make you like a wilderness. And Jeremiah's audience would have heard this very carefully because Gilead had already.

Fallen.

It had long fallen to the enemy in ruinous affair. And so God says, like Gilead and like Lebanon. Lebanon, long known for its great heights and its red cedars. A beautiful, powerful mountain. But it had also fallen to the enemy.

Its trees had already been cut. Its slopes had been blackened by fire. And as with Lebanon, God promises to appoint destroyers with the proper equipment to cut down Zion. Zion's royal house that was built from the cedars of Lebanon.

And so an army of log cutters would come and deforest the royal complex. And so it is that God promises in this poetry, the alabaster city will not gleam undimmed by human tears. It will be emptied by extermination and exile.

The holy city of the promised land would look like the waste tracts of the Sinai wilderness. And that poetry is there to emphasize the problem. The problem with Judah. And the intensity of the judgment that God brings because of this problem.

How could God who loves and values Judah like Gilead and Lebanon. How could he destroy her so thoroughly? And that's the question that the nations ask. You see that in verses 8 and 9. Many nations will pass by this city and they will say to one another, why has the Lord done this to this great city?

I mean, think about this, that God's people, that Israel and Judah, for many, many decades and generations, they have been called to be God's mouth to the nations. To be declaring the uniqueness of Jehovah, of Yahweh, the Lord God.

He's the only true God. And that he's a just God and a holy God and a good God. And they are to be declaring this. And so the nations knew essentially what Judah was all about. But why would this great God destroy Jerusalem?

Why would he destroy Judah? So here's the answer. Now we're expecting after reading verses 1 through 5, especially after reading verses 1 through 5, we're expecting the answer to go something like this.

Well, it's because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, their God, and oppressed others with injustice. That's what we're expecting the answer to be. That's the problem in verses 1 through 5, is it not?

That's the problem. But that's not what the answer is. And I think it's very instructive. Here's the answer. They forsook the covenant of the Lord, their God, and bowed down to other gods and served.

Them.

That's the reason.

Idolatry, it turns out, idolatry is a far bigger problem than injustice. And in fact, one might even argue, idolatry is their only problem. Judah forsook the covenant. They abandoned it. They deserted it.

They left it behind, all because of their idolatry. It is telling that after all the accusations of injustice, that the reason why Jerusalem falls is not because Judah failed to treat people according to their intrinsic value, but because they forsook the covenant and worshipped idols.

And because they worshipped idols, they did not fear the Lord. And because they worshipped idols, they sinned greatly in immorality and in injustice. So here's what's true. The fruit of injustice grows from the root of idolatry.

The fruit of injustice grows from the root of idolatry. If the idolatry wasn't there, you wouldn't have to worry about the injustice. It's the idolatry that's the problem. And in fact, as long as we're focusing on the gates, what goes on in the gates, 2 Kings 23, 8 tells us where commonly the high places of the idols were found.

In the gates. In the gates. The idolatry practiced in the gates had everything to do with the injustice perpetuated at the.

Gates.

It is the fruit of injustice that grows from the root of idolatry. And here's where we're wrong. Here's where we're wrong. If we make a God into our own image, who excuses our lack of love or affirms our acts of hatred.

If we fashion for ourselves a Christ who only cares about the people that were okay with him saving. Or if we cut scraps from scripture and craft a patchwork theology, we're in the wrong. And we're also in the wrong if we replace one idol for another in the effort to solve injustice.

Because idolatry is always the root of injustice, no matter what kind of idol it is. Here's how to get right. It's no mistake in the many wonderful promises of the revelation of Jesus Christ, when you come to the end of the Bible and you're reading through Revelation, it's no mistake that we see that when all the worship is done right, all the world is set right.

You see that in Revelation? When all the worship is done right, all the world is set right. No more sin, no more sorrow. Doing justice depends on doing reverence. We must repent. We must repent from peddling a God that would offend no man and marketing a Christ that would scare no devil.

Here's how to live God's way. First John 5, 21, the last word of the Apostle John's letter says this, little children, guard yourselves from idols. Little children, guard yourselves from idols. If we have an awakened and elevated concern for loving other people rightly, to follow through on the instructions here in Jeremiah 21, to do justice and to do righteousness, if that is our concern and our passion, then we must begin where with righteousness begins in our lives, and that is right worship of God.

Right worship of God. I was going to read it out of Proverbs 31, it's a good passage, we'll probably save it for next week, but instead I'm going to read it out of Hebrews 1, because if we're going to live God's way, if we're going to fight against idolatry, if we're going to have the right view of God and worship him appropriately, where do we begin?

We begin where with God most clearly reveals himself. God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days, in our days, has spoken to us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world.

And he, the Son, Christ, is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature, and upholds all things by the word of his power. When he had made purification of sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as he has inherited a more excellent.

Name than they.

So if we would repent from idolatry, which is the root of all of our injustice and inability to treat others rightly, to love others rightly, then we must look to Christ, who reveals God to us in an unfailing and perfect way.

Doing justice to others depends on doing reverence to God, and doing justice does not depend on stuff and having a lot of stuff. You can have a lot of stuff in your life, you can have a lot of stuff in the nation, we can have a lot of stuff in the church, we can have a lot of material wealth and community programs and compassion ministries and pep rally atmosphere and hip-swaying music, but if we don't have the fear of the Lord, we don't have the fear of the Lord, then we're not going to love each other rightly, love our neighbors rightly.

Let's close in the word of prayer. Father, I thank you so much for the time you've given us, I thank you for the clarity of your word, I thank you for your patience with us as we look to Christ and follow him.

We thank you that you have given us a good shepherd, a perfect shepherd. He is the door by whom we enter in and through whom we go out and find pasture, sustenance,.

Life.

Lord, I pray that you would increase our faith in Christ and that you would help us to truly fear you, to reverence you, for who you really are, so that we may love others rightly. We pray these things for the sake of Christ, amen.