"Valley of the Slaughter"

The Prayer for Light, Grace, and Right Relationship with Christ

So we thank you for creating us, for giving us life and breath, for giving us all things, but most of all, for giving us your Son, that we may be in right relationship with you, that we would know you and worship you and praise you, that we would know your love in our lives, that we would know your smile upon us, because of your delight in your Son, in whom we trust, with whom, by the grace of faith, we are united.

We ask today that you would, by the power of your Holy Spirit, bear us along in this text, in Jeremiah, as we consider the severity of your warnings, as we consider the degree to which you hate sin, as we consider that the wages of sin is truly death.

Turn our eyes to Christ, and may we rejoice all the more in Him as our Savior. I pray these things in His name. Amen. I invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to Jeremiah, chapter 7, we'll begin reading in verse 29, and continue reading through chapter 8 and verse 3.

The Valley of Slaughter and the Decreation of Judah

This is a sobering passage, and the title comes from the text itself in verse 32, the valley of the slaughter. God says in verse 29 to Jerusalem, They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into my mind.

Therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when it will no longer be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of the slaughter, for they will bury in Topheth, because there is no other place.

The dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the sky and for the beasts of the earth, and no one will frighten them away. Then I will make to cease from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and the voice of gladness and the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, for the land will become a ruin.

At that time, declares the Lord, they will bring out the bones of the kings of Judah and the bones of his princes and the bones of the priests and the bones of the prophets and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem from their graves.

They will spread them out to the sun and to the moon and to all the hosts of heaven, which they have loved, in which they have served, in which they have gone after, in which they have sought, in which they have worshipped.

They will not be gathered or buried. They will be as dung on the face of the ground, and death will be chosen rather than life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family that remains in all the places to which I have driven them, declares the Lord of hosts.

Wisdom calls out. Eternal wisdom declares publicly, blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at my doorposts. For he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord.

But he who sins against me injures himself. All those who hate me love death. Now all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ Jesus. When we read of wisdom personified in Proverbs, our minds ought to be redirected to Christ who is the wisdom of God.

And it is true that all who find Christ find life. And all who love Christ obtain favor, grace from God. And it is also true that all who hate Christ love death. Isn't that a remarkable expression? Love death?

Who loves death? Can it be true that people actually love death? Such is the psychosis of sin. Such is the insanity that comes in depravity that many make a wretched choice and would rather starve than come to Christ.

And they love death. What a horrific expression. Many in Jeremiah's day loved death. Many in our day love death. It's a surprising thing. What about you? Do you love Christ or do you love death? It is my sense that if we do hate death, we do not hate it nearly as much as it deserves to be hated.

For the Christian death is not to be feared, but it is an enemy. It is a damnable thief. And God will damn death forever in the lake of fire. Christ has defeated death. He leads us in victory over death.

But we must hate it. We must hate death as the primary consequence of sin. It would do well to hate death and every expression of it, to love life and cling to the one who gives it. We should hate death because we hate sin.

And we must hate death if we're going to choose life. We must hate death in order to choose life. And I think that that, I hope that this is what you will glean from Jeremiah's passage, from the severity of what is said here by the power of the Holy Spirit, that it will give you and it will increase in you a hatred and a loathing for death because it is what comes from sin.

Let's consider, first of all, the wasteland of death. This is the heart of the passage, verses 32 through chapter 8 and verse 2. To understand what's going on in this passage, we have to remember back to the 18th year of King Josiah when Shaphan the scribe brings to the king the book of the law that they had found in the temple that they were remodeling, renovating.

And they found the book of the law and Shaphan brings the book of the law, the holy book, and he reads it before the king. And Josiah is so convicted by the words that he hears, the word of God, that he declares war on all of the idolatry in the land.

And he goes about and he destroys the idols on the high places and he eradicates idolatry from the national life of Israel. But no matter how much he did, he could not remove the idolatry from the hearts and from the secret life of Israel.

His grandfather Manasseh was an incredibly evil man. Manasseh was the one who went to Assyria and brought back an abomination, an idol, and set it up in the temple courts to worship the queen of heaven in the temple of Yahweh.

His grandfather Manasseh was an incredibly evil man. He is the one who enshrined the worship of Molech, eater of children, in the valley of the son of Hinnom in a place called Topheth, translated place of fire.

And they sacrificed infants to Molech in the valley just south of the gates of Jerusalem. Josiah went to war against all that his grandfather had done and he shut it all down. But now, even though here is a king who has labored with such wisdom and knowledge and skill, he has given his legacy to a man who labors with none of these.

And what vanity is this? For now, once again, Topheth burns and all who live in Jerusalem only have to look to the south and they see the smoke rising from the valley of the son of Hinnom because they're sacrificing infants again.

And so the Lord says in verse 32, therefore, therefore, this stunning judgment is because of how committed Judah has proven to be in their rejection of God, in their murderous mentality toward one another, and their dedication to idols.

Therefore, look at the devastation. Therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when it will no longer be called Topheth or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of the slaughter.

They will bury in Topheth because there is no other place. And so what he is saying is there are days coming. There is a judgment coming. When there's so much death that they're going to run out of places to bury the people in the city and they're going to have to go bury them in this valley south of the city dedicated to Molech.

Days are coming. And in the words of Jeremiah and his book of Lamentations, days are coming when on the ground and in the streets will lie young and old, virgins and young men, fallen by the sword, slain in the day of God's anger.

He will slaughter not sparing. These are days with terrors on every side and there will be no one who escapes or survives in the day of the Lord's anger. The devastation is coming. There will be so much death that they have no normal place to bury.

So they're just, they're burying them in the valley of the son of Hinnom, Topheth, the place of fire, which will be retitled the valley of the slaughter, as it deserved to be called all along. But this devastation, this judgment, this destruction has theological importance because we see what sin does to humanity.

There is, this is de-creation language. This is creation unraveling in the chaos and the consequences of sin. So notice verse 33, the dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the sky and for the beasts of the earth and no one will frighten them away.

And then I will make to cease from the cities of Judah, from the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and the voice of gladness. The voice of the bridegroom, voice of the bride for the land will become a ruin.

This is creation unraveling. What God is saying is because of what you have done, because you have chosen death, because you have loved idols and not repented, what will happen is you're not going to have enough place to bury in the city, so you're going to be burying in the valley of the slaughter.

And eventually there's going to be so much death and so few alive that you're not even going to be burying the bodies anymore. They're just going to be piled up all over the ground. And the vultures and the wild dogs are going to feast.

This is creation unraveling when birds and animals eat humans. Do you see how the order is perverted and reversed? It's supposed to be the other way around. Even more so, you remember when God said about creation, it is very good.

It's after he made mankind. In the image of God, he made them male and female. He created them, Adam and Eve. And then he says, oh, now the creation is very good because of Adam and Eve, humanity, in marriage, in family, there in the earth.

But notice what happens in the judgment and the unraveling of creation. No more weddings. You hear that there's no more voice of joy, no more voice of gladness, no more bridegroom, no more bride. Can you imagine living in a place for 10 years and there's no marriage, no weddings?

It's never been heard of. How many weddings have you been to in 10 years? How many weddings have you heard of in 10 years? When there's no more weddings, this is the end of a society. This is the end of humanity.

No more joy, no more gladness, no more husband and wife making a family and spreading out to populate the earth. No more, no more life. This is decreation. It's what sin does. Sin devastates, unravels God's very good creation in a chaos.

But it's also desecration. Verses 1 and 2. At that time, declares the Lord, they will bring out the bones of the kings of Judah and the bones of the priests and the bones of the princes and the bones of the prophets and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem from their graves.

They will spread them out to the sun, to the moon, and all the hosts of heaven, which they have loved, which they have served, which they have gone after, which they have sought, and which they have worshipped.

They will not be gathered or buried. They'll be as dung in the face of the ground. And we've got to feel the progression of horrors because first, they just run out of room to bury all the dead bodies, so they bury them in Topheth.

And then, they don't have enough people alive and so many people dead that they can't even bury them all. And so the rats and the ravens feast. And now, the Babylonians who conquer this land to desecrate the people and to desecrate the land, to defame the astral deities and the gods and goddesses that the Jews have begun to worship, they go throughout all of the graves and all of the tombs.

They break them open. They take the bones of the nobles and commoners alike, and they spread the bones all over the ground to mock the gods that Judah had been worshipping, the sun, moon, and stars. Now, this threefold horror of devastation, decreation, and desecration, God is speaking this word about what's going to happen for a very particular purpose.

He wants the people of Judah to know what we need to know, that the wages of sin is death. Very few people really believe that anymore. Some people may think, well, the results of sin might be a slight discomfort, but they have a pill for that, or they have a therapy for that.

And sure, I do some bad things, but everybody else does bad things too, and we all kind of are sick in this together. It's the new normal. Very few people really truly believe that the wages of sin is death, or perhaps they know it and they don't care because they don't hate death like we're supposed to hate death.

If we really hated death, we would really hate sin because the wages of sin is death. And God is not going to allow Judah to go off quietly in the night without a warning. Why do we need to hear sermons about this subject?

Why do we need to hear about judgment of God? Why is there so much in the Bible about God's wrath and his holy hatred of sin? C .S. Lewis said, the safest road to hell. The safest road to hell is the gradual one.

The gentle slope, the soft underfoot. No milestone, no signs. Safest road to hell. God is too compassionate, and God is too merciful, and God is too kind to let that happen. And so the Bible is full of warnings.

The Bible is full of severe mercies to grab our attention, to tell us to turn back, to hate death, to hate sin. The evangelical church today in general offers our neighbors a safe, uninterrupted road to hell.

It has been a full generation or two generations since anyone, anyone in the South has ever died and gone to hell. No matter how they have lived their life, no matter what they have done about Jesus Christ, no matter, no matter, it's always, well, they're in a better place.

And the evangelical church is not evangelical when we deny God's judgment. That is not compassionate. That is selfish. Because we don't want people to look at us like we're mean and we're intolerant, and we don't want persecution, so we don't talk about judgment.

God talks about judgment, but we don't talk about it. I don't want to be persecuted. I don't want people to run away from church. I don't want people to get offended and never come back. But we can't allow the safest road to hell.

The Worship of Death, Idolatry, and the Love of Creation

Let's also think about the worship of death. What's going on here? This wasteland of death is a warning, but why is God warning them? Because they're worshiping death. They're worshiping death. Those who hate wisdom love death.

Those who despise Christ worship death. Something we need to know, we are created in the image of God, and that means, among many things, that means that our worship switch is hardwired on. It never is off.

You may think your worship switch is off if you don't get the right kind of music and the right kind of preacher and the right kind of lighting and the right kind of fog machine. You may think that the worship switch isn't on unless you get the right stuff in order.

But let me tell you something, the worship switch is always on. You're always worshiping. That's what it means to be created in the image of God. You're always worshiping. You're always looking for worth and glory, and you want to ascribe worth to something.

You're always, always worshiping. And the question is, are you worshiping Christ, or are you worshiping death? Are you worshiping the living God, or are you worshiping a dead idol? That's the question.

No matter how we feel, we're worshiping. But the worship of death is one that blasphemes God. Verse 30,. For the sons of Judah have done what is evil in my sight, declares the Lord. They have set their detestable things in the house, which is called by my name to defile it.

This goes back to Manasseh, who took abomination, set it up in the temple. We're going to worship the queen of heaven now in the temple courts dedicated to the Lord of hosts. We're going to worship the stars.

Josiah gets rid of it. Jehoiakim, his son, brings it back. Now they're worshiping the abomination in the temple all over again. And God says this is detestable, that they mix the worship of me with the worship of the queen of heaven, that they mix the worship of me with the worship of Molech, eater of children.

They blaspheme God because they mix, they synthesize worship of the false with the worship of the true. This kind of worship also oppresses the weak. Verse 31,. They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it ever come into my mind.

The worship of Molech was strictly forbidden in Leviticus 18 and 20. But here's the thing. They were killing their children for money. They were killing their children for issues about wealth. Because after all, if you're worshiping a god or a goddess, they're there to give you more abundance in your fields, more productivity as you go out fishing or you go out hunting.

They're there to make sure that all the rest of your children you don't sacrifice have a better life because they have more abundance. And so they were offering their children in a fiery sacrifice to the false god, Molech, for economical reasons.

And we're still doing it today. The abortion mill on 44th and Blackwelder is there for economic reasons because they're making money off of people they lie to. And the people that they lie to are being told, you have to offer up your child to Molech so you'll have more money for the rest of your life.

You see, the worship of death oppresses the weak. There's nothing ever in the Bible that we find that God says, you know what, you need to oppress the weak in order to strengthen the strong. That's Darwinian evolution.

Sorry, you're weak, you have no voice, you can't stop me, so I kill you so I'm stronger. There's nothing in the Bible that says that. The Bible says that we reach out to the weak, we love the oppressed, we try to lift them up, we give to those who are needy because it is, look at what Christ did for us.

Look what he did for us. He laid aside his glory to come for us, to lift us up to God, to rescue us. The worship of death blasphemes God and oppresses the weak. And what is the worship of death? It's that which serves creation.

It's that which worships creation rather than the creator. Notice verse 2, this is the Babylonians in their desecrating acts. They will spread the bones out to the sun, the moon, and to all the hosts of heaven, which they, meaning Judah, which Judah has loved and which they have served, which they have gone after, which they have sought, which they have worshipped.

The intensity of that. Judah has loved these false gods. They have served these false gods. They have gone after them. They have sought them. They worshipped them. Professing to be wise, they became fools.

They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image made like a corruptible man, four-footed animals, birds, and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in their lust to the depravity of their hearts so that their bodies would be dishonored among themselves.

For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who was blessed forever. Amen. How will the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets feel about their devoted worshippers who have been treated so poorly?

Nothing. They will think nothing and they will say nothing and they will do nothing because they're dead. Dead gods don't care. The horror of this is that Judah has expended her life for dead gods who don't exist, who don't care, and has firmly entrenched herself in the judgment of God.

Who does care? Who is alive? Who will act? Do you notice how intense it is? We should ask this question of ourselves. What or whom do I love? What or whom do I serve? What or whom do I go after? What or whom do I seek?

What or whom do I worship? Take that off on your five fingers. Love, serve, go after, seek, worship. Five fingers. Think of that grabbing hold, a five-fingered hold on something. What are you laying hold of?

What are you grasping with your love and your service and your going after and your seeking and your worship? What are you laying hold of? Are you grasping life today or are you grasping death? What are you laying hold of?

I pray you will lay hold of Jesus Christ and Him crucified for our idolatries and for our sins, Him raised from the dead to give us new life and that forever. Brothers and sisters, press on that you may lay hold of that for which we have also been laid hold of by Christ Jesus, Paul would say.

Did you notice in verse 30 that Judah had the temple of the Lord in their midst? There it is in Jerusalem. The place where His name is revealed. What a blessing. In the next verse, it says that God had commanded them things to follow and He had made it clear in chapter 8 in verse 1, we hear that God had given kings and priests and prophets to His people.

Oh, what a blessing. But do we see that despite all of the revelation of God and despite all of His holy anointed blessings to His people, what do they do? They choose death. They choose death. You see, Judah was not on the safest road to hell and God made sure they weren't because through His prophets, through Jeremiah, He warned them, warned them clearly and loudly and they understood what Jeremiah was saying because they wanted to kill him for it.

They were not on the safest road to hell but according to J .C. Ryle, they were on the saddest road to hell because the saddest road to hell is that which runs under the pulpit, past the Bible, and through the midst of warnings and invitations.

That's the saddest road to hell because there's so much good and so much blessing, so much glory, so many warnings, so many words, so many opportunities and to continue on and to love and to serve and to go after and to seek and to worship dead things.

Rejecting God. That's the saddest, saddest road to hell and that, my friend, the saddest road to hell is the road that so many we know and love are currently on. Aren't they? They've been told. They've heard.

They've had so much blessing in their lives to be warned. They've heard the scriptures. They live with Christians in their homes even as we challenge ourselves. Five fingers. Will we love them and be compassionate enough to challenge them?

I saw this verse in Jeremiah 8 -2. Look at this. They loved. They served. They went after. They sought. And they worshipped. They were really grabbing hold of this. It could never help them. I've been asking myself about that.

What about you? What are you laying hold of? Can it actually help? Do you have life in Christ? The third thing we need to think about is this word of death that God brings. Verse 29 and the last verse.

The first and the last verse. And the way I'm taking this passage is the way that sometimes the Hebrew authors work. They work in concentric circles. So we're just kind of moving our way out to the outer.

And this is a very important point. These two bookends. My wife and I have different ways of dividing up our children and making sure that we know that we have all five one way or another. It was just a very important thing to do.

And so the other day I had MTC and she had bookends. MTC is the middle three children and she had number one and number five so she had bookends. Well, this is bookends. This is bookends. This is the first verse and the last verse of the passage and they echo one another.

And they are telling us what kind of a message we have in front of us. It is a terrible warning. It is an attention grabbing warning and it begins with this wailing call in verse 29. It's not very clear at first.

Is this Jeremiah who's supposed to cut his hair? But in the grammar in the Hebrew it's in the feminine meaning it's targeting Jerusalem. It's speaking to Jerusalem. Jerusalem as the representative of all Judah, Jerusalem is to cut off her hair and cast it away and take up a lamentation on the bare heights for the Lord has rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath.

The Hebrew word for hair is also diadem or crown. In some ways, Jerusalem is being said remove your crown. Cast away your diadem. Why? Because the glory of God is departing from you. He has rejected you, forsaken you, this generation of wrath.

In ancient fashion, Jerusalem is to cut her hair as in deep mourning, as in protracted grief. Now and not later is the time for lamentation. Later is gonna be too late. There's gonna be no time later on for a funeral.

There's gonna be no time set aside for dignified grieving because later there's not gonna be enough people alive to bury all the dead. So now is the time. Now is the time to have a funeral. Now is the time to take up a lament.

And where would you take up a lament? Where would be the best place, Jerusalem? Here's the best place. Here's the most appropriate place. Go up on the bare heights. Go up on the heights that have been stripped bare of all the little trees and the saplings.

Go up to the bare heights that you have cleared out to put the wood into piles and to burn for the queen of heaven. Go up to the heights that are scorched by your generations of idolatry and there take up a lament.

And what shall you lament? What shall you wail about? That God has rejected and forsaken Jerusalem. What does that mean? It means that God has so abhorred Judah that he has cast her away from himself, despising her, completely rejecting her as a reprobate.

That God abandons Jerusalem, forsaking the city and the people, leaving them to lie in neglected ruin, corpses spread out before the sky. You say, why would God ever do that? Because that's exactly what Judah wanted him to do.

And they proved it a million times over by choosing to forsake God and choosing to hate God. And God said, amen, so be it. This was their choice. Verse three of chapter eight. Death will be chosen rather than life.

But all the remnant that remained of this evil family that remains in all the places to which I have driven them declares the Lord of hosts. God set before Israel in her early days. He set before them two choices.

He set before them life and death. And he said, choose life that you may live. And they have chosen death. They prefer death. It's a wretched choice. It's a wretched choice, not made by a few bad leaders, but by all the remnant that remains.

They would rather starve in sin than feast in faith. They would rather starve at all the banquets of Adam than to come be satisfied in the bread of Christ. This is the condition of the people. This is the condition of perhaps you and many who we know.

You know, this passage challenges us about whether or not we really are opposed to death. Are we really opposed to death and to sin? The passage challenges us about our need to be honest and open about God's judgment for the sake of souls.

But we're also exhorted here as to the time. For we're being told that now is the time to lament and to wail and to have the funeral because it's too late. And none of us can say when it's too late. We don't know.

In Romans 1, it says that God turned them over to a reprobate mind to do the things that they wanted to, the things that displeased him. He just kind of gave them over to their sins. He said amen to the rebellion and you just, he gives them over to it.

We don't know when that happens. I don't know when that happens, but it happens. And there is appointed to man a day, a day to die. And after that comes the judgment. We don't know when that day is. Even when we think we're ready, we're never ready for anyone we love to die.

Never ready. So now is the time, not later. Now is the time. Many say later, but later is often too late. Now is the time to lament. Now is the time for a God-focused, God-given sorrow. It's much better that we, it's much better that we be broken now in our sins upon the bare heights of our lives, scorched by our idolatry.

Now is the time to mourn. Now is the time to lament, to be broken and to repent. Someone once said that there are two words written upon the gates of hell, and they are these, too late. It's too late.

That's why now is the time to be broken over sin. Now is the time to weep over sin. Now is the time to weep over the consequences of death. Thomas Brooks says the damned in hell may weep their eyes right out of their heads, but they can never weep the sin out of their souls.

It's too late. That's why we need passages like this in Jeremiah and many others to teach us to hate death, to hate sin, to know what it is, and all of its ugly exposure. You know, the thing that's gonna teach us really to hate sin and to hate death, the thing that's gonna help us the most is when we clearly see that our deserved, wretched judgment has fallen upon Jesus Christ.

That He was made a wasteland of death for us. That He endured far more than anything that happened in the valley of the slaughter and He did so for us. That is the jar of the widow's oil that never runs dry from which we can always pull brokenness over our sins when we see what happened to our Savior.

This is the oil that never runs dry for our righteous hatred of sin and death. We have to hate death in order to choose life. We must. God has given us a sure and a clear word to teach us that so that we would choose life.

That we would grab a full five-fingered hold of Christ. That we would love Christ. That we would serve Christ. That we would go after Christ. That we would seek Christ. We would worship Christ. Let's pray.

Father, we come before You this morning and this passage is so heavy. It's so disturbing to see these images in my mind as I read them in Your Word. What a necessary text. What a necessary word from You to our hearts to reawaken us to the devastating consequences of sin.

That we would see this and we would be repulsed by it. That we would consider this to be reprehensible and that we would do everything we can to flee it and to help everybody we know to flee this wretched end.

It's not just the fleeing from the darkness. Father, You have given us the light. You have given us Your Son, Jesus Christ who is worthy worthy of all of our love and service and going after and seeking and worship.

He is worthy. We thank You for giving us Your Son. As You teach us to hate death may our love for Christ grow evermore. We pray these things in His name for His sake. Amen.