"Terror on Every Side" Part 1 July 22, 2018 AM

Prayer for Grace to Hear and See Christ

Heavenly Father, we are gathered here because you have sought us out and you did not let us run away and stop our ears. You've gathered us here this morning to hear your word. I thank you for searching over hill and vale to find me, a broken and wayward sheep.

Thank you for your grace. Lord, you know that we are not here by our good merits or our good fortune, but in your purpose, because of your mercy and in your grace, you desire us to hear a word from your word.

I ask that you would bear us up in this time, that you would grant us your Holy Spirit. He would fill us, that we would see Jesus Christ clearly in this word. We have no hope other than the hope you have given us in Christ, and what a hope.

Lord, I pray that you would work your will in our hearts today as we hear the truths of your word. We thank you for providing for us all that we need, all that we need to love you and to live for you.

We pray these things for the sake of Jesus Christ, with whom you are well pleased. Amen. Will you please stand in reverence to Christ, who is revealed in Jeremiah 19, verses 1 -9. Thus says the Lord, Go and buy a potter's earthenware jar, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the senior priests.

Then go out to the valley of Ben-Hinom, which is by the entrance of the potsherd gate, and proclaim there the words that I tell you, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel. Behold, I am about to bring a calamity upon this place, at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle, because they have forsaken me. And have made this an alien place, and have burned sacrifices in it to other gods, that neither they nor their forefathers nor the kings of Judah had ever known.

And because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent, and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire, as burnt offerings to Baal. The thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter my mind.

Therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when this place will no longer be called Topheth, or the valley of Ben-Hinom, but rather the valley of slaughter. I will make void the council of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies, and by the hand of those who seek their life.

And I will give over their carcasses as food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth. I will also make this city a desolation and an object of hissing. Everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss, because of all its disasters.

I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they will eat one another's flesh in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. How did it come to this? How did it come to this? You think of the sermons and the stories of Jeremiah, we gain some context for understanding how it all came to this.

Chapter one of Jeremiah is an excellent chapter to read. It will give you needful context for whatever part of Jeremiah you're in. If you are looking at a verse or a passage in Jeremiah and you don't know how it fits, go back and read chapter one and you'll see how it fits.

In chapter one, we see that the sovereign word of God came to Jeremiah and the sovereign words of God came through Jeremiah. Jeremiah was commissioned as the prophet of God to preach the words of God, which were most needful and most certain.

And that Jeremiah, when he was preaching, would preach to tear down and to build up, to uproot and also to plant. And that no matter who he preached to, whether Judah or the nations, that as long as Jeremiah would preach the word of God, God would make sure that Jeremiah in his message would overcome.

He would make him as a fortified city that no one could take. This was Jeremiah's commission. And this is something that we ought to refer to time and again, the way in which Jeremiah, the book operates, whether we're reading one of his sermons or reading one of his stories.

Jeremiah has been commissioned by the word of the Lord to preach the words of the Lord. And this is the first of five words that we need to hold on to. If we're gonna understand Jeremiah, first word is commission.

Jeremiah's commission in chapter one. The second word we need to think of when we're wondering where we are in Jeremiah is corruption. Corruption. Jeremiah has been commissioned to preach to a people that is thoroughly corrupted.

For example, in chapter five, verses 30 and 31 says, an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land. The prophets prophesy falsely, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love to have it so.

But what will you do at the end of it? Third word is collapse. And you see this in chapter seven. And it's also a theme in our passage as well. The valley of the slaughter. There's going to be so much destruction, the entire society is going to collapse.

All of the relationships, all of the norms, everything about being a Jew, living in Jewish society will be completely undone and unraveled. And this is described in the image of the valley of slaughter.

So Jeremiah's commission is to preach to a corrupted society about their coming collapse. And they are utterly condemned to this end. Chapter 11, verses 11 through 14. This is Jeremiah's word. Therefore, thus says the Lord, behold, I am bringing disaster on them, which they will not be able to escape.

They are condemned to this doom, though they will cry to me, yet I will not listen to them. This is a shocking verse. That doesn't seem fair, that God will reveal himself to Judah, that he would call them to live in his holy city, where the temple is on the temple mount, and say, no matter what you say, how you pray to me, I'm not going to listen to you.

I'm going to make sure that you are destroyed. It sounds unfair, but let God be true, and every man a liar. Verse 12 explains it. Then the cities of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will go and cry to the gods.

They will cry to the gods, to whom they burn incense, but they surely will not save them in the time of their disaster. For your gods are as many as your cities, O Judah, and as many as the streets of Jerusalem, and are the altars you have set up to this shameful thing, altars to burn incense to Baal.

Meaning that Yahweh, the Lord, the one true God, as far as Judah was concerned, was just one more God to pray to, hoping it would work out. So he's not going to listen to them, because they're idolatrous, and even when they think they're worshiping the Lord, the one true God, they envision him in their mind as a God that's okay being worshiped with other gods, which means they have even idolatrized Yahweh, and they don't know him.

So God says, I'm not going to listen to them, and then he tells Jeremiah in verse 14 of chapter 11, therefore do not pray for this people. Do not pray for this people, nor lift up a cry or prayer for them, for I will not listen when they call to me because of their disaster.

So he says, I'm not going to listen when they pray. Jeremiah, you don't pray for them, because they are condemned. They are reprobate. The fifth word, the fifth C to remember as we are going through Jeremiah, is a surprising one after what we've just said, and that's compassion.

It's compassion. Jeremiah 12 and verse 15, God says, it will come about that after I have uprooted them, I will again have compassion on them. After the uprooting will be a planting. After a tearing down, there will be a building.

He says, I will bring them back, each one to his inheritance, each one to his land. So you see that God has compassion in mind, even as he has condemned this people to utter collapse because of their corruption, a message that he has sent through his prophet whom he has commissioned.

That helps us understand what's going on in the book of Jeremiah. That's what we see in the stories and the sermons of Jeremiah, but that is a fulfillment of what God had already told Moses in Deuteronomy 31 16.

The Lord said to Moses, behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers, and this people will arise and play the harlot with the strange gods of the land into the midst of what they are going, and they will forsake me, same language as we have in Jeremiah, they will forsake me and break my covenant which I have made with them.

That is what the story of Jeremiah is about. About how Judah, what was left of the nation of Israel, how Judah forsook the Lord, breaking his covenant, and the fallout that occurred. Breaking the covenant.

That's the, that's the heading of our first point, a broken covenant, but it would do us well to think about why that is important. Breaking the covenant. Now is that a big deal? I mean it happened a lot, right?

I mean it happened a lot. It happened in, even in Moses's day and Joshua's day, a little bit. It happened especially in the days of the judges. Certainly happened in Saul's day, and how many bad kings were there versus good kings, and how much idolatry was there in the, in the nation of Israel, in the nation of Judah.

So breaking the covenant, is that kind of like breaking the speed limit? It just kind of happens all the time. You get in trouble, then you keep it five under for a while, then you break the speed limit again.

Let's not have that impression about breaking the covenant. It's not like breaking this, it's not like exceeding the speed limit. It's like trying to overthrow the government and failing. That's what breaking the covenant is.

It's like trying to overthrow the government and failing, and you know what? It never works out so well for the people who try to overthrow the government and then fail. It just doesn't work out so well for them, does it?

That is what's happening in Judah. Judah is trying to overthrow the government of God. It's not going to work, and God is going to execute every member of that coup. The covenant is very important. Another big picture.

As goes the image of God, so grows the kingdom of God. Think Genesis 1, 26 to 28. God makes man in his own image. It is according to his own likeness, and he says to Adam and Eve, he says to humanity made in his image, you're going to go throughout all the earth.

You're going to subdue it. You're going to be my image everywhere. His kingdom. As goes the image of God, so grows the kingdom of God. Because of sin, this image must now be reborn and renewed, and that only happens through Christ.

Wherever we find the image of God being reborn and renewed, we find the kingdom of God growing. The way in which God governs this movement, this growth of his kingdom, is his covenant. The covenants that God made with Adam and with Noah and with Abraham and with Israel and with David all have to do with how the image of God is supposed to live in the world so as to advance the kingdom of God.

By mediating his authority and holiness and truth and wisdom, they are to love God supremely, love each other rightly, steward the creation responsibly, and that's what all the covenants have in common.

They harmonize into the fulfillment of Jesus Christ, who comes as the mediator, as the Messiah, and he comes and does everything that the Father asks him to do, even obedience to death on the cross, and by the shedding of his blood, he says he brings in the new covenant, which is all based on his faithfulness.

His faithfulness. When we read in the Old Testament about someone breaking the covenant, we should not think to ourselves, oh well, that was an Old Testament problem. We ought to think of the New Testament relevance that Jesus Christ, he is ushered in the new covenant by his blood, and we should equate any attempt to overthrow the government of God in the Old Testament, any attempt to break the covenant in the Old Testament, with warring and raging and acting against Jesus Christ.

So that's our big picture, and I think we need the big picture because if we don't have the big picture, and we know where we are in the book, we'll be following the stray cats of moralism yowling for our attention, and we'll talk about proper burial practices and forbidding cannibalism, which is not what this passage is about.

This passage is about Jesus Christ, and this passage is calling for us to hear the word of the Lord. Hearing the word of God remains our only hope for the renewing of the image of God. So broken covenant, chapter 19, verses 1 through 9.

These nine verses, we should think of them like a sentencing hearing in a court of law, and in verses 1 through 3, the court is brought into session. Verses 1 through 3, thus says the Lord, go and buy a potter's earthenware jar, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the senior priests, and then go out to the valley of Ben-Hanom, which is by the entrance of the potsherd gate, and proclaim there the word that I tell you, and say, hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel. Behold, I am about to bring a calamity on this place at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle. Court is in session. God is the judge. God is the judge.

His words are heard in this court. He's the one who lists the charges in verses 4 through 5. He's the one who passes sentence in verses 6 through 9. And why is he the judge? We read it right there in verses 1 through 3.

He is Lord of hosts. He is Yahweh Sabaoth. He is creator. He owns all of creation. Therefore, he's the judge of the universe. He's also God of Israel. So, by merits of the covenant he has with Israel, he is their judge.

He is the judge of Judah. He's all-powerful. He's everywhere present. He's all-knowing. He's infinitely holy, good, and just. God is the judge. Jeremiah is the bailiff. Jeremiah is the bailiff. The Lord tells Jeremiah to make his courtroom ready.

Jeremiah collects the principal representatives of Judah, gathers them just outside the potsherd gate. The potsherd gate at the southeast corner of Jerusalem court is held here. You understand that the potsherd gate is also known as the dung gate.

It is a widely used gate. Many people use this gate at the southeast corner of Jerusalem because they are taking out their garbage. And so, there are a lot of people who are leaving, walking out of Jerusalem with their carts full, their donkeys weighed down, and their arms full as they descend out of Jerusalem.

But when they re-enter, all their burdens are gone. What happened to all their garbage? They threw it in the valley of the son of Hinnom, Topheth. You look to the south of Jerusalem. When you exit the potsherd gate, you look to the south of Jerusalem, and what do you see?

From east to west, there is a valley, a very deep valley, and this is called Topheth. It is a wretched place, pit of blood, abyss of fire, nadir of evil. There are two kinds of smoke that rise up out of Topheth, two kinds of smoke that rise from this hole of hell.

Trash is not the only thing burning down there, because Molech, the eater of children, lives there too. And by holding court just outside the potsherd gate, in view of this place, God forces the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem to look upon the evil that they have perpetuated, and look upon the doom that they have embraced, fire and destruction.

Jeremiah is the bailiff. He only speaks the words that he has heard from the Lord, and so he calls court to session. He calls all of Judah to hear the word of the Lord, but they're not going to hear. They are intentionally deaf.

They have stopped their ears. So God speaks a word that will be heard, but not by Judah, a word that will be heard by the nations that live on after Judah's destruction, a word that will make the ears of all who hear of this destruction tingle.

Well, what will God do for his spiritually deaf people? They don't want to listen, so he gives them a sign. He gives them a sign, the sign of the back book. You know what the back book is? The new American standard manages to take a five-letter Hebrew word into three rather long English words, a potter's earthenware jar, which is basically a little vase.

It's an earthenware jar about eight inches tall. It has a large weighty body, very narrow neck, a rim around the top, and a little handle coming from the rim down to the body. It can be used for all sorts of things, but the reason why it's called a back book is because when you pour liquid out of it, the air trying to get into the container makes a sound like that's why they named it that.

Isn't that more interesting than calling it an earthen jar of a potter? So he goes and buys this jar, this back book, from the potter. Now, Jeremiah had just been to the potter's house. He had gone there in chapter 18.

He had gone there for a sign as well. When he had gone to the potter's house the first time, he saw the potter at work with his wheel. And in Jeremiah 18 verses 4 through 6, we read this, but the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter.

This is clay that is still malleable. He's still trying to work it. So he remade it into another vessel as it pleased the potter to make. Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does, declares the Lord.

Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so you are in my hand, O house of Israel. And he goes on to make the same application to all the nations, to everybody who has ever lived. Such is the sovereignty of God that as it pleases him, so he does with us.

What a sobering thought. Now let's think of an even more sobering thought. What happens when Judah's form is no longer malleable, no longer soft and workable like the clay on the potter's wheel? What if their idolatry and their immorality and their injustice are as hardened in them as an earthen jar hardens when placed in a fiery brick kiln?

This little jar is still in the potter's hand to do with as he pleases. This fire jar is still controlled by the sovereignty of God. And so Jeremiah calls court into session. We know who the judge is.

We're about to hear the charges read, but he holds exhibit A. And when Jeremiah is done using exhibit A, it will have to be relabeled exhibits B through Z. God has made a covenant with Israel and Judah.

What remains of Israel has broken that covenant. Now God will list the charges. So we move from the present tense calling to order in verses one through three to the past tense indictments against Judah, verses four and five.

The charges are now read, because this calamity will come because they have forsaken me. They have forsaken me and have made this an alien place and have burned sacrifices in it to other gods that neither they nor their forefathers nor the kings of Judah had ever known.

And because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter my mind.

So you see that the calamity that God will bring is a just calamity because of these charges that he has Jeremiah read. And they are all based on the fact that God had this covenant relationship with Israel where he had specified how they were to love him supremely, how they were to love each other rightly, and what they were supposed to do with the land he gave them.

And they have broken the covenant in every possible fashion. Forsaking God heads the list of the charges. It requires some thought. How can one abandon God? How can you abandon God if you live in Jerusalem?

How can you abandon God if you live in view of the temple? How can you abandon God when you are able to go to the temple and offer sacrifices? How can it be possible that you abandon God when you live in the city where the prophets and the priests have access to the holy scriptures and tell you what they mean?

How could it be that they've forsaken God? What an incredible claim. And yet God demonstrates they have forsaken him by the list of the other claims. You see, God's people have not abandoned God in a physical way.

They have not physically evacuated from the temple, but by spiritual adultery in God's place. Judah made the temple, Jerusalem, and all of Judah an alien place. It says an alien, a strange place. The Hebrew word for this is the same used for another woman.

It's spiritual adultery. You see, when God sees Judah mixing the worship of Baal and Molech and the queen of heaven with his worship, he says that's adultery. That's fornication. Hosea and Ezekiel said the same.

So they have forsaken God because they do not worship him alone. They commit spiritual adultery. And, you know, idolatry always leads to injustice. If you find injustice in the world, the root of it is always idolatry of some kind.

That's the way it was in the life of Israel throughout the scriptures. You see, Jeremiah is standing along the southeast corner of Jerusalem, and to the south he can point and say, look at the smoke there in Topheth.

And then he can point upwards, up to the north, and he can point at the temple and say, look at the smoke rising up there. Look at them both. He says, this is idolatry. This is injustice. This is the great sin.

They fill this place with the blood of the innocent. They build the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of nor did it enter my mind.

You see, Leviticus 21 through 6, Moses, by the Spirit, specifically forbids the children of Israel as they are entering into this land of Canaan full of wretched and pagan idols. He specifically forbids them from worshiping Molech, which means that they would have to offer up their own children as burnt offerings to gain the favor and the prosperity that Molech offers.

Now, Josiah, a good king, tried to stop that practice. They were down in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, down in Topheth. They had shrines that they had built to Molech, and they were down there offering up their children.

And Josiah says, no, we're going to stop that. We're never going to have that again. He made all the nation break down the altars in the high places and to stop worshiping Baal and Molech and the queen of heaven.

And he brought this sweeping and enforced social reform to end idolatry in the land of Israel. And he said, what we're going to do is we're going to defile Topheth. We're going to defile the valley of the son of Hinnom, and we are going to fill it with trash, with putrid things.

We're going to fill it with the carcasses of the criminals so that no self-respecting Jew will ever want to go back down there and worship Molech. That was his plan. But you know, when you try to bring about social reform and moral reform without hearts truly repenting, you're just covering up rotten boards with whitewash.

And that was the case because as soon as Josiah died, the kings that followed him had no trouble at all ramping back up the sacrifices to the false gods. And interestingly, now they're saying that they're offering sacrifices.

They're offering their children to Baal. Why not Molech? You see, when moral reforms do not emerge from truly repentant hearts, this results in new perversions of old practices. They just changed the label.

They just changed the label. Instead of calling it worship to Molech, they called it worship to Baal. Are you worshiping Molech? No, no, of course not. I'm worshiping Baal. Oh, okay. They relabeled the sin, but that doesn't change the nature of the sin.

Relabeling sin doesn't change the nature of the sin. It just changes our attitudes about that sin. And the idolatry goes on and the injustice goes on and the innocent are killed. Well, they break the covenant in every conceivable way.

They're worshiping the creature rather than the creator who's blessed forever. They forsake him and break his covenant and they kill the innocent and lead one another into further perversions of sin. They've broken the covenant in every possible way they can.

And so sentence is passed in verses six through nine. Therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when this place will no longer be called Topheth or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but rather the Valley of Slaughter.

Valley of Slaughter. I will make void the council of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hand of those who seek their life. And I will give over their carcasses as food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth.

I will also make the city a desolation and an object of hissing. Everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss because of all its disasters. I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they will eat one another's flesh in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them.

You know, the destruction is of a particularly total manner when names get changed. We no longer talk about the World Trade Center. We talk about Ground Zero, and Topheth was never called that again, and the Valley of Ben-Hinnom was never called that again.

It was just called the Valley of Slaughter because of the magnitude of the destruction, the number of those who died. The Valley of Slaughter. You see, the slaughter would come by the Babylonians. So many people would die that there would be no more place to bury them, and so they were tossed into the valley south of Jerusalem without a real burial.

Nobody had the energy or the space to bury the dead anymore, and so the bodies were just left lying out for the vultures and for the jackals. This was a cursed way to die. All the nations knew it. That's why they would hiss and stare in astonishment at the awful and cursed end of this people.

And because we resemble what we revere, and we begin to look like what we worship, those who worshipped Molech, the eater of children, would eat their own children and eat each other in the siege of Babylon.

This is God's judgment. When we read in Romans 1 that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven and that this wrath is manifested in him turning those idolaters over to their own reprobate minds to be destroyed in their own sin, that's what we have here.

He's just turning them over to the end of Molech whom they worship. You see, they broke the covenant of God, and this shattered the image of God. They no longer were living in the image of God, and so that made them enemies of God in his kingdom.

Reverence for the Word of the Lord

Is there any hope in this passage? Well, it's at the very beginning. How many times do we see in verses 1 through 3 God say, hear, listen, pay attention? Verse 2, God says, proclaim the words that I tell you.

And just look at verse 3. Say, hear, hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, behold, that means pay attention. I'm about to bring a calamity upon this place at which the ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.

How many times does God say, just listen, listen, pay attention to the words that I'm saying through my prophet. Hear the word of the Lord. Hear the word of the Lord. If we're going to hear the word, we need to reverence the word.

You look at verse 3, and you hear the one speaking. Look at how God announces himself. He wants them to pay attention. He wants them to hear, and so he says, I'm Yahweh Sabaoth. I am the Lord of hosts.

I am the God of everything. You got to pay attention. I'm the God of Israel. Don't you remember the God who promised all these wonderful things to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and to his sons, and the one who has been faithful to you all these years, and has always revealed himself in mighty wonders.

Don't you remember who I am? Pay attention. You see, God wants them to reverence him, and thus they will reverence his word that he speaks. Do we really know with whom we have to do? Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, and it's the beginning of wisdom.

Do we really know who Christ is in his glory? Do we reverence him and what he says in his word as King of kings, and as Lord of lords? He is the one who is faithfully revealed and glorified his father.

He is the one who is the image of the invisible God. He is faithfully satisfied all of God's demands, and so carries in his own person, carries the new covenant with him into the true holy of holies. He is the ark of the covenant.

As the word of God, he accomplishes the will of God in advancing the kingdom of God, and he will never ever, as those before him, break the covenant. He will not even slightly dim the image of God, and the question is left for us whether or not we will do homage to the son.

Psalm 2, will we kiss the son? Blessed are all those who find refuge in him. When you take up the word of the Lord by the Holy Spirit, you're receiving the words of Christ himself. This is why a lot of the old timers complained about those red letter editions.

It's all to be in red, they said. These are all the words of Christ, not just some of them. Do we reverence the word of the Lord? There must be a proper reverence if we are going to be changed and renewed into the image of God, delivered out of this shattering, disastrous end that we see in Jeremiah 19.

And we ought to desire the word of the Lord as well. You see, God talked about a word that would come that would leave a tingling in the ears of those who heard it. Far better that our ears would tingle than that they be tickled.

Far better that we would hear the real word of the Lord than the word of somebody else saying it's from God, but only to say things they think we want to hear. The word tingle, that expression actually comes from 1 Samuel 3, verse 11, where, remember Samuel, the prophet boy who had the nighttime word from the Lord, and he thought it was Eli talking to him, but it was actually God.

The word that God told little Samuel to say to the high priest Eli was a word that would tingle the ears about the destruction of Eli and his sons and his family because of his perversity, because of his sin.

If we truly reverence the word, we will prefer the word making our ears tingle than settling for the tickling of our ears by false prophets that Paul warned Timothy in the latter days that they will not endure sound doctrine, but they will heap up for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desire so that they would tickle their ears and say wonderful things to them.

This was what's going on in Jeremiah's time. In Jeremiah 6, verse 13, it says, for from the least of them even to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for gain, greedy for gain, for wealth, and from the prophet even to the priest, everyone deals falsely.

Now listen to this. These prophets and priests who are entrusted with the word of God, what do they do? They have healed the brokenness of my people superficially saying peace, peace, but there is no peace.

Why is there no peace? Were they ashamed because of the abomination which they have done? They were not even ashamed at all. They did not even know how to blush. That's why there's no peace. That's why there's no healing, because there's no repentance, nor even conviction.

Therefore they shall fall among those who fall at the time that I punish them. They shall be cast down, says the Lord. Now listen, verse 16, thus says the Lord, stand by the ways and ask for the ancient paths where the good way is.

Walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. What does Jesus say to those who are weary and heavy laden? Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest, rest for your souls.

But they said we will not walk in it. We should desire the word of the Lord, no matter what that word is. Those who tickle the ears of the damned seek the praise of men at the cost of eternal souls. C .S. Lewis says there is the safest road to hell is the gradual one with a gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Better that our ears tingle, better that our eyes bug out and our heart pound and our palms sweat at the prospect of the judgment of God. Jeremiah does the right thing in preaching this message. He's telling Judah, days are coming.

This is the language from Lamentations. Days are coming when on the ground 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. If judgment is the word of the Lord, then that's the word we should desire. And the challenge for us then, if we're going to reverence the word and desire the word, we need to amen the word of the Lord.

We need to amen the word of the Lord. Jesus said amen a lot. He said, verily, verily, that's King James, truly, truly, amen, amen. There are two ingredients to amen, faith and repentance. Those are the two ingredients of amen.

Let me show you an example of that. We read verses four and five, the sins of verses four and five, and then we read verses six through nine, the scenes of wretched destruction, verses six through nine.

If we think that the scenes of verses six through nine are more horrible than the sins of verses four through five, we need to repent and God help us for our unbelief. Are we more compassionate than God?

We're certainly not as holy as God, but if we think that those awful scenes of verses six through nine are somehow worse than the sins of verses four through five, we have need to repent from that position and take God's side on the matter and to say, amen.