Sunday Morning, March 29, 2020 AM

Good morning and welcome. I invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 44, Jeremiah chapter 44. We come back to this passage. Last time, we just looked at the first verse, thinking about how God's Word is inescapable.

A lesson that the Jewish remnant needed to learn, although they rebelled against the Word of God and fled down to Egypt. It wasn't as if they were really escaping the implications of God's Word, the truth and the authority of God's Word.

As we continue through this passage, we're continuing at our second part of the sermon entitled, Unavoidably Undeniable, speaking about the will, the word, and the wrath of God. Unavoidably undeniable.

Last week, we looked at verse 1 and saw the range of God's Word, that it didn't matter if the people were in Babylon or in Canaan or in Egypt. God's Word made it all the way to them and considered the implications of that to our own lives.

We also thought about the aim of God's inescapable Word in that He was concerned about His covenant people and the way that they were profaning the covenant, the way that they were breaking the covenant, sinning against Him.

And He was aiming His Word exactly at those sins against His names, the breaking of the covenant. And this week, we're going to begin to think about how God's will is inevitable in verses 2 through 14.

But I invite you, if you're able, wherever you are, to stand with me as I read God's Word. These are the words of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, by His Holy Spirit, through His prophet, Jeremiah. This is the Word of the Lord.

We'll be reading verses 1 through 14 of Jeremiah 44. The Word that came to Jeremiah for all the Jews living in the land of Egypt, those who were living in Migdal, Tapanis, Memphis, and the land of Pathros, saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, You yourselves have seen all the calamity that I have brought on Jerusalem and all the cities of Judah.

And behold, this day they are in ruins, and no one lives in them, because of their wickedness, which they committed so as to provoke Me to anger by continuing to burn sacrifices and to serve other gods, whom they had not known, neither they, you, nor your fathers.

Yet I sent you all My servants, the prophets, again and again, saying, Oh, do not do this abominable thing which I hate. But they did not listen or incline their ears to turn from their wickedness so as not to burn sacrifices to other gods.

Therefore My wrath and My anger were poured out and burned in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, so they have become a ruin and a desolation as it is this day. Now then, thus says the Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, Why are you doing great harm to yourselves so as to cut off from you man and woman, child and infant from among Judah, leaving yourselves without remnant, provoking Me to anger with the works of your hands, burning sacrifices to other gods in the land of Egypt where you are entering to reside, so that you might be cut off and become a curse and a reproach among all the nations of the earth?

Have you forgotten the wickedness of your fathers, the wickedness of the kings of Judah, and the wickedness of their wives, your own wickedness and the wickedness of your wives, which they committed in the land of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?

But they have not become contrite even to this day, nor have they feared nor walked in My law or My statutes, which I have set before you and before your fathers. Therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Behold, I am going to set My face against you for woe, even to cut off all Judah, and I will take away the remnant of Judah who have set their mind on entering the land of Egypt to reside there and they will all meet their end in the land of Egypt.

They will fall by the sword and meet their end by famine. Both small and great will die by the sword and famine, and they will become a curse, an object of horror, an imprecation, and a reproach. And I will punish those who live in the land of Egypt, as I have punished Jerusalem with the sword, with famine, with pestilence.

So there will be no refugees or survivors for the remnant of Judah who have entered the land of Egypt to reside there and then to return to the land of Judah to which they are longing to return and live.

For none will return except a few refugees. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Worry and anxiety in times such as these needs to be answered with the truth that God is sovereign over all and directly involved with each.

This is certainly the testimony of all the scriptures. It is certainly highlighted here in Jeremiah 44 with the themes of judgment. And is this not, these two truths held together, is this not what Jesus emphasizes in his instructions to us concerning worry?

In Matthew 6, verses 25 through 33, we hear this combination of themes, that God is sovereign over all and directly involved with each. Perhaps you've been meditating on this very passage as growing concern mounts with the virus.

Matthew 6, 25 through 34. For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink, nor for your body as to what you will put on. Is life not more than food and the body more than clothing?

Look to the birds of the air, that they do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and that your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you, by being worried, can add a single hour to his life?

And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow. They do not toil, nor do they spin. Yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all of his glory clothed himself like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? Do not worry then, saying, what will we eat or what will we drink, or what will we wear for clothing?

For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. This spring has been splendid. The grass is green. The plants are coming out in full bloom.

The birds are rejoicing and singing, and they care nothing about the economic shutdown and shelter-in-place rules. And as we go out into our yards and as we take a brief walk outside, just to get out of our houses and to air out, as you listen to the birds singing and you see the green grass all around you, remember this, God is sovereign over all, and he is directly involved with each.

These are the very same truths which not only inform us that we are not to worry but to trust in God, but these truths are the very same which remind us and explain about God's almighty prerogatives in judgment against sin.

And what is the tie-in? What is the connection between rejoicing in God's providence as we consider the birds of the air and the grass of the field, as we consider that and also consider God's judgment, even his judgment in the form of a worldwide virus?

What are we reminded about in both of those seemingly distant themes? Both of those things remind us of the fear of the Lord. Both of those remind us that God is sovereign over all and directly involved with each, and this has to do with the fear of the Lord.

And as we fear the Lord, as we fear the Lord, we will earnestly seek the kingdom of Christ ahead of our own concerns. Well, let's think about our text, Jeremiah 44, and consider how God's will is inevitable, verses 2 through 14.

Now, this passage is structured in such a way as to give us past, present, and future. Past, present, and future. Verses 2 through 6, we have a review of the past. God is bringing up the recent past even to his people, reminding them of the woe and the wickedness of the way that they lived in the land of Judah and in the city of Jerusalem, and then how he brought devastating judgment upon their land.

He sees the need to remind this rebellious remnant of Judah down in Egypt of these facts that should be extremely fresh in their memory, but there is the past in verses 2 through 6. In verses 7 through 11, God deals with the present, how they are living now in the land of Egypt, the way that they're thinking, the way that they are worshiping, and really what is in store for them if they continue in their rebellion, which, of course, leads him into speaking to them about the future, verses 12 through 14.

So you'll see that in your text, verses 2 through 6 is the past, verses 7 through 11 is basically about the present, and then verses 12 through 14 are about the future. Additionally, verses 2 through 6 and verses 7 through 11 follow the very same pattern.

In verses 2 through 4, if you lay those alongside, verses 7 through 9, you hear God speaking to his people about their wickedness and the woe in their life. And then you have verses 5 and 10 sit next to each other where God says, but there is no repentance among you.

There was no repentance then, and there is no repentance now. And because of that, verses 6 and 11 are laid alongside each other, and you see the therefore of judgment. There is wickedness and woe, but you will not repent, therefore judgment.

And that's the same pattern in verses 2 through 6 and verses 7 through 11. The point that is being made with that structural and thematic connection, the point is being made that although the people of God saw for themselves God's judgment upon the wickedness in Jerusalem and indeed his long-suffering calls to repent, they brought the very same wickedness of Jerusalem with them down to Egypt as if they have no remembrance at all of what had just occurred.

And so God promises what he did to Judah and Jerusalem, he will do down in Egypt. And that's the point of verses 2 through 14 of Jeremiah 44. What can we learn from this passage? How are we instructed?

How are we compelled to think? Certainly we are instructed that God's will is inevitable. God's will is inevitable. I mean, they left the land of Judah for the land of Egypt. They were running from, they thought, the king of Babylon.

Indeed, they're actually running from the authority of God himself. They thought they might change their circumstances. They might turn over a new leaf, start a new way of life. But God's will is inevitable.

They're not going to change his will by their actions. And that's the overarching lesson of verses 2 through 14. Just as God did in Judah and Jerusalem, so he will do in Egypt. His will is inevitable.

You're not going to get God to change his holiness or change his purpose to bring judgment against sin. God is not a man that he would change his mind. And so we need to think about this. And it's important for us, when you look at verses 2 through 6, it's important for us to recognize that we must not, we must not explain away God's wrath.

We must not explain away God's wrath. And this is very tempting to do. Something that God would not allow his people to do as he brought their attention to what actually had occurred in their midst not so very long ago.

It is fashionable today to explain away all manner of modern and historical cataclysms as natural, political, or social phenomena. It is reprehensible to the modern or post-modern, the pagan or the barbarian mind, it is reprehensible to such minds to consider God's direct involvement in the world, either for blessing or cursing, either for exalting his people or chastising them, either for raising up nations or judging them.

We would not pray the prayer of Hannah or the prayer of Mary today. We would not consider God to be that involved in the ups and downs of the way the world works. Even Christians, even committed church members, who would otherwise be in these very pews, we are tempted to think, we are tempted to think that God does not directly involve himself with such things.

Yet take, for example, God's judgment upon the nations today, God's judgment upon the world today, this COVID -19, this coronavirus. What is happening? God is taking humanity's latest efforts at building Babel, and he is humbling it, he is dismantling it.

And this world economy that we're so proud of, the interconnected world economy that we credit for the great prosperity, the growing prosperity of people all over the world and our own prosperity, this great interconnectedness of all the different nations.

Our building of Babel, God is humbling that, God is dismantling that with this virus, a microscopic organism toppling world empires in their financial dominion. Rather than acknowledge him, however, rather than acknowledge Christ, acknowledge God as creator and confess ourselves as mere creatures, rather than repent in humility and do homage to the son, lest he be angry and we perish in the way, it seems that the agreed upon approach has been more of the same wickedness.

It seems that the response to God's judgment upon our Babel has been, well, we can overcome this virus through our unified resourcefulness. In other words, more Babel. If we set our mind to it, we can overcome anything, that kind of approach.

And certainly not taking into account that this is the judgment of God. The worst thing we can do, the worst thing we can do when faced with the judgment of God is to explain it away in some fashion so that we don't have to deal with its significance, so that we are not compelled to make any kind of changes in our lives.

Yet that's what the rebellious remnant down in Egypt was doing exactly. If you read just a little bit farther on in the very same chapter, you discover that they were explaining all of their recent misfortune in terms of their failure to worship the queen of heaven with the appropriate intensity.

They said, the reason why we have famine and the sword and pestilence, the reason why we have been having such a difficult time is we didn't worship the queen of heaven the way we should have. And then all this misfortune has come upon us.

You see, they were explaining it away in some other fashion. They were loath to confess and to acknowledge that what had happened to them was the direct judgment of a sovereign God. And so God sent Jeremiah to them with his word to make them deal with the truth of his judgment.

And first of all, in order to do that, he reminds them that they are witnesses. They are witnesses to the calamity. He says, you yourselves have seen. You yourselves have seen. Verse 2, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, you yourselves have seen all the calamity that I have brought on Jerusalem and all the cities of Judah.

And behold, this day they are in ruins and no one lives in them. This remnant has abandoned the land. But they had seen what had happened there. They had drunk from the cup of the wine of wrath from God's hand.

They had drunk it deep. They had staggered and gone mad. What was this calamity? You've seen all the calamity, God said, that I had brought upon the land. What was this calamity? Let's name that calamity.

Well, it was the sword, it was famine, and it was pestilence. Just as God said in Jeremiah 24 and 25 and even further passages, he promised to bring the sword and famine and pestilence upon those who were in disobedience to him.

There was the sword that had slaughtered. The sword had slaughtered sometimes by bandits in the night, raiding dwindling supplies, fellow Jew against fellow Jew, sometimes by suicide as some chose self-murder as a way out of the disaster.

Sometimes it was by the hands of the Chaldean soldiers as they tightened their stranglehold about the neck of the withering Jerusalem. There was the sword. There was also famine. Famine had starved them, that slow leaking out of strength, the malforming of their bodies, and the long stench of death.

There was the sword, there was famine, and there was the pestilence, the disease, which had plundered the very life from their loved ones as they stared helplessly, looking on, with no way to beat back the heartless, invisible thief.

That was the calamity. And God said, you yourselves have seen all the calamity. And they knew what it was. It was the sword, it was the famine, it was the pestilence. And he says, you yourselves have seen all that destruction.

So we surveyed the destruction as well. He says, behold, you remember those cities you saw on your way down to Egypt? You saw every single one of those cities of Judah as you made your way down here? They all are shattered.

They all are a ruin. They all are abandoned. God, just as he promised, had brought this judgment upon them. These cities had become a ruin, a horror, a hissing curse. The dead were scattered, forgotten like dung upon the face of the ground.

And this rebellion in Egypt had seen all of it firsthand. And God insists that they pay attention to what actually happened. Look at the ruin of your land. Look at the judgment that I brought upon you.

You didn't even have the capacity to properly bury your dead. You didn't even have the capacity to properly care for your dead. You're under judgment. What lies had they begun telling themselves in order to deal with the night terrors that accosted them in their sleep?

How were they thinking about those bright and frightening images seared upon the back of their eyelids? Could they really be explaining the horrors their nation had experienced? The horrors they personally had experienced as something other than the judgment of God?

Let us give honor to whom honor is due. Let us give honor to whom honor is due. God says it clearly in verse 2. I have brought this on Jerusalem and the cities of Judah. God is the one who did it. They were eyewitnesses to it.

They must confess that the destruction was God's activity. They should not explain the sword or the famine or the pestilence and explain it away as some kind of unhappy recipe of disaster which naturally takes place once certain political and social conditions are met.

No, they were trying to explain it away. But God is the one who takes the credit. And if they would fear God, and if we would fear God, we should confess that he is the one who has done it to his glory.

They were witnesses to the calamity, and they were witnesses to the covenant. Verse 3, God says, Because of their wickedness which they committed so as to provoke me to anger by continuing to burn sacrifices and to serve other gods whom they had not known, neither they nor you nor your fathers.

So God clearly specifies why he has judged the Jews. They had broken covenant with him. It is not enough that the Jewish remnant in Egypt be confronted with the details of the calamity that they had lived through.

No, it was not enough that they merely catalog the horrors and confess God's sovereign direction of them all. No, they must be confronted with the cause of God's anger. They must be confronted with the logic of his wrath.

They must be confronted with the reason for his recompense. And it was idolatry. It was idolatry. They provoked God to anger through their continued unrepentant idolatry. They kept on. They continued on burning sacrifices to other gods.

I don't know if we have an appreciation of what that means. I mean, what does that mean? We've heard a lot of it in Jeremiah. We come across it very often in the Scriptures, burning sacrifices to other gods.

What does that really mean? What it means at the heart of the matter is that they feared other gods rather than Yahweh Sabaoth, God of Israel. They feared other gods rather than the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel.

What they feared, what they feared, they worshiped. What we fear, we worship. What did they fear? They feared storm gods, fertility gods, river gods, war gods, death gods. They worshiped and feared health gods and wealth gods.

They feared and worshipped many cruel, heartless, false gods rather than serving the one true God who had set his love on them. And what they feared, they worshipped. And what they worshipped, like that they became.

What we fear, we worship. And what we worship, we become like. So very much like their idols, this remnant of Judah, this rebellious people, they had eyes which could not see like their idols. They had ears that could not hear like their idols.

Their necks were stiff and unyielding. And like their idols, their hearts were as cold as stone. This idolatry amounted to adultery, spiritual adultery. This was a very clear breaking of covenant. They refused to repent from their ways.

These ways, these worship practices honoring false gods and false goddesses throughout their cities, at every intersection, even atop their houses. Listen, none of these gods were ever known. None of these gods had ever revealed themselves in love to them.

God says, you serve these other gods whom they had not known, neither they, you, nor your fathers. None of these false gods had ever entered into loving covenant relationship with this people. How could they?

They were dead. They were nonexistent. They could not have revealed themselves. They did not make covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so this is not only idolatry, this is also whoredom. They were devoting themselves to whatever god or goddess they thought could offer them the most.

But it was nothing more than spiritual prostitution. Ezekiel gives us very graphic descriptions of that. They were witnesses to the calamity, they were witnesses to the covenant, and they were witnesses to the correction, verse 4.

Honestly, they had all the advantages in the world, but they were trying to explain away God's wrath. They were trying to explain away God's judgment. But yet they should have known it was God who judged them.

He had been telling them all along, if you do not repent from your idolatry, this is exactly what I will do. And lo and behold, it happened. Verse 4, yet I sent you all my servants, the prophets, again and again, saying, O do not do this abominable thing which I hate.

The rebellious remnant of Judah in Egypt must understand that all the calamity they witnessed was because they broke God's covenant. This is not an isolated incident that they broke God's covenant. No, it wasn't a tripping up or a failure in one little incident.

No, this is a fortified structure of behavior built over and against every wave of preaching prophets throughout the generations. And in this, we see God's long-suffering. God's long-suffering. I mean, after the wickedness and woe of verse 3, he then says, yet, rather than going straight to the therefore of judgment, he says yet.

Before the justified therefore comes a merciful, King James has it, howbeit. It's a generosity word. God says, this is the way you were, and yet this is what I did for you. Look at the generosity of God, of God's long-suffering.

Look how he takes time to try to correct his people. He sent all his prophets. He fired every arrow out of his quiver for their good. Look at the persistence of God's long-suffering. He sent them again and again.

That's an English accommodation to the Hebrew expression, which the King James still has, rising early. Rising early, meaning God had made it his priority. God had prioritized grace. God had prioritized loving kindness.

God had prioritized this attempt to call them to repentance. His gracious, special revelation had been his first desire in dealing with his people. He had not begun with anger. He is slow to anger, and yet angry he is.

He is. Look at God's loathing. He says, do not do this abominable thing which I hate. While it is true that God is holy and hates all sin, there are some sins which he hates worse than others. There are some about which he takes the time to state how much he personally loathes.

And this is one of those instances. He says, abomination. The term abomination in the Hebrew is toeva. It refers to a sin of a heinous nature. This refers to something detestable, something loathsome.

And to engage in abomination means to be cut off from the covenant, and all abomination deserves the death penalty, as we find throughout God's law. And so these Jewish rebels had heard these insistent pleas, even from Jeremiah himself, but they had rejected them just as their fathers had.

They were witnesses to the calamity. They were witnesses to the covenant. They were witnesses to the correction, and they were witnesses to the corruption, verses 5 through 6. But they did not listen or incline their ears to turn from their wickedness so as not to burn sacrifices to other gods.

Therefore, my wrath and my anger were poured out and burned in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, so they have become a ruin and a desolation, as is this day. This rebellious remnant, they themselves had seen the result of ignoring God's corrective warnings.

They themselves had seen the calamity that God personally brought against those freely engaging in abomination after abomination. They themselves were witnesses to the corrupted hearts so evident in their doomed city, in their doomed culture.

And what had ignoring God gotten them? When those who are made in the image of God reject the word of God, all that is left is the wrath of God. So it is in every age among every people. And this will of God is unavoidably undeniable.

Well, it's important that we not explain away God's wrath. It is vital that we not look about us today and listen to all of the analysis and the prognosticators talk about the coronavirus and so on and begin to attach to it all these...

Oh, the reason why we have this is because our economy was too globalized so we weren't dependent on American manufacturing. And the real reason that the problem was because the Chinese are communists.

And that's the reason why we have this virus. And the reason why we have this virus is because people desired money more than they love others. And we come on... No, let's call it what it is. It's the judgment of God.

It's the judgment of God. Why is it important not to explain away God's wrath? If we explain away God's wrath and it says, Oh, well, this is just one of the difficulties of living in a modern society.

If we try to explain it away, then how will we repent? How will we repent if we explain away God's judgment? How will we deal with our wickedness? And this is the next point, verses 7 through 11, is that we must not revoice our wickedness.

Verses 7 through 11, we must not revoice our wickedness. The term revoice comes from the study of music. And to revoice usually in terms of music means to revoice an instrument, perhaps to work on the pipe of an organ to make sure that the tone is... to change the tone of it and correct it.

But the term revoice has been taken up by a particular group. In 2018, a conference called Revoice was launched. And their expressed intention was to change the tone of the traditional church and how we talk about certain things.

And this is a conference that was aimed at Southern Baptists and conservative Presbyterians. They wanted to revoice the church's way of speaking about LGBTQ plus sexual minorities. They want to bring the church into repentance for our homophobia and repentance for our idolatrous privileging of family.

And, of course, they never openly advocate for the physical act of homosexuality or promote gay mirage. They did, however, seek to carve out gay Christian lifestyles, which would include a gay Christian lifestyle.

That's a weird thing to say, but they were trying to carve that out. Anything from the hermit's solitaire existence to the happy monkish commune and the ever-popular solemnized friendship, chased gay couple household, raising besweatered dogs and hoping to adopt soon.

Their doctrinal error essentially consists in refusing to acknowledge what the Bible does about sin. Listen. Desires in the heart, which are against God's holiness, are sin. The desires that are in the heart, that even come unbidden from the heart, that are against the holiness of God, against the expressed law of God, they are sin in and of themselves.

These sins are not to be hallowed as our identities, but plucked out and severed. What did Christ say? If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than to have two hands or two feet and be cast into the eternal fire.

If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be cast into the fiery hell. And if you think that it's too much to be asked to sever the hand, which is a part of you.

This is me. This is my hand. Is it too much to cut it off and throw it away? This is my eye. This is me. This is very personal to me. How could I be me without my eye? But Jesus is using hyperbole to say, if there is some kind of sin in your life, is it worth it to go to hell holding on to that sin as part of you?

Why not sever it? Why not pluck it out? Why not repent of this sin which feels like me? But why not sever that and pluck it out and turn to Christ in repentance for salvation? Better to go to heaven having cut out and severed sin from our lives than to embrace it as our own personal identity and go plunging straight into hell.

But the Revoice Conference did not acknowledge the truth of this in Scripture. But they are not unique. They are not unique in their attempt to make wickedness into something that is not wicked. Satan began that practice in the Garden of Eden and is proud as the father of lies to see his spawns so prolific.

Long has mankind done whatever is right in his own eyes, and it is endemic to failing cultures, to failing cultures to call good bad and bad good. That's the real pandemic. We are guilty of revoicing our wickedness every time we make excuses for our sinful passions, we dress up our sinful actions, and attempt to cover up our sinful lifestyles with platitudes of all the good we are about and promote and accomplish.

We want to mix wickedness with godliness, much like the Jewish remnant wanted to mix worshiping the Queen of Heaven with worshiping the God of Israel. Verses 7 -11 make it clear that we must not attempt to revoice our own wickedness.

Any hope of calling it anything else is futile. It is what God says it is. If we allow ourselves to entertain the fables of the enemy, we will blind ourselves to the consequence and character of wickedness, and we will fail to warn the wicked that God will cut them off.

So first of all, the consequence of wickedness, verses 7 through the beginning of verse 8. How aware are we, how cognizant are we of the consequences of wickedness? Lest we hold our nose and scarf down its rotten carcass, lest we squeeze our eyes shut and just hang on for the ride, we ought to deal with the outcomes of wickedness as God has graciously revealed them in His Word.

Why insist on experiencing the consequences ourselves? Let's learn from the Word. Wickedness destroys man, verse 7. Wickedness destroys man. Now then, thus says the Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, Why are you doing great harm to yourselves, so as to cut off from you man and woman, child and infant, from among Judah, leaving yourselves without remnant?