Sunday Morning, April 28, 2019 AM

Thank you, for those you have brought here today. We are grateful that you, as our maker, our creator, do know exactly what we need.

Not only do you see to our daily physical provision, not only have you blessed us with a created order and beauty, you offer to us today what we need more than our necessary food.

Your holy word. We were not meant to live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from your mouth.

You are so gracious to give us your words through these holy scriptures.

You have given us your words, and I pray that you would give us, by your

Holy Spirit, clarity to know exactly what this means, and I pray that by your power, that you would take the truth of your word and delve deep into our lives, separating everything out.

And before your pure gaze, may we understand who we are, may we understand what you have called us to be.

Lord, our hope, our hope that you will show us mercy, that you will renew, that you will redeem.

It's a hole in your son, Jesus Christ. We thank you that he is risen from the dead.

We thank you that he has ascended to your right hand. We thank you that he reigns supreme.

In his name, we pray for these mercies. Amen. I invite you to open your

Bibles and turn with me to the Old Testament book of Jeremiah. We're going to be looking at chapter 27, verses 12 through 22.

Jeremiah chapter 27, verses 12 through 22. To remember where we are at, we have to recall that Jeremiah is preaching his sermons at a time of political instability.

When he was called to be a prophet, he grew up under the reign of a very good king named

Josiah. As a young man, Josiah had good counselors. When he was young in his reign, someone found the

Bible, the book of God's law, hidden somewhere in the neglected temple.

They brought it to Josiah and they read to him the word of God. This impacted him so greatly that he began to change everything in the kingdom to line up with the word of God.

Things were a mess. They had not been celebrating the feasts. Even the Ark of the Covenant wasn't where it was supposed to be.

He was setting all things right. Jeremiah, of a priestly family of a small little town named

Anathoth, just north of Jerusalem, grew up in the midst of this great change. Good things were happening.

Josiah died unexpectedly, young in his reign. His sons and grandson did not rule well.

They all turned back to the ways of the other kings who had let the kingdom get so bad. His first son,

Jehoiakim, did not reign well. In fact,

Jehoiakim was a bit selfish. He taxed the people very hard to build massive buildings to his own fame.

He was not a powerful king. His kingdom was not powerful. They had to pay tribute to all other kinds of nations, including a great nation named

Babylon. Jehoiakim felt the pinch of the tribute, and so he began to rebel against Babylon and began to build his own structures at the cost of not paying off the powerhouse,

Babylon. And so here come the raids. Many nations came against Jehoiakim.

Many people were taken away from Jerusalem. Many riches were taken away from Jerusalem.

And Jehoiakim did not end well. He ended in death. He died trying to rebel against the

Egyptian pharaoh. Well, his son, Jehoiakim, became king and reigned for three months.

And the Bible said he was evil. I mean, what can you do in three months? But this guy got a reputation for being evil within three months.

And the king of Babylon came to, again, put the whole country, the capital city, under subjection.

And Jehoiakim courageously surrendered. He and his family, his household, all the nobles, the craftsmen, the people who could make all the fine articles in the temple, the people who could forge new weapons, all of those went away into captivity to the land of Babylon.

And the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, knew he needed to find somebody he could work with. And so he picked

Jehoiakim's uncle, Mattaniah, changed his name to Zedekiah and said, you will now be king.

So uncle Zed became king. But he was a puppet king of Babylon. And at the beginning of Zedekiah's reign,

Jeremiah is preaching this sermon in chapter 27. So we've had a lot of kings come and go all at once.

Judah as a nation, they are not powerful. They are under the thumb of the Babylonians.

They are facing great pressure politically.

And at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah, Jeremiah preaches a sermon.

And he preaches it not just to Zedekiah and to Judah, but he preaches it to all the nations. And he has something he wants to say.

And what he wants to say is this, God has given all things to his servant. God has given all things to his servant.

That's what he says in verses 1 through 11. That's what we saw a couple weeks ago. God has given all things to his servant.

And in this case, at this particular time in history, that servant was Nebuchadnezzar.

God was using Nebuchadnezzar to judge all the nations in the area. And he had given all the lands to Nebuchadnezzar, all the cities to Nebuchadnezzar.

And so the message from Jeremiah to all the nations was, submit. Resistance is futile.

Give up, submit, stay in your land, till your ground, do what you're supposed to, because God has chosen

Nebuchadnezzar to rule for this amount of time, and you need to submit to what God has ordained.

Well, you may imagine that was not a very popular message. But Jeremiah was always giving out unpopular messages.

It seemed that what God had to say was what people needed to hear, but it wasn't necessarily what people wanted to hear.

Well, that catches us up to where we are now. And I want to invite you to stand with me as I read this text, beginning in verse 12 through verse 22.

Jeremiah chapter 27, verses 12 through 22. I spoke words like these,

I spoke words like all these to Zedekiah king of Judah, saying, bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live.

Why will you die, you and your people, by the sword, famine, and pestilence, as the

Lord has spoken to that nation which will not serve the king of Babylon? So do not listen to the words of the prophets who speak to you, saying, you will not serve the king of Babylon, for they prophesy a lie to you.

For I have not sent them, declares the Lord, but they prophesy falsely in my name, in order that I may drive you out, and that you may perish, you and the prophets who prophesy to you.

Then I spoke to the priests and to all his people, saying, thus says the Lord, do not listen to the words of your prophets who prophesy to you, saying, behold, the vessels of the

Lord's house will now shortly be brought again from Babylon, for they are prophesying a lie to you.

Do not listen to them, serve the king of Babylon, and live. Why should this city become a ruin?

But if they are prophets, and if the word of the Lord is with them, let them now entreat the Lord of hosts, that the vessels which are left in the house of the

Lord, in the house of the king of Judah, and in Jerusalem, may not go to Babylon. For thus says the

Lord of hosts, concerning the pillars, concerning the sea, concerning the stands, concerning the rest of the vessels that are left in this city, which

Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, did not take, when he carried into exile Jeconiah, the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, from Jerusalem to Babylon, and all the nobles of Judah and Jerusalem.

Yes, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning the vessels that are left in the house of the

Lord, and in the house of the king of Judah and in Jerusalem, they will be carried to Babylon, and they will be there until the day

I visit them, declares the Lord. Then I will bring them back and restore them to this place.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So who's ready for 5G?

Anybody? Anybody? The convenience promised by the developers of 5G, that level of hope and desire, is only matched by the level of fear and anxiety that is promulgated by the doomsdayers who say that the grid is going to go down.

As good as 5G developers think the world is going to get, that's how bad it's going to get, according to those who believe the grid will soon go down.

Right? And they both think they're nuts, that aside. The 5Gers are looking forward to the day when they can ride along in their artificial intelligence car, driving itself to work, and they can live stream themselves, making fun of everybody who said the grid was going to go down.

Meanwhile, those who know the grid is going to go down are testing the flammability of smartphones to see whether they'd be good to cook food on.

Well, I don't know if the grid is going to go down, and I don't know if 5G is going to work, but we live in a kind of 5G world, where anybody can have access to anything almost instantly.

And that's a world in which we can be easily distracted. It is the equivalent of John Bunyan's Vanity Fair.

It's very distracting, this world in which we live. But what if all of the distractions disappear?

What then do we know to be true? What if the grid goes down? What is still true?

And the fact of the matter is, even though the grid may not go down, and 5G may never get developed, we need grid -down truth in a 5G world.

We need to have those truths that are true no matter what to direct us and ground us in a world full of distractions.

These distractions are often in the form of messages that are crafted particularly to our desires.

All sorts of artificial intelligence is listening in to know what we like, so that on our browsers and in our apps, what we like appears before us.

Everything is tailored exactly for what we want. And this is exactly the situation that Jeremiah was in.

They had no kind of technology that we would understand. Our technology would be completely foreign to them.

But you know what? Human nature was still the same. There were lots of distractions in Jerusalem and in Judah.

And Jeremiah had to constantly say what the

Word of God said over and against the tailored messaging of the false prophets all around him.

And this message is particularly one that is difficult to get people to buy into.

Babylon now rules the world. Nebuchadnezzar's in charge. Submit. That's a hard sell.

How do you convince people of that? Well, we see that first of all, in verses 12 through 17,

Jeremiah is tasked with proclaiming an unwavering word to unwilling vassals.

And in verses, you'll notice some symmetry to his message. In verses 12 through 13, he basically says, submit to God's king and live.

And then verse 14, he says, do not listen to the deceits of the false prophets. And then verse 15, he says, because they are going to take you along with them into destruction.

The very next verse, verse 16, he says, don't listen to the deceits of the false prophets. And then verse 17, he says, submit to God's king and live.

So there's a full pattern there. And when you have that particular pattern, the verse stuck in the middle is the main point.

We like to put our main point right at the very beginning and then say it again at the end. The Hebrew mind put the main point right in the middle and then put parallel thoughts around it.

So the main thought is this, God's going to exile and execute the false prophets and their followers. So don't listen to them.

Now, he gives a word, first of all, to the king and nation in verses 12 through 15. And then he gives a word to the priests in the city in verses 16 through 17.

To understand Jeremiah's sermon, you have to understand what he's wearing right now. At the beginning of the chapter,

God told him to put on some articles to make his message more impactful.

So Jeremiah put on bonds like he was a chained slave. And in that day, we would think of chains as slavery today, but in Jeremiah's day, the universal symbol of slavery was a yoke, like a wooden beam to lay across the shoulders of an animal and have that animal pull a cart.

Slaves, human slaves, also wore yokes because they would carry burdens on either side or perhaps they were pulling something behind them.

And that was the universal symbol of slavery, the yoke across the neck, plus the chains.

And so God tells Jeremiah, get dressed up like that. Put the yoke on your neck. Put the chains on.

Put the bonds on. And then, Jeremiah, I want you to preach the message that Nebuchadnezzar is now king.

I've given him all the lands and all the cities, so submit to him. Preach that to all the foreign messengers who have arrived in Jerusalem to congratulate

Zedekiah on his new reign. Zedekiah just became king. So here come the foreign ambassadors.

They've all arrived in Jerusalem to establish relations with the new king.

And before they leave, they're going to get a message from Jeremiah. They're going to go back to Ammon. They're going to go back to Moab.

They're going to go back to Tyre and Sidon. They're going to go back to all of their lands with this message to their king.

And the message was simply this. Before we got out of town, here's what happened. This guy came up and he had this yoke on, chains, he looked like a slave, but he was some kind of prophet.

And his message was this, that there's only one God, the one true

God, and he's given everything to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, even our city and all the land around it.

He's given it all to the king of Babylon. And the message is we need to submit and do whatever the king of Babylon says to do.

Please don't shoot the messenger. So Jeremiah's preached it to the nations.

Now he's preaching it to Zedekiah himself, his own king. He goes to his own king, Zedekiah. He's still wearing the yoke.

He's still wearing the chains. And now he's giving Zedekiah the message. Verse 12,

I spoke words like all these to Zedekiah, king of Judah, saying bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him and his people and live.

And he asks a very good question. Why will you die, you and your people, by the sword, famine, and pestilence as the

Lord has spoken to that nation which will not serve the king of Babylon? God has said it. If you reject my chosen king, if you don't follow my king,

I'm going to come against you with sword, famine, and pestilence. So Jeremiah says, why will you let that happen,

Zedekiah? Why will you let that happen to you? Why will you let that happen to your people? Zedekiah, don't let that happen.

People in danger are the king and his whole nation. He says, you and your people, you are in danger. And he says, don't listen to the prophets.

He says, do not listen to the words of the prophets who speak to you saying, you will not serve the king of Babylon for they prophesy a lie to you.

Prophesy a lie to you. So these prophets that Jeremiah is pointing at,

I want you to see their surgical strike. They know what Zedekiah most desires.

Zedekiah most desires to be the genuine article. He knows he did not come to the throne legitimately.

He knows that he is basically a puppet king. He knows that his reign right now is depending upon the favor of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.

But you know what he wants more than anything else? He wants to be a self -ruling, autonomous king and Judah be free from the tyranny of Babylon.

He wants to be the genuine thing. And you know what the false prophets tell Zedekiah?

Tell him exactly what he wants to hear. The surgical strike.

They know exactly what his desire is, what his greatest longing is, and they hit him right there.

And you may imagine that Zedekiah rejoices. Yes!

Here are spiritual authorities in my realm telling me the good news.

I don't have to serve the king of Babylon. And you know, by the end of his reign, he tested that theory.

And it went very, very poorly. Like, watch your children get killed and then have your eyes put out bad.

But the prophets told him what he wanted to hear. That was their surgical strike.

But notice their collateral damage. Notice the collateral damage. Verse 15,

I have not sent them, declares the Lord, but they prophesy falsely in my name in order that I may drive you out and that you may perish.

You and the prophets who prophesy to you. And everything's in the plural. It's not just the king. It's the king and all his people.

So they have a surgical strike. They're aiming their message exactly to what they know that Zedekiah wants to hear.

But the collateral damage is that he and the prophets and all the people in between are going to be destroyed.

And if they're not exterminated, they're going to be exiled. And it's going to be horrible. Just read Lamentations.

If you don't have time for all five chapters, just read Lamentations 2. You'll lose your appetite.

That's how bad it was. So, the word of the king of nations is simply this.

Submit to God's chosen king. Don't listen to the prophets. They're going to destroy you. Secondly, a word to the priests in the city.

Verses 16 and 17. Jeremiah says, Then I spoke to the priests and to all his people, saying, Thus says the

Lord, Do not listen to the words of your prophets who prophesy to you, saying,

Behold, the vessels of the Lord's house will now shortly be brought again from Babylon, for they are prophesying a lie to you.

That's what Jeremiah does. He's at the palace. He's preaching to King Zedekiah.

He then finishes his sermon and he goes up the path just a little bit, up in altitude just a little bit, and he goes to the temple courts.

And he preaches there to the priests and the people who had come there to worship. And he tells them,

Don't listen to the false prophets. Because you know why? The false prophets are telling the priests exactly what they want to hear.

Back in 597 BC, just a year or two before this,

Babylon had come and had done this whole switch. Put Zedekiah in charge and they had raided the city.

They had taken many of the gold articles that Solomon himself had crafted for the temple and they had taken all sorts of holy artifacts with them out of Jerusalem and taken them to Babylon.

And you'll read in your text sometimes the word vessel. That word vessel in the Hebrew can mean anything from a cup to a very large piece of furniture.

How large? The bronze pillars that Solomon had cast for the front of the temple that reached up stories was called a vessel.

So any of the holy articles in the temple, these were called holy vessels and Nebuchadnezzar had taken many of the best with him back to Babylon.

And the false prophets are saying to the priests who have had their temple raided, The vessels are going to come back, guys.

It's going to be fine. Well, that's what they wanted to hear. That's what they wanted to hear.

And the prophets, the false prophets told them exactly what they wanted to hear. And in this sense, they were idle rumors.

There's my pun for the day. But these prophets are lying deceivers, destroyers.

Notice in verse 17, Jeremiah says,

Do not listen to them. Do not listen to these false prophets. Serve the king of Babylon and live. Why should this city become a ruin?

It did become a ruin. Do we see that the false prophets who were telling the priests and the people exactly what they wanted to hear, they were doing this in the name of preserving the city, of keeping the city safe and restoring the temple.

These are noble thoughts. These are noble goals. They want to see the city safe. They want to have the reign of the king solvent.

They want the vessels be brought back from the pagan land and put where they're supposed to be.

These are all good and noble and right things that they want. And they are all not true. And so the false prophets are telling the people what they want to hear in the name of preserving what they most desire, but in effect, by telling them the wrong thing and the false thing, they ensured the destruction of what they sought to preserve.

They ensured the destruction of what they sought to preserve.

Jeremiah is saying, Guys, the grid is going to go down. What then? There'll be no more king.

There'll be no more temple. There'll be no more economy. No army.

No city. No walls. Nothing but rubble. That is what's going to happen if you do not turn from your wicked ways, unless you repent from these false ideas.

Well, how does this matter to us? How does this matter to us?

We have to understand that Jeremiah was not the only good prophet. I mean, he was alive when

Ezekiel was alive and he was alive when Daniel was alive. So there were a few good prophets out there. But for the most part,

Jeremiah was on his own, trying to say what was true, trying to give the real message of God to the people.

And then everybody else who claimed some kind of spiritual authority, they were all saying the opposite.

So the volume argument was with the false prophets. Earlier in the book, it says that the prophets prophesied falsely and the priests ruled by their own authority and my people love to have it so, but what will you do in the end?

So the volume argument was there. And many times we live in our world by the volume argument.

Well, whoever is speaking the loudest about something, well, then that must be true. Look, they have 10 ,000 voices saying this and there's only 200 voices saying the opposite, so the 10 ,000 must be true.

Well, this can be a very faulty argument, don't you see? It's been proven a faulty way of judging truth throughout history.

Just because a majority of people are saying something, we're all quoting our mother and grandmother now, well, if everybody were going to jump off a cliff, would you do the same thing?

And some of you, you know who you are, said, yes, less being stiff -necked and stubborn.

The volume argument was against Jeremiah. The volume argument in general, at least at this stage in our history, is against the

Word of God. It's not always been that way throughout history, but it is right now for our culture.

The volume argument is in disagreement with the Scripture, but that doesn't mean the Scripture is no longer true or relevant.

And when it comes to what we need, we don't need faster access to the happy data cloud.

We don't need faster access to the happy data cloud. We need to grid down truth in a 5G world.

So here's some questions. First of all, what are we listening to? What are we listening to? Only what we want to hear, or are we listening to what we need to hear?

Are we only listening to what we want to hear, or what we need to hear? I've often thought about the people walking about in cities, going through the subway systems, and they have on their $250 earphones that connect them straight to the happy data cloud, and they're listening to whatever they want to listen to.

They get to pick. Nobody's telling them what they have to listen to. They listen to only what they want to listen to.

They don't have to mess with the noise pollution of the city. They don't have to listen to the screeching brakes. They don't have to listen to the profanity around them.

They don't have to listen to unwanted advertising. They're in their own little world. But what happens if someone tries to sound an alarm?

What if there's something they need to hear? Will they be able to hear it? And how disruptive is that anyway?

Those of us who still listen to the radio, every once in a while, for no good reason, they test the emergency broadcast system.

That's an annoying sound. And those of us who live in Oklahoma, at noon in the city,

Saturday, sirens go off, and all my dogs start howling. Sometimes it's hard to have a conversation when that happens.

We don't like to have to listen to things that we didn't intend to listen to, that we didn't want to listen to.

This is why we don't like people interrupting us when we're talking. I wasn't done talking. I wasn't done listening to myself.

And here you are talking, and I didn't want you to talk. Naturally, we like to listen to what we want to hear versus what we need to hear, but do we see that that doesn't work out well?

That doesn't work out well. The Bible is full of stuff that makes you uncomfortable, makes me uncomfortable.

That's good. That's right. We need to be listening to things that we need to hear, bringing us into conformity to God's truth.

What are we listening to? Only what you want to hear versus what you need to hear. How are you with people who love you and tell you the truth?

Are you okay with that? Or do you say, you're not supporting me, you're not really for me if you don't agree with everything

I think. But people who, my old pastor used to tell me this, those who love you the most tell you the most truth.

Those who love you the most tell you the most truth. And so what are we listening to?

We need to listen to what we need to hear, not just what we want to hear. Secondly, who are we talking to? We are talking to one another, we are talking to people we love, we are talking to friends and neighbors, talking to our relatives.

Who are we talking to? Jeremiah was talking to kings, he was talking to priests, he was talking to prophets, he was talking to all the people.

But do you know when you talk to somebody else, you're talking to someone who was made in the image of God? When you're talking to somebody else, you're talking to someone who was made in the image of God.

And no matter what their design is for their life or what your design is for their life, if you're talking to someone who's made in the image of God, they need to hear the word of God.

They need to hear the word of God. Man is not to live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So I know you have a lot of good experience, and I know you have a lot of interesting stories, and I know that you have some very heartfelt, emotional value to add to a conversation.

But if you love someone, what will you give them? What are you gonna give them?

Are you gonna give them your experiences? Are you gonna give them your opinions? Are you gonna give them your emotions?

What are you gonna give them? If you love them, if you love them and you know that they're made in the image of God, and that the only way they're going to truly live and thrive the way they're supposed to is through the word of God, then give them the word of God.

It makes a difference if we know who we're talking to. Who we're talking to.

And then finally, what are we saying? And this is very important. What are we saying?

Okay, let's think about those prophets for a moment, okay? The prophets were finding out what it was that their audience most desired, and then they tailored their message to say just that.

Now, on the whole, that's been proven a very profitable way to go.

And that's in sales, that's in politics, that's the way a lot of people operate.

Finding out what this person is all about, what their values are, what they like the most, and then finding some way to tell them that.

To tell them that. It was the irony of Benjamin Franklin's parental advice, find out what your children want to do and then tell them to do it.

It was irony. That'll make you a great parent, you know. No disagreements at all.

But remember that the prophets, in the name of preserving what they most valued, in the name of preserving it, they ensured its destruction.

Now, let's think about this in terms of who you're talking to. Think about the people you love.

Think about your relatives, think about your extended family, think about your neighbors, friends, fellow church members, people you love.

Now, you want to see good for them, don't you? You want to see them growing in their understanding of truth and wisdom.

You should desire their holiness, you should desire their good from God's point of view.

From the objective point of God, you want to see them doing well. You want good things for them, you want blessings for them.

Now, in the name of preserving them and helping them and uplifting them, if you tell them exactly what they want to hear, this will ensure their downfall.

This will ensure their stumbling, this will ensure their embracing of folly. So, if you love someone, you need to tell them not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.

And that is not determined by my personality or my experience or my emotional investment.

That is determined by the clear reading of the Word of God, because he made us, in his own image, to live according to his word.

So, there's an unwavering word to unwilling vassals, verses 12 through 17, and then finally, in verses 18 through 22, there's a testing word about treasured vessels.

Testing word about treasured vessels. To understand what Jeremiah is doing here in verses 18 through 22, you need to remember that he has made some claims which need some backing up.

He has just said, the majority of people, the majority of the prophets are wrong.

I'm telling you the truth. That's quite an audacious claim.

And you know how it is, if anybody says something that's a minority position and totally discounts the majority opinion, you have a very suspicious view of that person.

Right. That's, you know, we are very susceptible to the volume argument.

Okay. So, Jeremiah has just said, these prophets who are telling you what you want to hear, and you like them because they tell you what you want to hear, they're wrong, and they're trying, and they're going to lead you down the path of destruction.

Well, that's an audacious claim. So, he's going to back up, he's going to back it up with proof from the

Word of God about how when God says something, it comes to pass. And that's what he's doing in verses 18 to 22.

And these treasured vessels that the priests are thinking so much about, he's going to use that as a test case to see whether God is saying the truth or whether the false prophets are saying the truth.

This is the test case. So, let's look at verses 18 through 20.

Jeremiah says, but if they are prophets, and if they really are prophets, if they really are telling the truth, and if the

Word of the Lord is with them, and Jeremiah doesn't believe that it is, let them now entreat the

Lord of hosts that the vessels which are left in the house of the Lord, in the house of the King of Judah, and in Jerusalem, may not go to Babylon, because they're going to.

If they're real prophets, if they're real men of God, here's how they should be praying, not that the vessels in Babylon will come back in a short while, which is what they were predicting, but they should be praying repentance, they should be praying that the vessels that remain aren't going to be taken off to Babylon along with the rest, because that's how it's going to happen if the people do not repent.

Now, these false prophets are very angry with Jeremiah. Back in chapter 26, under the administration of the previous king, they tried to kill

Jeremiah for doing what? In verse 8 of chapter 26, all the people seized

Jeremiah, saying, you must die. Jeremiah finished speaking, although the

Lord commanded him to speak to all the people, the priests and the prophets, and all the people seized him, saying, you must die.

Why did they want to kill Jeremiah? Well, what did he do? Why have you prophesied in the name of the

Lord, saying, this house will be like Shiloh in this city, desolate without inhabitant? So the prophets are defenders of their city, they're defenders of their temple, and if anybody says anything bad about their city or bad about their temple, they get really upset, and in the case of Jeremiah, they wanted to kill him for preaching against the city and preaching against their temple.

Well, what happened? What happened? Just a few years after Jeremiah preached this message, and he almost got killed for it.

What happened was Nebuchadnezzar showed up, laid siege to the city, took away thousands of people, and raided the temple.

So guess who was right? God was right, and the false prophets were wrong.

Also, the false prophets have a, they have a sermon they like, a slogan they like to share, and that is,

Shalom, Shalom. Peace, peace. In chapters 6 and chapter 8, we can hear their message.

Chapter 6 and verse 14 is a good place to see the slogan of the false prophets.

What do they say? God complains, they have healed the brokenness of my people superficially, saying, peace, peace, but there is no peace.

So, the people of Judah have gaping wounds, spiritual wounds. Their nation is filled with idolatry, immorality, and injustice.

They're a mess, but the prophets go around putting band -aids on these deep, infected wounds, and the band -aids all say,

Shalom, Shalom, peace, peace, everything is going to be all right. Does that heal the brokenness?

Does that cure the disease? Actually, makes it worse, and that's their message,

Shalom, Shalom, and the word Shalom in the Hebrew doesn't just mean peace like we would say today, like tranquility, or lack of conflict, it means everything's in order, everything is right.

Well, is that true? Is it true that everything's in order and everything is right? No, it can't be, because right now you have

Uncle Zed on the throne, there's no legitimate claim to be the king, he's a puppet king, and you have a temple that is devoid of all its most holy and treasured artifacts.

So things aren't well, folks, you say, Shalom, Shalom, but the evidence is that it's not.

So they're not telling the truth, but God is. God is telling the truth, and you see this in verses 19 through 22 of our text.

For thus says the Lord of hosts concerning the pillars, concerning the sea, concerning the stands, and concerning the rest of the vessels that are left in the city.

So you can picture bronze pillars very wide around, stories tall, massive engravings all over the top, pomegranates, the sea, the brazen laver, there is this massive hundreds of gallons of water sea, a brazen sea right in the middle of the courtyard.

It was too big for Nebuchadnezzar to haul off last time. And then there's the stands, there's the heavier stands inside, the heavier furniture inside of the temple, and so the

Lord of hosts says, now think about those things that Nebuchadnezzar left behind. You know, you know all those that he left behind.

He didn't take them the first time, but he's gonna come back and carry them all off. They're all going away.

God says, this is what's going to happen. And it proves, and it did happen,

Jeremiah wants him to think a little bit about the vessels that were already taken. Do you know why? In 1

Kings, or 2 Kings, 2 Kings chapter 24 and verse 13, now if you want to understand the times in which

Jeremiah lived, just read 2 Kings 24, and these are the times in which he lived. And in 2

Kings 24 and verse 13, it says that the king of Babylon, after he had taken

Jehoiakim, who had surrendered courageously, Nebuchadnezzar carried out from there all the treasures of the house of the

Lord, and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold which

Solomon, king of Israel, had made in the temple of the Lord. And how does that verse end? Just as the

Lord had said. He said that was going to happen.

He said it in 2 Kings 20 verse 17. He said it in Isaiah 39 verse 6.

The word was given to Hezekiah, who had showed off all the glory and the gold of Jerusalem to the emissaries from Babylon.

Isaiah told him, because of your pride, because of your arrogance, the

Babylonians are going to come back and take all this stuff away. This is going to happen. And you know what?

It did. So when God says, this thing's going to happen, and I know you don't like to hear it, but this thing's going to happen, and it does come to pass, we see

God is true. What God says comes to pass. It proves that God tells the truth.

So Jeremiah says, what about these vessels that you're saying are going to come shortly back from the land of Babylon?

What about those vessels that were taken away that you think are going to come back and you're telling the priests exactly what you want to hear?

Let's think about those vessels for a little bit. The reason why they're in Babylon is because of judgment, and God said it would happen, and so it did.

So they're prophesying lies, but God tells the truth. And it proves the truth of what was going to come, that the rest of the vessels will be taken away.

And you can read about that in Kings 25. All the rest of the treasures of Jerusalem and the temple were all taken away.

Now there's a note of hope there at verse 22 at the end. He says, they will be carried to Babylon, and they will be there until the day that I visit them declares the

Lord, and I will bring them back and restore them to this place. But that was not shortly. The false prophets were saying the vessels that are there in Babylon will shortly come back.

No, they would not. It would be about 70 years before they came back, and that's not shortly according to us.

And God's talking to the humans, the human people, the mankind, saying it's not shortly, it's going to be a long time, and indeed it was.

And God brought it back, and you read about that in Ezra 1, 7 through 11. God is true.

The false prophets are proven false. We can see that in history. We can see that the Word of God. Now, we are given instructions, practical instructions, in the

Old Testament and the New Testament to figure out who's telling the truth. I mean, this shouldn't be a guessing game to see who tells the truth and who tells the lies, right?

In fact, the church is called the pillar and the ground of the truth, so we ought to know how to tell the truth from the lies.

And there are practical instructions in Deuteronomy 18 and in the New Testament in particular to tell who's telling the truth.

And it comes down to this. When someone says, such and such will happen, and it doesn't, they're a liar.

Does that make sense to you? Those are the actual instructions in Deuteronomy 18. If a prophet comes and prophesies in the name of God, in the name of some kind of grand authority, and they say, such and such will come to pass, and it doesn't, guess what?

They're a false prophet. And if they did that within the covenant life of Israel, they would be stoned to death.

So when someone says something is going to come to pass and happen, and it doesn't happen, they're a liar. Stop listening to them.

That's a very practical instruction, right? In the

New Testament, we're told to test the spirits. 1 John chapter 4, many spirits have gone out into the world, many notions, many ideas, many teachings, many doctrines, many things have gone out into the world.

Test them to see whether they're true, whether they match up to the gospel of Jesus Christ, what is clearly stated about who

Christ is and what he came to do. So we measure up against the facts of history and the facts of Scripture to see what someone is saying is true.

Now if someone says, such and such will come to pass, this is also Deuteronomy 18, they say, such and such will come to pass, and it does.

They got it right, and then they say, now that I have proven my authority as a spiritual guide, we're going to worship

Baal. You still kill them, you still stone them, God tells Israel, because they've just said something that is not in agreement with the

Word of God. So it's not really a mystery, it's not really supposed to be a guesswork to find out who says the truth and who doesn't say the truth, and we need to challenge the world's lies and say something along the lines of, look here, you keep getting it wrong.

It would do us all some good to stop listening to today's objections to Christianity, today's current fashionable objections to Christianity and the

Bible and so on. If we could just, you know, turn that off for a second and then go pick up some artifacts, they're called books, and you can open them up and there's like lists of things and there's information there about all the things that people said a hundred years ago about why the

Bible is not true, and every single one of them, chopping like flies.

Every single well -informed, highly educated, well -attested objection to the

Bible, to Christ, every single one of them proven false.

Because that's the thing about a lie, a lie will last you for a while but in the end truth prevails, and what is in the dark comes out to the light.

So I'll grant you the devil's inventive and I'll grant you that those who don't want to follow

God are creative and coming up with new reasons why the Bible can't be true and Jesus isn't the only way and so on and so forth, but every single objection that has ever come up against Christianity, against the

Bible, has always been proven false, even if it wasn't in that generation, and we have a well -attested history to that fact.

They all get proven false. So we need to challenge the world's lies and say, yeah well look here, you keep getting it wrong, you keep getting it wrong, you're running out of chalk and erasers, you keep getting it wrong, and we need to champion the word's truth, champion the word's truth.

The truth of the matter is this, everything that God ever said about his son

Jesus Christ, he has and will bring to pass.

Hundreds and hundreds of prophecies in the Old Testament fulfilled in Christ, in his life, and his death, and his resurrection from the dead, and we have some left to be fulfilled.

But everything that God says about his son, he wants us to look at very, very carefully and it's always proven true.

And why is it important for us to know that? Because we need to know that God is trustworthy and when he tells us this, when he says that he's all about his son, my beloved son with whom

I am well pleased, we need to know that there is only one person with whom God is well pleased and that's Jesus Christ. And we need to know that when he says

I send my son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved, we need to believe that there's a one

Savior for the world and his name is Jesus Christ. And we need to know that when God says that he sends his son and on the cross,

Christ became sin for us. He and him who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

We know we have salvation in Christ and Christ alone. How can we be sure that that's true? How can we be sure that that is the only way to be saved?

Because it's God who's speaking and he has proven himself time and time again. Let God be true and every man prove the liar.

God is true and what he says is trustworthy. So that's what, that's by what authority we speak.

You may remember Jesus Christ, when he went to visit the temple, he came into the temple and he saw a very polished network engaged.

There was livestock and doves and money changers and there was a system, a very well -oiled machine at work in the temple, making money for the chief priests and the

Sadducees. And Jesus crafted a whip and went to work, grid down, and they demanded to know, by what authority are you doing these things?

And the truth is he had all authority because he was the son of his father and it was his father's house and he had all authority to do those things.

And that's what authority by which we are to operate, the authority of Christ under his authority. That's how we know what's true and what's false.

Let's pray together. Father, I thank you for the time that you have given us in your word. I pray that it has challenged us to hold fast to the truth and to speak the truth.

Lord, help us to know it is the loving and right thing to do. Deliver us from the temptation to only listen to what is pleasing, to only say what is appeasing, but deliver us from that so we may live the life that you have given to us to live in Christ, a life according to your word.