"Make Some Noise" Part 3

I've been praying for guidance this morning, I've got a lot on the page and trying to figure out how

I'm going to fit it in our time together. So we may go over a little bit, but please don't leave.

Just looking for guidance from the Lord, I don't, I know that we have to exercise patience as we go through the text, we go through the word.

We don't have to rush, we don't always have to stretch, but sometimes, sometimes we have to stay a little longer, and we might today, depending on how the spirit leads.

We're going to be reading in verses 17 through 24 this morning of Jeremiah 9, again, coming back to this chapter where I just hear a lot of noise in this chapter, a lot of cacophony that men spread about through their lives, great scenes of wailing and sorrow, a call to boast and to make much of the

Lord. So as we read through verses 17 through 24, which

I consider the heart of the passage, let's read this and remember that Jesus Christ will draw every tear at his table, that he has defeated death and he will cast that enemy into the lake of fire.

And let's remember that Jesus Christ in all of his wisdom and power and strength boasts his father, his father and his father, just read this, says the

Lord boasts, considering all for the morning may come, sin for the day may come, and take up a way that our eyes may shed tears and our eyelids flow with water.

For a voice of wailing is heard from Zion, how we are ruined, we are put to great shame for we have left the land because they have cast us from our dwellings.

Now hear the word of the Lord, O ye women, and let your ears receive the word of the Lord. He waters wailing, and everyone her name is a dirge.

Death has come up through our windows, it has entered our palaces to cut off the children from the streets, the young men from the town squares.

Thus says the Lord, the corpses of men will fall like dung on the field and like the sheaf after the reaper, but no one will hunger them.

Thus says the Lord, let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not a rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows me.

I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth, for I delight in these things, declares the

Lord. Let me pray for us. Father, I thank you for another opportunity to come together with my brothers and sisters in Christ, come together with friends and guests, and to be able to hear your word.

We come asking that you would illumine the text of our hearts. You have inspired it, you have breathed it out, it is true, it is powerful, it is living, it is active, it is relevant, it is eternal.

Father, we ask that you would open up our hearts to meet this glorious word, to be opened and to be changed.

We ask these things, knowing that you will answer according to your will, according to your delight in your

Son, Jesus Christ. Amen. A comeback room meal had been made.

That much was clear. Here was my seminary professor, normally lucid, no nonsense, always on topic, and he was talking nonsense.

We were at the beginning of our semester and we noticed in the syllabus that we were required to buy a very expensive

Bible software program and we were wondering why. Throughout the semester we noticed that there were two dozen assignments in which we were to use this

Bible software and run a search program on a book of the Bible, print off the results of the search program and turn it in.

Pure busy work, no educative purpose whatsoever, and we were wondering why we had to buy this expensive Bible software program for which our professor gained a commission.

And wondering, is this really necessary? And so he began to sell his product.

In order to sell the product, he had to demonize print books, of which he had about 500 in his office.

How clumsy they were, how hard it was to use them and read something and the binding would want to close it and you wanted to have it open and he went through all this rigmarole and how hard it was to type and you had to look at your typing because you can't look at words over here and type over here, that's impossible.

And he went through all of this and I began to feel sorry for him having to demonize books, print books, to sell his digital books.

I didn't buy the program, I borrowed the program from a friend who found it too complicated to use and finish the semester without having to spend the money.

But it's inevitable that when you want to build something up, the temptation is you have to tear something down.

And it sounds ludicrous in a sales pitch. And it's petty among siblings.

And in theology, it's absolutely essential. Absolutely essential.

Why do we not boast enough of God? Why do we not boast enough of God?

Why are we not raving about Christ? Maybe we don't spend enough time, enough effort being negative about sin.

Calling sin what it is, acknowledging what it does. If there's one take home lesson from today, from this text, it is this.

We must mourn sin as much as we praise God. And these things go together. We must mourn sin as much as we praise

God. Let us not equivocate about sin and death if we want to elevate the name and the deeds of God.

And in this we're looking for a harmony of worship. A harmony of worship. In which the low notes and the high notes go together.

On occasion, I have been invited to sing in quartets and ensembles and choirs.

And it's usually, this occurs in sparsely populated areas where there are no other options. And desperate people make suspicious decisions.

And over and over, the accompanist has to bang out the low notes. So that I can try to hear it and try my best to sing it.

And it sounds very low. And they sound kind of, they sound doom filled.

And they just kind of rumble along. But when the bass notes are put together with tenor and soprano notes, it sounds wonderful.

There's a harmony. We need all parts to our worship.

We need to recognize that in worship, it's not just about high notes.

It's not just about low notes, but there's a harmony of them together. And some of the low notes that we need to sing are notes of grief.

Notes of lamentation. Notes dealing with the difficult. Dealing with the ugly.

Let's read verses 17 through 20 again. And let's consider that grief should be purposeful.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, consider and call for the mourning women that they may come. And send for the wailing women that they may come.

Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us. That our eyes may shed tears, that our eyelids would flow with water.

For a voice of wailing is heard from Zion. How we are ruined! We are put to great shame, for we have left the land.

Because they have cast down our dwellings. Now hear the word of the Lord, O you women.

And let your ear receive the word of his mouth. Teach your daughters wailing, and everyone her neighbor a dirge.

Have you ever seen a funeral like that? Maybe you haven't attended one, but have you ever seen a video of a funeral like that?

In Middle Eastern lands, soaked with the blood of terrorism and warfare, we find these funerals.

In African ghettos baked in oppression, we find these funerals.

On urban American streets, slick with injustice, we find these kinds of funerals.

Don't we? Why? These funerals aim to disturb, not to soothe.

Haunting wails, frenetic sobs, loud prayers all swirl together in a bitter, nauseous brew.

Hundreds of mourners cry out, each one of them crying as if this one was their very own child.

What's going on? This is not mending brokenness. This is hoisting the ragged flag of a tattered soul for all to see.

This is not a solemn procession. It is a protest parade. It is a cry for help, wanting someone to pay attention.

The questions are being asked. We prefer funerals that answer questions, that give us answers.

These are the kinds of funerals that only ask questions. The questions are like this. Who's going to intervene? Who's going to see that justice is done?

Now, when we look at our passage, I mean, it looks like this is like one of those exhibition funerals that we've glanced at, askance, with knitted eyebrows, and say,

I don't know about that. But it's not the same. There are some very significant differences here, and we need to see these differences, and they will instruct us, and they will help us on to Christ.

There are some differences here. First of all, this is a preemptive funeral.

It is a preemptive, in other words, preemptive memorial service, being attended by those for whom it is to be held.

Secondly, these are not the victims of oppression and injustice. They are the perpetrators of oppression and injustice.

Third, there are no unanswered questions at this funeral. God has already made it very clear why

Judah is about to be indiscriminately reaped by the scythe of death.

So, it's a preemptive funeral. The Lord of Hosts commands a lamenting horde to be brought together, a wailing for Judah.

Why? Because grief is needed. Judah needs to grieve.

Judah has not been grieving. Judah has not grieved generations of idolatry. Judah is not grieving her current reprobate status before the

Lord. Remember a couple of chapters back, God has said to Jeremiah, no more intercession.

Don't pray for them anymore. They're too far gone. They're not mourning. They're not grieving the coming judgment.

There's no grief at all. They're still listening to the false teachers. Peace, peace, everything's fine.

So, there needs to be some grief. And Judah is not being persuaded by the preaching of Jeremiah.

Jeremiah is preaching the very words of God in startling and powerful ways, but they're not listening and they're not weeping.

So, God says, well, if they're not going to weep at preaching, maybe they'll weep if I surround them with wailing women.

So, he calls for the wailing women, the women of grief in the ancient Near East. And even today in the

Near East, there is this custom. Women who are hired to come and give expression to the tragedy that has occurred.

They come and they mourn and they weep and they wail. It's human nature that when we're surrounded by people who are crying, that we ourselves tend to cry.

Is it not? Just like you get caught up with laughter, you can get caught up with weeping.

It's natural to who we are as human beings. And when

I saw Niko and Anna, my dead cousin

Lillian's children at their mother's funeral, standing by the open casket, looking at their dead mother, they were weeping, they were shaking with sobs and I wept.

I wept for them, I wept with them. It was sad. Judah should be grieving.

There is so much worth grieving in Judah's life. So much oppression, so much sin, so much brokenness.

They should be weeping, but they're not. So, God says, if they're not going to listen to my sermons, maybe I can surround them with weeping women and maybe, maybe we'll get some tears going in their eyes.

Maybe we can bring them to some level of understanding of what they have been doing, what is happening, and what is yet to come.

But because Judah is so callous, and because the judgment is so catastrophic, God says, call all of the wailing women, all of the weeping women, and they must now teach their daughters, and they must help them, and then they must teach their neighbors.

And we're all hands on deck. Every single person we could possibly get to start weeping and wailing, we've got to do it because Judah is not grieving and Judah needs to grieve.

Why are they not grieving? The funeral is for them. The funeral is for them.

Why are they not grieving? Because it's also a perpetrator's funeral. I've never been to the funeral of someone who died in the act of committing a crime.

They went to go commit a crime and they died because of it. I've never been to a funeral like that. I can't even begin to imagine the conflicting emotions involved with the people who are there.

But this is a very strange funeral because it's for Judah who's still alive. It's a preemptive funeral, but they're the ones, they're the criminals.

They're the ones who have been so sinful before God. Idolatry, oppression, murder, adultery.

Verse 19 says, For a voice of wailing is heard from Zion. How we are ruined, we are put to great shame, for we have left the land because they have cast down our dwellings.

So this is looking to the future that the small remnant of Judah that's still left alive, exiled in Babylon, will look back in great shame at what has occurred and they have nothing to go back to but a pile of ruins.

But they are guilty and receive their just sentence. And this again, it's a prophetic funeral.

If you look back at verses 15 and 16, you'll be reminded to the clear prophecy that Jeremiah gives concerning the deadly judgment that God will mete out.

And then verse 16 itself looks back to Leviticus 26 .33, a verse that happens in a chapter where God says very clearly, stage by stage, here's what's going to happen if you disobey me.

Here's what's going to happen if you decide to abandon my ways. If you do that, here's this judgment.

If you do more, here's a worse judgment. If you do more, here's a worse judgment. He lays it all out for them very clearly so that they would know what would happen.

This is prophesied of. And so there's no questions left unanswered.

Judah actually has no cause to protest. No cause whatsoever to protest. Syrian mothers holding the limp bodies of their children killed by chemical warfare, they have a reason to protest.

Orphans of the Sudanese genocide have a reason to protest. Families broken, dealing with four generations of poverty, abuse, oppression, perversion, illiteracy, violence.

They should be heard when they ask why, but not Judah. Judah knew.

Judah was told. Judah had a very clear word from God, many clear words from God. Prophet after prophet after prophet preaching the truth to them and they refused to listen.

But God is very purposeful, and again, calling for a great wailing to be lifted up for Judah. Maybe, just maybe, the people would begin to be convinced of the coming temporal judgment.

Maybe, just maybe, if they would believe in that, they would turn away from the eternal judgment looming over them.

Now, as I read this passage and I was thinking about what Jeremiah was saying, Jeremiah is, as we know, the weeping prophet.

He's the weeping prophet of a grieving God. Jeremiah is persecuted, he is opposed in all that he does in the service of the

Lord. And here he is, under the instructions of God, he is telling Judah, weep for yourselves.

He's saying, weep for yourselves, because Jerusalem is about to be destroyed. As I thought about that context,

I thought about a very clear echo of this passage in the New Testament, as our Savior goes to Golgotha.

He's on the way to the cross. In fact, he's been carrying his cross and has stumbled under it, so the beam has been given to another man.

But he gets back up, and following him was a large crowd of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting him.

And what does Jesus say? Jesus turns to them and says, Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for me, but weep for yourselves and your children.

For behold, the days are coming when they will say, Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, the breasts that never nursed.

Then they will begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and the hills, cover us. For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will they do when it's dry?

None of us here have ever suffered like Christ suffered. None of us have any relatives, any friends, any acquaintances that have ever suffered like Christ has suffered.

Stumbling towards Calvary, his suffering plain for all to see, he redirects the wailing women to mourn for themselves, for their children, for the future of Jerusalem and the end of the world.

Judgment is soon to fall on Jerusalem. A horrific judgment in AD 70 that Jesus prophesied of and said it would come.

Why? Because Jerusalem perpetrated the greatest crime ever committed on the face of the planet, murdering

God's Son in human flesh. And he says, weep for yourselves.

Judgment is coming. Weep for yourselves. The end of history is nigh.

Weep for yourselves. Repent. There was no time for these wailing women to get grief wrong.

It had to be purposeful. A couple of questions I want to ask as we look at these passages.

The first question I want to ask is, who will teach the hard hearts to weep for themselves? Who will teach the hard hearts to weep for themselves?

I don't really know how to do that very well. I don't really know how to do that very well.

It's difficult to bypass the self -centered victim culture embedded in our common cultural conscience.

To help people do more than feel sorry for themselves, but actually grieve the violence that sin wreaks in their lives.

To actually believe and care about coming judgment. An old Puritan said this, he said, until sin be bitter,

Christ will not be sweet. Put it in the positive.

Sin must be bitter if Christ would be sweet. Not so long ago,

I had an over the back fence discussion with Junior. We got to talking and it wasn't so long after we started that we connected on the point that his mother and my mother died of cancer.

As we talked about the destructiveness of cancer, it occurred to me that sin is very much the same way in our lives.

I made mention of this. After all, death is the consequence of sin. I began to share with Junior how destructive sin is in our lives.

What a danger it is. What disaster it brings. What doom is ahead of those who are ensnared in sin.

That's not all we talked about. We also talked about Christ. We talked about his salvation. We talked about him as true food.

The true bread and water of life. But it occurred to me that Junior needed to know how bad sin was in a world where we usually excuse our sins.

How are we going to teach hard hearts to weep? Well, ultimately, that's the work of the Holy Spirit to break hard hearts like Saul of Tarsus.

You talk about a heart of steel set against Christ.

But God turned that into a heart living and responsive to his truth so that he would weep for what he had done and turn to Christ.

Ultimately, it's God's power and God's work, which means that teaching hard hearts to weep for themselves begins with our prayer, begins with praying for hard hearts to weep, asking

God to intervene, asking God to use us as emissaries of the gospel, but I commend this to prayer for this is not an easy thing to do.

Second question I want to ask is how are we going to use our suffering for the gospel? How are we going to use our suffering for the gospel?

When the waving women drew attention to Christ's suffering, he did not turn and thank them for their attentiveness, did he?

He redirected their attention to their need to weep for their own sins, to repent and to turn away from destruction.

That's how he used his suffering to redirect their attention. How do we use our suffering? Let's be honest, you and I are selfish creatures.

We are prideful creatures, and that's clear in the way that we commonly use our suffering.

Suffering is very often our shield to hide our responsibility towards others. Suffering is very often our excuse to justify our reactive, unloving words and deeds.

Suffering is often our badge of honor, our trophy which demonstrates our superiority over others who we have gone through so much more than others, and that's the way we use our suffering and our sin.

But brothers and sisters in Christ, our sufferings are to be shared in the sufferings of Christ.

There is to be a fellowship in suffering with Christ, and that can only happen when we take up our crosses, die upon them and live for Christ, not carrying around our personal crosses, our personal suffering to draw attention to ourselves, but to carry around our suffering for the sake of Christ.

I'll never forget the family that came to my seminary chapel. The father spoke of his eight -year -old, his son in a long -term battle with leukemia.

They were from Alabama but had to fly to Memphis to go to St. Jude's. Every other week for a couple of years.

He shared about well -meaning folks coming up to him as the months progressed and said, why you?

They were an upstanding family, a good Christian family, a giving, generous family, pillars in their church.

Why you? Why would God let this happen to you? He said he finally came to the conclusion after prayer and meditating on the scriptures that they were suffering for others.

They were suffering for others. Just like when

Christ's suffering was publicly on display and he turned everyone's attention to the gospel, that when you follow

Christ, that's what you do with your suffering. My suffering is for others.

It could be all about me. And instinctively, that's what we do with our suffering.

But following Christ, it's about others. It's about directing their attention.

When they see us suffering and it's a public suffering, we say, but look at Christ. But think of Christ.

But recognize what sin does to our lives, directly or indirectly. Don't you see the need for Christ?

Our passage leads us to express the harmony of worship by first recognizing that grief should be purposeful. Secondly, death is a robber.

Let's look at verses 21 and 22. Death has come up through our windows.

It has entered our palaces to cut off the children from the streets, the young men from the town squares. Speak, thus says the

Lord. The corpses of men will fall like dung in the open field and like the sheaf after the reaper, but no one, no one, no one will gather them.

Death is a damnable thief. Death comes in through our windows, stealing our loved ones indiscriminately.

For Judah, such will be the unleashing of death and the coming judgment that Judah's royalty and commoners, men, women, and children will be cut down by a mad reaper who does not even gather up the sheaves of corpses left behind.

Jeremiah describes the end that is the most horrific end in his mind for his beloved people.

Death is a robber. The thieving fingerprints of death are all over my mother's face and body.

The last couple of times I visited her in Chinook, Kansas. I'll never forget being shocked at her sunken yellow visage and her swollen abdomen.

I kept my preacher's smile in place. I mean, that's what preachers do. They just keep their smile in place, but it was not easy to do.

I remember thinking, I was shocked all the way through. I thought, death, cancer is stealing my mother away from, right in front of me, and I can't do a thing about it.

It made me angry. In honest, I'm still angry because death is a damnable thief who sneaks in through our windows to take away from us those most precious to us.

Death is an indiscriminate reaper, cutting down my grandfather by a work accident at 72, my mother by cancer at 60, my cousin by a car wreck at 35, my nephew in the womb.

And all of you have lost loved ones. All of you. You know the pain of death's seemingly arbitrary blade.

Jeremiah's personifications of death here as a heartless thief and a grim reaper give expression to our own tortured experiences and limited viewpoint on death.

But priests and priestesses of God, filled with the

Holy Spirit, given the scriptures, what should we confess about this reaping thief named death?

The first thing we ought to confess is that God is not arbitrary, capricious, and heartless when he uses death for his purposes.

For God is in charge of how long we live. Psalm 139 verse 16 says, And in your book were written all the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not even yet one of them.

God appoints unto every human a day to die. And even though we don't know that day, that's not cruel of God to hide it.

How tortured would we be if we all knew what day it was? So death comes unexpectedly.

And we're never ready to die. We're never ready for our loved one to die. Death is a robber.

Death is a robber and under the authority of Jesus Christ who holds the keys to death in the grave.

Jesus Christ, the judge of all men, savior of his people is in charge of death.

So death may come in through the window, but Christ is the one who unlocks the shutter. And when death emerges from the window with the soul of one of his sheep,

Jesus receives his loved one into his bosom and all is well. Death is a thief, but Christ has robbed him for the sake of his people.

He has robbed him of his hopeless sting and his fear.

What do we then have to do with death? Shall we dress him in white robes and speak triumphantly of him? Never.

Death is an enemy. Death is not natural. Death is the spawn of sin.

And Jesus Christ will cast death into the lake of fire. Death should not be celebrated.

I don't think death should even be euphemized. Why? Because we ought to hate sin and all that it does to us in this world.

We ought to hate sin and call the bitterness of death what it is so that we would speak triumphantly of Christ and praise

Christ. If death is no big deal, then who

Jesus is and what he has done is no big deal. Finally, we need to think of praise, boasting as that which reveals our values.

Verse 23. Thus says the Lord, let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, let not a mighty man boast of his might, and let not a rich man boast of his riches.

I want you to see the Holy Spirit's logical connection between our helplessness before the thieving harvest of death and what we praise and what we boast.

You see the logical connection. You see the word thus. I checked. It's in every translation. Thus. Thus.

We don't put enough thus in our walk with Jesus Christ. We need to think more clearly and act more directly in relation to God's truth.

Here is God's truth. We are powerless to stop death from stealing our lives. We are unable to avoid death from stealing our lives.

Thus, let not those who think themselves enlightened, intelligent, and smarter than everybody else boast in their intellect and their wisdom because for all their cunning, for all their planning, for all our cunning and all our planning, we can't avoid death.

We're not smart enough or wise enough. Secondly, let not the strong man boast of his physical condition or his position of authority or his weight of influence for none of those can stay the reaper.

Additionally, the wealthiest of all men cannot buy a second more of life on this earth than what

God has ordained. You can spend all you have on hospitals and doctors and medicine and you may think you have sealed the window well, but death will come through when

Christ tells him to. Now here is one of the most practical applications of the certainty of death.

It changes what we praise. It changes what we praise. What we boast about changes our values.

What good is our cleverness or our power or our money when we're dead?

Let's put it in the way that Christ put it. Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever will lose his life for my sake and the gospels will save it.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

Or to put it all into three words, remember Lot's wife. What do we praise?

What are our values? But let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the

Lord who exercises loving kindness and justice and righteousness on earth, for I delight in these things.

The Hebrew word for boast is halel. You know, like hallelujah, which translated means praise the

Lord. Right? And what we have here in verses 23 and 24 is repentance.

Stop boasting in these things and start boasting in the Lord. Do you see that? Stop boasting. Or you put it another way.

You're moving from hallelujah to hallelujah. Stop boasting in what is in you and what you have and what you can do and boast in the

Lord and who he is. And here's where we make some noise. As we praise the Lord, what do we go on and on about?

What gets us riled up? So I challenge you, ask someone who will love you enough to tell you the truth and ask them, what do

I tend to go on and on about? What do I make the most noise about?

What do I praise? And that will indicate what you value.

So look here in the text what is of greatest value that we understand and know the

Lord. Understand and know the Lord. That doesn't mean we comprehend him, for he is incomprehensible.

Not that we think he's our biggest fan, but we should rejoice in what we know about God, revealed from scripture.

What we know about God from scripture should be the treasured diamond of our conscious thought that communing with him in faith -filled prayer is what informs our goings on and going on.

That knowing and understanding God, knowing and understanding the Lord is the abundance of our hearts and therefore that's what our mouths speak about.

This is who we should boast in. And so we should boast in Christ. As we look at Christ, we behold our

God who exercises loving kindness and justice and righteousness on earth.

He did so in his life, in his death, and in his resurrection. He has embodied and accomplished all that in which

God delights. God delights in loving kindness, which is different in every translation.

Mercy, kindness, steadfast love, covenant faithfulness. It is the attribute where there is love, faithful love, right, kind, loving treatment of others based upon who

God is and not on who we are. God delights in that. God delights in justice.

God delights in righteousness, in making all things new, in satisfying his justice.

Christ has satisfied God's justice. Christ, defeating his people's enemies and thus saving them from ruin.

And he has done this through Christ's glorious victory upon the cross and his resurrection. We don't need a flimsy sales pitch from a professor to believe that sin is bad and God is good.

But we need to be ardently, thoroughly, robustly convinced from the scriptures that this is so.

If we do not boast enough about God, we should ask why. Part of it,

I think, would be that we're not negative enough about sin. And I don't mean being hypercritical about rude people who annoy us.

I mean looking at yourself and being broken about the way that pride in your own heart fractures your relationships.

I mean like being really honest with yourself about what sin does to you and to the people around you and grieving it and hating it and asking for deliverance from it and cleansing and healing from it.

We would truly hate sin, so we would truly boast in Christ. May sin be bitter to us in every way, that Christ may be sweeter to us through every day.

Let's close in prayer. Father, I thank you for the time you've given us in your word. What an endless source of transformation in our lives.

There's never a time when you are not doing your transforming work through this text.

I pray that you would have your way in our lives, that we would not merely be hearers today, but that we would give great thought and reflection and that we would respond with true action in obedience to your word.