Sunday Morning, October 13, 2019 AM Part 1

I ask that you would help us to hear the truth of your word, and we ask for the gift that only you can give, the resounding amen in our hearts of your truth in the word. For, Father, we are dependent upon you by your Holy Spirit to have the text illuminated to us, to have our hearts inclined to the text, which infallibly, inerrantly, eternally reveals to us our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Father, I pray that you would give us the strength and the grace and the peace to worship you today. And we ask for all of these graces, looking only to Christ, only to Christ, the one with whom you are well-pleased.

Amen. Let's open our Bibles to Jeremiah chapter 32. Jeremiah 32, and we'll be reading verses 26 through 35 this morning. Jeremiah 32, verses 26 through 35. Jeremiah has been building himself up on his most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, waiting anxiously for God's promised salvation, and by doing this, he has kept himself in the love of God.

He has made an account of his own obedience and made an account of his suffering. This is what we've been looking at in verses 16 through 25. And Jeremiah, having to walk by faith rather than by sight, receives a word from the Lord.

As God reveals to Jeremiah some vital truths about God's own character and God's own ways. If you would please stand with me, I'm going to read Jeremiah 32, verses 26 through 35. Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh.

Is anything too difficult for me? Therefore, thus says the Lord, Behold, I am about to give this city into the hand of the Chaldeans, and into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and he will take it.

The Chaldeans, who are fighting against this city, will enter, and set this city on fire and burn it, with the houses where people have offered incense to Baal on their roofs, and poured out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.

Indeed, the sons of Israel and the sons of Judah have been doing only evil in my sight from their youth. For the sons of Israel have been only provoking me to anger by the work of their hands, declares the Lord.

Indeed, this city has been to me a provocation of my anger and my wrath from the day that they built it even to this day, so that it should be removed from before my face. Because of all the evil of the sons of Israel and the sons of Judah, which they have done to provoke me to anger, they, their kings, their leaders, their priests, their prophets, the men of Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, they have turned their back to me and not their face.

Though I taught them, teaching them again and again, they would not listen and receive instruction. But they put their detestable things in the house, which is called by my name, to defile it. They built the high places of Baal, that are in the valley of Bin Hanum, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I had not commanded them, nor had it entered my mind that they should do this abomination to cause Judah to sin.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. The title of this morning's sermon is Managed Angerment, which is triggering some of you who are grammar perfectionists. Managed Angerment. Some people may feel that the most difficult portions to read in the Bible, if you're reading through your Bible on a yearly basis, some feel that the most difficult portions to read through in the Bible are not, sometimes they think it's the genealogies, sometimes they feel like it would be the land allotments in Joshua, or perhaps the Levitical holiness codes that these are difficult to read through, but these are not actually hard.

They may be tedious, but they're not actually hard. A challenge comes when we read passages like this one, in which God repeatedly says some things that do not match up with the common modern day conception of God, that leaks into our own perspectives on God.

When we read in passages like this one, God repeatedly saying how he is provoked to anger, how he will act in anger and who he is angry with. These are passages that are difficult to read. And I think these are difficult because of our own perception of our own anger and the anger which so often impacts our lives.

I think because of how dirty we feel when we lose our tempers, how permanently bruised we feel after someone unleashes their anger at us. When anger flares up in our homes and in our workplaces, when anger flares up within the church, our tendencies are to retreat from it or try to stop it as fast as possible.

It's kind of like the reaction to blood. You either run away or you go put pressure on it. Just stop it. You got to stop the anger. And I think that approach comes from this primary principle of the fear of man.

And the truth is that we make many decisions every day of our lives based on this one supreme principle of the fear of man, which goes like this. Don't do anything that will make anyone angry. Supreme principle of the fear of man.

Don't do anything or say anything that will make anyone angry. And by anyone, we mean the people around us. We don't mind if we make someone angry who lives thousands of miles away, hence all the trolls on the Internet.

But we don't want to make anybody angry whom we're going to have to spend any kind of time around, have to listen to or see. Don't do anything that will make anyone angry. So we drive defensively. We keep our distances.

We slather our emails with soothing qualifications and placating emojis. We go the long way around people at work who are permanently angry and complaining. And we often, maybe some of us, use our anger as power to shape the world to our liking.

And we are warned repeatedly throughout the scriptures about anger. Proverbs 29, 22. Read this just a couple of weeks ago. An angry man stirs up strife, and a hot-tempered man abounds in transgression.

And because of these experiences and these habits and these understandings of our own anger and human anger, we often come to the wrong conclusion,.

The wrong moral principle,.

Only say and do that which will avoid anger. And if that is our moral principle, if that is our guiding light, if that is our principle ethic, we have derailed our moral values from the character and the ways of God.

Because God gets angry. And God gets angry at individuals. And He gets angry at people groups. And God acts in His anger. And He does not wait to do and to say things until His anger subsides, but in fact expends His anger through the things that He says and that He does.

Well, we so often get angry for sinful reasons. And in our anger we will so often sin against God and sin against one another. God is ever righteous in His anger. He gets angry for holy reasons. And then He acts righteously in that holy anger.

Christ got angry more than once. It wasn't just the temple. He got angry more than once. And He said and did righteous things in that godly anger. And I think many of us feel the temptation to simply glaze our eyes over and space out a bit when we read in the Bible how angry God gets.

And we just kind of coast in our reading until we find something that sounds like mercy. Oh, good, landed. Got past that hard part. You just kind of like hold your breath. When you're a kid and you go over the bridge, you just hold your breath the whole time.

You're driving over the bridge and then you let it out. We treat passages about God's anger like that. But we must understand, as those made in the image of God, why does God become furious? How do we understand what He does in His wrath?

How are we to reflect His character and reflect His ways to His glory and keeping in mind that we're never, ever told in the Scriptures anger equals sin. We're never told that. Now, we are to rightly question our anger.

The question that God gave to Jonah is a great question to ask ourselves. Do you have good reason to be angry? That's a good question to ask ourselves when we're angry. We need to question our anger. We are to sanctify our anger.

As Paul says, be angry and yet do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. Do not give the devil an opportunity. So, be angry and do not sin. So, sanctify your anger. Anger cannot be our normalized first response or second or third response.