Jeremiah 23:5-6 Jeremiah Did You Know

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan.

Christmas Eve, the Darkness of Judah, and the Need for a Righteous King

And good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Felsick, I'm the lead pastor here and Merry Christmas Eve to all of you. It's a privilege to gather together. I'm glad that we're here together to grow in our faith.

That is the main reason we get together. We're gonna dig into his word. We're gonna get an opportunity to sing some songs together. And my hope is that by the power, really my hope and prayer every week as we move toward gathering together on Sundays is that the power of the spirit is felt here, that he reveals his glory, that he reveals his beauty, that he reveals his hope to us.

And his mighty works of salvation are made known to us this morning here on the day before, the day that is set aside every year to celebrate incarnation, the day to focus on our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who came to us in flesh to rescue us and redeem us.

I've chosen a shorter text this morning and I anticipate, I'm not making any promises, but I think we're gonna get out a little bit early and I just wanna let you know that that's kind of by plan and so don't think I ran out of material or anything like that.

We're just kind of taking a little bit shorter this morning. But I've chosen a text that's nestled in the middle of a kind of dark and harsh judgments on the people of God. I think that it's really good for us sometimes to see the setting of the glory of the sending forth of the Son of God set in the backdrop of the darkness of the world around us.

And we live in a kind of a dark day and age, right? How many of you would just kind of identify? Man, it just seems like there's a lot of hard things in the news, a lot of hard things locally, a lot of difficulties that we might face and maybe even kind of like some of us have this sense of an impending persecution that is to come or something like that.

But if you've ever noticed this, like a candle lit in this room would not do much because we've got all these LED lights already on and all of that. But how many of you know that if we were to darken all the windows and shut all the lights off then a candle does a lot.

It doesn't take much light to really illuminate a place, to really make a difference. And what we're gonna see here is like imagine that your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and then all of a sudden, bam, like that big truck on the country road that's coming at you and they've got those really nice blue halogen lights.

Do you know the truck that I'm talking about? And you go to flash them your lights because you're like, that is certainly their brights. And then they turn on their brights and you're like, I'm not gonna see for a week, right?

Like I'm gonna need to go see my optometrist because they just put their brights on. It's like that kind of light that's shining into the darkness, that kind of light that we're taking on and set in the midst of a text that is a bit dark.

We're gonna be in the Old Testament because it's often in the Old Testament that we see on the mouths of the prophets the need for God to send forth one who will fix the mess. Where the Old Testament contains the law that no one can fulfill on their own, a darkness of a type.

And the Old Testament contains the accounts of God's ongoing patience toward a very, very wicked and sinful people. The Old Testament also contains the prophecies of God sending forth the promised one who would remedy our fallen state.

The one who would heal us of the relational chasm, the relational divide that we've opened up between us and our creator through our sin. The setting for our text is coming judgment on the Southern portion of the nation of Israel known as Judah.

Their religious leaders called shepherds in Jeremiah have been neglecting his flock. They haven't been caring for the people. But the interesting thing is, it's not just only an indictment on God's leadership, but the people themselves are gladly following leaders into all kinds of pagan practices.

The leaders have scattered the people of God and in many instances, they have destroyed God's people through false prophecy and through false worship, even to the extent of a lot of pagan practices. Bad leadership is a theme in scripture and it's something that needs remedy.

It's something that God is working to fix because we have a lack of good leadership. That's not just an indictment on our culture,.

That's the way it is.

So while it's good to understand the context, what's most helpful here for our purposes is I'm gonna read this in just a moment, is to consider God's solution to the leadership problem of his people. He has a plan to bring forth restoration and it's gonna be through the establishment of his chosen leader.

He will send forth one to fix this. From Jeremiah's vantage point, he was predicting the first coming and the second coming of Jesus all rolled up into one, all of it wrapped up into a telescoping prophecy of hope and help that was to come.

He didn't see the full broad picture of there being one savior, two advents, one time that he would come as an infant, another time that he would come as a conquering king that we still look forward to.

But what do we celebrate? I want you to think about this. What do we celebrate when we celebrate Christmas? Now, have any of you experienced this Christmas is coming up on you super fast, like faster than most years?

Like I have, it's just like boom, oh, it's here tomorrow, what? And it happens to me, I think as I'm growing older, it just keeps coming, right? And it comes faster and faster every year. But when you think about the trip to Jerusalem of Mary and Joseph, when you think about the manger, the angels, the shepherds, the wise men, the flight to Egypt, I mean, I've done this, I've done this for like 50 times now, right?

And some of you more than that, some of you less than that. But I mean, how many times, how much can you like squeeze out of the angel encounter with the shepherds? How much can you squeeze out of this?

Like, what are we hoping to gain fresh and new every year? What does the birth of this baby mean? It means something that I am convinced is lost on many of us. Something that I don't think we have the structure, the framework in our culture to really understand.

Because I think I can speak for us corporately, and I can speak for each and every one of us, that we have absolutely zero emotional response to nobility or royalty. But even when I say those words, what do you think?

What do you think when I say royalty? Do you think about some tabloids about the British monarchy and about what Meghan Markle's doing and how Prince Harry has kind of like shunned the family? And what do you think of when you think of royalty?

Because I'm convinced that it's not austere enough. It's not robust enough to bear the weight of what it means that this baby was born royal to rule and reign over us. Are you getting what I'm saying in that?

I just don't think we think that way.

And it's not our fault. I mean, from birth to death in America, like we just don't have nobility. We don't have royalty. We put the emphasis on common people and we just don't have that framework. Some of us, maybe, maybe a few of us have peered into the British monarchy a little bit more in detail, reading the tabloids and following all the scandal and hearing about the birth of little baby royals.

Maybe some of you ladies here grew up as a little girl hoping to marry a prince. And then some of you maybe did, right? Hopefully you found your prince charming or whatever. But, you know, I mean, aside from that, what do we really think about royalty?

I think about it.

I want you to think about it. What does it mean to have the birth of my King, the birth of my Lord, my deliverer, my savior, the one who was born to shoulder the government of our wayward and feeble hearts, that one, that one, the one who was born to defeat the forces of sin and Satan and darkness and death and rise up from the grave victorious, that one.

See, we have zero innate sense of fealty. And some of you are gonna be on your phones in the next minute or two looking that up.

It's F-E-A-L-T-Y.

It's not a word we use. It's kind of like this fearful reverence, fearful awe of dedication and commitment to a ruler or a leader. We've never literally, never literally, like actually, bowed our knees and said to someone, my Lord and my King, send me wherever you will.

Ask and it will be done for you, for you are my King and I am your servant. We haven't said that. What does the birth of this one mean? Jeremiah gives us a glimpse from one who, from his vantage point, understood monarchy.

He understood the need for better rule because the people were languishing under extremely poor rule. He understood what it meant to need a better priesthood because the priests were all jacked up and completely messed up.

He understood what it meant to need better leadership. We might be able to relate to that a little bit better, at least in generic terms, we know what it means to need better leadership. But hear me carefully, church, the solution to our problem is not for one of us to rise up and take control.

The solution will never be an election where we finally get the right person. Give up on that being your hope. We're in an election year, we're coming into an election year, right? Give up on finding the right leader because how many of you know they're not coming for us?

The right leader is not gonna come from among us, he's gonna come from outside of us, amen? He's coming for us. The solution is for God to send forth the rightful, perfect, holy, righteous, just, and all wise King to lead us, to save us, to deliver us from ourselves.

So let's open our Bibles or your devices to Jeremiah chapter 23. The focus of our time is gonna be on verses five and six, but I'm gonna read the first, I'm gonna really read from verses one through six just to set the context and to clarify why I'm talking about shepherds and leaders and stuff like that.

So Jeremiah 23, starting in verse one, God's holy and precious word to us on this eve before we celebrate incarnation together as families. Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture, declares the Lord.

Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who care for my people, you have scattered my flock and have driven them away and you have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for your evil deeds,.

Declares the Lord.

Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of the countries where I have driven them and I will bring them back into their fold and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them and they shall fear no more nor be dismayed.

Neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord. Behold, the days are coming. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely and this is the name by which he will be called. The Lord is our righteousness. The Lord is our righteousness. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for a plan that you set in motion far, far, far in advance of this era we live in.

A plan that you had in the mouths of your prophets and through king after king after king that failed his people, you have made a plan to send forth the righteous king, the one who has righteousness on tap, the one who has righteousness in abundance to offer, to reconcile us in our brokenness, the Holy Father.

Lord, I ask that you would impress on our hearts anew in fresh ways the royalty, the nobility of this king born to us.

Help us to revere better,.

To pledge better, to honor better, to obey from hearts of love and gratitude for what he has sacrificed for us. Father, let praise and worship be the reality of our season leading into the rest of the year, leading into decades of worship and praise offered to you that will eventually culminate in eternal days of praise and glory and honor given to you.

May that even just be a start in some of our hearts here this morning as we have an opportunity to lift our voices in praise together, that our voices would mingle together in praise before your throne of acknowledging your glory and your majesty and your exalted nature that you are our divine Lord and king.

Father, please receive our worship and gladness as we lift our hearts in praise and gratitude for all that you have done for us.

Amen.

The Context of Jeremiah 23: Babylon, False Shepherds, and Divine Judgment

Thanks to David and the band for leading us. I'm grateful for them. And if you can reopen your Bibles to Jeremiah 23 verses five through six or your devices, we're gonna be just in that passage for a little short remainder of our time together.

I don't wanna repeat a ton from my introduction, but it's helpful for us to remember that these two short verses are set in the context of judgment being spoken against the people of Judah, God's chosen people.

In just a couple of years, the Babylonians are gonna roll into Jerusalem, set a siege around that city, a devastating time for the people of God. They're gonna end up breaching the walls, tearing them down, destroying the temple and carting the people of God off into exile.

So nice Christmas message for us here this morning. But then we see the light shining of this prophecy in the middle of that. Jeremiah is used by God to convey the reason that this is all happening to his people.

The leadership has led everyone away from God. The rulers over Judah and the priests have led into false teaching and false worship. And the people of God are giving themselves and their hearts away to idols, to things that are not God.

And they are worshiping in ways that God has not set for his people to worship. And they have devoured, the leaders have devoured the sheep for their own gain. There's a lot of wealth and a lot of benefit to religious authoritarianism.

And so that's what's going on in Israel at this time. So verses five through six serve as a candle shining in a very dark text into a very dark time. It's meant to be shocking and sudden and really short-lived in a book that's highlighting the devastation that is to come.

I mentioned it's not like a candle. It's like a spotlight after your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. It's bright in what it purports to communicate to us. Verse five begins with the word behold in part to grasp our attention.

God is trying to get our attention in this text. Behold is ancient for check this out.

Like that's what it means.

Set in the backdrop of judgment, God says through his prophet, check this out. An era of history is coming. And this keys us into behold the days are coming. It tells us that this is a future prophetic word.

Now many times the prophets speak directly into their immediate culture. They're addressing sin, they're addressing the devastation. But here he says I'm gonna tell you something about the future. And he wants to make sure that you know that this isn't just Jeremiah's thoughts.

He wasn't just kind of like thinking about it. He's like I bet God's gonna send a king someday. He says declares the Lord in verse five to be sure that we know that the words that he is saying are not just something he's made up, but these are the very words of God Almighty.

This is scripture, we should pay attention to it. We ought to check this out. And he wants to remind us all of this is coming from the voice of Almighty God. And here is what he is going to do in a future era says Jeremiah.

He will raise up a shoot from a stump. Now how many of you have ever seen that happen? Where you cut down a tree and then eventually something just grows up around it. A branch will come up out of what other prophets call in the text, it was mentioned in the kids program last week, the stump of Jesse.

And if you've grown, have you ever seen a branch grow out of a stump? You know what I'm talking about. When Linda and I first moved to the house that we live in now, we've got about an acre.

It's almost all wooded.

We have very little lawn to mow. But there's a constant battle with the woods wants to take over our lawn. So especially the raspberries, but there's other things too. When we moved into this little one acre lot, our driveway had no fewer than 20 mulberry trees lining it.

Now some of you are like mulberry trees,.

What's the deal with that?

They're scraggly.

How many of you know what I'm talking about? When I said mulberries, you're like, oh, there's a battle. Oh, there's a battle. There's a battle coming. So they're scraggly, they grow fast, they take over everything.

They will destroy maple trees. They will not let anything under their shade and they just constantly grow so fast. And not to mention the mess. If the birds get ahold of them, you can't leave your car parked in the driveway, right?

You can't do that.

So my first year on our property, I learned how to make a mulberry bush. You guys know how to make a mulberry bush? Chop down a mulberry tree. Chop down a mulberry tree, that's the way you make a mulberry bush.

You cut down the mulberry tree. If you don't poison the mulberry stump, you get a bazillion shoots coming off that stump in the spring and you will have, something that's like 10 foot wide in diameter going up into the sky.

And by the end of that summer, if you don't cut them all down again and poison that stump again, it's gonna be a mess and they go everywhere. That's the way you get a mulberry bush. So Jesse's line appeared to have failed like a stump of a tree that's cut down.

When you first cut it down, you're like, okay, done. It's gone and that's the image that we have when we hear other prophets talk about the stump of Jesse. It's like that tree, the royal lineage has been cut down.

His family tree had only ever produced bad kings who refused to worship God and refused to shepherd the flock well. You know, I think that if you lived in this era of Jeremiah you would be reasonable to ask the question, whatever happened to the promise that God gave to our great King David?

Did he not promise that a faithful king would come from the lineage that would be a righteous king who would reign eternally? Didn't God promise? And you would think, a stump of Jesse, this has failed.

As of the writings of Jeremiah, it looked like the line of the kings had indeed failed. And we will see Zedekiah is the king during this time and he's the last and final king before Babylon comes in and sweeps them away.

And trust in the line of the kings was reasonably at an all time low when we read this text. But here we get God saying, check this out, check this out. God will not fail to bring forth a righteous king from the descendant of David.

Here through the prophet Jeremiah, God is refreshing his promise to his people. A royal, noble line. He doesn't say, notice what is absent from this text. He doesn't say, a cute little baby will be born so a drummer can come and offer a really long, annoying song, pa rum pum pum pum, right?

He doesn't say, this is not what the prophecy is. Don't worry folks, I know that winters in Michigan get monotonous so we'll start a festive time in the middle of December. Every December, is that what he says?

You can get together with family and exchange presents. There'll be tinsel, there'll be bright lights and it'll ease the mood. Those of you with seasonal affective disorder, at least you got Christmas, right?

No, he says what? I'm sending a king. I'm sending a king. I'm gonna make good on my promise to David. I'm sending a king. Yes, we know he will come in humble circumstances but he will reign as we just sang, forevermore.

Yes, we know he will be a baby but he will be true nobility, true royalty. He will be a king in a way that a king demands loyalty. Let's skip for now, just for the sake of this text, let's skip what Mary knew and let's instead look with me at verse five to see what Jeremiah knew.

Jeremiah, did you know? Yes, he knew a lot. He knew about this king to be raised up from the line of King David. And here's what he knew, four things that he knew. It's gonna be the structure of our text.

The Coming King Will Reign, Rule Wisely, and Execute Justice

The first is that he will reign as king. God is sending a king. In the birth of that little child, God's chosen king came to us. I wanna point out something that's kind of nuanced and unique in this very son of God coming in flesh.

He didn't become king, God sent forth his king. He will not yet one day become king, he is currently king. Now we know that his kingdom will be fully realized on the day that he returns in glory to defeat all of the enemies of God and usher in a time of complete and utter eternal kingdom.

But he is king, he is king now.

He is Lord.

If you were there at that manger, it would be less reasonable to coo at him. Ooh, look at the cute baby. Would not be extremely appropriate to play your drum for him. Babies don't like drums. More appropriate to the point, to the understanding of who this child is would be to face plant in whatever was in that stable, let's just call it mud, in humble adoration.

That would be the right response to say, I owe you my life, my liege. Take the knee before him and say, I am yours. You are my ruler, you are my king. You are the one sent by God to rule over me. He came as the king, he didn't become a king.

And a day is coming when he will exercise that rule, that reign, that sovereignty, that kingdom with majesty and unimaginable, unimaginable glory. We sang Gloria this morning, and that our ability to sing doesn't scratch the surface of the glory, do his name, right?

He will rule in unimaginable glory. He will rule in sovereignty. He will rule in complete and utter majesty, that king. Now, we don't understand sovereignty. We don't understand royalty. We don't understand nobility as we ought.

He will reign as king for eternity. Second, he will deal wisely. He will deal wisely, this is the second point. Certainly, Jesus showed his wisdom in all that he taught while he was here on earth, and all that he modeled for his followers while he was here was wise, was good, was right.

Isaiah called him wonderful counselor, wise in all that he commands, wise in all that he teaches. But we have always lacked that, right? We have always lacked wise counselors, always. Now, some of you have a person that you go to, that you turn to, that maybe has some more years on you that can give you some advice or counsel.

But the best of presidents, the best of rulers, the best of therapists, the best of counselors, the best of educators, the best of consultants are limited by one primary thing, knowledge, knowledge. They lack comprehensive understanding.

Do you know what I'm talking about? It's a problem of leadership. It's a problem of living in a fallen planet. It's a problem with our broken and finite minds. We don't see all the circumstances at the same time.

It's one of the most painful things of leadership. Honestly, if you've ever led people, if you raise kids, there are times when your kids come to you and he says she did it and she says he did it.

And you don't know.

And you might still to this day not know. So maybe you have to ask them when they're adults and maybe they'll disclose what actually happened there. Maybe, you trust them, we don't have comprehensive understanding to be able to judge correctly, to be able to counsel correctly.

Jesus will one day rule his people with complete knowledge. He has no deficit of understanding. He needs no consultants. He needs no one to guide him. He never has to look it up on Google. He doesn't have to depend on Wikipedia, David.

He already knows what Gloria means. He needs no professors and he needs no life coach. He will deal wisely over his eternal kingdom and he will reign with perfection. Third, he will execute justice and righteousness.

I take those together, very, very related words in their root in Hebrew and actually in Greek. Justice and righteousness go together. Jesus has been sent and will be sent once again in the future to judge and to set things right.

As I said earlier, Jeremiah saw a telescoped prophecy. He saw one Messiah and it was not revealed to Jeremiah that Messiah would have two advents. So Jeremiah gets an image of the future that isn't complete and that's okay because God gives us what we need when we need it, amen?

So he doesn't give Jeremiah a full understanding of the baby born in the manger and all of the depth of detail and every nuance so that he could chart it out like many people want to do. Back in the 80s, every pastor worth their weight in salt was preaching on the end times and had their charts and their graphs and he didn't give that to Jeremiah.

Why do you think he gave it to you? I would just hold those future understandings lightly because Jeremiah here goes, God is sending forth one who is going to reign over his people, he will. And how many of you know that's true?

But he came first to redeem us from our sins. He will come a second time to rule and reign and defeat all of the enemies of God, amen? So Jeremiah didn't see it all.

We probably don't see it all,.

But we hold that with understanding that, how many of you know it's enough to set your heart on fire with joy that he is coming back? He is returning for his people, amen? Glory to God that he will come back.

But Jesus was sent the first and the second time, the first and will be sent the second time to bring forth judgment and righteousness. Even in his sinless life, his first go around, he demonstrated righteousness to us.

And yet more than this, he himself will be seen, is seen in scripture to be the basis of judgment. He is not merely the judge who judges the good and bad that you do, but we will be judged based on our relationship to his rule and reign, based on how we understand him.

Did we trust in him? Do we have loyalty to him? Do we have fealty to the king? Do we have belief that he is the one sent to redeem us? That is all the basis of the final judgment. The ultimate judgment over your life is what have you done with the king?

Do you trust him? Do you believe him? Is your life tied to him in a vital way where he's calling the shots and he's leading you? Do you recognize how much he's loved you and therefore are in a life of obedience to him from your heart, from a desire to please him, from a desire to honor him?

He will execute justice correctly when he returns the second time. To those who reject his authority and his salvation, there will be eternal separation from his rule. And that's a dark reality, it's a difficult reality, especially set in the context of his eternal reign, but some will say, I don't want you to rule over me.

I want no king but self. What will they get on that final day? Another way to say it is that those who don't want him to rule over them, those who don't want him to be their king, those who don't want his kingdom to come will not be forced to enter that kingdom.

They will not be forced to have him as their king. They will spend eternity outside of his righteous and wise and just rule. But for those who see his majesty and glory, for those who bow their knee in trust and loyalty to this redeemer king, those who believe that he has died to be the sacrifice for our sins, he will save us, rescue us, into an eternal kingdom of wisdom and justice and righteousness, and his people will be saved and will dwell securely, according to the start of verse six.

Saved and dwell securely are really intense words. They're so comprehensive in terms of the protection that's offered in the Hebrew language, saved and dwell securely, that it will require supernatural intervention to guarantee that, and it would be something that we would absolutely be able to behold with our eyes if God was enacting it now.

I believe this prophecy will not be fulfilled until the eternal kingdom of Jesus on the new earth after his second return. It will not be until that day that both Old Testament and New Testament people will be saved and will finally dwell securely.

This is not a promise for this life. How many of you already knew that? You've experienced some hard things. Is God's eternal salvation and security guaranteed to his people? Well, I can tell you this for sure.

Israel's not secure. Is Israel secure today? No, and neither are we. We know that we can be persecuted, even unto death. We are not saved in the sense of this Hebrew word, which has the nuance of removal from any and all harms.

Basically, this could be translated untouchable by harm if you interpret the word saved and dwell securely in verse six the way that they're used together. Untouchable by harm. That doesn't define us now, but it will define his future reign.

It will define his future kingdom. So we've covered these three aspects that Jeremiah declares about the coming king, but the fourth is unique in the Old Testament. Jeremiah supplies something here that other Old Testament prophets don't give us.

He understood, at least was given to him to understand and given him to declare something at the end of verse six that is astonishing and refreshing and kind of the gospel in the Old Testament. The branch of David that is to sprout up will reign as king.

He will dwell wisely with his people. He will execute justice and righteousness completely. But lastly, our fourth point in verse six, he will be the righteousness of his people. He will be our righteousness.

His title will be our righteousness. This is the name by which he will be called. The Lord is our righteousness. This is a pun on the current king, Zedekiah. So Zedekiah actually has the word righteous and Lord in it.

It means righteous is the Lord. And how many of you think that's just a really good name? That's a really good given. Like that statement is a given. God is righteous. Righteous is the Lord. That's the statement.

But when we see the title given to Jesus, to the coming king, it is the Lord is our righteousness. It personalizes it. It declares that he will impute to us his righteousness, that our trust for any righteousness must rest on this one who is to come.

What's happening here? Well, Jeremiah here is prophesying that a king is coming who will be called the Lord is our righteousness. And he's getting a little prophetic dig at the current king whose name just simply means righteous is the Lord.

God is sending a righteous, good, wise, noble, just king who will give righteousness to his people. And Zedekiah is not that guy. He's saying in his generation, that's not the guy. That another guy, Yazedek, not Zedekiah.

God's sending that righteous one. Here at the very end of the royal line of King David, before they are carted off into exile, we find the sparkle of hope. God isn't done. God is not done with his promises.

There will be a king. God promised to David and David will get his eternal king. God is not faithless. God is going to keep his promise. It's going to happen. God is gonna send forth the righteous king.

But here, Jeremiah says something that a student of scripture may find as strange. It said that he will be called by a title we never see him given in the New Testament. Jesus is never called, the Lord is our righteousness.

Nobody ever comes up to him and is like, the Lord is our righteousness, how you doing today? But here's what's awesome. Here's what's glorious. Here's what settled on me this week as I was studying this and I was preparing to get up here and talk to you about it.

It's just simply that I fulfilled this prophecy. And I'm guessing that many of you have as well. Whenever you, I contend that we fulfilled this prophecy many times over and over again in the church age, over and over again globally as the gospel is preached and shared from person to person.

What do we declare in the gospel? We declare the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who fulfilled all righteousness for us. And every time that we have declared the gospel of righteousness found in the son of Jesus Christ and our hope for him to impute, to credit to us his righteousness, we are declaring this.

We are fulfilling a prophecy written hundreds of years before Jesus was even born. We fulfill that. We declare it. We call him our righteousness.

He will be called.

The Lord is our righteousness now and forevermore in his eternal kingdom. I believe this will be a favorite title. How, ask yourself this, how in the presence of God for eternity, in what I believe is a physical new heavens and new earth, a place that we will dwell, not floating on clouds immaterially, but like places with tables and people to talk with and board games and sports and music and all kinds of things, all the endeavors that God has given us by which we worship him now will be there without sin.

I can't conceive of that. My mind can't wrap around what the glories are that God has for us. But how, how are we gonna be holy in his presence? How will we be righteous in that place, the righteous branch of David?