“A Morale Killer!” – FBC Morning Light (8/26/2024)

Well a good Monday morning to you. Hope you had a good weekend gathering with God's people, worshiping the Lord together, hearing from Him through His Word, and I hope you're continuing that in your day-to-day time of devotions, time in the Word, and today in our devotional readings we're in Ezekiel chapters 24 and 25 and Jeremiah 37 and 38, so we're still in those major prophets, gonna be in the major and minor prophets for a few weeks yet, and of course in these prophetic scriptures there's a lot that's said about judgment, and in today's text, I want to focus on Jeremiah 38, it's no different, but what I want us to see is how Jeremiah's contemporaries responded to his prophetic message.

Jeremiah's Prophetic Warning in Jerusalem

So chapter 38 begins with Jeremiah's proclamation in verse 2, thus says the Lord, here's what the Lord's gonna do, He who remains in this city of Jerusalem shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence, but he who goes over to the Chaldeans shall live.

His life shall be as a prize to him, and he shall live. Thus says the Lord, this city, Jerusalem, shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon's army, which shall take it. Now, that would be a hard thing to hear, if you were a citizen of Jerusalem, and loyal to your country, to hear a preacher get up and proclaim that, God's going to judge the city, He's going to give it over to the hand of the Babylonians, they're gonna destroy the city.

If you remain in the city, you're gonna suffer, but if you surrender and go to the Chaldeans, you'll survive. That'd be tough to hear. How would you like to hear that? Well, hard as it is to hear, it was a needful message, because it was the truth, and time was going to prove that to be the case, but here's what I want us to see.

The Officials Reject Jeremiah's Message as Morale-Killing

I want us to see the response of the officials to Jeremiah's message. That's what comes next in verses 4 and following. Therefore the princes said to the king, the princes heard this message, and they said to the king, please let this man be put to death.

Why? For he weakens the hands of men of war who remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, by speaking such words to them. For this man does not seek the welfare of the people, but their harm.

You see what they're doing. You see how they're responding to the accurate, truthful proclamation of God's Word. They're saying, get rid of the messenger, because his message is so discouraging, it's so undermining of morale.

And what's interesting to me is, here we are 2 ,500 years later, and the attitudes are the same. Now the actions are not yet parallel, at least not in our country. Zedekiah responded, the king, he responded to the princes who told him that.

He said, look, he's in your hand, I can't do anything against you. In other words, the king's saying, you can do with him as you will, because I'm powerless to do anything. And so what they did in verse 6, they took Jeremiah, they cast him into the dungeon of Melchiah, the king's son, which was in the court of the prison.

They let Jeremiah down with ropes, and in the dungeon there was no water but mire, and Jeremiah sank in the mire. So, no, they didn't kill him, they just threw him in the dungeon, made him sit in the mud and the muck at the bottom of this well.

And so the actions are following on the attitude, is that we're gonna get rid of this messenger, we don't want to hear what he has to say. All right, today, some of the attitudes are still the same toward any message that, you know, God might judge people.

Nobody wants to hear that. In fact, I was listening to a video the other night of a guy, he's got to be from England, I really don't know who he is, I didn't do any research to find out who he is, but he was speaking about what's going on in England right now, and even as I speak today, there's all kinds of chaos, there's rioting, there's upheaval in the streets of the major cities, you know, England is really struggling with all of this.

And this guy, he was speaking about some of this, but he didn't address it directly yet. He started off by saying, the Church of England has just decided that they want to change the terminology and no longer call the gathering of the people church.

They want to call it community. We're gonna gather in community, we're not going to gather in church. And they want to change that nomenclature because they want to appeal to more people, and try to encourage or entice more people to come to community.

And rather than having weekly worship services, the recommendation is, let's do nature walks and things like that. And so this guy responded to all that, and he said of course, this is a travesty, it is Jesus Christ who established the Church, you leaders of the Church of England don't have any right to do away with the terminology and call it community or anything else, and God wants to be worshipped in worship services in the gathered people of God that is called the Church, and not in some kind of mystical, esoteric nature walk.

That's not what God prescribed. And then he said this, why do you think we're having so much chaos in England today? And then he said, it's because God's judgment has fallen upon our land because of the leaders of the Church.

Well, his comments, of course, evoked all kinds of firestorm and criticism and, you know, hatred and animosity. It's the attitudes, the attitudes, and the attitudes, they're prevalent today. Just declare the possibility that even the chaos in our own country is due to God's judgment.

The climatic chaos, the political chaos, the division between peoples, and all the rest that's going on in our nation, just suggest that that's because, you know, God is judging a nation that has promoted the wide-scale murder of unborn children, the promotion of sexual deviancy, and the confusion of children, and on and on we can go with all the maladies of our land, alright?

Faithfulness in Proclaiming God's Word

So here's what I want to encourage us with. Jeremiah was faithful to proclaim God's truth, regardless of the personal hurt or animosity that he might feel as a result of that. And I want to encourage us who know Christ, who want to be faithful to him, just to be faithful, just to be faithful, and declaring God's Word, and holding forth the Word of Life, and holding forth the light that is Christ, regardless of how well it's received, and regardless of, you know, whether it raises the ire of the Christ-haters.

Let's be Jeremiah-faithful in our day as well, okay? Alright, let's pray. Father in Heaven, I pray that in this world of increasing chaos and struggle, that we would be faithful to your Word, and to our calling as your people, as followers of Jesus.

Help us, we pray, in Jesus' name, Amen. Alright, well listen, I hope your week gets off to a great start, have a good Monday, and may God bless you in it.