"Make Some Noise" Part 2

Old Testament book of Jeremiah, and we're going to be in chapter 9 as we were

Last week and we're going to begin our reading in a moment With verse 9 so Jeremiah chapter 9 beginning our reading in verse 9

We are in a chapter. That is very noisy There's a lot of noise in Jeremiah chapter 9 there is

Wailing There is chaos There's a bunch of lying going on There is a call to stop one kind of boasting and to start up another kind there are noises that Should not be going on that are going on and noises that are missing

This chapter is a lot about noise But ultimately this chapter is facing up to the truth that God is a holy

God God is a God who psalm says Dignation His bow he makes his weapons of judgment and that we

Fact that it's a holy God and that we are a sinful people and deal with the God that we find revealed in the scriptures

Not the God that we are in the process of inventing Our society

There is a symphony of God's judgment that takes place in our text this morning and we need to take consideration of that but as we read

It would be best for us as we think about the holiness of God and the righteousness of God as we think about his revelation of himself to mercifully warn

We give all the praise to Christ beginning in verse 9 Shall I not punish them for these things declares the

Lord on a nation such as this shall I not avenge myself

For the mountains I will take up a wheel wailing and weeping for the pastures of the wilderness a dirge

Because they are laid waste so that no one passes through and the lowing of the cattle is not heard

But the birds of the sky and the beasts fled they are gone. I will make

Jerusalem a heap of ruins a haunt of Jackals and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation without inhabitant.

Who is the wise man? Who is the wise man that may understand this and who is he to whom the mouth of the

Lord has spoken that he may Declare it Why is the land ruined

Laid waste like a desert so that no one passes through Lord said because They have forsaken my law

Which I set before them and have not obeyed my voice nor walked according to it but have walked after the stubbornness of their heart and After the bales as their father taught them

Therefore thus says the Lord of Hosts the God of Israel behold, I will feed them this

Wormwood and give them poisoned water to drink. I will Scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their fathers have known.

I will send the sword after them until I have Annihilated them and then if you'll skip down to verses 25 and 26 behold

The days are coming Declares the Lord that I will punish all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised

Egypt and Judah Edom and the sons of Ammon Moab And all those inhabiting the desert who clipped the hair on their temples for all the nations are

Uncircumcised and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised of heart

Let's go to the Lord And ask for his help today As we consider the truth of his word

Heavenly Father so many so many times in a week and in a day we sit before a

Mound of food that you have given to us and we give you thanks We thank you God for the food that you have given to us

We ask you to bless it to the nourishment of our bodies We we ask that you bless the hands that prepared it

We we give you praise for giving us our daily bread what we need and ask that you would

Bless the outcome of our eating the food giving us giving ourselves into your hands time and time again

Father it is in the simple and And trusting way that I asked

That we would all come this morning Father that we look to you and we thank you for the food

You have set before us these these scriptures this word from your text this this living word this sustenance for us

Now we do not live By bread alone, but by every mouth that come every word that comes from your mouth these words from the scriptures

Father we need your help. You have prepared it. You have placed it before us. I Asked that you would help us to eat it to consume it to chew on it to meditate on it to think about it

I pray that she would bring it into our lives and that it would change us And she would make us evermore into the image of your son

Jesus Christ Recreating us renewing us making us

Into what is best for us Reflecting you and living for you

This is our great hope this is why we are here this morning We ask that you would fulfill your promises to us

That your word would not return void, but accomplish the purpose for which you sent it And we pray for these graces and we claim these promises all for the sake of Jesus Christ with whom you are well pleased

Amen the 4th of July is

Great as holidays go. I really like 4th of July day Flags are flying

Barbecues are fired up air smells good Everything looks nice everyone most day for everyone

Has some sort of time off or a day off or plans to celebrate so everyone seems to be in a fairly good mood unless you're shopping and Then comes

July 4th evening. I Don't mean to be a curmudgeon at my young age

But I find it hard to rejoice in mass civil disobedience which occurs in my neighborhood as people take their hard -earned money stuff it full of black powder and light it on fire and explode the neighborhood

Over our heads again and again Hard to sleep Hard to get any rest

Hard to be nice and sweet in the morning. Isn't that right, honey? Sorry about that What do

I do? How do I cope? Well as a father of five and some of them very young I have learned that Those big headphones that you used to shoot off your pistols and your rifles and use when you mow the lawn and and and saw

Wood in your garage. Those are great also for sleeping That When there are loud noises that you just can't bear to have going on and you want to get some sleep

You just put on your soundproof headphones and try to get some sleep Sure, it gives you a slight headache and a stiff neck, but at least you slept soundproof

Headphones because I don't want to hear the noise. I know it's a noble reason we should be celebrating the birth of our country and there's this whole story about the

Ford and the flag and the bombs and a Noble reason to celebrate

But I don't care about that when it's too noisy, so I put the headphones on I Think in similar fashion.

We all have the capacity to put headphones on Spiritually when we don't want to hear certain kinds of noise

When we come to certain themes in the Bible when we when we are confronted with certain truths from the scriptures we tend to reach for the headphones and Put them on So that we don't have to hear that noise.

We often mute the sounds of judgments as we read our

Bibles and we we forget we tend to forget that What our good

Heavenly Father puts on our plate to eat we should eat it all and it's all good for us As I was a young man,

I found very creative ways to hide some of the food that was put on my plate and I caught

Not my youngest son But by next to youngest son doing that one of those very creative things and hiding his carrots in a very creative way

So he didn't have to eat them, but they're good for him. They're good for him It was put on this plate because it's good for him

Even if he doesn't want to eat it in similar fashion we tend to not want to listen to nor consume nor think about nor meditate on certain parts of the

Bible because They bother us we don't like it But we must listen we must understand that we must respond to the theme of God's judgment in the scriptures

It's difficult to imagine why we should subject ourselves to these themes when there are so many other more pleasant things to consider in the

Bible Is it possible however that we have spent a great portion of our lives or to some degree a great percentage of whatever degree that we are spiritual that we have spent a disproportionate amount of our

Christian lives In only certain types of themes and certain portions of Scripture and maybe we need

The balance that God puts before us in his word It's a thought we need to consider

We must not fail to listen to the sounds of God's judgment. I know you want to put on the earphones and Block it out, but he has our good in mind.

He has a noble reason for telling us what he tells us about his judgment So we're going to think about God's judgment a symphony of God's judgment.

We began last week in verses 2 through 8 Considering the cacophony of man's lies and how there was so much chaos and static in our world today even in our own lives

Due to the rampant lying and deceit that goes on But now we turn our attention to an additional theme and really it's full of questions as whether or not we are going to escape

God's symphony of Judgment and as we read verse 9, let's read it again and we have two questions that side by side they basically ask the same thing and you may sense

That they are rhetorical and They are for some people

Verse 9 shall I not punish them for these things?

declares the Lord On a nation such as this Shall I not avenge?

myself things he's talking about are things like Lying to one another about yourselves and about others gaining advantage over them setting up traps of deceit and Slander living your life in a in a culture of deceit lying and trying to to to gain and over Going through your life looking for ways to betray your your your covenant faithfulness to your spouse or to your family or This is a treacherous society

It's a society that is built on deceit. It is a society that is full of violence and God has listed the

Listed the offenses and then he says this he asks this question on such a nation as this

Shall I not punish them for these things? Shall I not avenge myself? Shall I not avenge myself these questions if you if you read the scriptures closely and if you read them

Fluently and fully you understand that these two questions in Jeremiah 9 9 are rhetorical

God has already in the context set out the charges against the people of Judah and We know what kind of a

God God is in his holiness and in his goodness So when he asks shall

I not judge them? Shall not shall I not avenge myself the answer obviously Obviously Begged for from the context is yes.

Yes, you should judge. Yes, you should take revenge But we live in a culture today that would find these questions shocking

Jeremiah lived in a culture that would find these questions shocking The answer from folks today would be to the contrary many would say no

No a God who judges

What is that a? God who punishes people

That's not Christian a God who takes

Personal vengeance who avenges himself if he's really a God what could we ever do to him?

I mean what kind of a God gets upset about what puny little mortals do surely We could have no capacity to never really bother him

What a small idea of God How how petty?

This sounds like this sounds like the beat stick of some angry bitter preacher

That's the world in which we live We live in a world tepid religiosity stale

Spirituality churches are filled and pews are full of people who have never ever Met a person

That they thought God might judge They have never ever met a person.

They thought God might judge Even though the Bible tells us we live in a world filled with people who need salvation

In fact we live in a world today where people in churches have never ever thought that perhaps maybe they might have to face a

Wrathful vengeful God We live in a world where no matter what a person believes

No matter how a person lives When they die, they are always said to be in a better place

Because after all God would never ever ever send anyone to hell And then when we read vast portions of the

Bible we get challenged by someone they say hey Let's read your Bible through your never done it. Here's your first time at least

I mean before you die You should read the Bible through right? Here's a program you could read through it in three years

It wouldn't be as difficult just five minutes a day instead of 15 minutes a day Just five minutes a day read your

Bible and you'll be done with it in three years And that's when you read vast portions of the Bible. They make absolutely no sense

What is going on here what are those judgment and death and destruction and God's angry what is this

Makes little sense to us the God of the Bible Said alongside the

God in which we are helping to create in the world around us God Time and again in the scriptures proves the reality of his everlasting judgment through his many temporal earthly judgment

So the scriptures point time and again to things such as the universal flood remember

Noah Sodom and Gomorrah the exile of the people of Israel To Babylon Jesus even pointed to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 all these things as examples

Illustrations proofs That God is a God who is holy and he judges sin that we ought to take a look take great stock of the earthly temporal judgments of God and Receive them as a warning and as a message that God is a

God who judges and he will judge everlastingly But if we deny

God his holy divine right to judge then we grow sympathetic to the claims that we hear on TV and look at on the internet and hear from our enlightened friends that what went on in the

Old Testament was not judgment, but genocide and So throwing in our lot with the

God of this world Rather than amending the righteousness of the

Holy God we begin to accuse him of heinous crimes What a profane and blasphemous world in which we live

The question will God judge it's a rhetorical in Jeremiah 9 9 It's an actual consideration today and most and it's still rhetorical today.

It's just in the wrong way Will God judge sinners and they people think that's a rhetorical question

No, of course, he won't when in the Bible. It's a rhetorical question and it's yes, of course he will I I Bring this up because I want you to know

It's okay. If you find Jeremiah weird and overbearing You're not coming to the

Bible From an entirely biblical worldview We're always being inundated

With the spirit of the age and very often we find certain things in the Bible just undigestible

We don't want to hear it we're reaching for the headphones Oh put something else on block out the noise because The Bible says things that we don't like and reveals to us a

God That we're not always comfortable with Now the question after will

God judge and since the answer really is yes from the Bible Then the second question is this will we listen? Will we listen to the sounds?

Look at verse 10 for the mountains. I will take up a weeping and wailing and for the pastures of the wilderness a dirge

You ever sung a song a good dirge lately. We don't do that. Do we? For the mountains

I will take up a weeping and a wailing and for the pastures of the wilderness a dirge because they are laid waste

So that no one passes through and the lung of the cattle is not heard Well the birds of the sky and the beasts have fled they are gone

I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins a haunt of jackals. I will make the cities of Judah desolation

Jeremiah is the prophet of God is is is elevated to this position of seeing the destruction as already done

It's as if he's he's looking back in the past and seeing What has yet to come in the future and he looks at the fields and he looks at the mountains

He looks at the the large swaths of destruction in the Levant as the Babylonian armies have already

Torched Judah and we hear a sound

What do we hear? We hear Jeremiah weeping and wailing

This is not a comfortable sound he's

That the Hebrew says he is bitterly weeping he's sobbing in a way

He doesn't care if anyone hears It's not something you want to listen to bitterly weeping

Sobbing yeah, I've done that more this last year than in any other year some of you could probably say the same

I Found myself on the anniversary of my mother's death covered in dust insulation and sweat

Crawling through my attic running cable badly and backwards and having to fix it And I end up falling through rock onto a couple of beams.

I Could have spit cuss thrown something. I was so fed up But on that day without my mother

I just sobbed I'm a grown man. I just sobbed.

So what else am I gonna do? Felt like one of the worst days of my life

Jeremiah weeps and sobs because he sees very clearly in his vision one of the worst days in All of Israel's history and what else is he gonna do?

he just weeps and his sobbing transposes into a dirge a

Funeral song a sorrowful song and he sings of the end and he mourns for mountains and the pastors

He envisions the mountains stripped of the trees. He looks at the pastures They're burned black and there's the sounds that should be there aren't there

It's listening There's no more cattle in the fields. No more lowing of the cows in the morning dew

There's no more trees. So there's no more birds chittering in the trees. You can't you can't hear it He's listening for the animals that went crunching through the forest.

He can't hear Silence is deafening It's the sound of judgment

When all life is vacated the whole land laid waste and he he stops looking at the mountains in the fields and he looks at the city

Jerusalem and Jerusalem is just just a heap of Stones Just a pile of stones as dead as bones

Like corpses on a field of war Then finally Jeremiah, here's the sound

He hears the echoing cackle of the jackals the wild dogs the only thing left

Living in the open tombs of Jerusalem and they're there. They're just there to feed on The dead those are the sounds those are awful sounds.

Those are terrible sounds. Nobody wants to listen to that noise And so we reach for the headphones

We don't want to we don't want to hear it but these sounds must be heard why because they affirm that God indeed is a

God who judges and Jeremiah is preaching and he's preaching and he's preaching and he's trying to tell the people

What is coming? They need to be warned they need to know And then you don't understand that's the third question in the text will we understand?

Verse 12 says who is the wise man that may understand this and who is he whom the mouth of the

Lord has Spoken that he may declare it. Why is the land ruined laid waste like a desert so that no one passes through?

The Lord said because they have forsaken my law which I set before them and have not obeyed my voice nor walked according to it

But have walked after the stubbornness of their heart and after the bales as their fathers taught them

Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts the God of Israel behold I will feed them this people with wormwood and give them poisoned water to drink

I will scatter them among the nations Whom neither they nor their fathers have known and I will send the sword after them until I have annihilated them

Do do we really understand why God judges Jeremiah is asking that who is the wise man?

Anybody anybody left in the land who knows why why the land is going to be devastated why it'll become a wasteland

Is there anyone? Who can answer that question and he has? Justification for asking that question back in Jeremiah 8 8 and 9

We learned that the scribes the wisest of all the land who have in their possession the scriptures Ironically and profanely have used the scriptures to deny the scriptures through false interpretation

So the wisest of all the land are saying things like peace Peace and they heal the brokenness of God's people in a superficial way and they're saying no

It'll be all right. No, it's gonna be fine. God doesn't judge And so who's the wise man?

Who's left? Who's the man of understanding who will interpret why it is that the land is devastated?

Jeremiah understood because God has spoken to him. God had commissioned him to preach this sobering message which addresses every level of who we are as human beings in the image of God and Describes a symphony of God's judgment notice first of all the idolatrousness of the people in this this judgment

Will take away everything that the people have worshipped the people of worshipped at the temple itself

Declaring the temple of the Lord the temple of the Lord the temple of the Lord saying God will never destroy us

God will never judge us. We have the temple and they worship the temple. They worship stones They also worship the stars and they worship the fertility goddess and the fertility

God They worshipped all these things, but then God took away all their lands

He took away all their crops took away their vineyards took away their animals and everything they used to worship the false gods

They did not to the glory of God steward the creation responsibly profaning the image of God they subjected themselves to stones and stars and blocks of wood and God's judgment therefore is to destroy the idols that they worshipped

Secondly notice the brokenness of this people. Not only did they not steward the creation responsibly. They did not love each other rightly they have a cycle of brokenness in that the father taught the sons how to worship the and In worshipping the bales you betray your marriage vows

You deny your marriage vows to go commit sexual immorality in The worship of false gods you engage in deception and you lie to one another and There's a brokenness among the people a generational brokenness

They did not to the glory of God love each other rightly profaning the image of God They betrayed one another in constant deceit.

So God breaks the cycle in judgment God takes them away to lands it scatters them to lands that they and their fathers had never known in Canaan they knelt before Baal Asking for some cool sip of milk some sweet drop of honey, but in Babylon God puts them in the dust and Fills their gasping mouths with a bitter wormwood brew

Teaching them the horrid realities of sin and what happens

Maybe just maybe the pig slop Will jar them out of their stupor

So God's judgment is in some ways a rescue Divine intervention in other ways God's judgment is personal

Vengeance holy retribution against those who should have been his children, but had made themselves his enemies

Finally notice the lawlessness of the people Jeremiah speaks in this proleptic fashion as if he's already on the other side of the destruction

He says where's the wise man who can tell us why the land is completely ruined anybody have a clue

Answers, but the Lord replies in verse 13. He gives the answer and the truth is all the idolatrousness and all of the brokenness of the land was because of the

Lawlessness of the people that God had given them his law. He has spoken to them clearly. Here's his voice and they rejected it

They rejected his law. They rejected the scriptures. They rejected his voice now

You look in there in verse 16 Look in verse 16 now, what was it?

What was it that they followed it's not verse 16 verse 14

Go look at verse 14. They didn't follow God's voice. He didn't follow scriptures. Look in verse 14. What do they follow? What does it say the stubbornness of their own hearts, right

Rather than and that led them to the bales and it led them into all sorts of sin So they were given God's voice with a privileged people that God would send to them

Moses and all the prophets with the scriptures that they would hear the very voice of God in the written word of God and yet they

Decided to reject that and to follow the stubbornness of their own hearts. Do you know what that's like?

Can you identify that? Do you know what it's like to follow the stubbornness of your own heart?

It's when on reflection you realize my heart is like this My heart inclines this way

My heart is full of desires for this my heart

Leads this way. So I must follow my heart. I Must follow my heart, you know the theme of every

Disney movie. I have to follow my heart My heart is this way it leans this way

I must follow my heart That's the following of the stubbornness of one's own heart in contrast here's repentance

Here's repentance. This is what Jeremiah is preaching and calling for Repentance is doesn't begin with a heart.

It begins with God's voice in the scriptures and we discover in the scriptures. God is this way God inclines this way

God leads this way. Therefore. I must follow God You see the two are absolute polar contrast here in Jeremiah 9

You know the the the tragic thing and it's ironic, but the tragic thing about putting on the headphones is that if you don't want to listen to God's Word God's Word doesn't stop speaking and And and putting on the headphones because you don't like what

God's Word says doesn't mean that God's Word stops coming true When I put the headphones on on July 4th evening

The fireworks don't stop they keep on going off They keep on exploding And God's Word still comes true and God according to his

Now we go to verse 16, this is what it was in my head verse 16 I Will scatter them among the nations

Whom neither they nor their fathers have known I will send a sword after them till I have annihilated them now

Jeremiah is Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit pointing back to Leviticus He's pointing back to something that God had already said and I know

Leviticus gets you excited But hold your horses Leviticus 26 33

But hold your horses. Let's go back a little bit more In Leviticus 26 it begins very positively and God's saying all the blessings that he wants to pour out on them

Because he wants them to follow him and know his blessings and his goodness and then he comes to verse 14 He says but if you disobey if you do not obey me and carry out all these commandments if instead you reject my statutes and if your soul abhors my

Ordinances so as not to carry out all my commandments and to so break my covenant Insert long list of bad things that will happen to you

Pick it up in verse 18 if also after these things you do not obey me then I will punish you seven times more

For your sins insert a long list of worse stuff that happens move along to verse 23

And if by these things you are not turned to me, but act with hostility against me Then I will act with hostility against you and I even

I will strike you seven times for your sins long list of even worse stuff

You're the patience of God verse 27 yet if in spite of all of this you do not obey me

But act with hostility against me Then I will act with wrathful hostility against you and I will punish you seven times for your sins

Long list of the absolute worst stuff that could ever happen to you culminating in verse 33, which says you however,

I will scatter among the nations and Will draw out a sword after you as your land becomes desolate and your cities become waste and Jeremiah is

Saying the exact same thing in verse 16 of the chapter 9. He is saying you Have exhausted every ounce of the most long -suffering

God and You have now come to the final ultimate judgment, which is exile and destruction.

It's now coming Who is the wise man who can tell me why the land is desolate?

Why the people are all gone because God is a man is God is a God of his word You may be a people of exquisite lies, but God is a

God of impeccable truth, and he will keep his promises And what he says in his word he will do

Do we understand? Do when we read scriptures like this do we understand why

God judges? Isaiah 48 11 says for my own sake for my own sake

I will act For how can my name be profaned in my glory?

I will not give to another Do we know why God does anything that he does? Do we know why

God what God's motivation is? When we think about our Creator He made us he made you and I in his own image according to his own likeness

He made us to love him supremely love each other rightly steward the creation responsibly

We were made to so mediate God's goodness that we manifest his glory This is who we are created in the image of God and when we live for ourselves

When we betray one another When we commit our lives to idols

We betray our uniform we go back on the we go back on what God has made us to do

We betray our maker spit on the hand that fashioned us and end up calling the light

Darkness and so God is just when he judges final question will we escape?

Verses 25 and 26 conclude behold the days are coming declares the Lord that I will punish all who are circumcised and yet uncircumcised

Egypt and Judah and Edom and all the sons of Ammon and Moab and all those inhabiting the desert who clipped the hair on their temples

For all the nations are uncircumcised and All the house of Israel are uncircumcised of hearts

So what does God say? He says the circumcised and the uncircumcised the religious and the pagan alike are

Going to be judged why because the hearts are not circumcised. This is Old Testament language What he's saying is in their hearts.

They're not really set apart unto me as my people They don't have the set -apart sanctified living heart that loves me and follows after me and is

Part of my people. They're not really truly of me This is this is very important this is very important for us to see

That when we ask the questions will God judge? Yes, he will will we listen to the sounds that affirm this in Scripture we should

Will we understand why God judges because he is glorious and he is holy and he is good

And he made us and so he owns us and he has the right to call us to live in certain ways

The final question is will we escape and it's it's it's to it's to our benefit to read those two verses and to come to The conclusion that neither the religious nor the pagan will be will be saved

Will escape It is not those who have been brought up in a religious background with a

Christian heritage that have come to Church very often who have been even baptized and been a part of all things

Church They are no more safe than the pagan Who has never darkened the door of a church none of us have arrived today and gained merit in heaven

God is not impressed with you showing up today. He is only impressed with his son Jesus Christ He is only impressed with his son

Jesus Christ Who has lived and died for us and for our salvation a perfect righteous son

Who is the wise man who understands why the Son of God was so devastated upon the cross?

That he was forsaken of God That he was judged by God father's symphony of Judgment crashes into the

Sun who for us and for our salvation lays down his life and satisfies God's ultimate commitment to righteousness and faithfulness and holiness and grace and justice and goodness and love all in one cataclysmic wrath filled mercy filled

Dark watch in the middle of the day Do you believe that God judges sin?

Do you believe that God is a vengeful God? I hope that you do

What other reason was there for Jesus Christ? To live in the way that he lived and die in the way that he died on the cross for you and for your salvation

Do you believe that God you better believe that God is a God who judges? And you better believe that the only way to escape that is to turn to his son

Jesus Christ in whom we ought to boast As the fulfillment of God's commitment to love and kindness and to faithfulness to righteousness and justice

What are we gonna say to one another what are we gonna say to one another

Are we gonna continue to say to one another That we've never met a person whom we thought

I would judge Are we gonna continue to say to one another? That God won't judge people that God won't send people to hell

Are we gonna continue to to one another and reinforce? The current version of God in our current society

What are we gonna say to one another? I pray that we will speak to one another in compassionate

Jeremiah like tones Even mournful tones compassionate tones and Fear the

Lord and fear the Lord Jeremiah can't find a wiser understanding man in his day because there's no fear of the

Lord We must fear the Lord And turn to Christ Christ saves us from idolatry

Christ saves us from brokenness Christ saves us from lawlessness Christ saves us from wailing songs of sorrow

Christ leads us out from under the symphony of God's judgment

And he leads us into the harmony of true worship and that forever in the life of God Let's close in prayer in a hymn

Heavenly Father. I pray that you have done your work by your Holy Spirit for the sake of your son that you have

You have taken your word Your warnings your scriptures your law

The pictures that we have of Christ and you have worked it all into our hearts we pray father that our

Efforts today of listening and paying attention and and considering the text that has not gone to waste

That it has not been lost But that you would continue to to use it for our good for your glory