"Covenantal Justice: Guarding the Gates " August 19, 2018 AM

The Authority of God’s Word in Prayer and the Call to Open Jeremiah

Let's go to the Lord in prayer together. Father, what a joy it is to come together and know that You have spoken. That Your Word is not so far off that we have to ascend to heaven to grab hold of it, or descend down to the depths of the earth to bring it up.

Father, You have not said that man must come to You, but You have come to us. You have sent us Your only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and though no one has seen God at any time, this one, Your beloved Son, from Your very own bosom, He has revealed You.

Thank You that we don't have to live in confusion. Thank You that we don't have to remain enslaved to lies. But You have given us Your Son, You have revealed Yourself, and You have spoken an everlasting, true, faithful, sufficient, clear word in these scriptures.

And You have poured out Your Holy Spirit, that every single word that Your Holy Spirit inspired and had written down through these holy men of ancient times. This same Holy Spirit indwells us and illumines the words that You have spoken to our hearts.

What an amazing gift. What a joy it is to come together and know that we have a foundation of truth that we may build upon, and You would have us live evermore in the image of Your Son, Jesus Christ. I pray today that You would greatly exhort us and encourage us in our faith, that we would hold fast to Christ, and we would grow in our confidence in Your holy scriptures.

I also pray that You would help us as Your children to be about what You're about, to care about what You care about, to be passionate where You are passionate. And I pray for these graces, only to Christ, with whom You are well pleased.

Amen. I invite you to open your Bibles to Jeremiah chapter 22. Jeremiah chapter 22. You may notice in the bulletin that it's a different sermon title. That's because I'm just guessing weeks in advance what I'm going to title the sermon.

Um, but if it's any comfort to you, uh, this is my experience. I think I know what a passage in the Bible is about until I sit down and read it. You ever had that experience? That explains why the sermon titles will be different from time to time, is I think I know what it's going to be about until I actually read it.

So we have to read it, folks. Have to read it to find out what God is actually saying. And it's not so far off as we think about the words that King Lemuel's mother told him. What a very wise woman indeed.

I was talking with Ms. Wiley earlier. At the beginning of Proverbs, we, we learn about lady wisdom. And at the end of Proverbs, we find a very wise woman as she instructs a king on how to rule a kingdom.

What a very wise woman indeed. And we are going to be talking to this morning and in weeks to come about how kings are to rule and by extension, how people are to live in a society. What God cares about.

God desires justice. And he desires righteousness to be practiced and pursued by his people. And in our passage, we're going to see that that divine priority begins with the king and it is practiced in the gates.

We have a passage that really extends from the beginning of chapter 22 all the way through verse 8 of chapter 23. And the theme is the same throughout. And I believe the theme is best described by this term, covenantal justice.

Reading Jeremiah 22:1-9 and the Theme of Covenant Judgment

And we're only going to read verses 1 through 9 this morning, but I would ask you to please stand in reverence to Christ who is revealed here. Jeremiah 22 verses 1 through 9. This is the word of the Lord.

Thus says the Lord, go down to the house of the king of Judah and there speak this word and say, hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah, who sits on David's throne, you and your servants and your people who enter these gates.

Thus says the Lord, do justice and righteousness. And deliver the one who has been robbed from the power of his oppressor. And do not, also do not mistreat or do violence to the stranger, the orphan or the widow.

And do not shed innocent blood in this place. For if you men will indeed perform this thing, then kings will enter the gates of this house, sitting in David's place on his throne, riding in chariots and on horses, even the king himself and his servants and his people.

But if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself declares the Lord that this house will become a desolation. For thus says the Lord concerning the house of the king of Judah, you are like Gilead to me, like the summit of Lebanon.

Yet most assuredly, I will make you like a wilderness, like cities, which are not inhabited. For I will set apart destroyers against you, each with his weapons, and they will cut down your choice of cedars and throw them on the fire.

Many nations will pass by this city and they will say to one another, why has the Lord done this to this great city? Then they will answer because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, their God, and bowed down to other gods and serve them.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. You know, there's something about flashing lights. There's something about flashing lights that make us slow down to look. And it's those same flashing lights that keep us from really seeing.

Isn't that the case? You're driving, especially at night, especially when there's rain about, and you see the flashing blue and red lights and you slow down to look. The instinct is caution. I hope it's not flight, but the instinct is caution and you slow down.

And as long as you're on your best driving behavior, you take your eyes off the road and look around to see what's going on. And you can't really see very much because those same lights are flashing in your eyes and you can't really see all the details of what happened.

We're not really seeing the human pain and suffering. We don't really understand the true story. It's just a moment. We're caught up in the moment. We're just passing by, but we're not really understanding the full story.

Why Social Justice Is Hard to See Clearly

It's a lot of flashing lights today in our society. All the authorities have been called to the scene of social justice. What is social justice? The most basic definition that we could possibly get to, I think, is this.

Social justice describes the elements of a just society. What justice means and how we achieve it, that is where the controversy is. The definition and the solution, that's where all the debate is. There's a lot of flashing lights.

There is so much talk. There is so much controversy. There's so much argumentation and even yelling and even violence surrounding this particular topic. Getting at what it really means, I think, is most challenging.

I think for many people, social justice might as well be an enigma wrapped in confusion and deep-fried in hyperbole because there really is racism. There really is prejudice. There really is oppression, but you'd be hard-pressed to see it clearly when all these things are covered in a tsunami of cheap victimhood and conspiracy theory.

The needy individual is so often swallowed up by the politicized class. Any possibility of prejudice is purged by passionate pretensions of self-righteousness. Language wars are being waged, and the only ones getting hit by the shrapnel of these changing definitions are those who are in real need.

It's a whole lot of money, and there's a whole lot of power at stake for the first responders to this sociopolitical four-alarm fire. And my sense is, and maybe this is just my own personal experience, that most of the time we're just driving by and looking at the pulsing colors and hearing the wailing sirens.

Everyone has their badges on, and everyone has their uniforms on, and the arguments are fierce, and the accusations are sharp, but the reality remains that the needs are great, but I believe the prognoses are shallow.

And I think the disease is pandemic, but I also think the prescription's a placebo. My concern, I think genuinely the concern of every Christian, is that we would not chase the flashing lights of popularized rhetoric and pass by those to whom God would have us show compassion.

True Justice Reigns Through God’s Word

Our passage teaches us that true justice reigns in God's people through God's word. True justice reigns in God's people through God's word. I think it's most clarifying and most helpful for us to crawl up out of the echo chamber of our own nation and look around at what's going on globally.

In other words, if we can crawl up out of the echo chamber of our own nation and all the debates and all the controversy going on, and take a look at all the places where Jesus told his disciples to go, all the places that Christ owns, and all the places to which he sends his disciples to preach the gospel, what is going on?

Is there injustice in the world? What do you think? Is there oppression going on in the world? What do you think? Do you think that racism and prejudice and genocide go on today? What do you think? Or did we solve it all post-World War II?

No, I don't think so. We have enough food in the world to feed everybody one and a half times over. And 25 ,000 people starve daily. That is evidence of corruption and oppression. Gender side, 200 million females, 200 million little girls and women have been killed in this world in recent decades simply because they're women.

In India alone, 1 million human beings are killed every year just because they're female. Women and babies are objectified to the extent that each year between 40 and 50 million babies worldwide are killed before they're born because they're a nuisance.

Today, globally, an estimated 20 .9 million men, women, and children are enslaved for either forced labor or the sex trade. The world remembers the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis. The world remembers 11 .3 million Blacks sold into slavery through the Atlantic slave trade and the 17 million sold into slavery into the Middle East.

But it doesn't appear that we've gotten a handle on the problem. Does it? Some things we need to think about. Does God care about justice? Does he care about righteousness? Does he care about a society that would do right and be right?

I think he does. I've got to say that this particular topic may be unfamiliar to a lot of us and is only slightly less controversial than the five points of Calvinism and so I'm going to go slow. I think it's important to recognize that most of the time the debates that we hear on the news or that we're following, most of the time the debates are not being spoken from a biblical worldview.

For instance, they're not checking with what God has to say first before they make their statements and their analysis. And I think it's important for us not to read a passage like this in Jeremiah 22 where God is saying, do justice, and then talks about those who are oppressed by extortioners and talks about widows and orphans and the shedding of innocent blood.

That we not look at that passage and immediately take up all of the baggage of our American political debate and dump it on Jeremiah 22. But that we would listen carefully to what God has to say from this passage and the following passages that we would rightly understand what's going on around us.

It's not without significance that Paul describes the church as the pillar and ground of the truth. If anybody in today's world would like some clarity on all the confusion, they ought to come to a church where the scriptures are preached and where the scriptures are believed and interpreted through Christ.

And then we know what's going on. My belief and my conviction from the scriptures is that this is the inspired, the God-breathed words of God. That it is unfailingly true that every single word that was written was superintended by God himself to say exactly what it says.

And this Bible is clear and this is sufficient for all of our faith and all of our practice. And no matter what the hot topic of the day might be, we'll know what to think about it, what to do about it because we read the scriptures.

I hope you're with me on that. And if you're not quite there, then stick around and I believe you'll find a very effective answer to the injustice issue and to the confusion of our day when we look at the text.

Justice or Judgment on the House of David

In verses 1 through 9, if there's a good way to summarize God's message to the kings of Judah, the house of David, the royal house of Judah, if there's a good way to summarize it, it is this. There will either be justice in your gates or judgment on your house.

In essence, in verses 1 through 9, that's what God is saying to the royal house of Judah. God is saying there will either be justice in your gates or there will be judgment on your house. And this morning, we're going to look at this word of God to the kings.

So where we have to begin is the word of God. Judah's kings since Josiah, the four kings that came after Josiah have not been what you call stellar kings. They've all been compromising kings. They've all been idolatrous kings.

They've all worshipped demons. They've all offered sacrifices to false gods. And as we're going to see in verses 1 through 9, the fruit of injustice comes from the root of idolatry. When's the last time that you heard any debate about social justice in our nation calling attention to the fact that all the problems stem from a failure to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ?

That the problems of injustice in our world today is because of idolatry. When's the last time you heard that? That's God's perspective on the matter. And God has some things to say to these kings who are idolatrous and who are unjust.

They have been unconcerned with the plight of those who are bound to extortioners. These kings have been unconcerned with the vulnerability of the one called the alien, the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow.

We read that innocent blood has not been defended or avenged. And God has something to say. The blame for this unjust society is laid at the feet of Judah's kings. The buck stops there. And so the reform has to begin there as it did with Josiah.

But the problem is, who gets to tell a king what to do? Who gets to tell the king of Judah that he needs to change? What we have here is an issue of authority. There's no doubting that there's injustice.

The fact that we know that there's injustice in the world is as simple as confessing that there's sin in the world. Did man stop being depraved all of a sudden? Man's depravity continues. Thus, there's going to be injustice in this world.

That's not the question whether or not there's injustice. The question is, who's in authority to define it and then prescribe a solution for it? That's where all the debate is. Who gets to call it what it is and who gets to say how to fix it?

And in our passage, God takes that authority out of the hands of the ones in charge and says, listen up. God's going to define it for what it is and he's going to prescribe the solution for how to fix it.

The Weight and Shape of the King’s Word

Notice how focused God is on his words, his communication to the king, to his nobles, to his people. I would say that in this passage, I noticed a turning up of the volume. That God is turning up the volume.

When you can't hear your radio because there's so much noise about you, turn up your volume. If your kids can't hear your necessary cautionary word, up goes your volume. And in today's debate, there is so much confusion, so many people talking at all at once.

We need to turn up the volume of the scriptures. That's what God does in this passage. He turns up the volume of his word so that all of the rogue kings and rebellious priests and false prophets, that his word will be louder than theirs because this word has to be heard.

I'm going to read through portions of verses one through six. And I just want to, you can look for yourself in your text, look at how many times there's an emphasis on divine communication. Verse one, the beginning and the end.

Thus says the Lord, speak this word. Verse two, and say, hear the word of the Lord. Beginning of verse three, thus says the Lord. Beginning of verse four, for if you men will indeed perform this thing, but in the Hebrew, it's the word for word, the var.

If you will perform this word. Verse five, but if you will not obey these words, I swear by myself, declares the Lord. Beginning of verse six, for thus says the Lord. Twelve times in six verses is this emphasis on divine communication.

And usually in the oracles of Jeremiah, there's a bit of a ramping up of thus says the Lord, hear my word. But not like this. This is a lot, even for Jeremiah. God is turning up the volume because he wants to be heard.

In other words, God in this passage, he is raising his voice. What do you think about that? Is it okay for a father to raise his voice? Why would you raise your voice? You would raise your voice to protect a child in danger.

You'll call them to come to you for safety. You'll tell them to stop doing something that is dangerous. Why is God raising his voice? Injustice and unrighteousness prevail in the gates. The alien, the orphan, the widow and the innocent are all being mistreated.

They're all being done wrong. Nothing is changing. And God says enough. Why? Because God cares what happens to these people. Challenge for us is going to be, do we care about what God cares about? Are we concerned in the way that God is concerned about these kinds of folks?

You know, I've noticed something that it puts a burden on me as a father that in general, especially young children, children care about what their father cares about, are interested in the things that he's interested in.

It can have a shaping impact on them for all the years to come. Their interests, their hobbies, their way of looking at the world. Are we as God's children interested in what our heavenly father is interested in?

Are we concerned about the things he's concerned about? We will be if there's a healthy relationship there, right? That if we love him and we know his love for us, if there is a good relationship with our heavenly father, we are going to be concerned about the things he's concerned about.

And in the way that he is concerned, if we know, if we know that things are not right in the world today, if we know that things are not right in our nation, if we know that there are deeply rooted problems, if we're convinced that all the punditry and pageantry of talking heads has never fixed anything, should we not turn up the volume of God's word?

You and I, let's be honest, you and I can stand to turn down the volume on all these sages of the ages to get a word from the king of kings, right? We can stand to turn down the volume on the talking heads that have never fixed anything and turn up the volume of the scriptures in our lives.

We need the word of God and we need to listen generously to the scriptures, generously. We don't need memes of scripture. We need reams of scripture to understand this world and how to respond. I think it's important for us to establish that value right at the beginning.

Because when God looks at the oppression going on in Judah, he doesn't look at it and call it a broken society. He looks at it and he calls it a broken covenant, which means that the justice that is needed is not social justice, it's covenantal justice.

We're going to explore more about what that means as we work through the passage. But that's the volume. God turns up the volume and says, hey, pay attention. And God gets to say, because of who God is.

The King of the Universe Speaks to the King of Judah

This is bringing us to the weight of the king's word. Look with me again in verses one through three. Thus says the Lord, go down to the house of the king of Judah and there speak this word and say, hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah, who sits on David's throne.

You and your servants and your people who enter these gates. Thus says the Lord, do justice and righteousness. There's weight to his words. He says, go down to the king of Judah. There's only one place in Jerusalem from where you can go down to the king's house.

The only place higher than the king's house in Jerusalem is God's house. It's the temple. This is a word coming from the higher ups down to the lower downs. It's only 25 feet in elevation. About 100 yards away that Jeremiah has to travel.

And so the significance is not so much topological as it is theological. But the king of the universe has something to say to the king of Judah. That's the significance. Going from God's throne, the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant to David's throne there in the palace that Solomon built.

There is an authoritative word that the king of Judah needs to hear. The weight of it. And we need to hear the weighty message of God on this matter. There are many people who fancy themselves a great authority in matters of social justice and how to cure what ails us because of their experience, because of their knowledge.

But there's no word that is so weighty and so authoritative as God's word. And what God thinks about the situation, the God who made us. Solomon built the palace and the temple in a very connected way.

It's very close together, 100 yards apart. But when you read in 1 Kings at the very first part of the book, especially in 1 Kings 7, it's interesting how many things are the same between the palace and the temple.

We've got the same windows, got the same decorations, a lot of the same features between the temple and Solomon's palace. The temple is about half the size of the palace. But the temple is also overlaid in gold.

And the palace is never said to have any gold. What's Solomon saying? The temple is higher than the palace and they are closely associated. God's house is half the size and twice the weight as Solomon's house.

And this throne gets to tell that throne what to do. And this throne can only prosper and only succeed if the king on that throne listens to the God on this throne. And that's the theological significance of the topography and the architecture that was built into the life of Israel.

We hear this a lot throughout the passages in the Bible. God knew that Israel would look around one day and say, we want a king like everybody else. And so he gave instructions upon that occasion. And he gave instructions in Deuteronomy 17.

And he said that the king was not to multiply for himself a few things. He was not to be a foreigner, but he was not to multiply horses or wives or silver or gold for himself. Because all of these were the trappings of self-sufficiency, moral compromise, and thus idolatry.

Rather than multiply for himself all of these things, the elements of power and the elements of wealth, the king was to increase in his understanding of God's word. In Deuteronomy 17 verses 18 through 20, it says that the king was to write for himself a personal copy of God's law.

The Pentateuch, the Torah, the five books, first five books of the Bible. He was to write for himself a personal copy so that he would be sure to know what God's word says, that he would know how to rule and be just.

And so very clearly we see that it is not power and it is not wealth, but it is the word of God that brings about justice and righteousness in a society. When's the last time you heard that in a debate about social justice?

No, it's all about who has the power and all about who has the wealth, but who's talking about who has the word? It's the scriptures, brothers and sisters. It's God's work in our heart through his word that will bring about righteousness and justice for our community and for our society.

There was great consequences that awaited the king and his people should they not follow God's word. These are listed in Deuteronomy. They're listed in first Samuel 12. They're listed in many places, but we see that the extortion of the oppressed and the mistreatment of the orphan and the widows, the violence done and shedding innocent blood, all of this injustice was being done in the gates.

And God says, if you read verses three and nine in our passage, this is breaking the covenant. This is breaking the covenant. This is not going against your fellow neighbor. This isn't a bad way to do your society.

No, no, no. This is breaking covenant with God. This is forsaking God's word. The people did not care for God's word. It was weighty. It was the word of the king of the universe to the king of Judah and to his people.

People didn't care for that weighty word. People say today, heavy, man, that's heavy. You know, and for folks today, a little heaviness is too heavy, but the king of the universe, his words are heavy and they speak weighty truth into our world of toxic fluff.

The Word of God Shapes a Covenant People into God’s Image

Let's think about the shape of the word of the king as well. You know, the volume, God's turning up the volume. Hey, there's injustice in the world. Turn up the volume on the word. Everyone wants to define it in different ways and offer different solutions.

No, no, no. Listen to the guy who knows. Listen to the God who knows. Listen to his word, the weightiness of his word. And now the shape the word takes. The word is absolutely essential for the keeping of the covenant.

For one thing is the record of the covenant. Israel couldn't keep covenant if they didn't listen to the word of God and follow it. But it's more than that because the word is more than a standard. It shapes us.

The living and powerful word of God shapes us by the power of the Holy Spirit because of the grace of Christ. The word shapes us into his image. That's the whole idea of the covenant anyway, to so shape his people into his image, that they would advance his kingdom to his glory.

In other words, we need the word of God. We need to turn the volume up on it. We need to trust in its authority so that God will have his way in us. He will shape us into his own image through the word of God.

And that is the way that we do justice and we do righteousness because we are becoming that. We are being renewed in the image of God. And who is God? Deuteronomy 32 verses 3 and 4. For I proclaim the name of the Lord, ascribe greatness to our God.

The Rock, his work is perfect for all his ways are just. A God of faithfulness and without injustice. Righteous and upright is he. And this is the God into whose image we are being renewed by the grace of Christ and the work of the word in our lives.

So we have to have the word. If we're going to be renewed into the just character of God that we would do justice. The practical outworking of that is that Israel was called to treat the poor and the widows and the orphans and the aliens with justice and righteousness.

And Deuteronomy 24 verses 10 through 22. I encourage you to read that for yourself. Deuteronomy 24 verses 10 through 22 lists many instructions regarding abuses and guarding against further abuses and repeats God's reasoning twice for why we are to do justice and righteousness and live in this way to the alien and the orphan and the widow and the poor.

Why would we ever do that? Judah may ask. Israel may ask. God gives his reason. Deuteronomy 24 verse 18. He says, but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there.

Therefore, I am commanding you to do this thing. Do you hear that the base motivation for why we would do justice and righteousness and care about these matters? Why we would eagerly pursue them is because of the grace of God.

That God would deliver us from the tyranny and oppression of Satan. That we were dead in trespasses and sins to do whatever the enemy wanted us to do. And we had no power to deliver ourselves or any desire to do so.

And we were rotten sinners before the view of a holy God and could never do anything for him whatsoever. And he rescues us in his mercy and in his grace. We had nothing to offer. We were not the deserving poor.

God saves us. So everything changes about the way we treat others. Not that by our humanity that we are going to erase the inhumanity that we see around us. It's not our humanity that will ever fix it.

You can pour bucket loads of humanity into a drop of inhumanity and never cure it. It takes God coming down in human flesh to birth us again. To give us the true human life that he always intended for us.

It takes Christ. It takes the gospel. And so we have a few things that we need to think about. True justice reigns in God's people through God's word. Which means that if we're going to take this seriously and the word says and God says to the king of Judah.

Here's what God desires of his people. Do justice and do righteousness. We take that seriously. That means that we have to begin with God's word. We will do justice and we will do righteousness when God's word is proclaimed.

When God's word is proclaimed. You see Jeremiah being stirred up by God. Stirred up by the Holy Spirit to preach the word of God. Thus says the Lord. That's the beginning of justice and righteousness being done.

This is important for us to remember. Today the emphasis is quite the opposite. The emphasis could be stated well in the words of Rick Warren. In an international conference where he spoke to Buddhist, Hindus, Muslims and many, many atheists.

And said let's have no more interfaith dialogues. We need interfaith projects. It doesn't matter what you believe. It matters what you do. And that is the mantra of today. We don't need preaching. We need projects.

We don't need doctrine. We need deeds. It sounds good but it ain't. The reason being is we keep on pouring humanity into the inhumanity. And we never get anywhere. Why? Because we are ignoring. We're ignoring God's word.

We're ignoring the gospel of Jesus Christ. And we cannot, we cannot bear to sacrifice the true, doing true justice and doing true righteousness in the name of, well let's just get along. True justice reigns through God's word.

As it is proclaimed and as God's word is believed. Not just the proclamation of the word but the belief in what God's word says. How can justice and righteousness reign in us and be done for those around us unless we believe in the God who is righteous?

Unless we believe in the God who is all righteousness and faithfulness and goodness. Unless he's our defining standard of what it means. Then what are we doing? Whose standard are we applying? Doing whatever people in the majority would approve of?

Or are we taking God's word seriously doing what God tells us to do? No matter how many noble excuses are made for gospel denying social justice warriors. Their labor is fundamentally flawed from the first without hope of any kind of genuine success.

God knows who we are. He made us. He gets to decide what is just and what is right and how we go about it. And he cares that we do so. That we not sit back and simply analyze that we actually obey God's word.

You see true justice reigns through God's word as it's proclaimed believed and obeyed. Which means we must take up individual responsibility and this personal exhortation that the God's word is saying to you and is saying to me do justice and do righteousness.

For this is what God cares about. And we are made in the image of God. Therefore we are to mediate the authority of God in our lives. We are called to do this. And at the same time let's be sure that by our efforts no other person will ever become just by our efforts.

Neither will we ourselves become justified in the eyes of God if we do enough justice in this world. No. No it is it is out of our justification from our being made right with God by the grace of God alone through Jesus Christ that we would ever pursue this course.

So justice reigns in God's people through God's word as God's word is proclaimed believed obeyed and fulfilled. It's fulfilled. We know that God cares about justice about oppression about righteousness in this world.

We know he cares about it because he promises that when Christ returns it is a day of judgment. It's a day of judgment. And all the horrible wrongs perpetuated upon this planet for all the centuries will be dealt with either on the cross of Jesus Christ or at the coming of Jesus Christ.