"Amen, O Lord" Part 2

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Jeremiah 11:1-8 Pastor Michael Dirrim 10 Sept 2017

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"The Genesis of Christmas" Part 3

"The Genesis of Christmas" Part 3

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I invite you to open your Bibles with me to Jeremiah chapter 11 verses 1 -8.
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We're returning to this passage we only just began last week. And the key sentence of our passage sounds at the end of verse 5.
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At the most basic level, this means that Jeremiah reverently received the revelation of God and committed himself to proclaiming that word prolifically.
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We were challenged to offer that same Amen, to offer the same worshipful confession of faith and repentance.
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To commit ourselves to the first imperative, what God has revealed must be proclaimed.
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And this morning we're going to see three more exhortations from Jeremiah 11, 1 -8.
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And be challenged again to say with the prophet, Amen, O Lord.
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Would you kindly stand with me as I read the word of God. We stand to receive a word from our
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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And this is the word of the
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Lord. The word which came to Jeremiah from the
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Lord saying, Hear the words of this covenant and speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and say to them,
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Thus says the Lord the God of Israel, Cursed is the man who does not heed the words of this covenant which
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I commanded your forefathers in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt from the iron furnace.
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Saying, Listen to my voice and do according to all which
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I command you. So you shall be my people and I will be your God in order to confirm the oath which
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I swore to your forefathers to give them a land flowing with milk and honey as it is this day.
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Then I said, Amen, O Lord. And the Lord said to me,
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Proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem saying, Hear the words of this covenant and do them.
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For I solemnly warned your fathers in the day that I brought them up from the land of Egypt, even to this day warning persistently saying,
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Listen to my voice. Yet they did not obey or incline their ear.
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But walked, each one, in the stubbornness of his evil heart.
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Therefore I brought on them all the words of this covenant which I commanded them to do. But they did not.
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Let me pray for us. Father, we come before you this morning and we confess our great need for you.
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We possess nothing of our own experience or talent, no skill, no inherent quality.
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We have nothing to bring to you by which to say we may enter your presence, that we may worship you, that we may receive any blessing from you.
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Holy Father, our full hope, our attention is on your son,
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Jesus Christ. It is by his merits, it is because of who he is, because of your great love for him, that we ask that you would bless our time together in your word and ask that you would give us a very clear view of your son,
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Jesus Christ, from the scriptures and help us to worship you in spirit and in truth.
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We pray these things for the sake of Christ. Amen. You may be seated. I think it was about two or three years ago that we were spending time with my parents and my mom was watching
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Becca and I interact with Emeth, our fourth born. He's four years old. He was three then.
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And my mom commented that her goal for me when I was three years old was to get me to hear three different instructions, remember them, and then do them all.
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And this was a great challenge for my interminably distracted mind.
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I think that's a challenge for every parent. They instruct their children that they would hear their instructions, that they would remember them, and that they would actually do them.
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Very often we motivate our children by reward. We promise them something good if they follow through and they do what we ask them to do.
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We want them to trust that we know best and that we want the best for them and that they would sense that good immediately when they follow through in obedience.
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And other times, when we want them to remember what we have told them to do, we tend to stimulate the memory lobe by actuating the anxiety switch.
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And we say things like this. You had better get done what I have told you to do in the right way by this certain time or I'm bringing the
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Wactychus to your terminus. That's Latin. We've got a similar pattern here in our passage.
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God, through his prophet Jeremiah, lays great stress on Judah's need to remember what he has spoken to them, great stress on their need to follow through on his commands, and it's all motivated by his faithfulness to his word, his promises that he has given to them.
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I think we can relate to the challenge that God has with Judah.
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We relate to Judah especially as we think about the first part of verse 8. We recognize that we too struggle with the stubbornness of our own evil hearts.
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Yet before we're born again, there's really no struggle at all. Before we come to Christ, there's no struggle at all.
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We just follow along our sinful lusts very faithfully, and whatever our hearts desire, we just go after that.
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And our only struggle seems to be how much can we get for ourselves in such a little time. But when we are made alive in Christ, we actually then do begin to struggle.
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Paul references his struggle this way in Romans 7 .19. He says, for the good that I want I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.
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Any Christian will know that that is common to their experience. And yet for the Christian, that is not the final word.
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That's not the end of it. Because we have this confidence that because of who
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Christ is and what he has done, because of his death and resurrection, because of his ascension as king of kings and lord of lords, because of his certain and sudden and soon return, we will progressively win over sin and we will advance in sanctification until one day we are glorified and have absolute victory.
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The way we progressively win over sin in the here and now is that we are sanctified by the truth of God's word.
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Jesus, interceding for his own, says, sanctify them in your truth.
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Your word is truth. So I hope that you see the importance of what we are studying.
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To enjoy the blessing of God, we must amen the revelation of God.
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So, we continue on in our passage. Not only what God has revealed must be proclaimed, but what
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God has spoken must be remembered. And we are looking at another parallel. You may remember that I said last week how in this passage, and you may have noticed as we read through, verses 1 -5 stand in parallel to verses 6 -8.
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And there are striking and strong comparisons and parallels between both sets of verses.
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And then there are some very important contrasts. So I want you to follow along as I read portions of verses 3 -4 and verses 6 -7.
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This is our second parallel in the text. Verse 3, And say to them,
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Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Cursed is the man who does not heed the words of this covenant, which
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I commanded your forefathers in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt from the iron furnace, saying,
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Listen to my voice. And then we'll pick it up in verse 6.
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In the middle, saying, Hear the words of this covenant and do them, for I solemnly warned your fathers in the day that I brought them up from the land of Egypt, even to this day, warning persistently, saying,
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Listen to my voice. We hear about the covenant that must be received, remembered.
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The covenant that God had made with his people when he brought them up from the land of Egypt. How he said to them,
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Listen to my voice. What God has spoken to them must now be remembered.
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Let's think about the curses of the covenant. The Spirit speaks to Jeremiah in verse 3 about Cursed is the man who does not heed the words of the covenant.
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That's an echo from Deuteronomy 27 -26. Cursed is he who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them, and all the people shall say,
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Amen. That Amen is the twelfth and the final Amen that the people gave to the twelfth malediction, a series of curses that the
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Levites spoke to all the people of Israel, and then all the people of Israel said, Amen, to each warning.
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And it's quite different in Jeremiah's day and age, because he's the only one left who says, Amen. It was once that all of Israel responded to the word the
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Levites spoke, and they all said, Amen, but now there's only one left who's saying, Amen.
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Now, the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai was not all about curses and bad things.
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The fact that there were curses presupposes that there were great blessings. There was great blessing in living as God's people in God's place, blessed under his rule, but he warned them about what happens in their disobedience, in their idolatry, should they flee from him, should they rebel against him.
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And the curses were manifested in a variety of ways, disease, crop failure, defeat in battle, drought, all of it somehow relating to death.
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It was to draw their attention to the consequences of sin, that which God proclaimed to Adam and Eve in the garden, that to disobey him would bring death.
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But God gave commands for them to remember and to follow and warn them about what would happen if they disobeyed.
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But think about the context of these commands. The context of these commands.
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It says, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron furnace, saying,
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Listen to my voice. When he brought them up from the land of Egypt, and warning them persistently even to this day.
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So, that's the context for when God gave them the commands. It was their deliverance out of Egypt.
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It was their deliverance from the iron furnace of Egypt. Think about the iron furnace.
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We would think of something that was made out of iron. They're thinking of something, a great pit covered over in several layers of brick, in which they would heat it to well over a thousand degrees, and they would melt.
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They would begin to soften and melt iron into something that would be malleable and useful.
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And God likens their time in Egypt as a burning in an iron furnace.
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Yet God delivers them out of the land of Egypt. And he makes this covenant with them and calls them to love him supremely, to love others rightly, and to steward their possessions rightly.
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He calls them into this blessed existence, and he wants them to remember what it was like, how he acted, how he redeemed them.
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He chose them for his glory. He loved them because he loved them. He saved them in his grace, and he called them into this righteous life of holy love.
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This is to be their all -controlling thought. They are to remember what he has spoken, what he has done for them.
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This is to be the all -controlling thought of why they should return to him, why they should worship him, why they should obey him.
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Jeremiah says, Amen, O Lord. Amen, O Lord. God first saves the people, then calls them into the blessedness of obedience, warning them about disobedience.
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This language, iron furnace, actually comes from Deuteronomy as well. Deuteronomy 4, verse 20, where Moses preaches to the second generation.
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He says, But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace from Egypt to be a people for his own possession as today.
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Now, verse 20 begins with a but before he talks about the iron furnace. So what's the issue?
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What's the contrast? Well, verse 19, right before that, Moses says, Beware to not lift your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars and all the hosts of heaven.
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Why is Moses saying don't look up at night or during the day? Why is he saying that?
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Because he knew they would be tempted to worship the stars and to worship the astrological phenomena.
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And that's exactly what's happening in Jeremiah's day. He's already mentioned it more than once, talking about how they worship the queen of heaven, how they pour out drink offerings to the stars.
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And they do this throughout the week, and then they'll come to the temple as if there's nothing wrong. They've even got an altar in Jeremiah's day.
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They've got an altar in the temple worshiping the astral deities. This is burning into the soul of Jeremiah, and he goes back to the passage in Deuteronomy 4, verse 19, where Moses warned them not to do that.
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And why not? Why not worship the stars? Because it was the
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Lord who rescued them and redeemed them and saved them out of Egypt.
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Why worship the stars so far away when the living Lord has come near? Why worship the moon and the sun that can't do anything for you, but the
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Lord has redeemed you from the land of Egypt? And even while doing so, disproving the sun god wrong.
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All of this is context. What God has spoken must be remembered.
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I think the question for us is will we remember what God has spoken? They were to have this all -controlling thought about who
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God was, how he revealed himself, how he covenanted with them, having rescued them from Egypt. What's our all -controlling thought?
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You're not only to be defined by but also directed by Jesus Christ.
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In 1 Peter 2, it says that we come to Christ who is a living stone, one who has been rejected by men, but he is choice and precious in the sight of God.
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And so we are to see him and reckon ourselves as living stones, being built up into a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
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Why, Peter says, this is contained in the scriptures. Behold, I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious corner stone, and he who believes in him will not be disappointed.
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This precious value, then, is for you who believe. But for those who disbelieve the stone which the builders rejected, this became the very corner stone, and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.
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They stumble because they are disobedient to the word, and to this doom they were also appointed. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
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For you were once not a people, but now you are the people of God. You had once not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
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And Peter is saying, look at Christ, consider him. Yes, these things were said of the Messiah in the
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Old Testament as the stone and the corner stone. Yes, these things were even said of Israel as the corner stone which the builders rejected, but now we see it is
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Christ. Now you are to identify yourself with Christ, so much so that he is your all -encompassing thought.
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He defines who you are, and thus he directs how you live. And that's why Peter then goes on, verses 11 and following,
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I urge you to live this way, and walk this way, and speak this way. What God has spoken must be remembered, the context of who we are, what we're all about.
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Christ must be our all -controlling thought. Thomas Brooks writes, Christ is the
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Son, and all the watches of our lives should be set by the dial of his motion.
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If we're going to enjoy the blessing of God, we must amen the revelation of God. And again, that's more than the interjection of just saying something out of our mouth, but actually, truly, by faith and repentance, conforming ourselves to Christ.
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Christ who has borne our curses, Christ who has won our blessings. Also, what
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God has commanded must be done. What God has commanded must be done. In the second half of verse 4 of Jeremiah 11, it says,
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God says, Picking it up at the end of verse 7, it says,
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So, as we read through Jeremiah 11, 1 -8, we hear a lot of similarities, a lot of parallels.
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But when we come to this section, there is a striking contrast.
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We have the invitation from God, the promise of God, and then we have the rebellious response of the people.
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With many exhortations, Moses commanded the people in Deuteronomy 27 -29 to follow through in obedience, that they would know the blessing of being
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God's people, in God's place, under God's rule. God promised to bless them, and they promised to obey
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God. He said, choose life, and they said, we'll choose life. But there is a problem.
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The problem, of course, is that the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth. Genesis 8. The man's heart is more deceitful than all else and desperately sick.
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Jeremiah 17 -9. We know this, that all have fallen short of the glory of God. We are by nature children of wrath.
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We are dead in transgressions and sins. And that doesn't mean that we're as bad as we could be, but we have no capacity to change our nature so that we may fix the problem.
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That we could live up to the commands that God has given us. Our oldest dog,
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Caris, is the best dog I've ever had. She only barks at strangers who get too close to the house.
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She barks at strange cars if they stop at the curb or pull into the driveway. She doesn't cause a great fuss.
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She even saved Benjamin's life, warning him it was a copperhead snake. She's still a dog.
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So, I can't get her to stop walking through my garden or drinking from rainwater puddles or gnawing on the more interesting offerings in my compost pile.
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She's true to her nature. She's true to her nature. She's a scavenger.
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We need our nature's change. There has to be a significant radical change and we are changed by the grace of the one who did obey all the
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Father's commands. Who died and rose again to free us from the power of sin and call us into an abundant life in him.
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Jeremiah says, Amen, O Lord. Now, religious language, Jesus tells us, religious language can often be a cover, a shroud for disobedience.
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It can be a covering to hide the lack of spiritual life. Religious language is exceptionally good at that.
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So, we have to be careful with religious language. This Amen that Jeremiah gives is no cover for a lack of true faith.
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It's no cover for a lack of a life of obedience. And we know that because Jeremiah, when he talks about stubbornness, verse 8.
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When he talks about the stubbornness of the evil heart, there's only one reference to that kind of stubbornness.
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That's in Deuteronomy 29, verse 19 especially.
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And it's helpful to go back and put your eyes on it. As Jeremiah has obviously taken up Deuteronomy and he's been reflecting on it and meditating on it, now he's preaching it.
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But Deuteronomy 29, verses 16 -21 is the context. But just look with me at verse 19 in particular.
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It shall be, when he hears the words of this curse, that he will boast, saying,
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I have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart, in order to destroy the watered land with the dry.
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This verse is notoriously difficult to translate, especially at the end. So, let me read for you a different translation.
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When someone hears the words of this oath, he may bless himself in his mind, thinking, Peace will be mine, even though I follow my own stubborn heart, so that the well -watered may sweep away the dry.
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And Hebrew is just intensely vivid. Each word seems to have just a plethora, sometimes, of different ways to read it.
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So the interpretation, the context, I think is important. So, I've done all my homework that I can do.
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I'm going to read you the translation from the Septuagint. It shall be, if one hear the words of this curse, he shall flatter himself in his heart, saying,
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Let good happen to me, for I will walk in the error of my heart, lest the sinner destroy the guiltless with him.
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I think here's what's going on, if you'll follow with me. Do you remember Abraham? How he was pleading with God, interceding with God, in Genesis 18, for Lot and those who may be righteous, living in Sodom and Gomorrah.
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How he began to say, Far be it from you, Far be it from you to destroy, to sweep away, the righteous with the unrighteous.
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Should you do that, God? Far be it from you. If you find at least 50, then 45, 40, 30, 20.
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If you find at least 10 righteous people living in Sodom, will you spare the city?
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And his whole reasoning was, Surely, O God, you would not sweep away the righteous along with the wicked.
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Far be it from you. I think that's what's going on here.
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That there is a twisted interpretation of that idea.
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And the one who is, in his heart, speaking, is saying this. He's blessing himself, saying,
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Peace will be mine. I'm going to be just fine. Even if I don't obey the commands of this covenant, even if I don't go along with it,
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I'll be fine. I'll be safe. Because the righteous don't get swept away with the unrighteous.
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So what if I'm unrighteous? The righteous are still here. I'm safe. They're my safety blanket.
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God won't take me out as long as the righteous are still here. So I'm fine. And I really think that's what is going on.
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That's what's being expressed from the heart of the one who is following his own stubborn heart.
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Let's be clear, that's what Jeremiah means when he's talking about those who follow their own stubborn heart. What does it mean?
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He's referencing Deuteronomy 29, and this is the attitude, this is the presumption of the one following their own stubborn heart.
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Presumption is the stench of a rotten heart. My great fear for you as your pastor is that you would develop a vocabulary of religious language that serves you well in hiding yourself from any exposure and that you sit and enjoy the blessings of those who are alive in Christ, but you yourself are not alive in Christ.
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This is the great fear that I have as a pastor. I think it dovetails exactly with what the pastor was saying to his flock in Hebrews as he preached his sermon to them in Hebrews 6, verses 4 -9.
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For in the case of those who have once been enlightened, tasted of the heavenly gift, been made partakers of the
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Holy Spirit, have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance since they crucify to themselves the
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Son of God and put them to an open shame. For ground that drinks the rain, which often falls on it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is also tilled, receives a blessing from God.
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But if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being cursed and it ends up being burned.
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But, beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you, things that accompany salvation.
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What I want you to know is that you can have been given some light of the gospel, you can taste, not necessarily consume, but taste of the heavenly gift.
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You can even receive some benefit from the Holy Spirit because of the
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Holy Spirit being at work in the lives of the people around you. You can taste the good word of God in preaching and teaching and studies and even see the miraculous work of God as He brings ever more
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His kingdom to pass in the lives of the people around you and still yet not be a
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Christian. And religious language can cover all that and hide it.
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And that's my great fear. That's my great concern because that kind of presumptuous life leads to an absolute disaster.
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Obedience is not the root of our salvation. It is the fruit of our salvation.
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Pursuing obedience to Christ is not the way we earn our salvation. It is the way we experience our salvation.
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Abiding in Christ and obedience to Christ are married. And you can't have one without the other and they always come together.
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If anyone's making deals in their heart and saying,
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I'm going to play along with this. If anybody's being presumptuous in their heart and saying,
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I'm fine, look at everyone around me, I'm fine. I've got all the spirituality I need because of the people around me.
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This is a very dangerous place to be. Christ is the end of the law for all who believe.
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But all who believe in Christ follow Him. And He leads them into all holiness and into all righteousness and into all truth.
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Thomas Brooks says, Oh, how much better it is to have a sore conscience than a seared conscience.
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What God has commanded must be done. What God has promised He will perform.
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The final parallel in our passage, God demonstrates that what He has promised He will perform. So look at verse 5 and then the last half of verse 8.
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Verse 5, In order to confirm the oath which I swore to your forefathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as it is this day.
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And then verse 8, last part. Therefore I brought on them all the words of this covenant, which
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I commanded them to do, but they did not. And the parallel in this is very simple. God says,
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I promised your forefathers I would give them this land, and I did. And I promised you that I would bring upon you the curses of the covenant, if you disobeyed me, and I have.
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Do you hear God saying that He is faithful to what He has said? What He has promised
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He will perform. He keeps His word.
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How important is it that a mother or father keep their word to their child?
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How important is that? If a mother promises her children a special day out and a special blessing, we're going to go do this and that, and then it doesn't happen, what does it do to the child?
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If the father says, now you better comply, you better follow through, or there's going to be a consequence, and this is the consequence it's going to be, and then the child disobeys, and then the father does not follow through and does not discipline the child, what does that do to the child?
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How much more infinitely important is it then that what God has promised He always performs?
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He is praiseworthy. He is praiseworthy that He always does what
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He says. The Hebrew word for that is emeth. He is faithful to do what
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He has said. He is always true. God keeps
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His benediction. The word came to Jeremiah with these words of the covenant from the Lord to speak to Judah, that I brought them out of the land of Egypt in order to confirm the oath which
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I swore to your forefathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey as it is this day.
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So God was saying, such would be the fertility of this land that no one would lack.
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There would be so much milk from the livestock, and the livestock would always have enough grass to eat, and the trees would all be honey filled, and the bees would be going about fertilizing the crops, and so we have
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God keeping His promise as it is this day.
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As it is this day, God says. So He is saying, I have kept my word, and the implication is what about you?
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God also has kept His malediction. In Deuteronomy 28, after a lengthy series of curse statements,
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Moses comes to a summary in verses 45 -47. He says, So God acts faithfully according to the word that He had promised.
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Through Jeremiah, He now says, I have been absolutely faithful to the covenant. I have always kept all my promises, and He sets that before the people to think about and to consider, precisely for them to wonder, are we going to keep our side of the covenant?
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Jeremiah said, Amen, O Lord. And the Amen that Jeremiah gives to the promise, and to the expression that God says, what
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I have promised, I will perform. When Jeremiah says, Amen, O Lord, this is of the same faith as Abraham, who was fully assured that what
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God had promised, He was also able to perform. At the heart of it, at the root of it,
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Judah's problem is that they didn't really believe that God would do what
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He said. They didn't really believe that God would keep
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His promises. They didn't really believe that God would be true to His word. At the heart of it, this was their problem.
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They were not fully assured. They were not convinced. Are you fully assured?
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Are you fully assured? God has promised a seed to crush the head of the serpent.
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God has promised one who would usher in a perfect rest. God has promised one in whom all the families of the earth will be blessed.
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God has promised one through whom would come as many descendants as the stars in the heavens.
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God has promised a king to whom it all belongs, reigning in great abundance. God has promised a prophet of perfect power, leading all of God's people.
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God has promised a priest of the eternal order of Melchizedek. God has promised a son of David who possesses all wisdom.
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God has promised that all who curse this one will be cursed and all who conspire against Him will be crushed.
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And all who have ever lived will stand before His judgment throne. Are you fully assured that what
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God has promised, He will perform? Look at Christ!
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And in Him all the promises of God are yes. So we give
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Him the praise. We give Him the praise. To His name our voice we raise.
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He is a God of all chesed and emeth. He is a God of all covenant faithfulness and keeping true to His word.
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How sure and vital are His words. What He promises, He performs. What He commands must be done.
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What He has spoken must be remembered and what He has revealed must be proclaimed. Let us be the amen of heaven on the earth.
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If we would enjoy the blessings of God, we must amen the revelation of God. Let's close in a word of prayer.
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Father, I thank You for the assurance that You give us in Your word. That You keep
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Your word. That it is unfailing. That You are unchanging. And I pray,
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Father, that in our confidence, that You keep Your promises. And as You set forth
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Your Son Jesus Christ before us for our consideration, that we would so love Him and rejoice in Him, that we would follow
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Him. That in our whole being, throughout our lives, at every aspect, we would amen
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Christ. So we would know Your blessings. I pray that You would entrench this word into our lives.
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Equip us and empower us to speak Your word to those around us.