WWUTT 2434 The Valley of Slaughter (Jeremiah 19:1-15)

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The people of Judah had done wickedly. They had sacrificed their own children to false gods.

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And so God was going to bring judgment upon them for this wickedness, as he will bring upon this land as well, when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the

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Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our

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Q &A on Friday. Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. In our study of the book of Jeremiah, last week we were in chapter 18, where God had told

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Jeremiah to go to the potter's house. Apparently, this was a very well -known place. There would have been lots of people there to buy from the potter's house, so they also would have heard the prophecy that Jeremiah was going to make.

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And Jeremiah prophesied about the potter and the clay. And just as they observed the potter making a vessel and making a mistake and then destroying what it was that he was making and shaping it into something else, so they were to understand that God is the potter and he does as he pleases.

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He can choose to make one vessel into this and another into that. He raises up kings and tears down kings so that they would see and know that God is sovereign in all that he brings to pass.

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Now as Jeremiah is still there at the potter's house, God is going to instruct him here in chapter 19, where we are today, to buy a potter's earthenware flask.

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And then God is going to show Jeremiah what to do with that flask as a prophecy to Judah.

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We're going to see in this section we're looking at today, the kinds of evils that Judah is guilty of and why

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God is bringing this judgment upon them. So let's look at Jeremiah 19. I'm going to start by reading through verses 1 through 9.

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Hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord, go buy a potter's earthenware flask and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests and go out to the valley of the son of Hinnom at the entry of the potsherd gate and proclaim there the words that I tell you.

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You shall say, hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.

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Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, behold, I am bringing such disaster upon this place that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known.

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And because they have filled this place with the blood of innocence and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burn offerings to Baal, which

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I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind. Therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the

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Lord, which this place shall no more be called Tophet or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter.

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And in this place, I will make void the plans of Judah and Jerusalem and will cause their people to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hand of those who seek their life.

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I will give their dead bodies for food to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the earth.

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And I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at. Everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its wounds.

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And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his neighbor in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them.

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Now, let me go on ahead here to what happens with this prophecy of the flask. Verse 10, then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you and shall say to them, thus says the

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Lord of hosts. So I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter's vessel so that it can never be mended.

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Men shall bury in Tophet because there will be no place else to bury.

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Thus I will do to this place declares the Lord and to its inhabitants, making this city like Tophet, the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah, all the houses on whose roofs offerings have been offered to all the host of heaven and drink offerings have been poured out to other gods shall be defiled like the place of Tophet.

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Then Jeremiah came from Tophet where the Lord had sent him to prophesy. And he stood in the court of the

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Lord's house and said to all the people, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, behold,

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I am bringing upon this city and upon all the towns, all the disaster that I have pronounced against it because they have stiffened their neck, refusing to hear my words.

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Well I went ahead and read the whole chapter there, but there you hear the prophecy, Jeremiah buying the flask and what it was supposed to represent.

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You also see the evil things that Judah had committed there in the valley of the son of Hinnom burning their own sons and daughters to false gods, making the work that God would do against them completely justified, bringing this nation against them to destroy them and to tear this place down,

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God said to a degree that it will never be rebuilt. So let me go back to verse one as we read through some of this again, go and buy a potter's earthenware flask,

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God said, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests and go out to the valley of the son of Hinnom at the entry of the potsherd gate and proclaim there the words that I tell you.

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So that's what God is addressing, that particular valley, what has happened there and what he is going to do to it and even how the destruction that will come upon that will be a picture of the destruction that will come upon the land.

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Now this flask that Jeremiah was supposed to buy, this is a solid vessel, like there's no seals in it, there's no lid on it.

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So when it's made, it has the substance put inside and then the rest of the flask is formed around it and heated so that it's one unit.

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And whenever the substance inside it is going to be used, then you break the flask open. So one place that we see this in scripture is where the woman comes to anoint

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Jesus and she has a flask of spikenard ointment and she breaks the flask and anoints

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Jesus with it and the whole house is filled with the aromatic scent of this ointment that she uses.

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Once she opens that flask, she uses all of it because you can't reseal the container.

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So that's an example there of where we see one of these flasks used. So when

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Jeremiah takes this flask, he's going to break it open and it's going to be a symbol of how

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God is going to break this people and it will not be rebuilt. It will not be remade, the judgment that God brings upon this place.

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So that's what's symbolized in this flask that Jeremiah goes and buys. And he takes some of the elders of the priests and some of the elders of the people.

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And they go out to the valley of the son of Hinnom. And you shall say to them, verse three, hear the word of the

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Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the

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God of Israel, behold, I am bringing such disaster upon this place that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.

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They will hear of what God did in that place. And it will even make the people's ears tingle when they hear of what happened there.

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So everything about that place will just be wicked. It will be known what it was that Judah did there.

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And then it will be known even the severity of the punishment that came upon them.

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And this is going to be a testament to the holiness of God, the righteous standard that he demands.

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And even though he had shown favor to this people before, they did not listen to God, did not obey him.

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And so God brought this destruction against them. And so the judgment of God would be known a testimony to other people in other lands.

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Verse four, because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known.

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So that reference to they have not known them, meaning they have never seen evidence of these gods being real and actually bestowing upon them anything.

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They've not received wisdom from these gods. They've not had power. There's been no mercy or goodness or grace that has come from these gods, nor have their fathers even experienced any of these things.

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These gods have given these people nothing. There's nothing to know about them because they're not real.

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They are figments of the imaginations of the people who want to chase after the passions of their own flesh.

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So they make up gods that will give them what they want. But there's nothing really to those idols or those false gods that they worship.

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So they are made in the image of man rather than understanding that man is made in the image of God.

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There is nothing about these gods to know. There's no relationship that you can have with these gods as though you could give them something and they could give something back.

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So there is no relationship here. The fathers have not known, the kings of Judah have not known these gods.

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There's nothing to know about them. But these are the gods that they've gone after. They've not gone after a god who can be known.

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That's the true God, the God of heaven who has actually revealed himself and has revealed himself to these people in incredible ways.

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He has shown mighty signs and wonders to them. He has blessed them immensely. But they've gone after these wicked things instead, these false gods that aren't real gods.

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They would rather give praise and honor to these false gods, which is really giving praise and honor to themselves.

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They are doing exactly as Romans 1 says of the person with an ungrateful heart.

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Though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.

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But they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Everything about sin that's talked about there in Romans 1 comes from an ungrateful heart.

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They know God is real. They know he is there, but they don't want to honor him. They honor themselves. They go after the passions of their own flesh.

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And so God will give them over to their passions to be destroyed, as he's going to do with this people here.

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So they went after other gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah have known.

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And they filled this place with the blood of innocence. They sacrificed children to these false gods.

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So absurd and so wicked was this people's passion that they spilled the blood of their own children over it just to have the passions of their flesh.

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Child sacrifice was going on in this place. And if you've ever seen anything talked about regarding the

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Valley of Hinnom, then you know the priests that were there when these sacrifices would go on, whether these children were being sacrificed to the

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Baals or to Molech, who was the god of shameful sacrifice.

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He was that idol that you've probably seen that looks like a man with a bull's head and he's sitting on a throne and he has his arms extended.

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They would place the child in the arms or in the abdomen of that false god.

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And then the fires would burn and consume the child. And if you've seen the sketches of this, you'll notice that there are all these drummers down at the base of this idol.

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And the drummers would be there to beat the drums extra loud so that the people would not hear the cries of their children as they were being sacrificed to these false gods.

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Now, the pagans, when they sacrifice their children, they did it. They sacrificed their firstborn, believing that the gods would be appeased and then they would bless their crops or even the rest of the children that they would have after that.

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And the Hebrews now have been sucked in by that that pagan wickedness.

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They have sexual relations with pagans, with each other, the sexual immorality that is going on that produces children, and then those children get sacrificed.

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And my friends, we have the same sort of paganism that's going on in our world today. Abortion is this.

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It is the sacrifice of children as a blood offering to the false gods of the sexual immorality that people in this wicked and depraved culture crave.

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They are fornicating. They're having sex out of wedlock. They they do not desire children. They're just after the titillating passions of the flesh.

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Women are getting pregnant with children that they do not want. So they go to the abortion, where is the abortion mills, these temples to false gods where their children can be sacrificed.

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And that's the blood offering that they give to false gods so that they can go back to their sexual immorality, desiring sex without consequences.

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When God made sex to be enjoyed between a husband and a wife in marriage, but they desire the passion of their flesh and their children pay the price for it.

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And so it's going on here, even in Israel, when they have gone after the ways of the pagans around them, they desire the passions of those pagans and are now burning their own children in the fire.

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You have filled this place with the blood of innocence and have built the high places of bail to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to bail, which

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I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind. Now there are some who will use that phrase and they will say that this this phrase in Jeremiah 19 five speaks against any concept of the of the sovereignty of God, of having decreed all things that will come to pass from the beginning of time before the foundation of the world.

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Well, that couldn't possibly be the case that God would decree everything that would come to pass, because right here in Jeremiah 19 five, it says that this didn't even come into God's mind to do such a thing.

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So he's really not in control of all things might be the way that they they argue that out.

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But that's not what is meant here. What's meant is that this is not the form of worship that God had ever decreed, nor did it even cross his mind that this would be the way he is to be worshipped.

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In fact, in the law, in Leviticus 20, it is explicitly condemned that the children of Israel should ever burn their sons or their daughters for any reason, especially as an act of worship.

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Leviticus 20, verse one, God spoke to Moses, saying, You shall also say to the sons of Israel, any man from the sons of Israel or from the sojourners sojourning in Israel who gives any of his seed to Moloch shall surely be put to death.

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The people of the land shall stone him with stones. I will also set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people because he has given some of those who are his seed, his children, in other words, to Moloch so as to defile my sanctuary and to profane my holy name.

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If the people of the land, however, should ever turn a blind eye to that man, when he gives any of those who are his seed to Moloch so as not to put him to death, then

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I myself will set my face against that man and against his family, and I will cut off from among their people both him and all those who play the harlot after him in playing the harlot after Moloch.

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In other words, if you know there's a man who's even burned his son or his daughter to Moloch and you just stand there and shake your head about it, but you don't do anything about it, you don't put the man to death who burned his children to false gods, then you're going to get cut off from the land as well.

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God will hold liable even those who knew about this sin and did nothing about it.

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And mark my words, my friends, the same thing can be said of the church today that won't speak up on behalf of innocent children who are being slaughtered by the thousands every day in America.

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There is a reason why we as the church need to speak up on behalf of unborn children who are murdered by the thousands and whether it's going to an abortion clinic or taking abortion pills.

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Either way, these are sacrifices that are being made, blood sacrifices made like the pagans did when they made their human sacrifices.

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And we need to be speaking up on behalf of those who have no voice to speak for themselves, protecting the lives of these innocent children and desiring that this wicked practice would be outlawed in the land.

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May God turn the hearts of this people from their wickedness to Jesus Christ who forgives sin and cleanses from all unrighteousness.

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The only solution to this abortion problem that we have in this land is Christ. Preach the gospel, warn of the judgment that is to come just as God brought judgment upon this people because of the wickedness that they did and then turn the people to Christ.

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Judgment is coming. The only way to be saved is to turn to Jesus Christ. So again,

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I guess I kind of rabbit trailed off of this, but where God has said this did not, this did not even come into my mind to do this.

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This is not the way that the people were instructed to worship God. Now, again, you can't say of this phrase that it doesn't mean

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God is sovereign because we've already seen back in chapter 18, when you had the example that was done at the potter's house,

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God was demonstrating to the people, I'm the potter and I get to decide what happens to you.

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I can raise up a king. I can tear down a king. God is absolutely in control of everything.

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But this statement here in verse five is to say, this is not the way you worship God. It is not the way that it was decreed in the law to worship

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God. In fact, just the opposite. And that someone who does such a thing will be put to death or even cut off from the land, which is exactly what

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God is going to bring upon this people. So continuing on verse six, therefore, behold, days are coming declares the

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Lord when this place shall no more be called Tophet or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter, because the people who did this thing, they will be slaughtered.

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They slaughtered their children. They're going to be slaughtered by the Babylonians who will come by the hand of God to bring judgment upon this people.

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Let me skip down a little bit for the sake of time. I will make this city a horror, a thing to be hissed at.

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Everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its wounds.

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And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and their daughters. And everyone shall eat the flesh of his neighbor in the siege and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them.

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That's a horrible thing. Even as wicked as this people is, they're not imagining to themselves that they would become cannibals, but because of the siege that is going to come against Jerusalem and against the land, they're going to have no food.

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And so what will they resort to doing? They'll eat their own children. I know, horrible thing to even mention, but this is the judgment that God is going to bring upon them.

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He will turn them over to their own depraved minds to do what is even more wicked than what they've already done.

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And so verse 10, God tells Jeremiah what to do with the flask. You shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you and you shall say to them, thus says the

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Lord of hosts. So will I break this people and this city as one breaks a potter's vessel so that it can never be mended.

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Men shall bury and Tophet because there will be no place else to bury the very place where they sacrificed their children will be the place of their dead.

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And Jeremiah came from Tophet. I'm skipping down to verse 14 here. Jeremiah came from Tophet where the

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Lord had sent him to prophesy and he stood in the court of the Lord's house and said to all the people, thus says the

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Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, behold, I am bringing upon this city and upon all its towns, all the disaster that I have pronounced against it because they have stiff in their neck refusing to hear my words.

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Now, where we go next in chapter 20 is that the people will persecute Jeremiah because of this word that he has said, and then

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Jeremiah will raise a complaint before God because of the way that he was treated. And that's what we'll get to next week when we come back to this passage in chapter 20.

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But my friends, we're going to be hated because we just desire godliness because we would speak up on behalf of those who are being put to death.

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The world is going to hate us for that, like with vile and even violent hatred.

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If they could put us to death too, they would. So far, the laws of the land protect us.

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But if it becomes so depraved in this nation, if God turns this people over to such a wicked mind that they could even put to death anybody who would oppose them and their desire for human sacrifice, they would surely do it.

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They're already sacrificing their children. They would sacrifice us too. But we must do as Jesus did, as the apostle

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Peter talks about in 1 Peter 2, entrusting ourselves to him who judges justly.

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In the end, God is going to bring judgment upon those who did wickedness, and he will deliver the righteous.

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So don't ever turn a blind eye to the wickedness that's going on in our land. We must patiently endure evil, as talked about in 1

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Timothy 2 .25. Also in Revelation 22 .11,

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let the one who does unrighteousness still do unrighteousness, and the one who is filthy still be filthy, and let the one who is righteous still do righteousness, and the one who is holy still keep himself holy.

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So we must not turn a blind eye to it, but we also must not give in to it. We have to keep ourselves free from temptation in the ways of this world and be in pursuit of Christ.

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He is coming back again to judge the living and the dead, and when he returns, may he find us faithful servants doing the work of the

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Lord, that we may enter into his kingdom in robes of white on that day.

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Heavenly Father, we thank you for what you have said to us in your word, and how we can see even in this

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Old Testament passage of what happened with the children of Israel of old, that we will see what is even happening in our own land is just repeating the same sins that have happened in the past.

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May it charge us to warn people of the judgment that is to come so that they will turn from their sin to Jesus Christ and so live.

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We even point out the sins that they're doing are the same sins that were done before that God is judged, and he will do it again so that they'll be convicted of this sin and find forgiveness and peace only in Jesus Christ who died on the cross for us and rose again from the dead so that all who believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

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us in paths of righteousness for your name's sake. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.