Jeremiah - Prophet of the Last Days — Art Katz

Prophetic Persecution and the Anatomy of Self-Condemnation

Game. Maybe true propheticness can be measured by the kind of adverse reaction that it invokes. If we find ourselves well accepted and popular, and one of the boys were likely in the false place, because the history of prophets is the history of persecution.

Jesus spoke about all of the prophets that were stoned, that were sent unto you. And that cannot be that a prophet should die in any place other than Jerusalem. That Jerusalem has been the place where the prophets have met their end.

So there's something intrinsic to the prophetic calling that invokes or has to do with persecution. And my concern this morning is a kind of anatomy of persecution. An understanding of it and what form does it take?

What is the prophet's response to it when it comes as being somehow something suggestive and instructive for us? So I want to pray for that. And this morning's devotional material speaks of persecution of another kind that may be more formidable as a problem for saints than that which comes from without is the persecution that comes from within, which is to say our own opposition to ourselves being our own worst enemies and kicking ourselves and opposing ourselves in a kind of freedom that we think we can enjoy, where we would never dream to call a brother a jerk.

We will call ourselves a jerk, as I've done recently when I hung up the hangers for the rods over my mother's door upside down and had to extract the nails and do it over again. And the very next one that I did, I did it again the same way.

And so I thought I was fully justified in kicking myself and calling myself a jerk. But that's no more pleasing in God's sight than if we were called someone else. We are not at liberty to abuse ourselves however much we think are coming.

And yet that might be the greatest indoor sport and the greatest practice of saints is that they're facing what is formidable, not from outside themselves but from within themselves. So before we get to Jeremiah and the persecution that came to him externally, I want to read a little bit from Oswald Chambers and another devotional source that just happens on this day to come up that might be helpful for some of us.

So Lord, blessing again we pray. Your blessing is everything. We can't imagine how anyone can proceed without the blessing of the Lord that maketh rich. So the operation of your spirit, Lord, and the bringing of these things to light and to life, may it bring release, may it bring deliverance, may it set free those who have hindered themselves from the fulfillment of their own calling.

And give us rich insight, Lord, into the experience of Jeremiah in that way, Lord, that will likely be our own. Show us the corollary between his time and ours, the forces that opposed him and how they sought to dispose of him and how you affected his deliverance.

And we want to learn, Lord, an anatomy of persecution, the principles, underlying things, Lord, that are universal at all times and will be likely to be experienced greatly of those of the last days. Thank you, my Lord.

Bless us together now and be blessed with us. And we thank you and give you praise for yet another privilege in Yeshua's name. Amen. Well, I read every day both my atmos for his highest, the selection for that day, and another one that I didn't know about until about a year ago called God Calling.

And I've mentioned it before, but I'll say it again. God Calling is the daily word that two women received in England. I don't know when, in the 1930s, something like that. They were spinsters or widows.

I'm not sure of their condition. They lived together and they sought the Lord and they received from the Lord a daily word in the morning. And it was such a kind that began to be circulated. People were blessed by it.

And then someone came and edited their notes that they took and compiled this devotional from those daily things received from the Lord. So here's today's, it's called Shame and Remorse. And it's God speaking.

That's how it came to them. God is talking to these women. My children, yes, shield from the scorn and cover from the chiding. It's in quotation marks. It must be either from a church hymn or something that was familiar to them in their English experience.

And then the Lord went on to say to them, according to their report, often I have to shield my disciples from their own scorn and chiding. You know what it means to chide? To berate yourself. My poor Peter could never have done my work, never have had the courage to live on or the daring to live for me, but for the tender love with which I enwrapped him.

Not from the anger of my father, who was so loved that I need to protect him, not from the scorn of his enemies, nor from the resentment of his friends, no, but from the self-hatred of Peter for himself.

That God's greatest act toward Peter was not to defend him from things that were external, though being an apostle he was going to experience that. His greatest threat was that which came to him from himself.

His own self-loathing, his own self-contempt, his own berating of himself and chiding of himself. And of course there was cause. He betrayed the Lord. After his loud protestation of all the world deny you, yet will I deny you ever.

Before that, the echo of that even dissipated. He was denying the Lord before the cock crowed three times. I don't know the man. And with oaths and with cursings. So if any man would be haunted by failure, grievous failure, shameful failure, it would be Peter.

And what the Lord is saying here, I like to believe that that is the Lord, that that would have disfigured his whole apostolic life. His own self-hatred for his failure would have kept him from a fulfillment of his own calling.

Because it is so cloying you can't shake it. It gnaws at you. The thought continually comes to you. The remembrance of your failure. And so the greatest act of love was to keep him from his own destructive tendency just to muse and to kick himself for that grievous failure.

And to one degree or another, that's the problem of many of us, if not all of us. Someone once wrote that though the cock would crow 10 ,000 times, we will not forgive ourselves. We will forgive others, but we'll not forgive ourselves.

We are our own worst taskmasters. And we sometimes have a standard for ourselves beyond anything that the Lord himself would impose. And so it's a frustration that is calculated to weaken the saint, to rob him, and at its worst form to destroy him and destroy him in his calling.

So before we talk about external persecution, let's look at the one that's right before us of which we ourselves are the promoters and the worst inflictors. So Peter was his own worst enemy. These are my own thoughts.

And self-condemnation was the thing that was eating at him. And that's not a privilege to which we are entitled. I'm not entitled to call myself a jerk because I hung up the hangers for the curtain rods the wrong way.

No more than I would call someone else who had done it that name. Because it's me does not give me the right to berate myself. I'm still a son of the most high God. And that when you impugn a son of his, you're impugning him.

But we think we have that liberty because we could do anything to ourselves. And somehow we have a greater delight in kicking ourselves than in kicking others. That's why this writer said that though the cock crowed 10 ,000 times, though we may have forgiven others, we'll not forgive ourselves.

There's something perverse about this self-inflicted morose kind of behavior. It's a form of soul sickness, but it's like a plague and affects more saints than we can know. And so to my followers today as then, there come the shame and remorse and contempt for themselves, for their weak selves.

They meant to be so strong and brave for me. And then I have to protect them with a shield of love or they would never have the courage to fight and conquer. But this facing of the real self has to be shame and remorse that must come because there's grounds for it.

The only question is how long do you continue to rue your failure? How long do you continue to steepen it? Maybe it has something to do with self-pity. There's a certain kind of perverse delight in ruminating over past fairness.

It's healthy to acknowledge them, to seek forgiveness for them, to put it under the blood. But it's abnormal and unhealthy to continue to languish in them, so talks here about if a butterfly remained earthbound and weighed down with the thought of its contemptible past, how would it be a butterfly?

Couldn't take off. So now today I say to you both, to these two women, that you are not to dwell for one moment on your sins and mistakes and faults and bad habits of the past. What does that mean? That we'd be oblivious as if it never happened and to disregard it, be light about the question of sin.

Not at all, no. You could be grave and solemn and stricken for that moment and then give it to the Lord and confess it to a brother. But after that, not to enjoy the luxury of languishing in it. It will weigh you down.

You'll not be a butterfly that can take off. You're not to dwell for one moment on your sins, your mistakes, your faults, your bad habits of the past. You must be as one who runs a race, stumbles and falls, but rises up again and presses on to the goal.

What does it avail if we stay to examine the spot where we fell or weep over the delay or over the short-sightedness that prevented our anticipating and avoiding the obstacles? What value is it to continue to rue something?

You know that word? R-U-E. So with you, here's the Lord exhorting these women, I laid on you as a command, do not look back. I'm not allowing you the luxury of festering over the failures of the past.

I'm commanding you, do not look back. Give yourself and all you have to a fresh start from today. Remember no more your sins and failures. Do not look for the remembrance is a fierce current of disappointment that hinders the swimmer.

I wrote here that swamps the swimmer. It's a tide that we in self, ourselves are invoking against ourselves and we don't need it. There are enough tides of opposition coming externally without our adding to it by continuing to dwell over what should be put under the blood and given to the Lord.

For what he forgives, he forgets and cast away from him as far as the east is from the west. Why aren't we then, if he's willing to do that, why aren't we? What is it about us that's so perverse that we will not forgive what the Lord has forgiven?

Isn't that remarkable? Because what he forgives, he forgets and we continue to hold it. About our own failures and maybe the failures of others. I'll tell you what, if you're holding the failure of another, you're preventing him from swimming.

Something is injected. Something comes into the atmosphere. There's a valence. Something is operating in the realm of spirit by your holding something against him for which the Lord has forgiven him. That's why it is that we're fighting against currents and we never break through to reach the goals.

So, when I sent my disciples out two by two, no script, no coats, no money, it was an injunction to be carried out literally, not only literally, but figuratively too. On life's journey, throw away all that is not important.

Cast aside all the hindrances, the past imperfections of your own and of others. The sense of failure, the haunting, persistent, annoying, G-N-A-W-I-N-G sense of failure, which will keep you from present success in the Lord.

Travel unladen with a light heart, freed from that kind of a weight. And then it ends, my children, I love you. Good? Worth recording? I hope it'll encourage many. Any thought that that has provoked you?

Simply that kind of indulging in self-pity and constant haranguing of oneself is ultimately yet another form of self-glorification. Yes. Because there's a standard that we also have established, not the Lord, that we want to meet because by that our self-esteem is established.

We have met our own standard. Well, the standard of the Lord is beyond any standard of ours and it can't be met by any accomplishment of ours. The only way to obtain it is to be in him who has attained it.

The fact that we're still kicking ourselves shows that we're operating on a very different plane, namely, still wanting to be established on the basis of our own standard and our own self-esteem. That's doomed for failure and we'll always kick ourselves for those failures and our whole life will be a life of fretful kicking because we've missed the point.

There's no way that we're going to satisfy ourselves by any standard that we can establish or succeed in, but that the Lord himself has given us his accomplished life to live in and to express. And so not the least of it is your thoughts above my thoughts.

Filthy rags. Huh? You know, the kicking against filthy rags of your own. Yeah. If Peter had something for his betrayal that would have crippled his whole apostolic life, what should we say about Paul?

He was a murderer, persecutor of the church. That should have weighed on him in such a way that he could never lift his head and never serve God completely. He makes, I think, one reference to it about how undeserving he was of the grace of God that it should come to him having been a persecutor of the church.

But that's all. Then he goes on. That's his past. It was instructive. It was needful. It was a sobering thing, but it's not a crippling thing. And in today's Oswald Chambers for the 20th, the scriptures out of Matthew 11, verse 28, and I will give you rest.

Beware of allowing self-consciousness to continue because by slow degrees it will awaken self-pity and self-pity is satanic. The complete life, I'm skipping here. In contrast, there's a life of a child.

When I am consciously conscious, there is something wrong. The child of God is not conscious of the will of God because he is the will of God. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. First they use language like, if God will help me, which I hear saints saying all the time, implies that there are two entities at stake.

One is God and the other is ourselves. If God will do for me, then I will be able. What Oswald Chambers is saying is that's missing the glory of the faith. That's operating religiously as if God is only giving us an assistance to our own human endeavor.

What he has given us is much more than that. Namely, he's given us himself. And to live and to be in him is not to say, Lord, what is the will of God for me, but it's to be in that will. And to live with a complete freedom and abandon to that knowledge that unless there's a check, you're continuing to be in that will.

We don't continually have to put the question to God. Am I in your will? Am I not? That's to tie yourself into knots and to make your life nothing but a frustration. That except there be a check just to have the sublime confidence you're in the will of God.

And Chambers is even more bold than I. He says, you are the will of God. I mean, how do we know about these days? What we're even speaking this morning? How was that determined? Did I make a calculated survey of different possibilities?

It came in this out of this morning's devotion and our prayer time and conversation the same way. So what he's saying is the rest of God is the sublime confidence that you're in the will of God. It's a childlike confidence and trust that is not continually taking a pulse, measuring, wondering, am I, am I not?

It's simply being. To live as Christ. And Paul's great accomplishment as an apostle was not in the least because he was freed from the kinds of considerations that choke and stultify us as self-conscious saints.

If we're self-conscious, the problem is that there's still a self that has not been crucified and loves to be the object of your consideration, wants you to dwell on it because that's, it doesn't want to give up the ghost.

It wants to be, to continue to be the foremost object of your concern. And it's more deadly in the spiritual realm than ever it was in the secular. Faith is, is a trust predicated on a knowledge of God, his character, and what he has performed.

If we don't know that, then how shall we believe that? So do we really know what was wrought at the cross and where Jesus says, it is finished? What is the it? And when, when he says finished, how thorough is that?

Is there anything left over after that, that God has not attended? Who has given us all the things that pertain to godliness and to life. So if we're falling short of that and still living fretful, self-conscious, lives, it's either we don't know the provision that has been made, or we have not the faith to believe for it, or perversely, we actually enjoy this self-consciousness and kicking of ourselves and self-pitying.

There's a perverse kind of enjoyment. If you want to see this, talk to my mother. Her whole life is predicated on self-pity. This one failed her, that one failed her, this is wrong, that's wrong. She enjoys.

These Jewish women, these widows, what else do they occupy themselves with? Failed possibilities. My brother Lenny was such a one. If only he had done this rather than that. If only he had this happen rather than that happen, his whole life, he was continually living in the past of unfulfilled or failed locations.

So to be saved is to be delivered. And Chambers knows this reality and expresses it like no one else that I know. The complete life is the life of a child. That doesn't mean goo-goo, that means childlike trust and confidence that it is finished, and that we are in the will of God, and that if we're not, he's well able to give us a check.

And in the absence of that check, go on with complete abandon and confidence that that is his will. For he is in us to will and to do of his good pleasure. And the God who created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is has not the power to check us if we begin to wander out of them?

Is he that weak that he cannot communicate to us that, uh-uh, you know, and you'll feel an inward check or a dis-ease, your rest begins to dissipate away, your peace? You know something needs to be attended, get back in line.

So when there has been the slightest deviation from the will of God, we begin to ask, what is thy will? A child of God never prays to be conscious that God answers prayer. He is so restfully certain that God always does answer prayer.

If we try to overcome self-consciousness by any common sense method, we will develop it tremendously. Isn't that a remarkable paradox? That in trying to get out of this terrible trap of self-consciousness, that the more we labor to get out of it, the more deeply we establish it.

Because we're still contemplating self. Jesus says, come unto me and I will give you rest. Christ consciousness will take the place of self-consciousness. And wherever Jesus comes, he establishes rest.

The rest of the perfection of activity that is never conscious of itself. You know that line is so superb that as gifted as Oswald Chambers was, he could not have composed it. That this is not only a statement about something, it is the statement of something.

The statement itself is the proof of what he's saying. This kind of sublime insight and the way it has been so phrased and expressed is itself Christ. This isn't the self-conscious man garnering his gifts and thinking how to say something cleverly.

This is a man beyond anything of that self-conscious kind. This was just quickened and took up his pen and he wrote it. But listen to this last line and say, could any man have composed that? Wherever Jesus comes, he establishes rest.

The rest of the perfection of activity that is never conscious of itself. It's not that rest comes from the absence of activity. That's not rest. That's kind of a death. We're not called to be inactive.

We're called not only to activity, but to supreme activity because he says, your work shall be greater than mine. So in the last days, we'll see an intensification of responsibility and works. But in that should be the rest of God.

It does not come out of our fretful self-conscious concern, but out of our childlike trust with the works of God issue. And that's why Jesus could say in his own time, when he was being accused of violating the Sabbath because he did some conspicuous things on the Sabbath.

And I think he did them on the Sabbath only to make this point. Because the men who accused him were men living on the other plane. And they thought that what issued from Jesus were the acts of Jesus.

But he said, no, he said, the Sabbath has not been violated. I didn't do anything. It's the Father who doeth the works. Go take your complaint to him. See what I mean? He was in the rest of God. And why is it that Jesus rose early in the morning while it was yet dark and found a place apart to pray?

Was it prayer to give, to load up petitions before the Father? I'm sure there must have been some, but I think more likely and more profoundly, a time of communion with the Father, a reunion, and the necessity again to have his spiritual batteries charged by being in the presence of God in prayer.

Prayer is more than petition. And in that he would receive the thoughts of the Lord. And then when the daylight began to break, the people would submerge him on litters and the insane and the demon-possessed and the sick.

And he was swamped and carried on all through the day. And he healed them all out of a remarkable energy that was imparted in his union with the Father in prayer. And he would say, the words that I speak are not my words, but the words that my Father has given me.

I had the feeling this morning, and I saw on some other occasions when we begin 7 a .m. a little bit hungover, I want to ask the brethren, I said, didn't you have a good night's rest? I'm sure you had more hours of sleep than I did.

Or is it that your sleep is not as restful as it ought because you're a troubled soul and a lot of your energy is being eaten up in self-concern even in the night hours? You're not enjoying the rest.

And the fatigue that you experience is not from the want of chronological time in bed or in sleep. It's for the want of getting rid of the conflict that is robbing you of your energy and of your life that you carry with you even through the night hours.

And I think that, and this is my own experience, fewer and fewer hours of rest, more and more intensive activity, and yet we will not come unglued. We don't need the eight hours, and I think we'll find we don't even need the six hours because we are more properly established in the rest of God.

So Christ consciousness will take the place of self-consciousness wherever Jesus comes, or maybe where we come to him. He establishes rest, the rest of the perfection of activity that is never conscious of itself, and even that we are at rest in our activity.

That's the remarkable thing about it. When it's the Father who doeth the works there's even an energy that comes from God that is not of ourselves. So we haven't shifted gears. We're still clunking along at the world's level, though we're believers and have not appropriated the full provision of God that would distinguish our life as being different than other, than the mode by which men live who are outside the faith.

I think we should have longer lives chronologically, and more fruitful lives, and activity right till the end, just like with Moses. His eye was not dimmed right till the moment that our death is not because our body has fallen apart, more from fatigue and inward conflict and unresolved tensions and all these things that take their toll on the body, but because the purpose for our length of years has been fulfilled.

We have performed, we have run the course that was set before us, and now we go to our reward. It's not that we end because the machinery has broken down, because of the undue stress. I think there are more people dying today from stress, and that opens the door to other diseases than probably any other factor.

The modern life is full of stress, anxiety, fear, doubt, all those things for which the saints of God should be free. And our life is not terminated because our bodies have suffered the consequence of that stress, but because, as I've said, we have finished the course, that we have the days that the Lord has numbered for us.

We've learned to number our days, and we're not even conscious of its activity. So let that be an encouragement. He says, come to me and I will give you rest. So come out of your self-consciousness where the enemy would like to keep you, because there you're only treading water, and come unto me.

Shift that gears, make that transition, and that will be your rest. Trust the Lord. You're in his will. He's in you to will and to do of his good pleasure. You're here because he's brought you. And if there's any change that needs to be wrought, the Lord knows how to effect it.

Maybe in the light of our conversation now, neither condemn yourself. No man now is there to condemn you. But don't remain under the condemnation by your own self-condemnation, for neither do I condemn you.

And if I don't condemn you, don't you condemn yourself. And so I think that that woman was totally delivered by that word. And I wish she's the same one who poured the anointing oil upon Jesus in gratitude for the great deliverance that was effected.

So self-condemnation is a curse, and an unnecessary curse. And Jesus did it all. And he doesn't condemn us, and neither would we, though we have reason. I mean, who is not marked with failure and defect?

And he doesn't want us to be blithely pass it over. Pause, be sober, bring it before him, repent, receive forgiveness, but don't remain rewing over that thing, and let it become a canker, if not a cancer.

Jeremiah's Prophetic Faithfulness Under Persecution

Okay, or we will never serve in a Jeremiah fashion. Can you imagine if Jeremiah was saddled with all of this terrible self-consciousness? Because the guy was daily barraged as a traitor. His word from the Lord was contrary to the whole conventional wisdom of the ruling class of his generation, who were going to oppose Babylon and fight it out.

And that was the honorable, and God would be with us, and he's not going to allow his own city to be taken and destroyed. But his counsel was surrender. It sounds like cop-out. And in fact, it was considered traitorous.

And if you did your homework and read up, you read where they condemned him for robbing the nation of its ability to fight. He was demoralizing those that would resist Babylon by telling them that there's no point in resisting.

It's not a people that you're laboring against, you're fighting against God. It's God who has determined that Babylon will be your judgment, and it's in vain for you to fight against it. And if you'll fight against it, it will result in your extinction.

But if you'll surrender to it, he will preserve your life. But it sounds like a subversive message, and he's the only one speaking it. So if a man had doubt and was anxious and fretful and fearful, what a way in which the enemy could have sifted him and left him just as a hulk, incapable of anything.

Should I? Shouldn't I? Is this me? Is this God? How do I? This can't be right. And all those guys be wrong. This doesn't sound wise. This sounds suicidal. You don't yield to the enemy. Remember Better Red Than Dead at a time when the Soviet Union was a great threat to peace and the issue was to what degree would nations condescend or infuriate this powerful bear to the point where it would drop its atomic load on us and we'd be finished.

And what the phrase came out in those days, Better Red Than Dead. Better to surrender to their imperialist and communist design than to oppose them and to be obliterated. In a sense, that's the kind of prophetic counsel that Jeremiah was giving in his time to his nation.

It has every earmark of being traitorous. So if I'm just repeating myself, but it's worth it. If ever the man was not in the peace of God, was not confident that when he said thus saith the Lord, it was a thus saith the Lord, that his counsel was not coined out of his own mind, but that it came from God, it was understood and tempered in the context of his whole theological understanding of the covenant, failure, curse, and judgment, then he would have been so rattled as to have been of no earthly good.

But we don't see any evidence of that in terms of his own self-doubt. We do hear complaints against God that he's suffering rejection and heartache because he takes all these things to heart. He sees the impending death of his own nation and in great detail does he describe what they're going to pass through to the point where in the siege of Jerusalem, they will be eating their own young.

They will resort to cannibalism and that came true. And the great people Israel reduced to the most animalistic level out of a survival in a siege that they need not have experienced if they had only heeded the voice of the prophet and surrendered.

And he has to eat that. And it's not unusual that we see in the prophets where they have to eat the scroll, eat the word. God touches their lips as he did with Isaiah and I think with Jeremiah also and gives them his word.

But the consequence of it, the pain of it, the anguish of it, they have healed the sickness of my daughter lightly. They say peace, peace. Imagine how that felt for that man. The false prophets are saying peace, peace, but he knows that he knows that there's nothing but destruction and devastation ahead and they will not hear him.

That he alone has the word and it's being rejected and that his very life is threatened because of his insistence on that word. That rightly does Gerhard von Rad talk about the martyrdom of Jeremiah. And we don't even know how Jeremiah's natural life ended.

It took place in Egypt. He was likely stoned to death because even in Egypt, those that were cast out of Israel in exile in Egypt took up again with the gods of Baal and all of the deities of the pagan world.

And he was again reproving them in Egypt for the very thing for which they were cast out of Israel. And the legend that we don't know for a fact, but the surmise is that he did not die in bed. That these exasperated people had enough of him, finally stoned him to death in Egypt.

Church legend says that Isaiah was sawn in half. The prophets so rile up an anger against themselves like no other. So even in Revelation where we read about the two witnesses in Jerusalem, the prophets who can bring fire out of their mouths to destroy those who oppose them and are finally slain.

That when they are slain and the people would not allow them to be buried. They wanted to luxuriate in seeing them in the streets of Jerusalem dead for three days. They so despised these men. They so hated their guts that they loved the death that had come to them and wanted to see their bodies actually fester and decay and would not even give them the privilege and the basic amenity of a burial.

And God raised, resurrected them right up out of that death. But it says that the people began to give gifts to one another because those who had tormented, those who dwelt on the earth were now dead.

These prophets tormented those who dwell on the earth to the point where they not only desired but they luxuriated in the death that came to those men. And every once in a while, and especially now in more recent years and months, I have to stop myself when I'm speaking somewhere before a congregation.

I say, you know, I feel like I'm, am I tormenting you? I have to stop and ask them, your faces seem to indicate that I'm tormenting you. Am I saying something that is making you patently unhappy? Were you expecting another kind of word but you're receiving something that is really chafing you?

And it's a form of torment. So there's something about the prophetic word that is so incongruent, so out of sorts with the temper and mindset and wisdom of their generation, that their speaking is the most, give me a word, it exacerbates their hearers.

They cannot bear to hear them. And just like Stephen when he gave in Acts 7, the history of Israel, and then he concluded by saying, as your fathers have done, always done, you do also. You do always grieve the Holy Spirit.

And they rushed upon him and gnashed upon him with their teeth. They put their fingers in their ears. They could not bear to hear the word of God through the man and they had to extinguish him. There's the first martyr who died because of his speaking.

Now if he only played his cards right and was more politic and abbreviated his statement and was not so abrasive, he could have survived. But he spoke the word of God as it was given and it precipitated his own death.

So also Jeremiah and all the prophets before us and so also the prophets of our own and final generation, your word will kill you because the world doesn't want to hear it and likely not the church either, the people of God.

So he says that they will kill us and claim they're doing God a service. There's a little indication of what we can expect in the last days. Interrupt me at any time. Some thought, for those of you who weren't here in our prayer time, I was encouraging our class to engage in corporate exegesis.

I don't have any particular insight into the chapter where Jeremiah is cast into the cistern, but I'm inviting everyone to wrestle with that text, put questions to it, examine it, bring forth out of it a corporate exegesis, a corporate understanding that the best theology of the last days will not be through individual geniuses like Karl Barth or Gerhard von Rahn, but the exercise of God's people dealing with a text together.