Sunday Morning, November 17, 2019 AM

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Sunday Morning, November 17, 2019 AM “That Ain’t Right!” Jeremiah 34:1-22

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you have made, we will rejoice and be glad in it. For Christ is
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King and his glory clothes us who are in him by faith alone, by your grace alone.
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So we give you the glory alone. I intercede for those who cannot be here presently with us.
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I pray that you would comfort them and encourage them. I pray for those who are sick that you would heal them and restore them.
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Those who are suffering from doubt and discouragement, that you would fill them with your spirit, that they would know your joy, and that your joy would be our strength.
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And I pray Father for our opportunity this morning to to read your word, to study it, to think about it, to treasure it, and apply it to our lives.
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Lord we need your help for this. We are but children.
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We need your help. We need your grace to be fed from your word.
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And so we ask that you would grace us with these blessings. We ask for these things in the name of Christ.
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Amen. We'll be in Jeremiah chapter 34 this morning.
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It's a rather lengthy chapter. I don't think I'll read all of it for you this morning in one standing, but we will end up reading all of it before we're done, if the
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Lord wills. We have been giving some attention to the very last days of Jeremiah, in which the armies of Babylon are surrounding the city
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Jerusalem. There is no hope. Jerusalem will fall. The Babylonians will come crashing through the gates and through the walls and kill most of everyone who is there.
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Only a few will survive. This is what we've been focusing on in the in the need for Jeremiah in these dark days to walk by faith and not by sight.
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The implications of these dark days for those exiles already living in Babylon.
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And now we come to chapter 34 in Jeremiah, a time in which a story that brings us back a little bit before things were so dire, before things were so dark.
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There was a little more hope in the city. A couple of the armed cities outside of Jerusalem still stood.
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There wasn't as much terror and panic within the city. Jeremiah was not in jail yet.
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He was still able to preach and move about freely among the people. And so we're backing up a little bit in the timeline to hear a message, a prophecy against the reigning
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King Zedekiah. So at this point I advise you to stand with me as I begin reading
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Jeremiah 34, beginning in verse 1. The Spirit of Christ speaks through his prophet.
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Here are the words of our sovereign Jesus Christ. The word which came to Jeremiah from the
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Lord, when Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon and all his army, with all the kingdoms of the earth that were under his dominion and all the peoples were fighting against Jerusalem and against all its cities, saying,
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Thus says the Lord God of Israel, Go and speak to Zedekiah, king of Judah, and say to him,
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Thus says the Lord, Behold, I am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he will burn it with fire.
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You will not escape from his hand, for you will surely be captured and be delivered into his hand, and you will see the king of Babylon eye to eye, and he will speak with you face to face, and you will go to Babylon.
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Hear the word of the Lord, O Zedekiah, king of Judah. Thus says the Lord concerning you, You will not die by the sword.
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You will die in peace. And as spices were burned for your fathers, the former kings who were before you, so they will burn spices for you, and they will lament for you.
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Alas, Lord, for I have spoken the word, declares the Lord. Then Jeremiah the prophet spoke all these words to Zedekiah, king of Judah, in Jerusalem, when the army of the king of Babylon was fighting against Jerusalem and against all the remaining cities of Judah, that is,
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Lachish and Ezekiah, for they alone remained as fortified cities among the cities of Judah.
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The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord after king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people who were in Jerusalem to proclaim release to them, that each man should set free his male servant, and each man his female servant, a
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Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, so that no one should keep them, a Jew, his brother, in bondage. And all the officials and all the people obeyed who had entered into the covenant that each man should set free his male servant, and each man his female servant, so that no one should keep them any longer in bondage.
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They obeyed and set them free, but afterward they turned around and took back the male servants and the female servants whom they had set free, and brought them into subjection for male servants and for female servants.
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Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Thus says the Lord God of Israel, I made a covenant with your forefathers in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage, saying,
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At the end of seven years each of you shall set free his Hebrew brother who has been sold to you, and has served you six years.
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You shall send him out free from you, but your fathers did not obey me or incline their ear to me.
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Although you recently had turned and done what is right in my sight, each man proclaiming release to his neighbor, and you had made a covenant before me in the house which is called by my name, yet you turned and profaned my name.
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And each man took back his male servant, and each man his female servant, whom you had set free according to their desire, and you brought them into subjection to be your male servants and female servants.
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This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. We live in a world that so often puts on the pretentious airs of humble uncertainty.
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If you speak certainly about anything in history, if you speak certainly about something being right or something being wrong, you will certainly be accused of arrogance.
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Only the humble people are open to all suggestions.
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It's truly the humble people who are not certain about anything. This is the kind of world in which we live.
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Moral relativism is worn like a cloak of diplomatic immunity. There's always some way to explain away whatever it is that someone does with some kind of moral relativism.
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And in this world where we have pretentious airs of humble uncertainty, where moral relativism is worn like a diplomatic cloak of immunity, there sure are a whole lot of folks who are outraged about absolute wrongs.
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Especially when those wrongs are aimed at them, or somewhere within a 50 mile radius of them.
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You know, a monument is left up, or a monument is taken down. Somebody goes to jail.
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Somebody doesn't go to jail. An awful story comes streaming across our newsfeed, and our internal judge involuntarily slams down the gavel.
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Guilty! And sometimes we even hear someone voicing aloud the definitive verdict, that ain't right.
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Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Because we're made in God's image. We're made in God's image, so we cannot help but operate with some innate sense of right and wrong.
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The conscience which God has written upon our hearts is enough to render us accountable to God and armchair judges.
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But in our fallibility, in our corruption, in our depravity, we remain dependent upon God's revelation for accurate judgment.
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Every case we rule on in our personal courts must be appealed to God's higher court for the proper verdict.
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For the final verdict. Something that this passage reminds me of is this.
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We must submit our categories of right and wrong to God's definitions. We must submit our categories of right and wrong to God's definitions.
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And by categories, I also mean feelings. I also mean instincts.
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When we feel that something is right or wrong, or we just instinctively know that something is right or wrong.
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And I also mean our experiential precedence.
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Well, I was treated that way one time, and I felt like that was wrong. Therefore, since I see this over here, that must be wrong too.
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All of our categories for right and wrong must be submitted to God's definitions for what right and wrong are.
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And we need God's revelation for that. In this passage,
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Jeremiah 34, Jeremiah 34 is thematically constructed like a chiasm.
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If you don't know what a chiasm is, then imagine your friendly neighborhood pond. And there are rocks around the pond.
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The ring around the pond is, of course, green. And near the middle of the pond, there is a little stick sticking out of the water.
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So you're gonna aim at that stick. And you're gonna take a stone, and you're gonna toss it and see if you can land it dead center in the pond.
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And when the stone hits, there's a splash. And then the ripples come out like this. Right?
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More than one ripple, several ripples come out from where you made your splash. That's a chiasm.
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But there are, in this passage, ripples out here that parallel in theme and thought. Ripples here that parallel in theme and thought.
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Ripples here that parallel in theme and thought. And the heart of the matter right in the middle of the text.
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Many different passages in the Old Testament function this way. This is the way that Hebrews often, the
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Jews would often write in terms of concentric circles with the very heart of the matter, the most important point, right in the middle.
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We like to put the most important point right at the front. Like I did today in my sermon.
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I gave you the title, and I gave you my proposition. We must submit our categories of right and wrong to God's definitions.
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See, I started with that. That's how we think. The Jews would write sometimes in these sets of parallels.
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And so we're going to work our way in from the outer parallels right to the heart of the matter. And when we get there, you're not going to like what we find.
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Now on the outer edges of this pond, on the outer edges of this chiasm, we have
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God's wrath promised. God's wrath promised. Judgment is prophesied of in verses 1 through 3.
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And in verses 21 and 22, the outer edges. I know that's surprising to you that in the book of Jeremiah, judgment was prophesied.
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Notice, the word of the Lord, the word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, verse 1, when Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and all his army, with all the kingdoms of the earth that were under his dominion, and all the peoples were fighting against Jerusalem and against all its cities, saying, now the word came to Jeremiah from the
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Lord, and what does this word say? The word says to Jeremiah, thus says the
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Lord God of Israel. Go and speak to Zedekiah and say, thus says the
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Lord. To put it simpler, Christ came to Jeremiah and said, now you're gonna go talk to the king and here's what you're gonna say.
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Thus says the Lord, behold I am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he will burn it with fire.
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And you will not escape from his hand, and for you will surely be captured and delivered into his hand, and you will see the king of Babylon eye to eye, and he will speak with you face to face, and you will go to Babylon.
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This is not surprising that Jeremiah is once again promising judgment. He's been doing this for decades.
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Jeremiah was not like some prophets. Some prophets like Isaiah were like a master at a grand piano, and had a very wide repertoire of things that he would write about.
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And there was, there are their poems, there are parables, there are very uplifting, soaring, glorious passages, and there are also judgment passages, and there's all sorts of variety in Isaiah.
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Jeremiah is more like a tuba player, and although he has some range, it's limited.
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And he just doesn't do what some of the other prophets do. He's just focused on judgment.
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The way that God put it in Jeremiah chapter 1, is that Jeremiah would be like a fortified city, a pillar of iron, with walls of bronze, against his whole land.
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Against his whole land. He was a fortified city to the kings of Judah, to its princes, against the people of the land.
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He would be like a rock that would constantly fend off their attacks at him, and say, no, thus saith the
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Lord, no, thus saith the Lord, over and over again. And in this case, it is no different.
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We are informed that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, has not yet destroyed all of the cities in Judea.
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He is busily taking them out. Jerusalem is still standing, however. The armies of Nebuchadnezzar are not right up against the walls, like they were a couple of chapters before.
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But we are reminded that Nebuchadnezzar is king of the world empire of Babylon, and he has been steadily wiping out all opposition to his throne.
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God said that would happen through Jeremiah. Jeremiah actually sent word to all the surrounding nations, and all the surrounding city -states, saying,
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God has given all of you to the king of Babylon, and he's going to come, and he's going to judge and rule over you.
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You better submit to him, otherwise you will be destroyed. Of course, Jeremiah's own people did not listen to that word.
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They rejected that word. Zedekiah rebelled against Babylon, and he and the people of Jerusalem are in the process of opposing the
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Babylonians. Sparks of resistance have lit a fire of rebellion, and God sends his spirit -anointed wet blanket to smother all hope.
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And that's what he does. And Jeremiah lays the wet blanket on twice, at the beginning of the passage and at the end of the passage.
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Notice verses 21 and 22. Zedekiah, king of Judah, and his officials, I will give into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of those who seek their life, and into the hand of the army of the king of Babylon, which has gone away from you.
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Behold, I am going to command, declares the Lord, I will bring them back to the city, and they will fight against it, and take it, and burn it with fire, and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation without inhabitant.
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Period. So that's the way that the passage starts and ends.
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The same thing. Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon will destroy you. There's no way out. No escape.
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God has given the city, the king, the officials, indeed all of the cities of Judah to the king of Babylon. That is
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God's judgment upon his people, which he promised even from the days of Moses. Now, what did
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Zedekiah, the nobles, the officials, the princes, the priests, and the people think about that?
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What did they think about that? What did they think of that message that Jeremiah preached again and again?
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Well, later on, we see that they isolated Jeremiah, then they arrested Jeremiah, they beat him, they persecuted him, they rejected him.
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That's what they thought of his message. What do we think of that?
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What do we think about this message of judgment that Jeremiah keeps sounding out again and again?
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What do you think about God handing one people group over to another people group to be slaughtered?
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What do you think of that? Because that's what he says is going to happen. And it did happen.
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What do you think about God's ways of judgment? I think a whole lot of people today would protest.
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Even people from the pew would protest God's involvement in any kind of judgment, either on earth or in eternity.
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Isn't it God's job to be the eternal grandfather, if not the eternal puppy? It's just always loving and accepting.
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God uses Babylonians to judge Jews? That ain't right! That was the protest of Habakkuk.
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If you read it clearly, or Habakkuk if you're from across the pond, he protested.
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It's like, God, I know we're evil. I know we're wicked. We deserve judgment. But the Babylonians are worse than us, and you're using a people who are more wicked than us to judge us?
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That ain't right! So what do we think about judgment? You know, protesting any injustice on the part of the
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Creator who owns everything, who is the standard for right and wrong, just and unjust.
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Protesting any kind of seeming injustice on the part of the Creator proves to be a rather large nothing burger.
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What categories are you using to call God unjust?
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They're his categories. He declares it.
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We must submit to it. Jesus Christ prophesied judgment. Judgment upon his generation.
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Judgment upon all mankind, promising that the justice of God would be done.
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A precedent for the nonsense of putting God on trial and trying to debate whether or not he's good, precedent for that kind of nonsense has been well established since the days of Job, if not the garden itself.
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This judgment is prophesied, but it's also personalized. It's personalized. Verses four and five, here's the next ripple in.
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Yet hear the word of the Lord, O Zedekiah, king of Judah, that says the Lord concerning you, you will not die by the sword.
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You will die in peace. And the spices were burned for your fathers, the former kings who were before you.
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So they will burn spices for you, and they will lament for you. Alas, they will lament for you, saying what?
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Alas, Lord, for I have spoken the word, declares the Lord. Now this sounds like Zedekiah is gonna make out okay, you know?
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He's not gonna be judged at all. But we already know from other contexts, Zedekiah is going to be arrested, brought before the king of Babylon, where he's going to watch the king of Babylon kill all of his sons, and then the king of Babylon is going to burn out his eyes, and then
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Zedekiah is going to live in prison in Babylon, blind for the rest of his life, and the last thing he saw were his sons being killed.
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That's the judgment that awaits Zedekiah. But he's gonna die in peace. He's not gonna die by the sword, like so many of his countrymen are going to die.
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And it says that when he dies, his people are actually going to honor him in his death, burn spices for him, lament for him in a way that would be befitting a king, to honor him.
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Now for the significance of that, there was a good king named
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Jehoshaphat. And when he died, his wicked son, Jehoram, reigned in his place.
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Jehoram was wicked and evil. He killed his brothers and lived like Ahab, but he lived it in Judah.
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And the nations that Judah had once subdued rose up against Judah due to Jehoram's sin, and he died in agony under God's judgment.
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And this is the final word in his reign, 2 Chronicles 21 19 through 20. Now it came about in the course of time, at the end of two years, that his bowels came out because of his sickness, and he died in great pain.
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And his people made no fire for him, like the fire for his fathers. He was 32 years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years.
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And he departed with no one's regret. And they buried him in the city of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.
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So Jehoram was a bad king, and he oversaw the decline of Judah, the decline of Jerusalem.
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And when he died in painful agony under the judgment of God, the people did not lament him and did not bury him with honor.
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And yet, what about Zedekiah? Zedekiah didn't oversee the decline of Jerusalem. He oversaw the destruction of Jerusalem, the devastation of Jerusalem, the end of Judah as a nation.
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And so what he did was seemingly worse than what Jehoram did.
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And yet, how is he remembered? How is he buried? How is he honored?
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It would seem that Zedekiah deserved at least the Jehoram funeral package, perhaps worse.
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But Zedekiah is honored. That ain't right. How does that work out?
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Why is it this way? Zedekiah was plenty evil. 2 Chronicles 36, 11 through 13, says
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Zedekiah was 21 years old when he became king, and he reigned 11 years in Jerusalem. He did evil in the sight of the
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Lord his God. He did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke for the Lord. He also rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar, who made him swear allegiance by God.
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But he stiffened his neck and hardened his heart against turning to the Lord God of Israel.
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He was a wicked king, but he doesn't die in disgrace. That doesn't seem right.
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That doesn't seem right. So, in peace he died, but at least he tried.
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There was something he tried to do that perhaps, for someone, it might seem that makes a difference.
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That maybe Zedekiah did something that was somewhat noble, and so maybe that's why he had a better end than Jehoram.
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What was that? Well, it was a matter of contrast. What did Zedekiah do that his officials and nobles didn't do?
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Why did they die by the sword in agony, without honor, but he died at peace with honor?
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What was the difference between them? Well, this is the other side of the ripple. In Jeremiah 34 verses 18 through 20, on the first side of it, we hear about Zedekiah's end.
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Well, what about the end of his officials? What about the end of the leadership in Jerusalem? Verse 18,
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I will give the men who have transgressed my covenant, who have not fulfilled the words of the covenant which they made before me, when they cut the calf in two and passed between its parts, the officials of Judah and the officials of Jerusalem, the court officers and the priests and all the people of the land, who pass between the parts of the calf.
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I will give them into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of those who seek their life, and their dead bodies will be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth.
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To put it simply, what had happened was they had made a covenant in Jerusalem, in the presence of the Lord, in the temple courts.
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And to make a covenant, literally in the Hebrew, is to cut a covenant. And so they took animals, they cut them in half, dragged them apart, several animals all in a row, cut them in half, dragged them apart, making a very bloody path.
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And then they all walked down the bloody path saying, I promise to do what
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I promised to do, and if I don't, may I be like these animals. And God obliged them, because they didn't do what they said they were going to do, which was to release their slaves.
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Now, Zedekiah was the one who initiated this whole thing. He said, let's make a covenant before the
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Lord, let's do the right thing here, let's let our slaves go free like we were supposed to all along.
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Well, he got the thing started, and he did his part as the king, but the officials and the priests and the people did not uphold their part.
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They went back on their word, and thus God says their judgment will be appropriately applied.
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And it seems that their judgment, their disaster, God's judgment on them was far worse than what happened to Zedekiah.
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And maybe it was just the grace of God on Zedekiah. Maybe he really didn't do all that much.
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And we're floundering, trying to find what made the difference, why does Zedekiah end up kind of okay, not really, but then all of these people end up this way.
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And we're trying to find the reason why. Why do we do that? Because we seek justice in this world.
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We want things to be justly arbitrated. We want it to be set out that these injustices and these wrongs and these acts of wickedness will not go unpunished, but will be rightly dealt with.
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And why do we desire that? We desire that because we're made in the image of God. Sometimes we wonder how there can be any justice in this world.
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People get away with murder because of their power and position and wealth, and we say that ain't right.
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And if we're especially angry with some person or some personality for the wrongdoing, and then they don't receive as much judgment as it's clear that they really deserve, all because, all because of their position or maybe their outcome is lessened because they point to something, well
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I did this good thing over here so you shouldn't punish me this hard, and then we say that ain't right. That's not justice.
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We have to remember though, we have to submit our categories of right and wrong to God's definitions. And if God said to Zedekiah, you will not be judged to the severity as your people, what he did was right.
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What he did was just. He is the very definition of righteousness. He is the very definition of justice.
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And we have to submit our categories of right and wrong to God's definitions.
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Now notice that God was personal in the judgment. God was personal in the judgment. At the end of all things, at the end of all things, the judgment is personal.
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Christ the Creator looks eyeball to eyeball with the human being that he has made, for whom, that this human being exists for Christ, and he will look at the person eyeball to eyeball, and the judgment is going to be personal.
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God, Jesus has made us. He has given us all that we have. He has given us instructions and orders, and he's going to say, where's the fruit?
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Right? That's why we have, the judgment is personal. Person to person.
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The parables are, the master spoke to this steward. Right? The judgment is personal.
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What have you done? What have you done? The judgment is personal, which is why the cross is personal.
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That's why Jesus Christ died for persons. That's why it's
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Jesus Christ died for me. That's why Jesus Christ died for you, personal.
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You have to have a personal Savior, because there's a personal judge, and God is the one who decides the categories of right and wrong according to his own nature.
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And so we must go to the cross where Christ died, in our place, and for our sake, that we may have his personal righteousness covering us.
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It's our only, it's our only claim. You know, I don't know about you, Zedekiah may have died in a less, slightly less awful way than the rest of his nobles and citizens, but what comfort is that?
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What comfort is it if I'm just a little less wicked than my neighbors and my everlasting judgment is just a little less awful?
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What comfort is that? What comfort is that? God is personal in his justice.
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He's going to render exactly what everybody deserves, but I don't want what I deserve. I want what
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Christ deserves. I want what Christ deserves. It's everlasting favor, everlasting love and acceptance.
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So he's my only claim. It's my only claim. We have justice, we have judgment prophesied, judgment personalized on the outer areas of this text, but as we move in, we see that God's judgment is coming because God's name is profaned.
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God's wrath is promised because God's name has been profaned. And this is all about how
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Zedekiah and the leaders in Jerusalem made covenant and broke covenant. And so in verses 6 through 11, we hear about these promises that were made.
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Jeremiah the prophet spoke all these words to Zedekiah, king of Judah in Jerusalem, when the army of the king of Babylon was fighting against Jerusalem and against all the remaining cities of Judah, that is
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Lachish and Ezekiah, for they alone remained as fortified cities among the cities of Judah.
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The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord after King Zedekiah had made a covenant, after King Zedekiah made a covenant with all the people who were in Jerusalem to proclaim release to them.
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To do what? That each man should set free his male servant and each man his female servant.
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Which male slaves? Which female slaves? All of them? No, a
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Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman. That's what the Mosaic law says.
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You can't keep a Hebrew slave for longer than six years, so that no one should keep them.
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A Jew is brother in bondage. Verse 10, and all the officials and all the people obeyed who had entered into the covenant, that each man should set free his male servant, each man his female servant, so that no one should keep them any longer in bondage.
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They obeyed and set them free. But afterward they turned around and took back the male servants and the female servants whom they had set free, and brought them into subjection for male servants and for female servants.
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With the Babylonian armies destroying the fortified cities of Judah and this great threat on the horizon, it seems it's time to do something, maybe to convince
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God to, you know, back the pressure off. So they look around, so what are we doing wrong?
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Obviously we've been keeping our slaves longer than the six years, and so we've got to release them. So they try to do something right.
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But this is not godly sorrow, this is worldly sorrow, because you know it's worldly sorrow because they repent from their repentance.
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The worldly sorrow produces a repentance where you turn away from your sin for a little while, and then you repent on your repentant, and you go back to what you were doing before.
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That's worldly sorrow, which leads to death. It wasn't godly sorrow, a true brokenness, a true forsaking of sin.
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Now Zedekiah tries to do something, at least with the appearance of right. He's no
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Hezekiah or Josiah, but at least he made the effort to correct some kind of long -standing injustice, which was this.
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Every Sabbath year, every seventh year, slaves generally were given the opportunity to leave their enslavement and to go back to their clan, to their lot, and live free again.
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There was no prison system in Judah. There was no prison system in the life of the nation of Israel.
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Most of the time, if you did something really bad, you were executed. If you stole, or if you were unwise and foolish, and caused great economic harm to somebody else, then you would become that person's slave and work it off.
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But then you would be released on the Sabbath year. Now the release every seventh year of the slaves, that practice had long been abandoned.
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We hear from 2nd Chronicles 36 to 21, that God's judgment upon Judah was connected to the
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Sabbaths, which the Jews had not observed. And if you're not resting your fields every seven years, you're sure not letting your slaves go free every seven years.
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And that wasn't right. That wasn't right. So Zedekiah began a social justice campaign, and led a pledge to end this oppression.
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It was a big, showy covenant cutting, with all the top names and their full virtue signaling regalia.
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A real success, except for the part of it actually doing anything. And we're not told exactly under what pretenses, or guile, or force, but these slaves who were released, weren't really released.
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And they were brought back in to their enslavement. But the worst part of it, the worst part of it, was they broke the third commandment.
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They broke the third commandment. Verses 15 and 16. God says, although you recently, although recently, and here we're on the other side of the ripple, although recently you had turned and done what is right in my sight, each man proclaiming release to his neighbor, and you had made a covenant before me in the house which is called by my name, that you turned and profaned my name, and each man took back his male servant, and each man his female servant, whom you had set free according to their desire, and you brought them into subjection to be your male servants and female servants.
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You see how verse 11 parallels with verses 15 and 16. So we're honing in on the main theme.
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They broke the third commandment. Zedekiah led this movement to take, to make this covenant, and they did it in front of the temple.
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They did it in the courts of the temple. That's where you would do something like this. And you may imagine the blowing of trumpets and the long -winded prayers that attended these acts of penance and reparations.
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But in any case, they cut the covenant in the name of the Lord in the courts of his temple. They cut all the animals in half.
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They walked down the middle of that sober, bloody path, and they said, I vow, I solemnly vow to release all of my
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Hebrew slaves according to the laws of Moses, and then they broke the covenant.
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They broke their vows. And when they did that, God judged them.
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Now it wasn't just because they broke covenant, but because they had also attached God's name to the whole process.
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They attached God's name to the whole process. We're doing this act of social justice in the name of God, and then nothing ever actually happened.
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They plastered the name of God all over their campaign. They cited biblical phrases. They co -opted biblical definitions.
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They colonized spiritual spaces, all to advance the nobility of their names and their social justice efforts.
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But really, they're just taking God's name in vain, saying really nice things about God, but not actually doing what was right.
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That part was lacking. That part was missing. This is the Achilles heel of every pagan societal repair in the name of Christ.
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It immediately slides sideways into subversive exploitation of those that says that they were going to help, and it's just profane.
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Using God's name in vain. That ain't right. There's some poetic justice in verse 17, which is in parallel with the justice promised.
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Notice that God's, so they said, they made a covenant that they were going to release, they're going to release their slaves.
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They didn't do it, so then God said, I'm going to release you. That's the parallel.
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Verse 17, therefore, thus says the Lord, you have not obeyed me in proclaiming release each man to his brother and each man to his neighbor.
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Behold, I am proclaiming a release to you, declares the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine, and will make you a terror to all the kingdoms of the earth.
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Aren't you glad when God makes a covenant, he doesn't release?
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When he makes a covenant through Christ, who never fails, he never lets go of Christ or anyone who is in Christ.
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We are in Christ's hand, which is in the
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Father's hand, and no one's going to snatch us out of his hand.
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There's no release. There's no failure. Jesus, in Luke chapter 4, verses 16 through 21,
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Jesus comes teaching his home crowd. What does he say?
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He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and as was his custom, he entered the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read.
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And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him, and he opened the book and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the
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Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the
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Lord. He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him, and began to say to them,
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Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And if you want to know what it means to be released from oppression and slavery by Christ, read
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Romans 6. Because it means being delivered from oppression and slavery to the enemy, to wickedness, to sin, and being brought into the enslavement under Jesus Christ.
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A slave of righteousness is the Christian. A slave of Christ is the saint.
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At the heart of the whole matter, in Jeremiah 34 verses 12 through 14, at the heart of the whole matter is this fact that God's Word was defied.
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That's the problem. God's wrath was promised because his name was profaned. At the heart of the whole matter, at the center of this text, the main point is this, that God's Word was defied.
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Notice the emphasis on his revelation in verse 12, and at the end of verse 14,
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Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Thus says the Lord.
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I love that. At the end of verse 14, Your forefathers did not obey me, nor incline their ear to me.
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It's about the Word of God, isn't it? It's about what was said by the Lord, and whether or not the people were listening and receiving it.
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That's the heart of the whole matter. That's the heart of the whole matter. Why didn't they receive what the
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Lord was saying? Because they didn't like what they heard. That's obvious.
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They didn't like what they heard. It did not match up with their values, which had evolved and progressed over time.
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They had already left those old -fashioned, restrictive ways behind. Jerusalem was Disneyland. It was a world in which everyone pursued their own dreams, believed in themselves, and always, always followed their hearts.
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It's also known as the days of the judges. In those days, there was no king in Israel, and every man did whatever was right in his own eyes.
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When God's revelation confronted them, what happened? They sensed the threat to their self -actualization, and they said,
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That ain't right that I would be conformed to doing things I don't agree with. God's revelation was defied, and that means that God's redemption was defied.
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Verse 13, thus says the Lord God of Israel, I made a covenant with your forefathers in the day that I brought them up out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage.
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See, they made a covenant to release their slaves. God made a covenant to release his slaves who followed through.
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God did. God, when he made a covenant to release his slaves, he did it.
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They made a covenant in his name to release their slaves, and they didn't do it. And in fact, the regulations for how they were to do slavery was based on how he freed them from their slavery.
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Verse 14, at the end of seven years each of you shall set free his Hebrew brother who has been sold to you and has served you six years, and you shall send him out free from you.
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That is a summary of God's many regulations of slavery. In your handout, you'll see some other passages to go read the fine print.
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But at the heart of why Jerusalem was going to be burned to the ground, the reason why the leadership were all to face personal judgment, was because of their hypocritical lip service to the redemption -based divine regulations that God gave for slavery.
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God told them how to do slavery rightly, to his glory, for one another's good.
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I told you you wouldn't like what was at the middle of the passage. Why? Because we live in a culture where if anyone ever says anything about any kind of slavery with anything less than foaming at the mouth vitriol, then you ain't right.
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Now, I know there's a few topics of conversations that we're going to be having around the Thanksgiving table. Hey, I was just thinking about slavery.
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No, we're probably not gonna talk about slavery around the Thanksgiving table. But you know, it is a biblical topic.
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It would be hard to avoid all 1 ,100 references to slavery in the
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Bible, wouldn't it? You'd have to be a fancy tap dancer, indeed, to pretend like slavery ain't there.
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Our familiarity with the biblical concepts of slavery remains foggy at best. I'll give you an example.
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This year, a leading evangelical at a major conference got carried away with his virtue signaling, and he was listening.
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He was listing the commandments of God. He said, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not enslave.
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I missed that one. But yeah, that's what we're expected to say.
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We have little conception today of the different forms of slavery used currently and historically.
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The slavery systemized by God in Israel is different than the slavery employed by other nations of the ancient
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Near East. Also different from the chattel slavery which sprawled across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America.
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Which is, of course, different from the citizen -backed incarcerated slavery federalized in our government today.
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It's all slavery, but it's different kinds. Our passage today tells us that slavery was not being practiced rightly in Judah.
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I want you to notice the fact that passage does not say slavery being practiced is wrong in and of itself.
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What it says is, and this is the problem we have, this is what we choke on if we're all up to date with our culture today, is this.
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The way in which the slavery was being practiced in Judah was wrong. That's what the text says, in agreement with many other passages in the
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Bible. So that brings our attention to the fact there's a standard for righteous,
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God -glorifying slavery and that's revealed in God's Word. Now I'm pressing the matter because I'm wondering if you're queasy about that.
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I'm wondering if you're queasy about that. Because if you're queasy about that, that unease in your heart will spread to what the
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Bible says about sexuality, what the Bible says about gender, what the Bible says about creation, what the
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Bible says about the atonement of Jesus Christ, what the Bible says about the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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When we get queasy about the clear and obvious meaning of the text, we're in the same trouble that Jeremiah's generation was in.
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It's a test case, isn't it? How are we defining right and wrong? Here's our challenge.
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Are we willing, no matter how complex, how controversial, how contentious an issue might be, to stubbornly insist on deriving our definitions of right and wrong from the
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Bible? That's where we've got to be, because we are the pillar and ground of the truth.
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We're the salt and light of the earth, and we can't get our definitions for right and wrong from anywhere else. There is a kind of hierarchy that's right, and a kind of hierarchy that is wrong, defined by God's Word.
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There's a kind of wealth and nation -building that is right, and the kind of wealth and nation -building that is wrong, defined by God's Word.
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There's a right kind of sexuality and a wrong kind of sexuality, defined by God's Word. There's a right kind of slavery and there's a wrong kind of slavery, defined by God's Word.
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What if we tried to do what Jeremiah's generation did, the leadership in Jerusalem? What if we tried to handle social issues with religious -sounding words, but no scripturally obedient follow -through?
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Well, that ain't right. What if we defied or ignored basic instructions from God's Word?
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That ain't right. What if we subjected God's words and our definitions for right and wrong to pagan sources of authority?
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Well, that ain't right. What if we employed critical race theory, intersectionality, and deconstructive analytical tools to the
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Bible, to our faith? Well, that ain't right. What if we depended on the world to tell us what our acceptable margins are for asserting right from wrong, and when we can speak and we can't speak?
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That ain't right. Why isn't it right? Because here's our standard for right and wrong.
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God gave us a clear, unfailing, inerrant Word all about His Son, and that's the one whom we're following anyway.
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So we're good to go. Scripture is sufficient. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for this passage where, at the heart of the whole matter, is a challenge to see whether we believe your
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Word, whether we say that what you have said is good, that we are in agreement with it.
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Father, give us the courage, give us the courage to get our definitions from your
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Word, and help us to be consistent, steady on in that, and not to use vague -sounding, foggy kinds of words.
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Help us be clear. Help us to be like children who believe their Heavenly Father, and echo the clear, the true, the good