In the last chapter, we looked at the way Jeremiah spoke God’s word into his own age. We saw how he preached judgment against a merely external religion, against the general apostasy, and against specific sins—adultery, lying, and hypocrisy. Jeremiah’s voice was raised against the travesty his own people had made of God’s revealed truth.
We turn now to examine not so much the sins of the people as the people themselves. Who was Jeremiah speaking to? Was it just the ordinary people in the next village? Whom did he accuse of turning away from God?
In Jeremiah 22:11, 12 we read, “For thus saith the Lord touching Shallum, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, who reigned instead of Josiah, his father, who went forth out of this place, He shall not return there any more, but he shall die in the place where they have led him captive, and shall see this land no more.” Here we find immediately the preaching of an utter destruction which includes the king of the land. Jeremiah 22:18, 19 has the same emphasis: “Therefore, thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah, my brother! or, Ah, sister! They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah, lord! or, Ah, his glory! He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”
Thus Jeremiah speaks soberly, using a very strong figure of speech. The judgment of God is coming upon this land because men have turned so far from Him that, rather than having the glorious funeral which the kings of Judah wanted to have, this king would be buried like an ass. How do you bury an ass? You drag him outside the city, abandon his carcass, and that’s that. Such is the kind of judgment that is coming from God upon the generation and the leaders who have turned away. Again in 25:9-11 we feel the emphasis of utter destruction: “Behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, saith the Lord, and Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against its inhabitants, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations. Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth.” Jeremiah’s generation was seeking everywhere for the voice of mirth, even where there was no real mirth. And God says, “I’m going to take away from them the voice of mirth.” “And what am I going to use as an instrument?” God asks. “I’m going to use a nation that is not My people, a military force that is not following the living God, and I’m going to use them against you.”
I must say, when I pray for my country and our culture, I do not pray for God’s justice. I can only plead for His mercy. If we had the justice of God, we would not have peace. We would have a situation like Jeremiah’s. How dare we pray for justice upon our culture when we have so deliberately turned away from God and His revelation? Why should God bless us? Jeremiah was counted a traitor because he spoke like this, but it is what God put in his mouth: “Yes, you’re the people of God; yes, externally you seem to have the real religion in the temple, but it’s worth nothing to Me; and because you have turned from Me and from the propositional truth that I have given you, I am going to send an overwhelming judgment upon you.” So I must say, for my generation and my country I pray for one thing—God’s mercy.
But for Jeremiah’s day the message of total destruction goes on: “And [I] will bring them against this land, and against its inhabitants, and against all these nations round about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations. Moreover, I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride. . . .” The central things of life are going to grind down to a close: “the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle”— that is, the conduct of business as well as the joy of marriage. “And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.” Then, of course, comes that marvelous promise: after seventy years God will return them to the land. But Jeremiah’s message to the generation to which he was preaching was destruction.
When Jeremiah preached destruction, he was not just talking in generalities. He preached against the dignitaries, the leaders of the land, who were drawing their people away from God. So we find in Jeremiah 8:1, “At that time, saith the Lord, they shall bring out the bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of his princes, and the bones of the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their graves.” That is, Jeremiah says, “I’m talking against you, O kings. I’m talking against you, O priests. I’m talking against you, O prophets.” Jeremiah preached against the dignitaries who might have been great in the hierarchy of that society and state, but who were leading the people astray. Today such dignitaries include not only church and governmental and judicial leaders, but those of education, the media and culture.
He continues this emphasis in 13:13, 14: “Then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land, even the kings who sit upon David’s throne, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness. And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the Lord.” He names those who are the leaders of the land, who stand in the social and state hierarchy—the kings, the prophets, and the priests. We also find a similar message toward the end of the book. (I am almost choosing at random, because the total message of Jeremiah is repeated over and over again throughout the many years he prophesied.) Thus in Jeremiah 34:19, 20: “The princes of Judah, and the princes of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all the people of the land, who passed between the parts of the calf [that is, who made a covenant in God’s name and then broke it], I will even give them into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of those who seek their life; and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the fowls of the heaven, and to the beasts of the earth.” It is easy to preach like this to the common people, but what Jeremiah did under the moving of God was to have the courage to vocalize and to verbalize the preaching of God against the dignitaries who could do something about it. He even dared to name them. He dared to say, “You are leading us astray, and God’s judgment is upon you.” Naturally, as in our own day, such preaching brings a repercussion from those in power in either the church or state.
Jeremiah did not just preach against the political dignitaries, but, more than anyone else, against the religious leaders who were leading the people away from the propositional revelation of God. In Jeremiah 2:8 he says, “The priests said not, Where is the Lord? And they that handle the law knew me not. The pastors also transgressed against me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not profit.”
And so he turns here and asks, “The religious leaders—are they leading you aright?”
And he says, “No.”
“Are they to be honored merely because they’re religious leaders?”
“Not if they’re not preaching the truth.”
Surely this has something to do with the message we must speak to our post-Christian world. We must treat men with love, we must treat them and talk to them humanly. But we must not tone down our message; the religious leaders of our day too are often leading people astray. There is nothing in the Bible that removes a man from under the judgment of Scripture just because he is a religious leader. In fact, it is the other way around.
Further, we find in Jeremiah 5:13, “And the prophets shall become wind, and the word is not in them; thus shall it be done unto them.” What’s the matter with the prophets? The trouble is they are not speaking for God. They are merely taking the social consensus of their day and speaking as though that was the Word of God. In 5:31, “The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and my people love to have it so; and what will ye do in the end of it all?”What of these priests? What of these prophets? They merely echo what everyone around them is saying. Surely that sounds familiar. When we listen to the religion that is preached in our generation, it is largely the same thing the unbelieving philosophers and sociologists are saying. The only difference is that theological language is used. But God says, “It will not do. This brings you under my judgment.”
In Jeremiah 12:10 God gives us a graphic picture of the destruction the religious leaders have brought on the people:
“Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.” The religious leaders have walked through God’s garden and destroyed it. In Switzerland, every blade of grass is precious; you dare not walk through any field. It would be like walking through someone’s rose garden. But here is God’s field, and someone has trampled down the grass. Is it the common man? No, not primarily. Rather, it is the religious leaders who made the garden a desolate, desolate wilderness. Surely then, we cannot fail to speak against the religious leaders, when they are the ones who are bringing the desolation.
In Jeremiah 23:1, the figure of speech changes: “Woe be unto the pastors who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the Lord.” Walking upon God’s garden has now become scattering the sheep. Who scatters the sheep? Again it is the religious leaders. “Therefore,” Jeremiah continues, “thus saith the Lord God of Israel against the pastors who feed my people, Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them; behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the Lord.” Don’t you care for the sheep? Well, then I will visit upon you the natural results of what you have taught. Malcolm Muggeridge, when he wrote in The New Statesman, “The Death Wish of the Liberal,” saw from his own liberal background exactly where liberalism has led. Removing the absolutes, liberalism has led into a wilderness. It has eliminated the categories that make the difference between love and non love It led us all the way to Antonioni’s movie Blow-up, advertised as “Murder without guilt, love without meaning.” The sheep are scattered.
The sheep of today are scattered even further than they were by the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day. At least the Jews had still some kind of gods, false as they were. Our generation has become so ridden with folly that it lives in a materialistic world, shut up finally to the flow of atoms, to the flow of consciousness, contemplating itself without categories and without values. And by the 1980s it had added the folly of a multitude of countless mysticisms. No wonder God says, “I am going to judge you for what you have done.” Who was responsible for this in Jeremiah’s day? The religious leaders. Who has done it in our own? Surely the greatest judgment must be not upon those who have destroyed from the outside. Certainly the greatest guilt rests upon the church which knew the truth, deliberately turned away from it, and now only presents men with relativism, an echo of modern secular thought.
Jeremiah continues in 23:11: “For both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in my house have I found their wickedness, saith the Lord.” It is a horrible thing to dwell in wickedness if you’re one of God’s people. But to bring the wickedness into the house of God is a double sin. And God says, “Where has this wickedness sprung from? It has sprung from My own house.” Likewise, in our own culture what has cut the ground from under the base was on the inside. In the days of deism in our country, it was indeed true that in places there were few Christians, but rarely did the church itself become deistic. Rather, although the churches may have shrunk in size, when a man entered the church usually he could hear the truth. But in our generation, when men listen at the doors of many churches, what they hear is non truth
Furthermore, we find these words in 23:13-16: “And I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria; they prophesied in Baal, and caused my people, Israel, to err.” That was in the northern kingdom. But now Jeremiah swings around to the southern kingdom, and he says, Are you better? “I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing; they commit adultery, and walk in lies; they strengthen also the hands of evildoers. . . .” What is this? Is it not situational ethics? Jeremiah continues: “. . . that none doth return from his wickedness; they are all of them unto me like Sodom, and its inhabitants as Gomorrah. Therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets, Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall; for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into all the land.” And 23:21, “I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran; I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.” They have come and spoken in the name of God, and they have said, “God says,” but they have not had the Word of God. It has merely been their own words welling up inside themselves and echoing the society which surrounds them. These men come and say, “Here is the message of God,” but it’s not. It’s the message of man.
Do you think God is going to take this lightly? If you believe that a holy God is really there, do you think He can take it lightly when people move among the people of God, and say, “This is the Word of God,” when they are speaking only from themselves and are directly contradicting what God has propositionally revealed? How do you expect God to take it lightly? What is He? Is He really an old man rocking in a chair, blind and hard of hearing?
Once more we read in 23:26: “How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart.” And finally, we read in 23:30, which is especially strong, “Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbor.” What do the prophets say? This prophet hears that prophet, and then he repeats the message. And all you hear are echoes. It is like being in a hollow, boarded-up building; all you hear is echo, echo, echo, echo. Study the theology of our own day and all you hear is the echo, echo, echo, ECHO! Echoing what? Echoing what this man says, what that man says, what materialistic sociology teaches, what materialistic psychology teaches, what materialistic economics teaches, what materialistic philosophy teaches. Echoing, echoing, echoing as though the words were sprinkled with holy water because they now repeat these same things in theological terms.
And do you expect God to sit there and just rock in the heavens and say, “Isn’t that nice; isn’t that nice; isn’t that nice”?What kind of a god do you have? And if such a god existed, what kind of a god would he be? What would be the use of having him? People have said that we who are evangelicals believe in a sort of old man with a beard. And we say it’s not true. But I must say that in looking upon the evangelical church, it seems to me very often we give them the right to say it. And so I speak to you, O church; I speak to you, O generation, and even to that portion of the evangelical church that’s getting wobbly—I speak to you and say God will judge! If we don’t have the courage to say that, and mean it, we cannot expect our generation to do more than say, “god words, god words, god words.”
But we come to the worst sin of all. In 6:14 we read, “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.” The same language is used in Jeremiah 8:9-11. What does it mean? Imagine a bulging wall that is about ready to fall, and somebody comes and just whitewashes it. The prophets were giving just such cheap solutions, healing the hurt of my people, says God, slightly, slightly. They were saying, “It’s better than you think. Don’t be despondent, don’t get disturbed, take it easy, the day is not so bad, we can care for it rather lightly, don’t worry too much, peace, peace.” And God says, “I hate this above everything else; My people are under My judgment because they have revolted from Me, and the prophets who claim to speak for God say peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Near the end of Jeremiah’s prophecy, in 27:14, 15, we find him speaking in exactly the same way: “Therefore, hearken not unto the words of the prophets that speak unto you, saying, Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon; for they prophesy a lie unto you.” They were saying, “Don’t worry; Babylon isn’t going to take this country. Really it’s not going to be so bad; you’re going to make it.” And then God said this: “For I have not sent them, saith the Lord, yet they prophesy a lie in my name.” And so here you have it again—speaking lightly of what is serious, giving all kinds of secondary solutions.
What caused such a breakdown in our culture? The two world wars? Don’t believe it. If the house had been strong, it would not have come down with the earthquake. If the heart had not been eaten out of the culture, the world wars would not have broken it. “Don’t worry,” some say, “it’s only a technological problem, and technology will be a solution.” But that is not true. Man would not be in the position he is in simply because of technological problems if he had had a really Christian base. An energy crisis? Of course it is serious, but it is not the heart of the problem. The fact that the United States is now urban rather than agrarian? Is this the final problem?No. To solve only the urban problem would be to heal “slightly.” You can hear it over and over again—all kinds of secondary solutions to secondary problems. Of course these are problems, but they are not the central problem. And men who use theological language to fasten our eyes upon them as the central problem stand under the judgment of God, because they have forgotten that the real reason we are in such a mess is that we have turned away from the God who is there and the truth which He has revealed. The problem is that the house is so rotten that even smaller earthquakes shake it to the core.
Jeremiah, in 28:1-15, gives us a specific example of a prophet, Hananiah, who said, “Don’t worry, everything is going to go well.” Hananiah prophesied that within two years God would bring back the hostages that had been taken to Babylon. But God, speaking through Jeremiah, said, “Hananiah, it’s not so, and not only is it not so, but God is going to judge you, because you are telling the people a lie. You’re saying it’s not going to be so bad when, O people of God,” says Jeremiah, “the trouble has hardly begun.” It is a serious thing indeed to use the name of God to say that secondary solutions can cure our problems when the real problem is that people have turned away from God and the truth that He has revealed in verbalized, propositional form concerning Himself.
We must understand that Jeremiah did not only say these things to great men in general. He named them by name: Manasseh, the king (Jeremiah 15); Pashur, the chief governor in the house of the Lord (chapter 20); Zedekiah, the king (chapter 21); Shallum, the king, Jehoiakim, the king, and Coniah, the king (chapter 22); Hananiah, the Prophet (chapter 28); and Shemaiah, as he was in Babylon writing letters back to Palestine (chapter 29). Most of these names appear in the latter portions of his prophecy. As the situation became more serious, Jeremiah did not lessen his message; rather, he began to name the great people by name, saying to them, “Look at what you have done.”
What then are the results of his message? We have one indication in Anathoth, Jeremiah’s hometown. “Therefore, thus saith the Lord of the men of Anathoth, who seek thy life, saying, Prophesy not in the name of the Lord, that thou die not by our hand” (11:21). That is, the people of his own town said,“Jeremiah, if you don’t keep quiet, we’re going to kill you. We don’t want your prophecy of judgment.” The priests, the prophets, and the people violently opposed him. So in Jeremiah 26:8, “Now it came to pass, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the Lord had commanded him to speak unto all the people, that the priests and the prophets and all the people took him, saying, Thou shalt surely die.” And in 26:11, “Then spoke the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to all the people, saying, This man is worthy to die; for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.” Those of you who mean to be tellers of the Word of God in a generation like our own must understand that men are going to say, “You’re cutting out the optimism and, therefore, we’re going to bring every pressure against you that we can bring.” When a man stands up in the communist or other totalitarian countries today and really speaks of the judgment of God, he gets the same treatment as Jeremiah.Even in the West the results are similar. Men say, “You’re against our culture, you’re against the unity of our culture, you’re against the progress of our culture, you’re against the optimism of our culture and country, and we’re going to do what we can against you.” Our culture may do little if we preach only the positive message, but if we are faithful and also preach judgment in state or church, the result will be the same as with Jeremiah.
Men haven’t changed, not one bit. For a man to think that he can preach the Word of God today and not experience the true price of the cross of Christ in the sense of not being accepted by the culture—for a man to think that he can be a teller, whether he be a teacher, a minister, a Christian artist, poet, musician, movie maker, or dramatist—any man who thinks he can speak truly of the things of God today into such a culture as our own and not have such words spoken against him is foolish. It is not possible. It is not possible whether one is the teller with his music or with his voice, whether one plays an instrument or speaks out behind a pulpit, whether one writes a book or paints a picture. To think that one can give the Christian message and not have the world with its monolithic, post-Christian culture bear down on us is not to understand the fierceness of the battle in such a day as Jeremiah’s or such a day as our own.
In Jeremiah 36:22-24 we find the same thing: the priests, the prophets, the people rise up against the message. “Now the king sat in the winter house in the ninth month; and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. And it came to pass that, when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth. Yet they were not afraid.” And Jeremiah is astonished that they can take the Word of God, cut it up with a knife, cast it into the fire, and burn it until the message is totally consumed! And he says with wonder, “Yet they were not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the king, nor any of his servants that heard all these words.”
This is an exact picture of our own generation. Men today do not perhaps burn the Bible, nor does the Roman Catholic Church any longer put it on the index, as it once did. But men destroy it in the form of exegesis; they destroy it in the way they deal with it. They destroy it by not reading it as written in normal literary form, by ignoring historical-grammatical exegesis, by changing the Bible’s own perspective of itself as propositional revelation in space and time, in history, by saying only the “spiritual” portions of the Bible have authority for us.
I would say to you who call yourselves Bible-believing Christians, if you see the Word of God diminished as it is in our day and are not moved to tears and indignation, I wonder if you have any comprehension of the day in which we live. If we as Bible-believing Christians can see God’s Word, God’s verbalized, propositional communication, treated as it is so often treated and are not filled with sorrow and do not cry out, “But don’t you realize the end thereof?”—I wonder: do we love His Word? If we fight our philosophic battles, our artistic battles, our scientific battles, our battles in literature, our battles in drama, without emotional involvement, do we really love God? How can we do it without being moved as Jeremiah was moved? How can we speak of judgment and yet not stand like the weeping prophet with tears?