We have already had a glimpse of the personal results to Jeremiah that the preaching of judgment brings. In Anathoth, the people said, “Keep quiet or we’re going to kill you.” The threats to his liberty were not idle, for we read in Jeremiah 20:2, “Then Pashur smote Jeremiah, the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the Lord.” The first thing they did was to fasten him in the stocks. Poor Jeremiah, who has been preaching faithfully in the midst of this “post-Christian” culture, finds himself in the stocks. But his punishment didn’t end there.
The stocks were not enough for him; so they put him in prison. “For then the king of Babylon’s army besieged Jerusalem; and Jeremiah, the prophet, was shut up in the court of the prison, which was in the king of Judah’s house” (Jeremiah 32:2). Just as his prophecy is coming true, just as the king of Babylon is at the doors, just as the false prophets are being proven wrong, Jeremiah is put into prison, the prison that is in the king’s house. Those who know the Doge’s palace in Venice can picture this, because that palace contained the most important prison. Apparently it was the same there.
Later on in 33:1 Jeremiah is still in prison: “Moreover, the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah the second time, while he was yet shut up in the court of the prison.” But even that was not the end. In Jeremiah 37:15, 16 we read, “Wherefore, the princes were wroth with Jeremiah, and smote him, and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan, the scribe; for they had made that the prison. When Jeremiah was entered into the dungeon, and into the cells, and Jeremiah had remained there many days . . .” So they gradually increased the punishment—from the stocks, to a prison, to a dungeon. Finally, as we read Jeremiah 38:4-6, every one of us must be moved. For here is a man of flesh and blood, like ourselves, in a historic space-time situation with his own aspirations, and he is carted off and put into a dungeon. And now his very life is threatened: “Therefore, the princes said unto the king, We beseech thee, let this man be put to death; for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city.” That is, Jeremiah is not giving an optimistic answer; he isn’t saying everything is going to turn out well. He isn’t saying there is an easy solution; all we need is a little more technical advance to make the grade. He is cutting down their humanistic optimism, saying that they are under the judgment of God, and thereby weakening the people, undercutting their morale. “For this man seeketh not the welfare of this people, but the hurt.” Of course it is not true. Jeremiah is wanting their real welfare. He is saying, “You must be healed of the real disease, which is your revolt against God, and not merely of some superficial, external wound.” But that didn’t please the dignitaries.
So we read, “Then Zedekiah, the king, said, Behold, he is in your hand; for the king is not he who can do any thing against you. Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon . . . that was in the court of the prison; and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire; so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.” The story would make vivid drama, but it is not merely a piece of theater. Jeremiah, a man like yourself, was put into the innermost dungeon where they put a rope around his arms and lowered him down into the mire. As he went down, he must have wondered, “What are my feet going to touch?” He wasn’t going to drown, but there was mud at the bottom, and as they let him down, he sank, and he sank, and he sank—to his knees, to his waist, to his armpits? We do not know, but he was there as a result of his faithful preaching of God’s judgment to a postChristian world.
It’s no small thing to stick with the message. It’s easy to opt out. Evangelicals can easily opt out into their own little ghetto, saying nice things to themselves and closing their eyes to the real situation that surrounds them. One can opt out in many ways. But if one really preaches the Word of God to a postChristian world, he must understand that he is likely to end up like Jeremiah.
We must not think that Jeremiah’s trials were merely physical. They were psychological as well, for Jeremiah never saw any change in his own lifetime. He knew that seventy years later the people would return, but he didn’t live to see it. Jeremiah, like every man, lived existentially on the knife-edge of time, moment by moment; like all of us, he lived day by day within the confines of his own lifetime.
Jeremiah was not just a piece of cardboard; he had a psychological life just as you and I have. How then was he affected? There were times when Jeremiah was discouraged and overwhelmed.
In Jeremiah 15:10 we read, “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury, yet every one of them doth curse me.” I am glad Jeremiah said that, because I have known discouragement too. And if you are being faithful in your preaching and not just opting out, in a culture like ours you too will experience times of discouragement.
And you say, how can a man of God be discouraged?
Anybody who asks that has never been in the midst of the battle; he understands nothing about a real struggle for God. We are real men. We are on this side of the Fall. We are not perfect. We have our dreams, our psychological needs, and we want to be fulfilled. There are times of heroism as we stand firm and are faithful in preaching to men who will not listen. But there are also times when we feel overwhelmed.
In Jeremiah 20:14-18, we read one of the great cries of discouragement in the Bible, parallel to some of the cries of Job. But the intriguing thing is that neither Job, nor Jeremiah, nor David in the Psalms (where David often cried out to God, saying, “Have You turned away Your face forever, O God? Where are You?”)—in none of these cases does God reprove His people as long as they do not turn from Him, nor blaspheme Him, nor give up their integrity in their attitude toward Him. There is no contradiction here. It is possible to be faithful to God, and yet to be overwhelmed with discouragement as we face the world. In fact, if we are never overwhelmed, I wonder if we are fighting the battle with compassion and reality, or whether we are jousting with paper swords against paper windmills.
So Jeremiah says in 20:14-18, “Cursed be the day on which I was born; let not the day on which my mother bore me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad. And let that man be like the cities which the Lord overthrew, and repented not; and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide, because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?” Jeremiah was discouraged because he was a man standing against a flood. And I want to say to you that nobody who is fighting the battle in our own generation can float on a Beautyrest mattress. If you love God and love men and have compassion for them, you will pay a real price psychologically.
So many people seem to think that if the Holy Spirit is working, then the work is easy. Don’t believe it! As the Holy Spirit works, a man is consumed. This is the record of the revivals; it is the record of those places in which God has really done something. It is not easy!
As I stand and try to give a message out into the world—at the café tables and in the universities, to individuals and large seminars, publicly and privately—a price has to be paid. Often there is discouragement. Many times I say, “I can’t go up the hill once more. I can’t do it again.” And what is God’s answer? Well, first it is important to know that God doesn’t scold a man when his tiredness comes from his battles and his tears from compassion. Second, this involves learning to say, and mean, “Lord, please make your strength perfect in my weakness.”
Jeremiah, we recall, was the weeping prophet. This has psychological depth as well as historic meaning. He is really the man weeping. But what does God expect of Jeremiah?What does God expect of every man who preaches into a lost age like ours? I’ll tell you what God expects. He simply expects a man to go right on. He doesn’t scold a man for being tired, but neither does He expect him to stop his message because people are against him. Jeremiah proclaimed the message to the very end. He was always against going down to Egypt for help. And, as the captivity came, he could have escaped to Babylon. Instead he stayed with the people of God to keep preaching the message even after the judgment had fallen. His people dragged him down to Egypt, and even there he continued to preach the same message, down in Egypt where he never, never wanted to go.
Jeremiah, then, provides us with an extended study of an era like our own, where men have turned away from God and society has become post-Christian. Now, before returning to the book of Romans with which this book began, we should tie together the exposition of Jeremiah.
First, we may say that there is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can begin. There must first be the message of judgment, the tearing down. There are times—and Jeremiah’s day and ours are such times—when we cannot expect a constructive revolution if we begin by overemphasizing the positive message. People often say to me, What would you do if you met a really modern man on a train and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel? And I’ve said over and over, I would spend forty-five or fifty minutes on the negative, to really show him his dilemma—to show him that he is more dead than even he thinks he is; that he is not just dead in the current meaning of dead (not having significance in this life), but that he is morally dead because he is separated from the God who exists. Then I’d take ten or fifteen minutes to preach the gospel. And I believe this usually is the right way for the truly modern man, for often it takes a long time to bring a man to the place where he understands the negative. And unless he understands what’s wrong, he will not be ready to listen to and understand the positive. I believe that much of our evangelistic and personal work today is not clear simply because we are too anxious to get to the answer without having a man realize the real cause of his sickness, which is true moral guilt (and not just psychological guilt-feelings) in the presence of God. But the same is true in a culture. If I am going to speak to a culture, such as my culture, the message must be the message of Jeremiah. It must be the same in both private and public discourse.
Secondly, with love we must face squarely the fact that our culture really is under the judgment of God. We must not heal the sickness slightly. We must emphasize the reality. We must proclaim the message with tears and give it with love. Through the work of the Holy Spirit there must be a simultaneous exhibition of God’s holiness and His love as we speak. We cannot shout at people or scream down upon them. They must feel that we are with them, that we are saying that both of us are sinners, and they must know these are not just words, but that we mean what we say. They must feel in our own attitudes that we know we too are sinners, that we are not innately good because we have been born into an evangelical home, attend an evangelical church or an evangelical school, or take some external sacraments.
There is in all of this a time for tears. It will not do to say these things coldly. Jeremiah cried, and we must cry for the poor lost world, for we are all of one kind. There is, of course, a sense in which there are two humanities—one saved, one lost. But the Bible also tells us that there is only one human ity; we all have a common ancestor, and all have been made in the image of God. So I must have tears for my kind. But with the tears the message must be clear: our culture, our country, our churches have walked upon what God has given us, and thus all these are under the judgment of God.
It is my experience that giving the realistic message does not turn people off—if they feel real compassion in you. As a matter of fact, it is the other way. The real thinkers and the serious artists understand the scream of modern man: “There’s something wrong with my culture. It is a dead end.”
Take, for example, the picture by Edvard Munch in which a man is screaming. Or listen to people crying, “It’s plastic. Our culture is plastic.” Modern man knows something is wrong, but no one tells him why. It is up to Christians to do so, to point out what is wrong and to show modern man why he is hung up and why his culture is plastic.
Often Christians, young and old alike, have not faced the facts about their own countries—that they are under the judgment of God. Perhaps that explains why they are often without enthusiasm in their proclamation of the gospel, why they just give the crumbling wall a coat of paint.
Third, we must say that if we believe in truth, we must practice truth. We live in an age of synthesis and relativism; men don’t believe truth exists. How do we expect a world to take us seriously when we say we believe truth exists and then live in a relativistic way?
I would like to quote from the last appendix in my book The God Who Is There. Its title is “The Practice of Truth.” This gives in an abridged form the speech I gave in Berlin at The World Congress on Evangelism: “In regard to the first of the principles of which we spoke: The full doctrinal position of historic Christianity must be clearly maintained, it would seem to me that the central problem of evangelical orthodoxy in the second half of the twentieth century is the problem of the practice of this principle. This is especially so when we take into account the spiritual and intellectual mentality which is dominant in our century. . . . The unity of orthodox or evangelical Christianity should be centered around this emphasis on truth. It is always important, but doubly so when we are surrounded by so many for whom the concept of truth, in the sense of antithesis, is considered to be totally unthinkable. . . . Moreover, in our age of synthesis men will not take our protestations of truth seriously unless they see by our actions that we seriously practice truth and antithesis in the unity we try to establish and in our activities. . . . Both a clear comprehension of the importance of truth and a practice of it, even when it is costly to do so, are imperative if our witness and our evangelism are to be significant in our generation and in the flow of history. . . . In an age of relativity the practice of truth when it is costly is the only way to cause the world to take seriously our protestations concerning truth. Cooperation and unity that do not lead to purity of life and purity of doctrine are just as faulty and incomplete as an orthodoxy which does not lead to a concern for, and a reaching out towards, those who are lost. . . . All too often the only antithesis we have exhibited to the world and to our own children has been talking about holiness or our talking about love, rather than the consideration and practice of holiness and love together as truth—in antithesis to what is false in theology, in the church, and the surrounding culture.”
I want to ask you something. Remember the false prophets in Jeremiah’s day saying, “Peace, peace.” Can you imagine Jeremiah saying to them, “We’re all in one group because we all wear ecclesiastical colored ties”? I can’t. He didn’t do it. And I firmly believe that this is one of the things we must understand in our days of desperate need when men no longer believe in truth. We cannot expect them to take seriously our belief in objective truth, if in our practice we indicate only a quantitative difference between all men who are in ecclesiastical structures or who use certain forms of theological language. I do not mean that we should not have open dialogue with men; my words and practice emphasize that I believe love demands that. But I do mean that we should not give the impression in our practice that just because they are expressed in traditional Christian terminology all religious concepts are on a graduated, quantitative spectrum—that in regard to central doctrine no chasm exists between right and wrong.
Fourth, we must realize that to know the truth and to practice it will be costly. At times the price will be high in your individual family. Often there is a tremendous pressure upon young Christians as they face their non-Christian families. But the price is also high in society. You may not get the honor which you covet in the scholastic world, in the artistic world, in the medical world, or in the business world. The price may be high indeed.
Fifth, we must keep on speaking and acting even if the price is high. There is nothing in the Bible that says we are to stop. The Bible rather says, keep on, keep on. We may think of Paul as he writes in 2 Corinthians 11:24-28 (paraphrase):“I’ve been beaten by the Jews, I’ve been beaten by the Gentiles, I’ve battled the seas, I’ve known the wrath of men, and I’ve known the force of Satan.” Did Paul stop? Paul said, “No, I want to come to Rome and preach the gospel there as well.”
Perhaps you know this story of Martin Luther. When he had begun his preaching, he received word about the first Protestant martyrs. Some monks had read Martin Luther’s work, turned to this way of thinking, and were burned alive in the Grand Place in Brussels. There is now a marker in the Grand Place where they were burned. And the story is that when Martin Luther heard that, he began to walk the floor and he said, “I can’t go on. I can’t do it anymore. Because of me, other men are being killed. I can’t go on!” Then as he wrestled with it, he understood that because it was truth, no matter what the cost to himself or anybody else, he must go on. Thank God, Martin Luther marched straight forward, and we had the Reformation.
Christianity is not a modern success story. It is to be preached with love and tears into the teeth of men, preached without compromise, without regard to the world’s concept of success. If there seem to be no results, remember that Jeremiah did not see the results in his day. They came later. If there seem to be no results, it does not change God’s imperative. It is simply up to you and to me to go on, go on, go on, whether we see the results or whether we don’t. Go on.
We in L’Abri Fellowship have seen many results, and we have much to be thankful for. We have seen many things to encourage us, but there are also discouragements. And even if there were only discouragements, God’s Word is still the message to Jeremiah: go on and teach and act, preach the truth of the revelation of God no matter what the cost; go on, go on, go on. If you are not willing to go on, you have to ask yourself the question, do I really believe Christianity is truth or is my Christianity only an upper-story religious concept? Do I really believe Christianity is truth, or does my Christianity rest only on an experience, an emotion—and when the experience, the emotion, cools, my Christianity collapses?
Our day is not totally unique. Time after time Christian cultures have thrown themselves away. Take, for example, the church of the Apostle Thomas in India. It began to whittle away at the truth. So the church largely died. There are two ways to bring about such death: one is to compromise the truth, and the other to have a dead orthodoxy. Both can equally grind down and destroy the message of a church in a generation, especially if the generation is hard. Do we realize that in China at about the year A.D. 800 there were Christian churches in almost every great city? Do we realize that there were hundreds of Christians in the Arabian peninsula just before Mohammed in A.D. 550? Why was it that Mohammedanism was able to rush over that country? Because of military force? Not only that. When Mohammed came forward and looked at the Christians he said, “There’s nothing here.” And he was largely right. Mohammedanism started, and it swept that portion of the world. The same thing was true with the church in North Africa, and the primitive church in Armenia, in Georgia, in Gaul. In each of these places there was a Christian church and a growing Christian culture, but the church collapsed. The pattern is clear: defection and then destruction.
And we as Christians today, what are we saying? We are saying that we want reformation and we want revival, but still we are not preaching into this generation, stating the negative things that are necessary. If there is to be a constructive revolution in the orthodox, evangelical church, then like Jeremiah we must speak of the judgment of individual men great and small, of the church, the state, and the culture, for many of them have known the truth of God and have turned away from Him and His propositional revelation. God exists, He is holy, and we must know that there will be judgment. And like Jeremiah, we must keep on so speaking regardless of the cost to ourselves.
My concluding sentence is simply this: The world is lost, the God of the Bible does exist; the world is lost, but truth is truth. Keep on! And for how long? I’ll tell you. Keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on, and then KEEP ON!