Sermon Transcript
Jeremiah 25. For 23 years, from the 13th year of Josiah the king of Ammon— son of Ammon, king of Judah— to this day, the word of the Lord has come to me, and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened. You have neither listened nor inclined your ears to hear, although the Lord persistently sent to you all his servants the prophets, saying, turn now every one of you from his evil ways and evil deeds, and dwell upon the land that the Lord has given to you and your fathers from of old and forever. Yet you have not listened to me, declares the Lord, that you might provoke me to anger with the work of your hands to your own harm. Thus the Lord, the God of Israel, said to me, Take from my hand this cup of wine of wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it.
They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword that I am sending among them. And if they refuse to accept the cup from your hand to drink, then you shall say to them, thus says the Lord of hosts, you must drink. For behold, I begin to work disaster at the city that is called by my name, name. And shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth, declares the Lord of hosts.
Wail, you shepherds, and cry out, and roll in ashes, you lords of the flock, for the days of your slaughter and dispersion have come, and you shall fall like a choice vessel. No refuge will remain for the shepherds, nor escape for the lords of the flock. A voice, the cry of the shepherds and the wail of the lords of the flock. For the Lord is laying waste their pasture and the peaceful folds are devastated because of the fierce anger of the Lord.
We’re picking back up our series, Jesus in Every Genre, where we are looking at how every section of the Bible is really about Jesus. The reason we believe that every section of the Bible is about Jesus is because Jesus said it was all about Him. Jesus tells the teachers of the law, all the religious experts in his day. He says, you, you search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but they bear witness to me, yet you refuse to come to me and have life. That’s John 5, where Jesus explains to the disciples on the road to Emmaus.
It says, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them the things in all the Scriptures concerning himself, Luke 24. The Old Testament is promise or expectation of Jesus. That’s not to say the Old Testament isn’t also about other things. It is real history, for example, and whenever God intervened in people’s lives, obviously, it was meaningful to those people in the moment, of course. I mean, God God rescued his people out of Egypt.
That was a big deal, like, in its own right. But there is also another narrative about Jesus running through all the events of the Old Testament. It’s like God is writing a story and there’s many different chapters and each chapter has adventure of its own. Each chapter has real people in it with real lives just like ours. It’s history.
Happened, real ups and downs and tragedies and victories, but God incorporates all of those individual stories that really happened into the grand story which is about Jesus. So, today we are studying perhaps, perhaps one of the least liked aspects of the Old Testament, and it often shows up in the prophets. Now, when people think prophets, they normally think of someone foretelling future events, like a fortune cookie. We’re like, that’s prophecy. Or in the Bible, places where it says something like, you know, the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, we’re like, that’s prophecy.
And certainly, that is prophecy, but if you go read the prophets, you’ll find often Often prophets warn or predict future destruction. Specifically, the prophets foretell destruction in response to the wickedness of the people. So, it’s God’s wrath. Prophets talk a lot about the wrath of God. Jonah tells the Assyrians, 40 days and your city will be overturned.
Ezekiel tells Pharaoh in Egypt, I think we have this on a slide, this is what the Sovereign the Lord says, I will throw you on the land and hurl you on the open field. I will let all the birds of the sky settle on you and all the animals of the wild gorge themselves on you. I will spread your flesh on the mountains and fill the valleys with your remains. I will drench the land with your flowing blood. I will snuff you out.
Nahum similarly tells Assyria, I am against you. Declares the Lord Almighty. I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame. I will pelt you with filth.
I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.
That’s wrath.
Now, obviously, this is imagery. Nahum is talking about a whole nation, and nations don’t literally have skirts Unless maybe it’s the Statue of Liberty, right? There is no skirt to lift, right? It’s symbolism. But the nation will be exposed, vulnerable, ashamed as a result of their sin.
It’s wrath. And texts like those can make us quite uncomfortable. We may not immediately see how wrath like that could ever possibly fit in with the idea of God’s love. Like, we may think there’s a contradiction between Old Testament God and New Testament God, because when we think of New Testament God, we think of, for God so loved the world that he sent his only Son. We just sang it.
But then we read in the Old Testament, and Revelation for that matter, and some other places, God snuffs out entire nations, to use his term, pelts with filth, fire falls from the sky, valleys fill with blood. So So what are we to make of this, these seemingly inconsistent pictures of God, Old Testament versus New Testament? Should we believe God changed his mind? Maybe he calmed down after Jesus was born, or maybe it’s not even the same God, or maybe did the Old Testament prophets have it wrong? Maybe those prophets were just kind of guessing what God was like or looking at other nations around them and what they thought God was like, but they were incorrect.
What do you make of it, wrath versus love? How to reconcile those?
People over the centuries have come up with all kinds of ways to disarm the wrath that we see in Scripture, to say God isn’t really like like that. And it wouldn’t take you very long at all to find a book or a blog post that explains how the wrath we see in Scripture from God is not true. There are all kinds of people going back a long way who have wanted to discredit wrath one way or another, and you might be someone who is uncomfortable with a God who would cause destruction in response to wickedness. That kind of God may make you feel unsafe or unsettled. But what we will see today is that understanding these prophets and their wrath in light of Jesus is really the way to see how deep God’s love is for us.
Romans 15:4 tells us that all Scripture should encourage It says, for everything that was written in the past, that means Scripture, was written to teach us so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide, we might have hope. So Scripture is meant for our encouragement, which means when we read cup of God’s wrath like in our Jeremiah verses today or being publicly shamed like in Nahum or spreading your blood, snuffing you out like in Ezekiel. It is meant to encourage us, among other things, which means if we don’t feel encouraged, maybe we are missing something. Likely, we are probably missing Jesus. We are probably missing how wrath is really ultimately about Jesus.
So, as we look at Jeremiah’s prediction of destruction today, which really happened to all the nations he named, we will see first the patience of God, then the scope of judgment, and finally the ultimate picture of love. The patience of God, the scope of judgment, and then the ultimate picture of love. So, first, the patience of God is long-suffering. God bears with people and the pain they cause to each other for so long, so long. Before we talk about God’s wrath, which does happen, it may be helpful to first reflect on God’s patience just so we see His heart.
He is not some bloodthirsty tyrant on a hair trigger, even in these Old Testament passages or in Revelation, which is New Testament. He is not hotheaded. He really does love people. People. For God so loved the world is just as true in the Old Testament as it is in the New.
God is immensely patient even in this wrathful Old Testament. In our verses here, it says starting in verse 20— or verse 3, for 23 years the word of the Lord has come to me, and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened. You have neither listened nor inclined your ear to hear, although the Lord has persistently sent to you all His servants the prophets, saying, turn now every one of you from his evil way and his evil deeds. God waits 23 years.
Meanwhile, the Israelites are harming each other. They’re not honoring God. How long would you wait before you would act, especially if you could see all this mess from God’s perspective, right? This is This is on a national scale, on a global scale, how people are cruel to one another, how nations are cruel to one another and others, right? You see the mass harm caused by selfishness, greed, lust for power.
People are really hurting one another. Would you wait 23 years before you stepped in and ended it?
Wouldn’t it be wrong to wait that long when you could stop all the suffering with a snap of your fingers? 23 years. Don’t we get mad at God for not intervening when people are hurting?
See, God is so patient you could accuse him of being too patient. If he errs in any direction, which he doesn’t, but for the sake of argument, doesn’t err, but if He did, if He errs in any direction, it’s not that He’s too wrathful, it’s that He’s too patient.
All our cries for justice to be done, for example, you know what we’re really asking for? We’re asking for God to be wrathful. We’re saying, bring judgment, God. When a tragedy happens, a big one, a shooting, a senseless war, a genocide, and we look to heaven and we say, God, God, why don’t you do something about this? What we want, or one thing that we want, is for God to give the offenders what they deserve.
We’re saying, judge them, Lord. We’re asking for wrath in these big macro travesties. We’re asking for wrath. And then less serious, okay, less serious, doesn’t all have to be heavy today, when we chant, lock her up, lock her up, or we chant, lock him up, lock him up. What is it that we want?
What are we asking for? We want people to be held accountable for their wrongs. We don’t want the bad guys to get away with it. We’re asking for judgment, and if we had our way, If we’re honest, we’d prefer judgment to be swift and merciless against those who have messed up our world, right? Like, bring the fire down, God.
We want that. See, we’re not nearly as tenderhearted as we think we are, and we certainly aren’t as tenderhearted as God.
God, unlike us, does not want to destroy. That is not His heart. That breaks His heart. Ezekiel 18:32, I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord. Or 2 Peter 3:9, He is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
He is patient. He is so patient with the problems in our world. He is patient with you. He is patient with me. He is patient with the people who have hurt us.
But we shouldn’t understand His patience to mean that He is absent or that He approves.
Patience, long-suffering patience, is really the perspective of how we should look at it. When someone has wronged us deeply and we want judgment to fall from the sky, like, immediately, and it doesn’t, we should not believe God is absent. We should not believe God approves. We should believe God is patient. But there will come a time when God will bring judgment.
He will not let evil reign forever. The people who have hurt you will be held accountable. The people who need to be locked up will be locked up. No one is going to get away with anything. 2 Thessalonians 1, starting in verse 6, God is just.
He will pay back to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled. This will happen. It will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with His powerful angels. This is New Testament, by the way, for those of you who think New Testament is different than Old Testament. It’s not.
He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction.
Now, if we have really been hurt by someone, really hurt, when we read God is going to pay back trouble to those who have troubled us, we think, hallelujah, like finally those people, they are going to get what’s coming to them. God isn’t absent. God doesn’t approve of what they’ve done to me. He’s keeping track. And he’s storing up wrath over there and they’ll get some of that blazing fire when Jesus is revealed from heaven.
That’s what I’m talking about. Finally, they’re going to get what they deserve. That’s what we say if we’ve really been hurt.
But I’ll warn you, we shouldn’t celebrate too heartily over destruction of our enemies. We should temper our thirst for vengeance. Because the judgment that falls on our enemies falls on us as well.
And that brings us to our second point, the scope of judgment. The scope of judgment is that judgment falls on everyone. If you read our text, Jeremiah 25, it’s no one is excluded. It’s every nation. It’s every king.
And then in verse 29, the Lord says, you shall not go unpunished. Punished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth. Judgment comes on everyone. One of our misconceptions is that the world is divided into good people and bad people, and good people are safe. We assume there’s some, like, group of righteous, faithful folks hiding out somewhere that’ll be spared when judgment comes, and we are one of them, of course.
And that’s just not what we see in Scripture. What we see in Scripture is that judgment comes on everyone because everyone is guilty. Everyone has contributed to the pain in this world, and if God is going to hold the world accountable, then He will hold us accountable as well. There’s this illustration from Francis Schaeffer who was a pastor and writer in the 1940s to 1980s, and Schaeffer asks if everyone was born with an invisible tape recorder, around their neck. So you can see what time period he lived because he’s talking about a tape recorder.
But imagine you had one around your neck for your whole life and the only thing that it ever recorded was when you made a moral judgment about someone else. You said, you know, she shouldn’t go on a date with that kind of guy. You’re in California, you’re like, you can’t throw batteries away in the normal trash. Or somebody lies in order to get ahead in your company and you complain, or even if you say, you shouldn’t be so judgy, that’s judgment, right? Anytime you make a moral judgment about someone else, it records what you say.
And then at the end of your life, Francis Schaeffer illustrates, God hits play on the tape recorder. And Schaeffer estimates thousands and thousands of judgments roll out, and perhaps it will take years he says, only how you have said other people need to live their life. Now here’s the problem, which is probably obvious to all of us. None of us even live up to our own standards, do we? You who say she shouldn’t date that kind of guy, have you dated that kind of guy?
You who say you shouldn’t fudge the truth in order to get ahead, have you fudged? Fudged the truth in order to get ahead? You who say, don’t speak to your children in that tone, have you spoken to your children in that tone? Just our own sense of right and wrong, wherever you think that comes from, even with that we fall short of like ourselves. And if there were some tape that recorded all of our own moral judgments and then we were held to just our own standard, we wouldn’t measure up.
That’s all of us. So how much more would we fall short of God’s standards? We have all contributed to the brokenness of the world and we know it. We know it. We have hurt people and we know it.
And nowadays there’s been so much psychological discovery regarding like how we wound one another, other. Experiences from our childhood we carry into adulthood and then it comes out somehow. We either duplicate the exact behavior that we experienced or we lash out in some other way and it causes harm to other people. Or maybe because of our history we become timid and cowardly and don’t act when action is necessary and then somebody ends up getting hurt because we didn’t act. And if you’re God and you can stand back and this whole picture, how all this pain and woundedness, shame, all of this is just interconnected and influencing everything across generations and cultures and times, you see how everyone is really both a victim and a perpetrator, right?
Everyone has caused harm and everyone has been harmed. We all, every one of us has a legitimate gripe towards somebody else. Things have happened in our lives that are not fair, but at the same time, all of us have given somebody else something to gripe about, like legitimately. So we all deserve judgment, we all need help, we need to be rescued, and we need to be penalized. That’s the mess of humanity.
As an extreme example, last week we had this special Sunday where we learned about the mass problem of human trafficking and how so many of those who are trafficked are both exploited and exploiters. They are very much victims for sure, undoubtedly, but many of the victims are also victimizers. It is like not only are they being trafficked, but they are also trafficking others. That makes it quite complicated to untangle all of it. Like, how do you step in as some kind of authority and address this?
Do you rescue? Do you punish? It’s a mess. One thing I learned that California is doing, it sounds like a good idea, is when they have a bust, so to speak, they go in to confront this exploitation, they send both a police officer and a social worker. They send the law and they send a counselor.
So So, it’s rescue and it’s judgment, right, law enforcement, sometimes for the same person. And that’s what humanity needs. We are both broken and we have broken others, not to the same degree, of course, obviously, but sometimes extreme scenarios can help inform our scenario. We deserve judgment and we need rescue.
So, how is God? Going to fix, restore, and judge this complicated mess that is us? How does God send both the counselor and at the same time enforce His laws? How does He do that? He sends Jesus, which brings us to our final point, the ultimate picture of love is Jesus.
Jesus solves the problem of how God can provide both rescue and judgment. Jesus is judged in our place so we can be rescued. On the cross, Jesus pays the penalty that we owe. He fulfills what justice demands. He takes the wrath of God in our place.
The phrase that is repeated over and over again in our verses today, the cup of God’s wrath, Verse 15, the God of Israel said to me, take from my hand this cup, the wine of wrath, and make all nations to whom I send you drink it. So I took the cup from the Lord’s hand and made all the nations drink it. And verse 28, God says, if they refuse to accept the cup from your hand to drink, then you say to them, you must drink.
The cup of God’s wrath is often how wrath is depicted. In Scripture. It’s an image of pouring out wrath from a cup. Get to Revelation and it’s bowls. But does the image of a cup sound familiar to you?
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, what does He pray? May this cup pass from Me. Jesus experienced the cup on the cross, the cup of God’s wrath. Wrath, the punishment for sin, what justice demands. He was judged in our place.
And just like our verses here, Jesus asks, may I not drink it? Jesus prays, may this cup pass from me? But just like verse 28 that we read, the Lord of hosts says, you must drink. You must. What all these nations deserve to drink, what we deserve to drink, Jesus drank in our place.
It was Him who paid our penalty, which means it is paid. Believer in Christ, you will never experience God’s wrath, never. There is zero wrath for you through your faith in Christ. Nothing that you have experienced in your life has been God’s wrath. You are free from that.
Those of us who have placed our trust in Jesus, we can go back and read these Old Testament pictures of wrath and understand, one, it’s what we deserve. Serve. It’s the penalty that we owe. But 2, it’s what Jesus took for us so that we could be free from it forever. And we are free from it.
We never have to pay that penalty. It has been paid. It’s amazing how many Old Testament pictures of God’s wrath line up with Jesus’ death on the cross. We already talked about the cup, but these other verses we read this morning, Jeremiah 25:34, wail, you shepherds, Cry out, you lords of the flock, for the days of your slaughter have come.
Well, who is the shepherd that is slaughtered? Who is the shepherd that cries out? It’s Jesus.
Or I quoted Nahum at the beginning of the sermon, and these aren’t the type of verses that we normally put on coffee mugs, but maybe they should be. Because they can encourage us. Remember, God says to Assyria, I am against you. I will lift your skirt over your face and I will make the nations look at your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame. Remember how uncomfortable that made you when you heard it?
But do you see Jesus in Nahum? Do you see Him? It was Jesus who was stripped when He was hung on a cross. It was Jesus who was shamed. It is Jesus who was exposed publicly.
Then remember in Ezekiel I quoted, God was going to rip flesh and fill the land with blood? Well, whose flesh was ripped? Whose blood was spilled? It’s Jesus. Wrath is about Jesus.
It’s all about what He did for you. All the pain, all the embarrassment, the guilt, the humiliation we carry from what we have done was carried by Jesus. Jesus stands in our place. He says, I’ll take the blame. I’ll take the fall.
He is stripped. He is shamed. He is mocked. He is exposed instead of us.
If all of our dirty little secrets came to light, Think about how rejected we might be, how ruined our reputation might be. We may lose our friends, we may lose everything, but the gospel is Jesus took that rejection in our place. Everyone looks at him with disgust instead of looking at us with disgust. It’s his reputation that is ruined, not ours. It’s him who loses all of his friends, and he did.
All His friends abandoned Him. He was totally alone, totally rejected, totally despised, totally shamed in our place. Isaiah says it perfectly, starting— Isaiah starting in verse 3, He, Jesus, was despised and rejected by men as one from whom men hide their faces. That’s how people would react to us if they knew, isn’t it? They would hide their faces from us.
Us, but He was pierced for our transgressions. He is in our place.
Now, who loves us like that? Who takes the fall for us like that? It is really only Jesus. When we look at the wrath in the Old Testament, we should see both the severity of our sin because the kind of judgment that sin deserves, that we deserve, but also we should see just as clearly the severity of Jesus’ love for us that He was willing to stand in our place under such judgment. If you are someone who for some reason doesn’t believe in wrath, you don’t believe God is like that, you believe God is like a grandpa in heaven full of candy and snuggles and He never has any wrath at all, if that’s you, I know you think that in order to like make His— make the image of Him more loving in your mind, but you actually lose a huge picture of God’s love.
You lose a picture of God’s love because the cross is where Jesus paid what we owe. And then we see how much He loves us. We see how much He was willing to pay in order to restore us. And if you can see the cross for what it is, the supreme act of love, taking what you deserve in your place, if you can see that, you will never feel as loved as that.
As Tim Keller says, Jesus on the cross should both humble us to the ground and at the same time make us feel loved to the sky. Humbled because such a payment was owed for what we have done, but loved because such a payment was gladly provided. Do you see how much Jesus loves you?
Can you read the Old Testament wrath and say, this is how much Jesus loves me?
And if so, is a love like that enough to heal some of your wounds, to repair some of the damage that is in your soul from how you’ve been hurt? Is a love like that enough to erase your shame?
Is a love like that enough to give you peace with your past, to free you from your guilt? It can. The gospel can provide that for you, and only the gospel can provide that. No one else will carry your guilt like Jesus. No one else will pay what you owe.
No one else will be mocked, shamed, exposed, ripped to pieces in your place. Trust Him. Tell Him, thank You. Thank You that I’m free from humiliation. I’m free from guilt.
I’m free from judgment because You stood in my place.
Let’s pray. Father, we do thank You for Jesus. We thank You that He was willing to stand in our place. Be condemned instead of us. Lord, we thank You that You came up a way to be both counselor and law enforcement, that You didn’t waver on justice, but You also never wavered on compassion.
Lord, we pray that Jesus and His work would transform us. We pray that we would be filled with a heart like Yours that never wavers on compassion and never wavers on justice, but is always willing to pay what it takes to restore.
Show us how to do that, Lord, in our, in our world, in our communities, and with those who are hurting. We pray all those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
