Sermon Transcript
Hear the word of God from Jeremiah chapter 25. For 23 years, from the 13th year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, to this day, the word of the Lord has come to me, and I have spoken consistently to you, but you have not listened. You have neither listened nor inclined your ear to hear. Although the Lord persistently sent to you all his servants and prophets, saying, turn now, every one of you, from this evil way and evil deeds, and dwell upon the land that the Lord has given to you and your fathers and of old 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 the wine of wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink of 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 this city that is called by my 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. Hear the word of God.
Over the years, I have known, and I’m sure you have too, and you might be one of them, I’ve known people who have resisted or outright rejected Christianity because of the biblical notion of judgment. They didn’t want a God who was wrathful. They preferred a God who, as they would put it, is loving, is only loving. And what they meant by that was a God who would affirm, support, be there when you needed him, but would never raise his voice, let alone punish or judge. C.S.
Lewis described people like this by saying they don’t really want a Father in Heaven, they want a grandfather in Heaven. A God who is all about the cuddles and candy, but none of the sternness. No, a grandfather in Heaven. To them, and I’m sure for some of us, the idea of God’s wrath, or especially hell, a place of eternal torment for sins, that idea seems wrong, might seem incompatible with a God of love, might even seem harmful to believe, somehow damaging to us psychologically. And certainly we could cite examples from history where the doctrine of hell or wrath was used manipulatively, you know, to scare people to get them to do something.
That’s part of our Christian history. We have to own that hell has been used abusively. So some people want nothing to do with a God like that. You know, for them, if there’s any amount of wrath, they smell a rat and they’re out of here. And since the Bible speaks often of a God who judges, delivers wrath, even eternally in hell, they then decide, I want nothing to do with the God of the Bible.
But it’s not just non-Christians who struggle with the idea of God’s wrath. Many, or maybe even most Christians do as well. You know, even if we believe it’s true, we may not really want it to be true. R.C. Sproul, for instance, who has— he’s passed away now, but he was a heavyweight theologian.
I mean, totally committed to biblical truth, not trying to undermine or get around anything in the Bible. But he said the doctrine that he struggled with most was Hell. He didn’t like it. Maybe there are many of us like that. We don’t like it.
We don’t want it to be true. But yet, when we read the Bible, it’s there. It’s an elephant in the room. And not just in the Old Testament, in the New Testament as well. Sometimes we can have the idea that God was more spiteful in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament he changed and he became only about love.
I’ve even heard comedians make jokes like that. Something like, God seemed way more angry until he had a kid, And then he calmed down. It’s a pop culture understanding of the Bible, an incorrect pop culture understanding. Because the problem with believing, you know, the Old Testament is wrath and the New Testament is love is first— there’s a couple problems. First, okay, there’s only one God.
He never changed, and he never had a kid. God has existed as 3 persons from eternity past. So that’s one problem. But also, the more obvious problem is that the New Testament often speaks of wrath, judgment, even Hell. Jesus Himself talked about it frequently.
Luke 16, He describes a place of ongoing torment after death. Mark 9, He talks about an unquenchable fire where the worm does not die. Matthew 13, He says people will gnash their teeth in anguish and regret. Matthew 25, He depicts a place of darkness. Matthew 10, He compares it to a trash— a well-known trash heap outside the walls of Jerusalem called Gehenna where rubbish was burned and maggots abounded.
Like, Jesus talks about it and describes it a lot.
And that makes us uncomfortable. Whether we’re Christians or not, whether we believe the Bible or not, it can be unpleasant for us. To think about. In fact, I would guess there are more of us who dislike the idea of wrath and judgment than there are people who love it. Even God himself doesn’t seem to enjoy it.
So for instance, this is Ezekiel 33. God says, and I think we have this on a slide, as I live, declares the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why would you die, O house of Israel? He takes no pleasure. He doesn’t like it when the wicked die apart from him.
Similarly, on the other side of the coin, 1 Timothy 2, Paul explains, God our Savior, who desires— this is, this is what he wants— He didn’t want the wicked to die, but what he wants is for all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. So while there are certainly images of wrath and judgment in scripture, and we will take a look at one of them today that Al just read, there are not images of God reveling in it. It’s not something that he celebrates. So if you don’t enjoy it, if it makes you uncomfortable, it doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It means something’s right with you.
It means you have aligned with God’s heart. You’re actually being godly if you take no pleasure in wrath or hell, because that’s what God— how God describes himself. We are in the 5th week out of 7 looking at the book of Jeremiah. And each week in our series we’ve said that contained within the book of Jeremiah is really the story of the whole Bible. If you didn’t know, the Bible is not a collection of little nuggets of wisdom about how to live a good life.
That’s not really what it’s about, though you can pick that up along the way for sure. Instead, the Bible tells one story. It’s humanity’s story, that we were created good. But then we fell. But then the story wasn’t over after we fell.
Instead, God gets to work to redeem us, and one day he promises to restore everything that is broken in the world. That’s the big story of the Bible, and we find all of that in Jeremiah. So week 1, we talked about creation, how God made everything good, and we saw that God made Jeremiah with a good purpose. Then weeks 2 and 3, we talked about what went wrong in the world? If God made it perfect but it’s clearly not perfect now, what happened?
What’s the problem? Well, Christians believe the problem is sin, that humans corrupted the perfection that God originally made, and it’s a big problem. So week 2, we talked about how our sin breaks God’s heart. Then week 3, we talked about how sin hurts us, hurts us personally, hurts the next generation, hurts society. Sin is very destructive.
That was weeks 2 and 3. From there, we talked last week about God’s law, why he gives us rules, which one reason is to help us understand what is good and true versus what is wrong and false. Now, as we said, of course, knowing right from wrong doesn’t mean we always make the right choice. There’s much more to our redemption than simply knowing what we should do. We don’t need less than rules, but we certainly need more than rules.
So we talked about how God also gives us a new heart with laws written on them so we have a desire to follow. That’s part of our redemption. And today we get to judgment, what God does with what is wrong in the world, how he holds evil accountable, which is a necessary part of redemption because this place will never be perfect again unless evil and corruption are dealt with. Part of healing any system is destroying the disease. That has to happen.
And God does that through judgment and wrath, which is why we see it throughout the Bible, and we certainly find it in Jeremiah. Um, if you sit down and read the book of Jeremiah all the way through— and you should, of course— you will see much wrath, much judgment. So we’re not going to ignore it, we’re not going to bypass it, we’re not going to act like it’s not there. We’re going to study it, and as we do, we’ll see the necessity of judgment, who deserves judgment, and finally how judgment is really the key to understanding God’s love for us. Necessity, who deserves it, how it shows us God’s love.
So first, necessity of judgment is justice. Judgment is justice. The people in Jeremiah’s day were persisting in evil. There was rampant oppression in their society. For instance, multiple times Jeremiah specifically calls them out for how they treat the foreigner, meaning immigrants, how they were treating orphans, how they were treating widows, how they treated the marginalized in their society.
They were violent and cruel to their marginalized. That’s Jeremiah 7 and Jeremiah 22. He also denounces their corruption. Chapter 6:22-23, he refers to improper uses of power. He said throughout the book he calls out their sexual immorality.
They’re greedy. They lie. They deceive one another. They worship other gods, even to the extent of sacrificing their own children to other gods. That’s Jeremiah chapter 19.
Child sacrifice was a tragically common practice for many of the other religions in the ancient Near East. It was not part of biblical faith whatsoever. God hated it, but they were doing it, and they had been doing all of that for a long time. Jeremiah says, starting in verse 3, for 23 years the word of the Lord has come to me. 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 way and his evil deeds. God had warned them over and over and over again. I mean, this goes back even before Jeremiah’s ministry because he references these other prophets that had been sent. But during Jeremiah’s ministry, it It had been 23 years straight they’d been persisting in evil.
So, how should God respond?
Do nothing?
Should he look at all that and say, ah, it’s fine. You guys will probably figure it out. You know, remember, I’m just a God of love. I’m only here for cuddles and candy. And a shoulder to cry on whenever you’re sad.
I won’t intervene because I don’t hold people accountable.
If that’s how God responded in the face of evil, he would be unjust because it’s wrong to ignore such things. God actually makes that case himself. Jeremiah 5, God asks, Shall I not punish them for these things? declares the Lord. And shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?
He asks the same thing again in chapter 9. Shall I not punish? It’s so interesting. You know, God never owes us an explanation for what He does. We are never in a position to judge Him.
He is Creator. We are creature. He doesn’t owe us an explanation. But he gives us one anyway. He asks rhetorically, what do you want me to do?
Just let all this go? Welcome all these people with open arms? Want me to say, you know, they’re probably good people deep down, they’re just misunderstood. I don’t need to intervene. God asks, is that what I should do?
So what do we think? God asks us the question, what do we think? Is that how we want the evil that we see in our world addressed by our leaders or by God? Do we want those who are in charge to ignore injustice, whether, you know, it’s a national scale or it’s in your company? We see people commit crimes, hurt others, oppression, violence, deceit, immorality.
Do we want our leaders to just look the other way? Do we want them to say, well, I only love.
If I rain down anything, I’ll rain down cuddles and candy all over this unspeakable behavior.
If our leaders did that, we would say, no! You have to do something. Evil must be held accountable. If we want to live in a just society, we have to have justice.
That’s what we would say. And God says that too. He answers his own question in our passage in Jeremiah 25. He says, shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth.
So God steps in. God doesn’t ignore the wrongdoing. He won’t let evil continue unchecked. And look, if you care about justice, there’s a way in which that’s good news, because we don’t want people to get away with it, do we?
Think about, you know, whatever it is that you’re upset about in our world. Right now, and there is much to be upset about. On the news every day, right, from wars, human trafficking ring is the top story again, right, cruelty to marginalized people, corruption, deceit, violence, sexual immorality, there’s all of it.
Don’t we want justice?
Or would we be okay if everybody got away with it? We want to just all sit down and sing Kumbaya together and act like none of it ever happened.
We want justice.
Justice is needed. Therefore, judgment is needed.
See, in this context, the surprising thing isn’t that God is wrathful. Because we are too, right? We’re angry. We want people to pay for their crimes. So the surprising thing isn’t that God is wrathful.
The surprising thing is that God doesn’t revel in it, that he takes no pleasure in his wrath. That’s what’s surprising, um, because we, we probably would revel in it, right? I mean, that some of the evils that we see in our world, we might cheer for joy if we saw some of those thrown into the pit of hell, we might celebrate and say, good, get them! I hope they suffer for what they’ve done. They deserve it.
We might say that.
God doesn’t.
God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Zero.
He actually wants them saved.
Redeemed, made good, part of the family.
That’s what’s surprising.
I imagine, you know, some of us might have come in today disagreeing with God about wrath. I’m sure, you know, at least some of us 30 minutes ago, some of us wanted a God who was only love, wanted that grandfather in heaven Okay, and that’s understandable. I get that. But if we frame judgment as wrath, and judgment and wrath as justice, and we think about all the things we’re upset about in our world that need to be punished, we might now be upset with God about his compassion.
We might want him to revel in his wrath a little.
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t want anyone to suffer judgment. He wants everyone, even the worst of us, to come to a knowledge of the truth and be with him forever and ever. Even though he will judge, and it is necessary for him to judge, his heart is elsewhere. And that’s fantastic news as we move into our next point, which is, uh, who deserves judgment?
And it’s all of us. Interestingly, even including Jeremiah. We’ll get to that. One of our misconceptions about the world is that it is divided into good people and bad people, and we are the good people, of course. Sure, we might say bad people deserve judgment, but that’s not us, right?
To be fair, of course, some people are worse than others. That’s true. But just because some people are worse doesn’t mean that we are innocent. We’ve all contributed in some way to the corruption or pollution of God’s perfect world. And as I just said, that includes Jeremiah.
It includes the guy who is telling Israel that Israel will be judged. We see this in Jeremiah 25. We’ll look at this again where God says— God says this through Jeremiah. So Jeremiah is speaking, but it’s God’s words, and he says, shall you go unpunished? You shall not go unpunished, for I am summoning a sword against all the inhabitants of the earth, says the Lord of hosts.
The sword is coming to all the inhabitants of the earth, all of them. And if I were Jeremiah and God had just told me to say that, I might have looked up and said, all the inhabitants? So not just those folks But this folk too? The guy speaking on your behalf? You sure it’s everyone, Lord?
God says everyone.
We’re all on the hook. Israel, the other nations, Jeremiah, you, me, all of us guilty of breaking God’s perfect creation. We all deserve judgment.
And I know for some of us that’s hard to admit. We don’t want to view ourselves as guilty. So may God give us the grace to see that this morning. But on some level we know it already, don’t we?
Don’t we know that we are at least not innocent? Don’t we know that? I mean, if for no other reason than we hide things.
We all have things in our past. We probably have some things in our present that we’d rather not see the light of day. What we did on that business trip. What happened in the closed-door meeting. The text message we deleted.
The search history we deleted. The explanation we gave. The explanation we rehearsed. So that we could deceive someone of what happened. Acting like we forgot certain details, hoping they wouldn’t come to light.
Saying it only happened once when we know it happened a bunch, we just hope no one can prove that it happened a bunch. Paying cash so there isn’t a record of the purchase. Changing the topic of the conversation so we don’t have to answer certain questions. All the times that we’ve told ourselves, I’m going to take this to the grave. Having a burner phone, having a burner social media account.
Why do we do any of that?
We know we’re guilty. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t hide. If everything was on the up and up, why the shadows? We know we haven’t measured up. We probably haven’t even measured up to our own standards.
Forget about God’s for a second. There’s probably been times when we’ve said, I will never do that again, and then we did that again. We said, I would never talk to anyone like that, and then we talked to someone like that. We say, I would never take advantage of anyone, until we want what they have, and then we take advantage. We say, I would never lie to the people who I love the most, Until there’s something that we don’t want them to know about.
Look, we have a God-given sense of goodness in our hearts, and we’ve violated it, and we know it. And it doesn’t really matter if a friend tells us, oh, everyone does that. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter how many times somebody tells us not to worry about it.
We can’t shake the knowledge that we We are wrong.
So when God judges the world, as He should if He cares about justice, and He does, when He judges the world, what does that mean for us? When everything we’ve ever done sees the light of day, when we find out that what we have tried to forget was not forgotten by God, when our lives are put on the scales, What’s going to happen?
The verdict will be guilty for you, and me, and Jeremiah, and everyone. None of us will have an excuse. None of us will be able to argue. The evidence will be overwhelming that we have contributed to the breaking of creation.
And if we feel the weight of that, as I pray all of us do, Then first, at a bare minimum, we should instantly be more compassionate to everyone else instead of being judgmental. If we ever thought those people are the problem with the world, if only we could get rid of them, then this place would be better and everything would be fixed. We have all this vitriol against them because they are the problem. If we’re judgmental at all, That should stop instantly because we understand it’s not just them who are the problem, it’s us too. Be less self-righteous, less condemning, more empathetic to those around us who have failed in our eyes.
I mean, God’s judgment levels the playing field. It prevents us from being on our high horse against anyone.
But, but our fallenness shouldn’t only make us more empathetic. To our fellow humans. It should make us drop to our knees before God because we know we can’t defend what we’ve done. We can’t justify. We can’t make a case for our innocence.
So the right response then is to turn to God hoping that He actually is compassionate, that all that talk about taking no pleasure in the death of the wicked and that He wants everyone to be saved, we hope all of that is really true. And it is. God’s heart for us is so large that He’s not only willing to receive us back, but in order to do so, He takes on Himself the wrath that we deserve. Which brings us to how judgment is the key to understanding God’s love, as He drinks the cup that we deserve. You know, here in Jeremiah, as well as other places, God’s wrath upon evil is described as a cup that is poured out or drank.
So, you know, it’s like wrath is in the cup, and the wrath is distributed from the cup. That’s the image. Jeremiah says, I took the cup from the Lord’s hand and made all the nations to whom the Lord sent me drink it. Then you shall say to them, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, drink, be drunk, vomit, fall, rise no more because of the sword that I am sending against you. 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 the cup of wrath. But Jeremiah is not the only place that we find the image of the cup. As you know, the same image is spoken of by Jesus. For instance, we talked about this last week, we talk about it every time we take communion. On the night Jesus was betrayed, he had one final meal with his disciples, and after the meal he took the cup and he said, this is my blood of the new covenant poured out for the forgiveness of sins.
So in Jeremiah, the cup is poured out on evil and wickedness, but now Jesus says that same cup is still poured out, but this time it’s not poured out on wickedness, it’s poured out on him for our forgiveness. The idea is that the wrath that should be on us was taken off of us and put on Jesus. Even more explicitly, after that meal, you know, Jesus goes off and he prays by himself. This is very shortly before he gets arrested. He knows he’s about to go to the cross.
He knows he’s about to bear the weight of the sin of the world, and he’s praying. Garden of Gethsemane. You remember what he prays? Father, if possible, May this cup pass from me. May it not be poured out.
You know, He goes on to say, not my will, but yours be done, Father. He’s saying, I’m willing to drink the cup if I must, but if we could do it some other way, let’s do it some other way. And as we know, Jesus went to the cross, so the cup did not pass from Him. It’s like the Father told Jesus, as He had said in Jeremiah, You must drink. But this time it’s not the nations that drink, stagger, and fall.
It’s Jesus who does. Not because he’s guilty. He’s the only one who isn’t guilty, in fact. But he drinks the cup on behalf of the guilty. This is how God forgives us.
This is how God clears our record. This is how God saves a guilty people. We don’t earn our way back to Him. He pays our way back to Him. I’ll give you another example from our text.
You know, Jeremiah says, Wail, you shepherds, and cry out! 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. So, it’s judgment falling on the shepherds because they’re wicked. But again, this is not the only time we see judgment falling on a shepherd.
Because Jesus picks up the same image in the New Testament, John 10. Jesus refers to himself as the Good Shepherd, but then he quickly adds that the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. So in Jeremiah, guilty shepherds bear God’s wrath, but in Jesus, the innocent one does. The Good Shepherd stands in place of the wicked ones. Whatever image of wrath that we see in the Bible, we see Jesus making references explaining that’s what He took for us.
And this is why believing in judgment and even believing in Hell is critical to understanding the depth of God’s love for us, because Hell is exactly what Jesus experienced on the cross for you. If you want to know how much Jesus loves you, it’s He swallowed the full wrath of God on your behalf. You know, the hellfire and brimstone that we see in the Bible in places like Jeremiah, okay, yes, it really happened. Those nations really were judged. Yes, we deserve the same judgment.
Yes, it is what will happen to us if we are outside of Christ. The judgment will fall one way or the other on us if necessary, but most importantly Those images show us what Jesus absorbed for us when he stood in our place on the cross. He took the judgment we deserve so that we could be free from it forever. Listen, if you are in Christ, if you have put your faith in him, wrath will never come on you, ever.
In this life or in the next, you will experience zero wrath. Why? Because Jesus drank all of it, every last drop. Romans 8:1, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, not even a whisper. None of it.
It’s all gone. So whenever you read about, you know, God’s judgment in scripture One thing you could take from it is that is a description of how much God loves you, because that’s what Jesus bore for you on the cross. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your justice. Thank you that you care about right and wrong.
Thank you that it will be punished on the cross or in hell, Lord. You will purify Your earth and bring it back to how You want it to be, absolute perfection. We thank You most of all, Jesus, for Jesus who takes the wrath that we deserve, stands in our place, drinks the cup, is the shepherd that dies for the wicked. Lord, thank You. May we see our need of Jesus and may we put our faith in Him.
We pray all those things in His name.
