Sermon Transcript
From Jeremiah chapters 5 and 7. Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note. Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her. I will go to the great and will speak to them, for they know the way of the Lord, the justice of their God. But they all alike had broken the yoke.
They had burst the bonds. How can I pardon you? Your children have forsaken me and have sworn by those who are no gods. Shall I not punish them for these things? declares the Lord.
And shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this? They have spoken falsely of the Lord and have said he will do nothing. No disaster will come upon us, nor shall we see sword or famine. Behold, I am bringing against you a nation from afar, O house of Israel, declares the Lord. It is an enduring nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language you do not know, nor can you understand what they say.
They shall eat up your harvest and your food, they shall eat up your sons and your daughters, they shall eat up your flocks and your herds, they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees, your fortified cities in which you trust they shall beat down with the sword. Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, Who have eyes but see not, who have ears but hear not. Do you not fear me? declares the Lord. Do you not tremble before me?
Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have kept good from you. Their houses are full of deceit, therefore they have become great and rich. They have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of evil. They judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house which is called by my name and say, we are delivered, only to go on doing all these abominations? But they did not obey or incline their ear. But walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts and went backward and not forward.
In the fall of 2001, I was a student at Georgia Tech, but instead of being in school that semester, I was working a type of internship with a company you’ve probably never heard of named Mirant. They went bankrupt a few years later and were acquired by someone else, but Mirant was in the energy business. They owned a few plants, but mainly they bought and sold energy as a broker. And whether or not you’ve ever heard of Mirant, you have probably heard of our largest competitor at the time and the biggest player in the industry, which was Enron. And during my semester with Mearant is when Enron collapsed.
If you don’t know the story of Enron, let me give you a summary, which I had a front row seat to watch. Enron’s executives over a period of time, they made a series of bad decisions. None of their decisions on their own individually seemed particularly dubious, at least to them, but added together, their decisions were catastrophic and became one of the largest scandals in corporate history. So what were those terrible decisions? Well, Enron began as a natural gas pipeline company, but then under the leadership of Jeffrey Skilling, their CEO leading up to the collapse, Skilling pioneered the idea of treating natural gas like a tradable commodity.
They even created a gas bank to link producers and consumers, you know, buy low, sell high. Revolutionary concept at the time for natural gas. So instead of just selling gas, Enron would trade contracts between buyers and sellers, profit from swings in the market just like financial firms do. At first, all that worked very well. They were praised by Wall Street.
Enron was repeatedly named America’s most innovative company. But then what they started doing, which was not illegal as I understand it, according to my coworkers, they started an accounting practice where they would record all the future expected profits from a long-term contract. They would record all of that as income as soon as the contract was signed instead of actually booking profits as the profits actually came in. So, you know, if they thought they’d make $10 million over the next few years on this contract, they would say, we’ve got $10 million right now. And I guess that’s okay, because in theory the contract should work out.
However, what that led to is it incentivized their executives to begin inflating the amounts that they thought that they would get from these contracts. Because, you know, if they estimated, oh, we’re going to get $20 million from this contract instead of $10 million, then they could instantly, you know, book another $10 million of revenue on paper just, just by changing the estimate, right? You’ve doubled your money, which of course then made the company more money, which was great for the executives because then they got more rewards, more bonuses, stock options were worth more. Because, you know, the stock price kept going up because the revenues, the expected revenues kept going up. But you see how all this is going to break, right?
Eventually the estimates for what they said they were going to make in the future, which started off optimistic, then became kind of aggressive, then they just— these future estimates, they just became fantasy land, what they were saying they would eventually make. And while the house of cards stayed together longer than you think that that it might have. There were signs of trouble pretty early on. The estimates weren’t panning out, weren’t coming true. So what are they going to do?
Are they going to go back to the old accounting system? If they did, their company would lose a ton of money on paper, which would tank the stock price. It would not only hurt the executive rewards, but it would hurt their employees, hurt the stockholders, hurt everybody. So there’s a lot of pressure to keep the house of cards standing. Then adding to that pressure, simultaneously the company adopted an employee ranking system to evaluate employee performance.
Bottom performers were fired every year, which on its own, that’s not necessarily a bad practice. Jack Welch famously did that successfully at GE. It worked out swimmingly. However, At a place like Enron, where the top performers became the top performers by inflating the numbers the most, and the worst performers were those who did not inflate the numbers, right, there’s a lot of pressure to overestimate. If you didn’t overestimate, it’s career suicide, because they’re going to terminate the bottom performers, right?
So everyone kept doing it. Well, as the losses piled up, they had to do something, but instead of resetting, back to reality, they made another poor decision, which again, as I understand it, it’s not illegal depending on how you do it, but they created something similar to shell companies, off-the-books partnerships, which would then absorb Enron’s losses. How it worked was Enron would transfer the bad debts, the contracts that didn’t work out, they would send those off to these kind of fake companies, So it looked like the fake companies had losses while Enron kept the good contracts. That sounds bad. It is bad.
But afterwards, all the executives said they didn’t think that they were lying. They thought they were doing good business. And they thought they just needed a little bit more time to get things right. Like, our big win is around the corner. And when we get that big win, it’ll erase all of our mistakes.
We’ll be okay. Of course, they weren’t okay. All of that collapsed. Employees lost jobs, pensions— they still had pensions back then. Investors lost billions.
Some people went to jail. And then the executives could see how terribly they managed everything. They even said, it didn’t feel wrong until suddenly it was all very wrong. The story of Enron is often told of one of corporate corruption and greed. Which is fair, it is, but it’s far more a story of moral erosion.
Because no one, no one in the company just woke up one day and said, let’s be dishonest.
Instead, it started as, oh, here’s an opportunity to advance our company. And then when it wasn’t working out as they thought it would, the question was, should we admit it? To which they answered, not yet. Let’s not reveal our mistakes. We’ll get it figured out.
We’re not lying. We’re just giving ourselves some more time so that we don’t hurt anyone. That’s all they said. That’s all it took. They couldn’t see what they were doing, but they, they were blind to it.
But nevertheless, of course, we know their actions were inexcusable as judged by a jury of their peers. Um, we’re in the 3rd week of our series in Jeremiah, and if you haven’t been here the last couple Sundays, we said that contained within the book of Jeremiah is really the story of the whole Bible: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. So in our first week, we talked about how God made everything good— the earth, the people, everything. All of it was wonderfully designed by a loving Creator. All of it lived in harmony with each other and with God.
That was the beginning. However, in our second week, we talked about our earliest ancestors, as well as people in Jeremiah’s day, as well as ourselves today. We, all of us, have decided to forsake the goodness that God invited us into. We walked away from his light. We chose darkness, and subsequently, it has caused much trouble in our world.
Christians call that sin. Last week, we talked about how our sin affects God. That our sin breaks God’s heart. God’s reaction to our rejection of him looks much less like law enforcement and much more like a betrayed lover. In scripture, God is not pictured as someone just waiting to hit us with a stick whenever we do something wrong.
It’s not him. Instead, it’s more like when we sin, he’s grieved Because we’ve tainted the intimacy with him for which we were made in the first place. That’s how God responds as a betrayed lover. But even still, even though he’s grieved, he continues to pursue us. He even bears the cost to forgive us, to pardon us.
Okay, that was last week, how our sin affects God. This week we’re looking at how our sin affects us, and we’re really focusing on Jeremiah chapters 5 and 7. But as you read Jeremiah on your own, and you should, you’ll see that from beginning to end Jeremiah reiterates the chaos sin causes for humans. It’s all throughout the book. We’re only looking at chapters 5 and 7, but chapters 5 and 7 kind of represent the whole.
As we look at our passage today, we will see what sin does to us personally, what it does to the next generation, And then what it does to society at large. And then finally, we’ll talk about what hope do we have. Given how bad it is, we might be tempted to think there’s no hope, but don’t fall into despair because at the end we will talk about our hope. All right, so personal effects, effects to the next generation, effects to society, and then our hope. Hallelujah.
Um, so first, what sin does to us personally, and, and we’ll see, we’ll see 2 of these. So one, sin makes us spiritually numb.
The more we follow and the more we fall away from God, the more we lose the ability to tell the difference between what is good and true versus what is wrong and corrupt. So from Jeremiah chapter 5, it says, hear this, O foolish and senseless people who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear. Do you not fear me? declares the the Lord. In other words, they were blind and deaf to what they were doing.
They can’t see that it’s a problem, didn’t want to listen to anyone who tries to tell them what they’re doing is a problem. And we could track that in the story of Enron. Every next step toward their collapse didn’t feel wrong. And when their executives were challenged— and they were challenged both by people on the inside and people on the outside— they, when they’re challenged, they didn’t listen to it. They told their critics, we know better than you.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
They had eyes, but they didn’t see. They had ears, but they didn’t hear, oblivious to the disaster that awaited them because sin had made them numb. The lesson is don’t listen to your feelings. Listen to the Word of God. Follow what Scripture teaches even if you don’t feel like it, even if you think your way is better, Even for us, even if we think our way is working, our feelings are not trustworthy because our feelings will tell us things like, well, if it’s wrong, why does it feel so good?
Well, if it’s wrong, why am I having success?
That’s what anyone would say as they are being lured into a trap. They would say, this looks great, this seems wonderful, and it’s going to seem that way until the trap closes. We’ll be lured one step at a time toward disaster. It’s like following a path down into darkness. Jeremiah warns, they did not obey or incline their ear, but they walked in their own counsels.
It’s what I feel good, it’s what I think is good, I’m using my own knowledge to figure out where I go. The stubbornness of their evil hearts not listening to counsel on their own, which is what I think. They went backward, not forward, so it’s a path. They were heading in a direction. It was a lot of little decisions.
It was not like they made one mistake and their world was over forever. It was more like a slow fade. It was like Enron. The farther they went down the path, the more blind they became, the more callous they became to God’s voice, more callous to truth. They became— Israel at the time became, seems like, totally cold toward God, that they didn’t care about God at all.
They’d become so numb that they treated God with just as little regard as possible. They believed even they could trample all over God and it wouldn’t matter. They thought, we can live however we want and God will just forgive us. You know, God will deliver us if we get out of trouble. They thought even we could use God for forgiveness and deliverance but not pay any attention to Him.
This is from Jeremiah 7:9-10. I think we have a slide of this too. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other other gods that you have not known, and then come stand before me in this house which is called by my name and say, we’re delivered, God’s still got us, only to go on doing all these abominations? Like, sin had so blinded them that they didn’t even— they didn’t realize they didn’t have a relationship with God at all. I mean, imagine a so-called relationship where one person says, I can treat the other person any way I please I can break all my promises, I’ll never return calls, I’ll do what the other person hates, but anytime I need something, I know he or she’ll just provide it for me.
We would tell that person, you’re not in a relationship. I don’t know what kind of toxic, twisted thing this is, but it’s not a relationship. Don’t kid yourself.
So that’s how far Israel had slid away from God. That’s how numb and blind they were. So that’s one way sin affects us personally. A second way it affects us is that it blocks us from the good life. Jeffrey Skilling, Enron CEO that led them down this path, he spent 12 years in federal prison.
Obviously not the good life. Then he later, but more than that, he later admitted in interviews, in addition to jail time, he’s like, my reputation was destroyed. He’s like, I became the face of corporate evil. It’s a label I never intended for myself. It hurt his family, of course.
Sin kept goodness from him, even though along the way before the collapse, he thought the opposite. He thought his decisions were making his life better. But he was digging his own grave and he didn’t know it.
As we read in Jeremiah, this is Jeremiah 5:25, right? Your sins have kept good from you. We have that on a slide too, I believe. So listen, goodness is found in God alone ultimately.
If we stray from how God says to live in his word, it will hurt us personally eventually, if not right away, soon enough. C.S. Lewis wrote, and I pull this quote out as often as it is appropriate, but he wrote, C.S. Lewis wrote, nearly all that we call human history, all of human history, money, poverty, ambition, war, classes, empire, slavery, history, Lewis says, is the long terrible history of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this: God made us.
God made man to run, or God invented us as He invents an engine. As a car is made to run on gasoline and it would not run properly on anything else, God designed the human machine to run on Himself. God Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, the food our spirits were designed to feed on, There is no other. That is why it is no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself because it is not there.
There is no such thing.
End quote. We walk away from God, we won’t find goodness. We will be blocked from goodness because the goodness that we’re searching for is only found in one place and we just walked away from it.
Those are the personal effects of sin, spiritual numbness and blocked from the good life. Now let’s turn to the generational effects of sin and we’ll look at these, we’ll look at 2 of these as well. So first, What sin does to the next generation is lead them astray. Our actions are watched and repeated by our children. You know the old commercial from the ’70s or ’80s?
It was part of the war on drugs, I believe. And in the commercial, the dad, you know, like finds his kid with a crack pipe or something, and the dad asks, you know, who taught you how to do this? And the kid responds, I learned it from watching you. I always kind of rolled my eyes at that commercial because I’m like, why would the dad even ask that? I’m like, shouldn’t the dad know where the kid learned it?
Like, if the dad’s doing it, obviously the kid’s going to do it, right? So they needed better ad people back then. But that’s how kids learn nearly everything. It is said with kids that more is caught than taught. Kids just absorb how to live by watching us, more so than they learn by us, like, specifically sitting down to teach them something.
More is caught than taught. That doesn’t mean everything is caught, but more is caught than taught. And in Jeremiah’s day, the kids followed in the footsteps of the parents away from God. This is Jeremiah 5:7. God says, your children have forsaken me.
Of course they would, because that’s what their parents are doing. So for those of us who have kids, what are we modeling? What would our kids say is most important to us?
Or when have they seen us bend the truth?
On the other side, when have they seen us repent? When have they seen us say sorry in front of them or say sorry to them? I mean, if we want them to be quick to apologize to us, we’ve got to be quick to apologize to them. If we want them to be gracious, we’ve got to be gracious. But if they see us stubborn, if they see us shifting blame to others, if they see us never taking responsibility, That’s what they’re going to do.
They will catch whatever we are, even if we instruct them otherwise. They will more so follow our actions than our words. More is caught than taught. If you don’t have kids, the same principle really applies in any level of leadership. I mean, teams take on the personality of the coach, which is kind of scary if you’re a leader of the team.
Because if you don’t like something about the people you’re leading, the first step is to look in the mirror, right? Anything that you see in yourself that you don’t like, admit that to your team. None of us will ever be perfect, so the next best thing we can do is just admit our imperfections instead of trying to justify them. If we do that, if we can just admit our mistakes, mistakes and own them, then our kids and employees, teammates, they will similarly feel the freedom to admit their weaknesses. That will add health.
It will all be better. In Jeremiah’s day, nobody is doing that. It was all deceit and backstabbing, which was repeated by the next generation. So, one generational consequence of our sin is it will lead those after us astray. But another one is that it causes them harm.
You know, we can’t have destruction and chaos in our lives and it not spill over to them. The next generation will suffer our consequences. Jeremiah words it like this, it’s Jeremiah 5, he says, or God says, behold, I am bringing against you a nation from afar, O house of Israel. They shall eat up your harvest and your food. They shall eat up your sons and daughters.
So the sons and daughters are paying the price of the parents’ unfaithfulness.
Some of you probably have personal stories like that. Your parents’ actions, decisions, failures, what they did affected you. Even though you didn’t choose it, you suffered for it. Andrew Fasko, which was Enron’s CFO at the time of their collapse, 6 years in prison. Okay, so he lost his job, he went to jail, he had personal consequences, of course, but he later talked about in interviews that his children also bore the shame that he caused.
You know, his kids had to go to school and hear about their dad from other kids. They had to move. Suddenly they were in a one-parent home because dad’s in the slammer. Right? Kids caught the consequences, which we might say, that’s not fair because it wasn’t their fault, but that’s the way it works.
Sin gets all over everyone. You can’t avoid it. So if we’re into something that we shouldn’t be into, We won’t just hurt others, we will hurt ourselves. I mean, we won’t just hurt ourselves, we will hurt others. Sorry.
The next generation suffers when we stray from God and his good purposes. Okay, so we’ve covered personal consequences of sin and generational consequences. Now let’s look at societal consequences. What sin does to a society is it causes breakdown. The more widespread sin is, the more fractures there will be everywhere.
I mean, if you’ve traveled, you can probably bring countries to mind with different levels of corruption throughout the country, and then what it is like to live in those societies with different levels of corruption. You know, in fiction, like, What would be the difference between living in Gotham City versus Mayberry?
Right? Much harder to live in Gotham. Why? Because there’s much more sin.
The more there is, the more it ruins life for everyone. Jeremiah paints a pretty bleak picture of what was going on in Israel at the time. From chapter 8, it says actually, from the least to the greatest, everyone is greedy for unjust gain. So everyone is focusing more on profits than people. Their goal is to enrich themselves by whatever means possible, lie, cheat, steal, whatever it takes.
And if everyone is doing that, what’s going to happen? Well, some people will be pretty big winners, you know, but a lot of people, especially the marginalized, they’re going to get hurt, which is exactly what Jeremiah describes. Back to Jeremiah chapter 5, he says, therefore— I mean, this is just some of them— they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. I don’t know how they pulled off fat and sleek at the same time, but they did. And we might think, hey, everyone wins, right?
They’re rich, they’re fat, they’re sleek. Well, not so fast. Not everyone wins. They know no bounds of deeds and evil. They judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless to make it prosper.
They do not defend the rights of the needy. So only some people became enriched, and for them it was really only temporary. Eventually everyone was hurt. It’s like, I mean, imagine if everyone is Enron. In a society.
Imagine if the norm across a culture is deceit, malpractice, unfaithfulness. You can’t have a society. It would be a hellscape. You can’t trust anyone. Can’t believe any reports.
A society like that will not survive. It will break down. So, that’s what sin does to us personally, generationally, societally. It’s Bad. It’s a toxic cancer.
Now the next logical question is, how can that problem be solved?
Jeremiah hinted it’s going to be pretty tough because he warned us that once we’ve started to drift, we’re often too numb or too blind to even acknowledge that there is a problem, much less be able to fix it ourselves. I mean, for instance, the picture he paints is that they’re blind. How do you unblind yourself? You can’t. So the solution to the problem we caused is not us.
It must come from somewhere else, and it does. We’re not left without hope. The hope that we have, of course, is Jesus. The story of the Bible is that— that is really that Jesus came to fix this problem. Jeremiah sets us up for Jesus.
Even in our text today, Jeremiah sets us up for Jesus. Jeremiah will become much more explicit in the rest of our series that the answer is Jesus. But even today, Jeremiah prepares us to receive Jesus as the answer with saying things like— you just mentioned sin makes us blind. Well, how does that set us up for Jesus? Think about What did Jesus do when he came?
He opened the eyes of the blind. Similarly, Jesus says sin makes us deaf, but Jesus made the deaf hear. Jeremiah says sin keeps good from us, but Jesus says, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly. Jeremiah says sin brings judgment on us and the next generation, but on the cross Jesus took the judgment on himself so that we may be free from it. Jeremiah shows us a society collapsing because of greed and self-interest, but Jesus creates a new kind of society, a new kind of people, the church, where we elevate others above ourselves.
In other words, the devastation of sin does not have the final word. Jesus does. And Jesus doesn’t say to all of us, get yourself clean and then come to me. Instead, he meets us in our mess and absorbs it. On the cross, Jesus takes on our numbness, our self-deception, our deceit, our greed, all of it.
The erosion that destroys communities, the erosion that destroys companies, the erosion that destroys families, the erosion that destroys souls. Jesus bears all of that in his body on the cross. But he does more than that. He does more than only forgive our sin. He also reverses its effects.
Where sin numbs us, Jesus restores our sensitivity. Where sin fractures relationships, Jesus rebuilds trust. Where sin has harmed the next generation, Jesus can redeem our legacy. Where sin hollowed out a society, Jesus forms a new people marked by love. He doesn’t do all that instantly, but he does it truly.
So the invitation today is not, you know, try harder, be better, Don’t be Enron. The invitation is bring your erosion to Christ. Bring your slow drift to Christ. Bring your small compromises. Bring your immorality.
Bring whatever’s in the darkness. Bring the numbness you can barely notice anymore. Because the good news of Jeremiah fulfilled in Jesus is that God does not abandon His people ruined by sin. He rescues them, and he’s still doing that today. He will do that for you, no matter how far gone you are, and no matter what you’ve gotten yourself into.
He will rescue you. So put your faith in him, and he will begin to make you whole.
Let’s pray.
Father, help us to hate sin like you do.
Help us to see how toxic and corrosive it is to everything. Help our hearts break as your heart is broken over our broken world.
Relieve our numbness, restore our sensitivity, May Jesus burst into all of our lives and elevate us out of whatever pit we’ve gotten ourselves into, Lord. We pray all those things in his name. Amen.
