Sermon Transcript
Today’s scripture reading comes from Jeremiah chapters 2 and 3. The word of the Lord came to me saying, go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, thus says the Lord, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you have followed me in the wilderness in a land not sown. Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord, what wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me and went after worthlessness and became worthless? The priests did not say, where is the Lord?
Those who handled the law did not know me. The shepherds transgressed against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this. Be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord.
For my people have committed 2 evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Have you not brought this upon yourself by forsaking the Lord your God when he led you in the way? Your evil will chastise you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God.
The fear of me is not in you, declared the Lord God of hosts. As a thief is shamed when caught, so the house of Israel shall be shamed, they, their kings, their officials, their priests, and their prophets. Can a virgin forget her ornaments or a bride her attire? Yet my people have forgotten me days without number. Go and proclaim these words toward the north and say, return, faithless Israel, declares the Lord.
I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the Lord. I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt that you rebelled against the Lord your God and scattered your favors among foreigners under every green tree. And that you have not obeyed my voice, declares the Lord. Return, O faithless children, declares the Lord, for I am your master.
I will take you, one from a city and 2 from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.
The beginning, we said contained within Jeremiah is really the story of the whole Bible. In other words, by studying Jeremiah, we can study what God is doing in the world at large and with all of history. And if you didn’t know, the Bible from beginning to end really tells one story, even though the Bible contains all these different books that were written by— we really don’t know how many different authors, but we know it was at least dozens of people. I mean, in other words, the Bible wasn’t authored by one guy in a cave one time pulling a really long all-nighter. It was written by a whole collection of people, many of whom never met each other, and they wrote over the time period of thousands of years.
But even though one author wrote in 2000 BC and another one wrote in 50 AD, their books, they fit together. Put together, they tell one coherent story that God made us, God made the world, we started off in paradise with him, in harmony with him and with each other and with the whole earth. But then we fell. The original harmony was shattered. Because we broke it.
Uh, the problem wasn’t on God’s side of the ledger, it was on our side. And we didn’t fall because— just because of unfortunate circumstances we couldn’t do anything about. It was our decisions that ruined paradise. But also, from the very beginning, God promised to repair what we broke. He said one day one will come who will rescue us from the trouble that we have caused.
Then later in the biblical timeline, it’s revealed Jesus is this one to come, and it was his work to reconcile us to God and begin to put the world back together. Jesus’ work was not so much to help us escape from the trouble that we caused, but rather to enter into the damage and restore it. That work is ongoing, of course. It is not complete, but one day it will be finished. God will one day remake the world.
He will remake our bodies so that everything is in harmony once again. Those are the big pieces of the story: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. It’s all of history in 4 words. Last week we started at the beginning with creation— what God made, how he made each one of us as individuals, that we are wonderfully designed works of art And in Jeremiah, we saw the intentionality and purpose for which we were created. None of us were accidents.
None of us were surprises. We are all masterpieces of heavenly architecture, as was the world at its beginning. That’s chapter 1 of the history of everything, perfectly created. So today we turn to the 2nd chapter of the story, what went wrong? What happened at the fall?
What Christians refer to as sin. Now before we get into our text, we should lay some groundwork because depending on our backgrounds, we may not all understand sin the same way. And some of our preconceived notions about sin are healthy and true and some are not, which means before we do anything else, we need to try at least to get on the same page. So let’s pull back from the biblical story for a moment, hopefully back to a place where we all agree, kind of regardless of our faith background or even if we have no faith tradition whatsoever, we probably all agree that something is wrong with the world. We know this place is not as it should be.
It’s not as it ought to be because we see wars, poverty, disease, injustice, suffering, betrayal, hatred, racism. We see people make decisions out of fear or selfishness. We know the chaos that causes. We see divisions, loneliness, greed. We know something isn’t right.
Something is broken. And whatever it is, It seems to have infected everything because we observe this problem in our workplaces, in our governments, in our families, in our kids. If we’re married, we see it in our spouse. Our spouse certainly sees it in us. We both wonder how the other one could possibly be so selfish at times, for instance.
And if we’re wise, We see it in ourselves. We admit, or we should admit, even if we don’t do it out loud, I have not lived as I should, and I’ve done it willingly. We can probably all agree on that, okay, this problem. Now, what you might not realize is if you see this problem with this— see this problem in the world, if you see it, you have actually just taken a step toward some kind of spiritual faith. If you see all the cruelty in this world and you think it’s a problem, if, you know, if we believe this world shouldn’t be this way, the world ought to be better, if we think that, we’ve taken a step towards some kind of faith.
Because if there’s no such thing as a spiritual realm or a Creator, or if there’s nothing beyond the natural world, if the material world is all that there is, if all that we are is only the result of mindless forces that pieced our atoms together in the particular configuration that they are, if that’s the case, if it’s just all mindless how we got here, then there’s no such thing as ought to be. If we weren’t made with a specific purpose in mind for what we should be, then it’s nonsensical to evaluate if we’re living up to what we should be. Well, you have to have an idea of what something was meant to be in order to know whether it is succeeding or failing at what it is supposed to do. So, if we ask, like, is this a good hammer? We have to have some idea of what a hammer is meant to do.
You know, if the inventor of a hammer wanted it to tell time, but the only— it’s just a stick with a heavy rock tied to the end of it, and it’s supposed to tell time, then it’s not a very good hammer, right? You have to have an idea of what it’s meant to be to know if it’s being good at what it’s meant to be. Or let’s say a hammer was created without any purpose at all. If a hammer just came to be by a star exploded and some particles coalesced together in the shape of what we understand to be a hammer and fell out of the sky, there’s no way to evaluate if it’s any good or not. Because it was never made with an idea of what it should be.
It fell out of the sky. One guy could say, well, it’s for this. Another guy could say it’s for that. But there’s nothing objective to say what it should be. So if this world, if our world is only the result of mindless forces, it makes no sense to look at wars, poverty, disease and say, well, that’s not right, because there is no right.
There is no good, bad in justice. I mean, people have different opinions. People have very strong opinions. People have very different opinions about what justice might look like, but there’s nothing objective to decide between warring tribes of what justice would be. All we have really is just survival.
Or think of it this way, if humanity, for example, is only the result of a long evolutionary process driven forward pretty much by the strong eat the weak, the survival of the fittest, right? That’s how we got here, strong eat weak. Then what’s wrong with the strong eating the weak?
Nothing. That’s not oppression, that’s just the way of the world. The big guy bullying the little guy, great! That’s just the next step in the evolutionary process. That’s how our ancestors made it, so what’s wrong with it?
Why shouldn’t we do that? Why shouldn’t nations do that? Why shouldn’t the strong nation devour the weak nation? That’s not a problem. I mean, the little nation may not like it, but sorry, that’s just the way the universe works.
If you don’t believe me, listen to this quote from Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, emeritus fellow at Oxford, prolific writer, outspoken atheist. He says in his book Out of Eden, he says, the total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. It must be so. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, Some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
If the physical world’s all there is, oppression isn’t wrong really, ’cause there’s no such thing as wrong. Even if we don’t like it, even if we’re on the weak side of the equation, for example, and we’re gonna fight for our own survival, of course, and we’re gonna hope we can convince some other people to fight alongside of it, and our idea will win out in the end because it means we won’t be destroyed. Even if we do all that, That’s just our opinion. The other tribe that’s fighting against us has a different opinion, and we have no real means to call them actually unjust because there’s no such thing as justice. No evil, no good, because there’s never an intention of what this place ought to be or what ought not to be.
There’s only this cruel survival process. That’s it. If no one designed this place with a specific intention in mind for what it should be. This world’s just like the hammer that fell out of the sky. Can’t call it good, bad, right, and wrong.
It just exists. Good, bad, right, and wrong— those words have no meaning. But I bet you don’t believe that.
I bet you believe this place is more, or should be more, than a cruel survival process. I bet you believe there is an ought to be for this world and the people in it. I bet you believe it is wrong, not just uncomfortable, for the strong to eat the weak. I bet you believe it’s wrong for bullies to punch down. But you believe it’s wrong, not just inconvenient, for those who they hurt.
You can feel it in your heart, can’t you, that this place isn’t as it ought to be? You know there’s an ought. You know, don’t you, that you’re called to a greater goodness? And if we believe that we are called to something greater, then you have taken a step toward believing that there is someone calling us.
If you believe there’s an ought-to for this world, you’ve taken a step toward someone designed it with that intention. See, you’re closer to faith than you might think you are. All right, now with that intro, let’s turn to our passage. As we study Jeremiah today, we’ll see the prevalence of our problem, of our sin. We’ll see how our problem affects God and then what he does about it.
Prevalence of our problem, how it affects God, and what he does about it. So first, the prevalence of our problem. It’s pervasive. It’s ubiquitous, actually. Sin is in all of us.
We all already admitted that we see it everywhere— corruption, decay, brutality, cruelty, tendency towards selfishness, unfairness, twisting the truth to advantage ourselves. Something is wrong everywhere. There’s nowhere we can look and not see problems. And if we think we finally find someplace, or if we think we found some relationship that doesn’t have any problems, just wait a minute. Something will break soon.
It won’t stay perfect for very long. Okay, but at the same time, we don’t want to paint too bleak a picture because there’s goodness everywhere we look as well. You know, all of us retain the image of God from our creation. We have the capacity for much good, and we often do it. Almost nothing’s entirely bad.
Even our worst enemy, there’s something in them that we can applaud. But nothing’s entirely good either. Everything’s been infected by sin. Everything’s tainted. Everything’s polluted.
Jeremiah observes it in all levels of leadership in every institution. He starts at the top, verse 8, he mentions priests. The priests, those who handle the law, did not know God. The shepherds, that’s their spiritual leaders, went after things that do not profit. So, I mean, these are the people who are specifically tasked with teaching people right from wrong, pointing them to God.
Jeremiah, they’re part of the problem. Priests are leading people astray, contributing to the corruption. It’s the same thing with their political hierarchy. Verse 26, he mentions their kings and officials have turned their back on God, which it would be shocking if it weren’t so familiar. It seems more unusual to find a politician who leads with integrity than one who doesn’t.
But in Jeremiah’s day, of course, as in ours, the problem wasn’t just with their priests and their leaders, it was with the general public as well. Verse 11, God says, but my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Verse 13, my people have committed 2 evils. They’ve forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Verse 29, you have transgressed against me, declares the Lord.
The point is everyone has abandoned the goodness of God. Everyone. Later in chapters 46 through 50, which we can’t cover in detail because we’re trying to study all 52 chapters of Jeremiah in 7 weeks, But in chapters 46 through 50, Jeremiah calls out the other nations around Israel as well. So abandoning God wasn’t just Israel’s problem, it was everyone’s problem. He lists Egypt, Philistine, Moab, Edom, Damascus, Hedor, Kedor, Babylon, others.
Everyone has forsaken the fount— the fountain of living waters. Everyone has turned to their own way. It’s utterly pervasive. Following the pattern of our earliest ancestors, we’ve abandoned the goodness for which we were created. God made us to have life, have it to the full, enjoy this fountain of living waters which is him.
You know, he is the source of light, he is the source of goodness, and we said no thanks. We walked away. And what’s the result of that? What’s the consequence? God says, verse 4, they went far from me They went after worthlessness and became worthless, as we should expect.
You know, if we drink poison instead of living waters, we’re poisoned. If we walk away from wholeness, we get brokenness. If we walk away from light, we’re in darkness. It’s cause and effect. There, there are consequences when we choose sin, and we’ll talk more about those next week, but there’s personal consequences Relational consequences, societal consequences.
Every time we forsake the goodness of God, we affect a whole lot more people than only ourselves. That’s next week. We’ve all chosen that, all of us, even the very young among us. I’ll never forget my niece who is now 16 and she’s driving, but when she was just old enough to kind of toddle walk around, so she’s maybe 14 months old, I don’t know. My brother and his wife at the time also had this little Yorkie dog, probably like 6 pounds, just nothing to this little dog, certainly much smaller than my niece.
But my niece had some of her toys just kind of scattered about on the floor where she could reach them, and the dog who was right next to her picks up one of her toys in his mouth and starts to walk away. So how does my beautiful, precious little toddler niece respond? Was she kind? Did she willingly share her toy with the dog?
No! As soon as that dog takes her toy, instant, she raises, you know, her chubby little hand back and just as hard as she can smacks the dog straight across the face, tries to get her toy back. Which of course she wasn’t even playing with that toy before the dog took it. It’s an immediate reaction from her. She didn’t know very many words, but she’s clearly indicating, I don’t like what you’re doing, so I’m going to use violence to get my way.
Where does that come from? What is that? With her at the time, I can guarantee it was— I can guarantee it was not learned behavior because up to that point in her life, I am certain she had never seen anyone hit anyone else. She didn’t go to daycare, didn’t learn it from an older kid. She was my brother and his wife’s first kid.
She was the first grandkid on either side of the family. The TV shows she watched were just like colors and shapes and music. I mean, her mom and dad certainly didn’t treat the dog like that or each other like that. I mean, she had never seen violence, and yet she knew exactly how to use it, wanted to use it, chose to use it. That’s the Christian doctrine of sin.
We are part of the problem that we see in the world.
Whenever someone wants to dispute Christian doctrine of sin, I say, hopefully sensitively, I say, you must have never had kids.
Also, I bet you’re not in management.
Because if you’re a parent or you’re trying to manage people, it’s pretty obvious people don’t do what they’re supposed to do. No matter how many policies or punishments you put in place or how great you are at casting vision, something’s going to go awry, right? And with kids especially, you’re like, why?
Why do you willingly cause problems? Like, you know this is going to upset the apple cart and you still do it. Why? It’s because they’re sinners.
We all are. That’s why there’s problems in the world. Again, that doesn’t mean we’re all totally corrupt. You know, it doesn’t mean we’re all corrupt to the same level, but this problem is in all of us, every single one of us. It’s utterly ubiquitous.
Now, how does that problem affect God? It breaks his heart. Our sin grieves God. It’s way deeper than simply we did something wrong and he’s the law enforcement, so now he’s after us. That’s really not the picture of God in Scripture, but that might be our view of God depending on our background.
We might think of God as, you know, only a judge who is just waiting to smack us on the back of our heads with a ruler whenever we do something wrong. But that picture is inaccurate, even though He is a judge and He will judge the world, and we will talk about that in our series. But in Scripture, He’s not portrayed as some cruel teacher who’s just waiting to hit us whenever we mess up because in that illustration the teacher doesn’t care about you. The teacher certainly cares about the rules but not so much about you and that’s not God. God cares deeply about us so much so that sin breaks his heart.
He wants us to thrive, he wants a good relationship with us, he wants personal intimacy with us, we matter greatly to him. In fact, throughout Scripture and in our passage, God compares his relationship with us as the relationship that’s shared between husband and wife, bride and groom. For instance, in our passage, verse 2, the Lord says, I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness. The idea in God’s mind is that we would be lovers with him, as enthralled with each other as a new bride and groom are. That’s what God wants with us.
He created us to be the apple of his eye, hold an elevated position in his heart. He wants to delight in us, and he wants us to delight in him. And it hurts him when we don’t. It hurts him when we walk away from him after everything that he has given us. He gave us life, he gave us breath, he gave us a world to live in.
Even if you’ve never considered God before, even if you don’t believe in him, he still the one who made your life possible, and it breaks His heart when we aren’t walking with Him or when we treat Him as if He doesn’t exist. From chapter 2 again, verse 32, can a virgin, that’s meaning a bride, forget her ornaments, like on her wedding day, or a bride her attire? Yet my people have forgotten me days without number. And then He gets more graphic in chapter 3, describing His people as an unfaithful bride. I didn’t include those verses in the reading before the sermon, and I will not quote them now because I’m not sure I’m allowed to say them in church, even though God said it in the Bible.
I don’t— he can do that. I don’t know if I can. But he says his people aren’t just a little unfaithful. They are the type of wife who runs around with everyone except the one that she should be with.
And you can imagine how devastating it would be for a husband if his wife was like that. God’s point is that’s what he feels like because we’ve sought after many other things besides God to fill the place in our hearts that is only meant to be filled by him. Now, that’s not to say, you know, we can only love God and not love anything else ever. Of course, we can love many things. Just like husbands and wives love many things besides their spouse.
They can love work and sports and the kids and good food. Lots of room in a heart, right? But for husbands and wives, those other things can never replace each other. Those other things can never become primary over your spouse, and if they do, that’s a problem. If husbands and wives are more enthralled with work than they are with each other, or more enthralled with hobbies than they are with each other, it will erode the relationship.
Same thing happens with us and God. If something’s more primary in our hearts than him, it erodes our relationship with him. But more severely, and what God is really talking about here in Jeremiah, is not when we love a good thing more than we love God. That’s not really what he’s talking about. It’s more like when we love a bad thing that’s contrary to God, like adultery would be with a spouse.
It’s contrary to your spouse. We’re enthralled with darkness. We run into the arms of sin. We climb into bed with what God is opposed to. That’s a bigger problem than simply loving a good thing more than him, and we all do that.
John 3:19 is, the light has come into the world, but the people loved darkness rather than the light. They loved it. They loved the darkness because their works are evil. And so we’ve given ourselves over to what is opposite to God, and it breaks his heart. See, that’s different.
That’s way different. It’s way deeper than simply, oh, we broke a rule, so now we’re going to get punished. It’s not that. It’s we’ve grieved him. That’s how sin affects God.
Now lastly, how does God respond to this grief that he has? As a jilted lover, he is jilted, but yet he’s still a lover. And we see both of those in our passage. On the jilted side, our unfaithfulness angers him. He’s very upset.
He says we deserve judgment, we should be ashamed. As anyone would say who has been so betrayed, so forgotten as God has. It makes sense that he’s livid. We would be, for sure. But perhaps, unlike us, unlike how we might respond if we felt like God did, if we were that grieved with someone, God doesn’t give up on us.
In fact, even when we walk away from him, he still pursues us. Immediately after this, you know, graphic description of this unfaithful wife, immediately afterwards he says from chapter 3 starting in verse 12, return, faithless Israel, declares the Lord. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful. I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt that you have rebelled against the Lord.
Return, O faithless sons. I will heal your unfaithful— your faithlessness. So even after the giant mess that we caused, even after we broke his heart over and over and over again, he tenderly says, come here. I got you. Come here.
I will repair what you broke. I will pardon. I will forgive. It’s astounding. I mean, imagine a husband whose wife has been that unfaithful, who has walked away from him over and over again.
She’s chosen others. She’s ruined their relationship. She’s broken the trust, repeatedly. What would it take for her to come back?
It would be costly for someone for her to come back. Either the husband is going to make her earn her way back, you know, prove her faithfulness, you know, make her grovel at his feet long enough until he thinks she She has paid enough, you know, which is basically her paying her own way to get home. Or the other option is that he forgives. He accepts her back without any groveling, without any payment on her part. He forgives.
But if he forgives, it’s not just like, oh, he can just forgive. Imagine being in that situation. Someone you care about, for them to come back. If they come back, you must absorb a cost. You must bear the burden of the pain the other one caused, the shame of what the other one caused.
Like, you must swallow it somehow to receive them back, to move forward, which is painful. It’s painful to forgive, to accept someone back who has so wronged you. There is a cost to it. But that’s what God does for us in Christ. That is what the cross is about.
On the cross, Jesus absorbed the pain of our unfaithfulness. He bore the cost of our shame in order to forgive us. And it was a huge cost. It emptied Jesus to do it. Remember in our passage today, uh, God refers to himself as the fountain of living waters.
God is this eternal wellspring of life. And if we walk away from that, you can imagine what would we expect to experience, right? Dryness, thirst, especially if this is the fountain from which we were made to drink, especially if this fountain would eternally satisfy us. And if we walk away from that, it would be a cosmic kind of thirst, which is exactly what Jesus experienced on the cross. When Jesus was on the cross, He cried out, I thirst, which shows on the cross the one who is the fountain went dry.
The fountain himself was parched in our place so that we could return to the waters. The cross shows us God does not ignore our sin. He does not minimize our betrayal. He never says, let’s just forget about it and move on. Instead, He absorbs the cost himself.
The jilted lover becomes the wounded Savior for you because he loves you even after all we have done.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for Jesus who bore the cost of our betrayal, to bring us home, Lord. We pray that he would be real to us today and that we would want to embrace him, receive his forgiveness, and work alongside him to put back together this world that is so broken. May you continually refine us, Lord, as we work to repair the brokenness around us. We pray those things in Jesus’ name.
