“ 6 During the reign of King Josiah, the Lord said to me, “Have you seen what faithless Israel has done? She has gone up on every high hill and under every spreading tree and has committed adultery there. 7 I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me, but she did not, and her unfaithful sister Judah saw it. 8 I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries. Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear; she also went out and committed adultery. 9 Because Israel’s immorality mattered so little to her, she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood. 10 In spite of all this, her unfaithful sister Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense,” declares the Lord.
11The Lord said to me, “Faithless Israel is more righteous than unfaithful Judah. 12 Go, proclaim this message toward the north: “ ‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will frown on you no longer, for I am merciful,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will not be angry forever. 13 Only acknowledge your guilt—you have rebelled against the Lord your God, you have scattered your favors to foreign gods under every spreading tree, and have not obeyed me,’” declares the Lord.
14 “Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion. 15 Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding. 16 In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,” declares the Lord, “men will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made. 17 At that time they will call Jerusalem “The Throne of the Lord”, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts. 18 In those days the house of Judah will join the house of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your forefathers as an inheritance.”
We humans excel at avoiding real reconciliation. We seem to think that ruptures in relationships will simply blow over with time. We offer excuses for the ways in which we break harmony—“I was tired.” “I had a long day.” We offer non-apologies such as, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” When sinned against and actually given a confession, we avoid using the word “forgiveness.” Instead of, “I forgive you,” which would imply forgiveness is necessary, we say, “don’t worry about it”, which implies that there was no problem in the relationship—even though there clearly was. We excel at avoiding real reconciliation.
The same goes with us with God. We seem to think that He considers sin to be the sort of trouble that should simply blow over if we give it enough time. We offer non-confessions—“I guess I’m sorry, but I don’t really know what else I could have done.” We avoid using the word “sin” even in our confessions of sin; we use the words like “mistakes” or “struggles.” We excel at avoiding real reconciliation.
God doesn’t avoid reconciliation. He takes reconciliation seriously because He takes relationships seriously. He calls for real confession and real repentance because He offers real forgiveness. He deals in the real. He calls you to do the same; you must deal in the real. Real reconciliation with God requires real repentance. That’s the claim of this sermon: real reconciliation with God requires real repentance.
We will see this in three points. First: faithless Israel and Judah. Second: God’s condition for forgiveness. Third: a vision of restored relationship. We see the faithlessness of Israel and Judah in verses 6-10; in verses 11-13, we see God’s condition for taking His people back. In verses 14-18, we see a vision of what a restored relationship looks like.
First: faithless Israel and Judah. Aside from the call of Jeremiah in chapter one, what we are studying this evening is the only oracle in the first 20 chapters that comes with a time stamp; “During the reign of King Josiah, the Lord said to me…” Why? If you want to improve your Bible reading, you must notice what is different and ask, “why?” Why was this particular oracle introduced with a time stamp when so many others weren’t?
To answer that, we must look at the religious situation when Josiah took the throne. His father Manasseh, who was exceedingly wicked, had reigned for 55 years. To put that in perspective, LBJ was president 55 years ago. Imagine that every president, Congress, and Supreme Court since LBJ’s time was militantly godless and pushed that agenda everywhere and anywhere. That was the situation when Josiah took the throne.
Josiah courageously and faithfully introduced reforms aimed at maximizing obedience to God. He receives the highest marks of any king. As 2 Kings 23 puts it, “Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.”
What we have before us is God’s assessment of the people in Josiah’s day. It is His assessment of the people’s response to Josiah’s reforms. It is given by way of comparison—God compared Israel, the ten northern tribes, with Judah, the two southern tribes who were under Josiah; verse 6, ‘During the reign of King Josiah, the Lord said to me, “Have you seen what faithless Israel has done? She has gone up on every high hill and under every spreading tree and has committed adultery there.”’
This metaphor is exactly what we’ve been studying in the morning; there is a connection between our intimacy with God and physical intimacy in marriage, which is why adultery is always linked idolatry; both are a betrayal.
The ten northern tribes betrayed God by their false worship. It began when they broke off from Judah. God had commanded all His people to worship in Jerusalem and Jerusalem only in order to preserve purity of belief. He knew that if the people worshipped wherever they wanted they would soon worship however they wanted meaning they would worship like their Canaanite neighbors; that’s what they did; they worshipped the Canaanite fertility gods on every high hill and under every spreading tree, as verse 6 puts it.
This was encouraged by their first king, Jeroboam. He feared that if the people went to Judah to worship in the temple in Jerusalem they would find more and more reasons to reunite with Judah and would soon turn on him. He set up two golden calves for the people as worship sites and encouraged this franchised worship on every hill and under every tree.
God sent prophet after prophet to Israel—Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea—calling them to return to Him, but they delved further and further into idolatry and the brutality and debauchery that always goes along with giving one’s self to any power other than God. God’s warnings increased. His discipline increased; that leads to verse 7, “I thought that after she had done all this she would return to me, but she did not,” and so He served her, her divorce papers; verse 8, “I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries.” In Israel, a man who divorced his unfaithful wife would give her a certificate and send her out of the house. That’s what God did with His unfaithful people.
Now the two southern tribes, which Josiah now ruled, had been watching this. Rather than seeing Israel as a cautionary tale, Judah had grown so spiritually dull that they no longer cared about their marriage covenant with God. They regarded betraying Him as a very minor matter and thought that He would think it a minor matter; that’s verse 8, “Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear; she also went out and committed adultery. Because Israel’s immorality mattered so little to her, she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood.”
Now we come to God’s assessment of the people’s, priests’, and nobles’ response to Josiah and his courageous reforms; that’s verse 10, “Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense.” God saw contrasted Israel with Judah to show that they were the same—and we will see that in some ways Judah was worse.
The king was courageous and faithful. He repaired the temple, but the nobles agreed it was a good idea not because of any faithfulness to God but because of national prestige. When the priests found the book of the law, likely Deuteronomy, and read it, the king was cut to the heart because he had a heart of flesh. The other power players in Judah went along with the king’s spiritual reforms because it made political sense to go along with the new king.
There was certainly some genuine repentance, but by and large, the nation was no different. It had not returned to God. The steps forward under Josiah were actually just a layer of paint covering decay. The people didn’t truly repent or return or reconcile themselves to God. As Calvin put it, “a great portion of the people were under the influence of hypocrisy and deceit, as it is usually the case when rulers seek to support the pure worship of God, and to free it from all corruptions.”
Despite the best efforts of the best king, the people loved sin more than they loved God. Think of the sorrow of king Josiah if he did, in fact, know this assessment. He put himself on the line time and time again for the people’s ultimate good and by and large they didn’t care. Now think of king Jesus, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” You can’t know how you would have responded to the revival in Josiah’s day—whether in truth or in pretense. You can, however, know whether you are responding in truth or in pretense to what Jesus has done and is doing. God is just as interested in that today as He was in Josiah’s day. He is just as interested in people returning to Him. We see that in our second point: God’s condition for forgiveness.
A man who watches his brother gets hooked on meth, sees what that does to his family, and then decides to do meth himself, and then fakes his way through rehab is more guilty than his brother. He knew more going in and he lied about being willing to change; that’s verse 11, “Faithless Israel is more righteous than unfaithful Judah.”
We now see the grace offered the older brother on meth—Israel. These words are to the northern tribes, “Go, proclaim this message toward the north… only acknowledge your guilt—you have rebelled against the Lord your God, you have scattered your favors to foreign gods under every spreading tree, and have not obeyed me.” Rejecting the gift of such attempts at revival is a horrible sin.
God invited Israel back on one condition: real repentance. The condition to return to God then and now is real repentance. Given how gracious this condition is, it’s amazing that people still balk at it. They think God should have no conditions. Calvin’s answer to such delusion is spot on, “God lays down here a condition, lest hypocrites, relying on His goodness, should become more and more hardened…”
You can only enjoy God’s mercy if you return in God’s way; ‘“Return, faithless Israel,” declares the Lord, “I will frown on you no longer, for I am merciful,” declares the Lord, “I will not be angry forever.”’ You can only enjoy God’s grace if you confess God’s just condemnation on your sin. As J.A. Thompson put it, “[Jeremiah] could be a prophet of grace just because he took God’s judgment seriously.” The only Christians you know who take God’s grace seriously are the ones who take God’s judgment on sin seriously; they are the repentant ones; the rest are into cheap grace, which is no grace at all as those of you who are in the young men’s discipleship group will see in our new book.
Now we’ve seen this call to return was directed to Israel. It was for the first brother who got hooked on meth, but it was meant to be overheard by the second. God spoke these words to Israel, but he wanted Judah to overhear them. He wanted Judah, who wasn’t in exile yet, to hear His words to the Israelites so that when they were in exile too, they would know that this same grace was still available to them too.
Maybe tonight you find yourself wondering if this grace is for you. Maybe you are wondering if you are too far gone. Maybe you think you’ve faked repentance too many times for God to ever take you seriously. Don’t tell God what He will or won’t take seriously; just listen to Him, “Only acknowledge your guilt—you have rebelled against the Lord your God.” That’s God’s condition.
We now see a vision of what it looks like to return to God in our final point: a vision of restored relationship. God is eager to take us back. We see that in His words, ‘“Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband.”’ God’s people truly were faithless, but God was still willing to be their husband. Jeremiah was borrowing heavily from Hosea here.
There is a play on words here that is instructive. The people were worshipping the fertility god Baal, and this Hebrew word for husband sounds like “Baal.” God was telling His people that He was what they’ve been looking for all along; they were looking for Baal; He was the true Baal—the husband. That’s what He has been telling you if only you have ears to hear; or as one author put it, “the man who rings the bell at the brothel, unconsciously does so seeking God.” God knows what satisfies. He satisfies.
He is willing to take wayward hearts back, but surprisingly few come; verse 14, “I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan.” This is the remnant. Throughout Scripture you see that only a portion cleave to God—Isaac does, Ishmael doesn’t. Despite all expectations Jacob does and Esau doesn’t. Genuine repentance is far rarer and more precious than we can begin to comprehend. If you live a life of returning to God, recognize that as a reason for humility not pride.
Jeremiah pictured this return as returning to Zion; these imagines of restored relationships come fast and furious and we don’t have time to study them all. We will study Zion; verse 14, “I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion.” The start of the problem for the northern tribes was that they wouldn’t worship in Zion; they wouldn’t come to Jerusalem. When God called them back, He called them back to Zion. They couldn’t return to God in any way, shape, and form, they chose, and neither can we. We return to Him in the ways He sets forth in His word because that’s the only way to return. That doesn’t make God narrow. A ventilator tube isn’t narrow. It just has real boundaries so air can pass through. God’s ways just have real boundaries so that grace can pass through.
You see the flow of this grace in the imagery of the ark; verse 16, ‘In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,” declares the Lord, “men will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made.”’ The ark was the purest meeting place of God and humanity. It housed the manifestation of God’s presence. Jeremiah was saying that there would be no more need for the ark because the whole city would be the ark. The ark was the throne of God and the whole city was the throne; verse 17, “At that time they will call Jerusalem “The Throne of the Lord.” God’s presence would be as manifest everywhere as it was in the Holy of Holies. This promise became increasingly precious when the ark was destroyed in the fall of Jerusalem, and it remains precious to God’s people because that is still what we are waiting for; ‘I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”’ That’s the return to which all other returns point. That’s what the returning people of God are returning to in Jeremiah’s day and in our day.
You are included in that group because you are part of the “all nations” in verse 17, “at that time they will call Jerusalem “The Throne of the Lord”, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord.” Just as the manifestation of God’s presence was expanded from the ark to the new city so God’s people were expanded from the Jews to all nations. This isn’t just a study in seventh century BC Jewish literature; this is the God of the whole world who spoke first through the Jews to explain His purposes in the world.
His purpose is to return His people back to Him and you see the change that invariably happens when His people do, in fact, return; verse 17, “No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts.” You know you are returning if you no longer follow the stubbornness of your evil heart. Your heart is evil. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” as Jeremiah will put it in chapter 17. If you don’t recognize that about yourself, you are not returning to God. You haven’t taken the first step, which we saw is, “acknowledge your guilt.”
Those who return to God recognize the evil of their own hearts and are constantly being drawn to God by a force beyond themselves, which is God. You see that with the incarnation—God drawing us to God. You see that with the Holy Spirit—God drawing us to God. We are that needy. We are so poor at reconciliation that we need God to draw us to God. Praise God that He cares more about real reconciliation than we do. That’s the only reason any one has ever been reconciled to God. We’ve been reconciled because God excels at it. Amen.