“1 “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city. 2 Although they say, ‘As surely as the Lord lives,’ still they are swearing falsely.”
3 O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain; You crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent. 4 I thought, “These are only the poor; they are foolish, for they do not know the way of the Lord, the requirements of their God. 5 So I will go to the leaders and speak to them; surely they know the way of the Lord, the requirements of their God.” But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke and torn off the bonds.
6 Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out, for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many.”
“So how bad is it?” I found myself asking that question quite a bit over this past year. I asked it of doctors in different parts of the country. “I’ve heard that hospitals in your area are overwhelmed with covid patients; so how bad is it?” I asked it of friends who live and work in DC; “the political climate seems downright toxic; so how bad is it?”
On the ground details help us understand what’s happening. They tells us whether the situation is better or worse than we imagine. The on the ground details of tonight’s study show that the situation in Jerusalem was much, much worse than anyone imagined. The answer to the question, “so how bad is it?” was that Jerusalem was morally bankrupt. The Jewish population certainly talked about how bad the situation in Jerusalem was just as people talk about how bad situation in DC is today, but in Jeremiah’s day the reality was that the city was worse than anyone thought.
This will show us that God had just cause for His judgment. God was building His case for the Babylonian exile. Part of that case was that the situation demanded an exile. He explained just how bad it was in Jerusalem to prove that the coming judgment was just. He always has just cause for His judgments. That’s the claim of this sermon: God always has just cause for His judgments.
We will see this in three points. First: the Lord’s challenge. Second: Jeremiah’s findings. Third: the consequences of unrepentant sin. You see the Lord’s challenge in verses 1-2, Jeremiah’s findings in verses 3-5, and the consequences based on Jeremiah’s findings in verse 6.
First: the Lord’s challenge. Throughout this chapter, God demonstrates that the situation in Jerusalem was so bad that judgment was the only available option. Now, God didn’t need to demonstrate His case. He was and is the judge and jury. He doesn’t need our input or approval. He proved His case as a way of honoring His people. He honored that relationship even when they didn’t.
God’s case was that Jerusalem was far worse than anyone thought; verse 1, “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city.”
These words were directed to a group—Jeremiah and an imaginary search party. God called for a fact-finding mission to search for just one righteous man. Just as the angels searched for ten righteous people, so this group would search for just one righteous person. Sodom needed ten righteous people to avoid destruction; Jerusalem only needed one.
We know happened to Sodom; the question now is what will happen to Jerusalem? This is a particularly pointed question because when God and Abraham spoke about Sodom, God told Abraham to, “direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” That’s how they could avoid what happened to Sodom happening to them. The question now was, “how many children of Abraham were doing what was right and just?” That’s worth considering today too—how many people who claim to have faith like Abraham are doing what is right and just?
You would expect that Jerusalem would receive a better report card than Sodom. After all, they had the Scriptures. They knew exactly what God expected. They knew why God deserved obedience. The people of Jerusalem’s eyes were opened by the law. It’s one thing to disobey relatively blindly like Sodom; it’s something else entirely to disobey with your eyes wide open.
Jesus said the same. He said that it would be more bearable on judgment day for Sodom than for the towns that rejected his message. Increased knowledge brings increased culpability. If knowing more about God’s will leads a man to reject more of God’s will, you know that man is certainly unrighteous. The message is that if one righteous man was not found in Jerusalem, then Jerusalem was, in some respects, worse than Sodom, and so sinning with your eyes wide open is, in some respects, worse than mistreating strangers, homosexual acts, and violence.
The Lord challenged Jeremiah to find one man in Jerusalem was wasn’t disobeying with his eyes wide open. If Jeremiah could find just one man who sought to love the Lord his God with all his heart, all his soul, and all his might and his neighbor as himself, God would refrain from doing to Jerusalem what he did to Sodom. This is worth considering for us because this same God remains the judge of all the earth. What we do as a church matters far more than any of us think.
God didn’t want this search party tricked by mere religious talk in Jerusalem. He knew that if they were to literally do this search, they would encounter all sorts of people talking a good spiritual game with nothing much to back it up; verse 2, ‘Although they say, “As surely as the Lord lives,” still they are swearing falsely.’
We often don’t probe deeply enough when it comes to these matters. We’ve largely reduced faith to mere mental assent. We’ve come to believe that if we can get people to agree with a few statements, then they have become Christians. That doesn’t probe deeply enough. That doesn’t probe to the heart. The question is, “does this man want to love the Lord their God with all his heart, with all his mind, and with all his strength?” “Does this woman want to love her neighbor as herself?” Does she have a sense that to do otherwise is sin from which she must be forgiven, and from which—relief of relief to her—she has been forgiven but only through the blood of the Son of God? That’s a new heart. You can’t make that happen. Only the Holy Spirit can. That’s what we want to see glimpses of when someone professes their faith.
Knowing religious language is insufficient. Growing up in church is insufficient. The people this search party encountered had that. Jesus expects to encounter a whole lot of that on judgment day, which is why he felt compelled to ask, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” The search party didn’t find faith in Jerusalem; that’s our second point: Jeremiah’s findings.
Despite the imaginary nature of this search party, Jeremiah recognized that God was serious about this search for true faith; verse 3, “O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth?” Now when you read these words, you need to ask yourself, “how does God look for the truth about people? How does God look for the truth about me?” There are many ways. Sometimes He calls for uncomfortable obedience. We saw that in His words to Abraham about offering Isaac, “now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” Sometimes He offers a divisive teaching to divide the sheep from the goats. You see Jesus do that repeatedly. In our passage, we see that God disciplines sins as a way of looking for truth; verse 3, “O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain; You crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent.”
The way in which you respond to the correction of God tells you about the state of your soul. When you face consequences for your sin, do you fuss and fume or do you repent? Think about it in terms of an employee. Let’s say that you catch an employee embezzling. You’ve got indisputable evidence. You confront him on it. He denies it. You fire him. He throws a fit and tries to run your business down all over the internet. Now, are you thinking, “maybe I made a mistake letting him go?” No, of course not; you are thinking, “it’s good to be rid of that guy; who knows what other trouble he would have caused?” You are glad to be rid of him because of the way he responded to correction. The way in which you respond to correction makes your heart public; it brings out what’s inside.
People who face consequences for their sin and continually refuse to repent are revealing something; they are revealing that their hearts are not soft to God. They are functioning out of a heart of stone and not a heart of flesh. You don’t find any willful, unrepentant sinners among the elect because willful, unrepentant sinning is impossible for anyone who is born of the Spirit. Church discipline just follows what God did as recorded in verse 3.
We’ve lost this understanding. We’ve lost an understanding of the wisdom of Proverbs which teaches that discipline corrects fools. We’ve lost the understanding that willful, unrepentant sin is impossible for a Christian. We’ve come to think that calling a willful, unrepentant sinner to repentance is somehow unchristian. We’ve come to see giving consequences for willful, unrepentant sin as unchristian. “How could the church do that? Don’t they know about grace?” We do. We know that repentance is the conduit of grace and that not even God covers willful unrepentant sin with grace.
Jeremiah knew that he wasn’t dealing with real faith in Jerusalem because the people did not repent when corrected time and time again. As Walter Bruggeman put it, “only a hint of covenantal responsiveness will be sufficient for the rescue, but no hint of such responsiveness can be found.”
Now this is hyperbole. Jeremiah’s inability to find one righteous person is an exaggeration. There were some covenant keepers in Jerusalem. We will see that throughout this book, but the message with this search party was that the situation was hopeless. The covenant keepers were such a miniscule minority that they were of no account in the life of that city. We saw last week that not even the covenant keeping of the king made a real difference in the life of that city.
Now Jeremiah had a hard time believing that the situation really was that hopeless; you see that in verse 4, ‘I thought, “These are only the poor; they are foolish, for they do not know the way of the Lord, the requirements of their God. So I will go to the leaders and speak to them; surely they know the way of the Lord, the requirements of their God.”
The poor people didn’t know God’s law as well as they should have. They hadn’t been educated in it the way Jeremiah had. Jeremiah thought that certainly those who were educated in the law would keep the law, but, as verse 5 puts it, “with one accord they too had broken off the yoke and torn off the bonds.”
The ones who had been catechized in the law, were just as clueless as the people who missed out on such education. The people who were appointed to teach the law were as clueless about it as the people who didn’t know it at all. There are parallels between this and most of the priests before the Reformation. We’ve got recent, and very public, examples of Christian leaders doing worse than those who don’t know the law.
Jeremiah described the people of his day having, “broken off the yoke of God.” He likened the law to a yoke. A yoke was laid on oxen to direct them. The law was laid upon the people to direct them. This is the same yoke that Christ talked about saying, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” If you don’t think that this yoke is easy and light, give the world’s yoke a try. If the ten commandments of God seem too much for you, give the ten thousand commandments of the world a try.
If the yoke you are carrying—and we all are guided by something—is too heavy, give Jesus’ yoke a try. Pray for a heart that wants to bear this yoke that is easy and light. Pray for a heart that wants to be guided by God. The way He guides is described in His word. Don’t be as foolish as those people in Jerusalem. The yoke they chose guided them to destruction. Such yokes always do. We see that in our final point: : the consequences of unrepentant sin.
Since the situation in Jerusalem was, in fact, hopeless God gave His people the consequences for their sin. He laid upon them the curses laid out in Deuteronomy; look at verse 6, “Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out, for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many.”
This is a poetic description of Babylon. The animals are fierce because Babylon is fierce. We will be dipping into the rest of this chapter because it expands on this final point; look at verse 15, ‘“O house of Israel,” declares the Lord, “I am bringing a distant nation against you an ancient and enduring nation, a people whose language you do not know, whose speech you do not understand. Their quivers are like an open grave; all of them are mighty warriors. They will devour your harvests and food, devour your sons and daughters; they will devour your flocks and herds, devour your vines and fig trees. With the sword they will destroy the fortified cities in which you trust.”
Note the language of seeming invincibility—Babylon’s quivers are like an open grave; the least of their warriors is a mighty man; they devour whatever they encounter. The reason they are described in invincible terms isn’t merely because of their supreme political power, although they were dominant; they are described in such terms because God had given Jerusalem into their hands.
Why? There are a number of answers, but the one that interested Jeremiah here was the sin of Jerusalem. Babylon was unstoppable because the sin of Jerusalem; verse 6, “for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many.” Their rebellion was greater than that of Sodom. They sinned eyes wide open and weren’t serious about repenting even when they thought they were. God was never fooled but He kept giving them chances; no more chances would be given because none would ever be taken; that’s the logic of verse 30, “Should I not avenge myself on such a nation as this? A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way, but what will you do in the end?”
The people would not repent and so they would be left with no options other than death. The wages of sin is death. They could put their archers here and their chariots there, but it would make no difference because they were seeking to stand against the wrath of God. There is no standing against the just wrath of God. That’s why there is nothing more terrifying than a person who claims to love God but actually loves sin; “my people love it this way, but what will you do in the end?” If a man who claims to be a Christian loves sin and don’t repent, he is as hopeless as Jerusalemite before Babylon. If the church claims to follow Christ, but follows they world, it is as hopeless as Jerusalem before Babylon.
Sodom was a warning to the people of God. They didn’t pay attention. Jerusalem is a warning for the people of God. Are we paying attention? That’s a valid question. That’s a valid question because Jesus thought this was a valid question, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” You can only answer for you, but you must answer for you. Amen.