“1 Hear what the Lord says to you, O house of Israel. 2 This is what the Lord says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the sky, though the nations are terrified by them. 3 For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. 4 They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter. 5 Like a scarecrow in a melon patch, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good.”
6 No one is like you, O Lord; You are great, and Your name is mighty in power. 7 Who should not revere you, O King of the nations? This is your due. Among all the wise men of the nations and in all their kingdoms, there is no one like you. 8 They are all senseless and foolish; they are taught by worthless wooden idols. 9 Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. What the craftsman and goldsmith have made is then dressed in blue and purple—all made by skilled workers 10 But the Lord is the true God; He is the living God, the eternal King. When He is angry, the earth trembles; the nations cannot endure His wrath.
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March Madness ends tomorrow. Trash talking has always been a big part of the tournament because trash talking has always been a big part of basketball. Nobody talked trash better than Larry Bird. Before the 1988 three-point shoot-out, he walked into the locker room and asked the rest of the guys, “so, who’s coming in second?” He did win and he won in his warmup jacket. When he scored 60 points against the Atlanta Hawks, he started calling the shots beforehand. “This one is off the glass,” and sure enough it went in off the glass. That’ was infuriating for the Hawks. When playing in a new building he would regularly ask for the scoring record. He once went over and told the coach of the opposing team, “you better get somebody else out here to guard me because I’m killing this guy.”
Larry Bird talked trash because he could back it up. God can back up what He says, and in this passage tonight, God talks trash. This passage comes right on the heels of our last study on boasting in God. Jeremiah certainly boasts in God here. God certainly boasts in God here. He does it to show us that all the alternatives can only disappoint. He does it because He truly is the best. He does it to warn people against putting their hope in anything other than Him. God talks trash with good reason. That’s the claim of this sermon: God talks trash with good reason.
We are going to study this in two points. First: the worthless ways of the nations. Second: our incomparable God. We see the worthless ways of the nations in verses 1-5 and our incomparable God in verses 6-10.
First: the worthless ways of the nations. How do you know when someone wants to talk to you about something important? They use your name and pause. That’s what’s going on with verse 1, “Hear what the Lord says to you, O house of Israel. This is what the Lord says…” Of course everything God has to say is worth hearing, but this rhetorical device is meant to catch the attention of even the dullest listener. The people needed to pay close attention to what came next; ‘Hear what the Lord says to you, O house of Israel. This is what the Lord says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations…”’
God’s people are always at risk of learning the ways of the nations. That looks different at different times in history. In Jeremiah’s day, God’s people were at risk of learning the ways of Egypt and especially Babylon. They considered these nations to be quite impressive, and therefore they thought their philosophies and customs were very impressive. You see the same dynamic at play today when a Japanese couple wants an American wedding, or an American company raves about its Scandinavian furniture.
God’s people in Jeremiah’s day admired the Babylonians and the Egyptians. They admired their militaries. They admired their wealth. They wanted to be like them. God warned them against it; verse 2, “Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the sky, though the nations are terrified by them.”
Babylon and Egypt practiced astrology. They thought eclipses and star positions foretold the future. God warned His people against believing in that believed, but God wasn’t just talking about astrology; He was talking about the entire culture that flowed out of astrology. The word “culture” is connected with the word “cult.” In other words, how we live as a people flows out of what we worship and how we worship. That was true for Israel. That was true for Babylon and Egypt. It’s also true for America.
God was warning His people against becoming like the nations. They, like the church today, were to be in the world but not of the world. A passage like this exists because being in the world but not of the world is a difficult calling. As JA Dearman put it, “Assimilation if not downright capitulation to a dominant culture was a real issue for Israelites and Judeans among the nations.”
God doesn’t want His people to wind up like the nations because as He puts it in verse 3, “the customs of the peoples are worthless.” Now God isn’t against culture with its customs. You can’t be against culture and customs if you are pro-people. God is against culture and customs that flows out of wicked cult. Left to our own wisdom, we humans make a mess of the cult—of what we worship and how—and that has effects on the culture we make and in which we and our children live. The dehumanizing aspects you see every day in our culture flow out of the idols of this culture. Our culture flows out of our cult.
The cult of the nations in Jeremiah’s day was based on idolatry. God trash talks these idols; verse 3, “they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter.” Step number one with idolatry is you need to give your god eyes and ears. He can’t see or hear you unless you help him. In step number two, you make your god pretty. You need to put gold or silver on it. It’s kind of like build-a-bear but it’s build-a-god. For step number three, you need to be sure to nail your god down. It’s terribly embarrassing when your object of worship collapses in front of you. This is trash talk. What kind of a god needs to be made? The real God makes us. What kind of a god needs to be beautified? The real God doesn’t need our help to look good. What kind of god needs help standing up? The Lord doesn’t.
Babylon and Egypt might have looked impressive. The ways of the nations often do. On closer examination, you find that this apparent greatness rests on a lie. Their cultures are built on a lie. The gods at their center are, in the words of verse 5, “like a scarecrow in a melon patch.” Scarecrows only look real from a distance. When you get up close, you can see that they are nothing. That’s idolatry. That’s the wisdom of the nations today. That’s the wisdom dominating this nation. Humanity’s attempts to harness the good, the true, and the beautiful for our benefit can’t help. As JA Thompson put it, “idol worship tried to capture in material objects what is a spiritual experience. As a result it encouraged the absurd practice of people venerating their own impotent creations.” The incarnation is something completely different. Rather than us attempting to try to capture the best in physical form by making an idol, God takes on our form to remake us.
God trash talks these idols because they can’t help His people like He can; look at verse 5, “they must be carried because they cannot walk.” The verbal form for walk here is in the strongest form. Jeremiah was emphatic that these centerpieces of the nations can’t even carry themselves around. Isaiah, who Jeremiah was probably borrowing from, laughed it up with this same idea. He imagined the Babylonians having to carry their idols as they ran away and used the word for “carry” about the Lord, saying, “Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.”
You don’t need a god that you need to carry. You need a God who will carry you. The same goes for whatever people find security in today. If you need to play the market well to be fiscally sound, can money really save you? If you need the nation to be moving in the right direction before you can hope for the future, you just found out that your functional hope is not placed in Jeremiah’s God, but is found in the United States of America. Walter Bruggeman is right, “in our own time, we seem to be deeply—if not hopelessly—enmeshed in our self-created systems of security, well-being, and prosperity. But the enmeshment destroys us, for it talks us out of neighbor love, out of genuine freedom, and destines us to the anxiety of competence and finally to despair.” That’s our culture. Idolatry is not limited to the past.
People continue to put their hope in idols because they think they can deliver just as people in Jeremiah’s put their hope in their idols because they thought they could deliver; verse 5 is the truth, “Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good.”
God’s people were at risk of learning the ways of people who put their trust in objects that could do nothing. They couldn’t do anyone any harm and they couldn’t do anyone any good. The Lord, however, can do great harm, and He can do great good. Rather than being so concerned about how to keep up with the Babylonians and Egyptians, God was telling His people that they would be wise to concern themselves with what He thought of them. The same goes for us today. God is the one with whom we must reckon and if He is for us, nothing can be against us and if He is against us, it doesn’t matter who is for us.
He is that great. He is incomparable; that’s our second point: our incomparable God. My guess is that someone here has a sweatshirt at home that says, “World’s Greatest Grandpa.” Now, at risk of breaking your heart, that ranking isn’t scientifically based. There is no governing body that ranks all the grandfathers in the world based on kindness, generosity, and jokes and then averages those categories to determine the overall winner. That shirt just mean, “you’re the best because you’re mine.” It isn’t putting other grandfathers down. God’s sweatshirt would be rather different. It would put the other gods down. If God’s people gave Him a sweatshirt it would say what verse 6 says, “No one is like you, O Lord; You are great, and Your name is mighty in power. Who should not revere you, O King of the nations? This is your due.” The other nations could think of their gods the way we think of the title “World’s Greatest Grandpa”, as in, “he’s the greatest because he’s mine,” but Israel’s prophets were feisty. They really thought their God was objectively the best. They thought he deserved to be acknowledged as the best by everyone. They trash talked.
They behaved a bit like Tom Brady fans behaved after Brady won the Superbowl yet again this year. Brady fans were bound and determined to force everyone to acknowledge that Brady was the best. Jeremiah was even more adamant that everyone should acknowledge that the Lord was the best. “Who should not revere you, O King of the nations? This is your due.”
Do you believe that? Do you think that everyone should revere God? We can talk about how good it would be everyone in this nation to be in sanctuaries on Sunday, but why? Because it would make people better? Maybe. Because it would be good for society? Probably. Because it would be good for the church? The reason we should want everyone to be in worship is because verse 6 is true, “Who should not revere you, O King of the nations? This is your due.” God deserves worship. He deserves to have me bow before Him. He deserves that from everyone. When you take a step back and yourself who else actually deserves worship, you see what Jeremiah was after when he said, “No one is like you, O Lord.”
Now remember, God’s people in Jeremiah’s day wanted to be like the Babylonians and the Egyptians. They wanted to do life the Egyptian way or the Babylonian way because to them it seemed like the best way. Jeremiah was trying to help them see the idiocy of that; verse 8, “Among all the wise men of the nations and in all their kingdoms, there is no one like You. They are all senseless and foolish; they are taught by worthless wooden idols. Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. What the craftsman and goldsmith have made is then dressed in blue and purple—all made by skilled workers.”
God’s people were at risk of exchanging the Lord for a lie. That’s always the risk. That’s the risk today. It’s the risk because, as Jeremiah makes clear, the wise men of the nations are taught by idols.
Modern people read this passage and wonder how a society could be foolish enough to organize itself around blocks of wood adorned with gold and silver. If the ancients read our newspapers, they would wonder how a society could be foolish enough to start reorganizing itself around the idea there are more than two genders. Different ages have different delusions. They set up different gods to help determine what’s right and wrong; God says, “They are all senseless and foolish.”
Those who worship what is senseless and foolish become senseless and foolish. If you worship money, you will see others and yourself in terms of financial value. If you worship pleasure, you will wind up being used for pleasure and you won’t find it all that pleasurable. If you worship freedom, you will become free… free from any restraint, free from any boundaries designed to keep you safe. Egypt had a cult and a culture that flowed out of it. Babylon had a cult and a culture that flowed out of it. This nation has a cult and there is a culture flowing out of it. This cult far stricter than any form of Christianity; sin against it and you will find out. Just watch what happens when people oppose the idols of this age. Never laugh at idolatry as if it is unimaginable for you. You are living in the middle of it in this nation.
Don’t follow the ways of the nations. Don’t revere what they revere. Their idols are powerless to satisfy anyone. They are death. They will not last. In other words, they are nothing like God; verse 10, “But the Lord is the true God; He is the living God, the eternal King.”
The God of the Bible is everything our idols aren’t, and our idols are everything God isn’t, but that’s why the carnal heart loves idolatry. They like their idols because idols don’t ask anything of them; God does. They like their idols because idols give them a sense of control; God doesn’t. They like their idols because the idols of any age make their worshippers popular in that age. God doesn’t. Their idols are everything God isn’t—easy, unimposing, and constantly affirming. The problem, of course, is that these idols, then and now, are everything God isn’t and so they are lies, and they aren’t alive, and they soon pass into irrelevance.
If you know God, you know that what the nations worship and what this nation worships you know it doesn’t compare with God. If you know Jesus, you know that idols don’t compare. An idol was an image of a god; it showed you what the invisible god whom you couldn’t see was like. That’s what Jesus did. He showed you what the invisible God was like. As John put it, “No one has ever seen God; [but] the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made Him known.”
Jesus is a better idol. He is a better representation of a better God than anything you will ever encounter. By knowing him, you can actually know the good, the true, and the beautiful. By knowing him, you can actually know God, and you can know that you know Him. If you want to keep knowing Him, you better you keep yourself from idols.
That’s how John ends his first letter. He spends five chapters talking about what it means to know God and how you can know that you know God and then seemingly out of nowhere he ends his book with these words, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” Not a word about idols until that final verse, but the message is clear—if you want to know the true God, keep yourself from idols. That’s Jeremiah’s message, ‘Hear what the Lord says to you, O house of Israel. This is what the Lord says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations.”’
The ways of the nations are worthless when compared with God. The attempts to capture God are worthless when compared with God’s willingness to become like us. That’s why God trash talks them. He does it because you need Him but somewhere in your heart, you want something else. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows you need Him. That’s why He trash talks whatever else views for your worship. Amen.