“1 This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 “Listen to the terms of this covenant and tell them to the people of Judah and to those who live in Jerusalem. 3 Tell them that this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Cursed is the man who does not obey the terms of this covenant— 4 the terms I commanded your forefathers when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the iron-smelting furnace.’ I said, ‘Obey me and do everything I command you, and you will be my people, and I will be your God. 5 Then I will fulfill the oath I swore to your forefathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey’—the land you possess today.” I answered, “Amen, Lord.”
6 The Lord said to me, “Proclaim all these words in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem: ‘Listen to the terms of this covenant and follow them. 7 From the time I brought your forefathers up from Egypt until today, I warned them again and again, saying, “Obey me.” 8 But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubbornness of their evil hearts. So I brought on them all the curses of the covenant I had commanded them to follow but that they did not keep.’ ”
9 Then the Lord said to me, “There is a conspiracy among the people of Judah and those who live in Jerusalem. 10 They have returned to the sins of their forefathers, who refused to listen to my words. They have followed other gods to serve them. Both the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken the covenant I made with their forefathers. 11 Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them. 12 The towns of Judah and the people of Jerusalem will go and cry out to the gods to whom they burn incense, but they will not help them at all when disaster strikes. 13 You have as many gods as you have towns, O Judah; and the altars you have set up to burn incense to that shameful god Baal are as many as the streets of Jerusalem.’
14 “Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them, because I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their distress.
15 “What is my beloved doing in my temple as she works out her evil schemes with many? Can consecrated meat avert your punishment? When you engage in your wickedness, then you rejoice.”
16 The Lord called you a thriving olive tree with fruit beautiful in form. But with the roar of a mighty storm he will set it on fire, and its branches will be broken. 17 The Lord Almighty, who planted you, has decreed disaster for you, because the house of Israel and the house of Judah have done evil and provoked me to anger by burning incense to Baal.”
Telling the truth can be dangerous. Jefferson Lopes was a Brazilian radio show host who highlighted government corruption. His station was attacked and burnt down in November of 2017. After the attack, he uploaded a Facebook video vowing to put the station back on the air. Within two months, he was shot dead in his own living room.
Telling the truth can be dangerous. Shujaat Bukhari was the senior journalist and founder of The Rising Kashmir, a daily paper in India. After Bukhari was shot dead, one of his journalist friends said, “If you’re Kashmiri and you’re the editor of a newspaper here, it’s a very difficult job. You have to walk a very thin line; you don’t want to [anger] militants, you don’t want to [anger] the army, you don’t want to [anger] the Indian state, you don’t want to [anger] the Pakistanis. You’re stuck between so many players.” Apparently Bukhari found that line too thin to do just to his job.
Telling the truth can be dangerous. Jeremiah just said what God told him to say. His hometown tried to kill him for it. That’s the story among the three that we are here to consider. It is a story about false religion and the way it tries to silence the truth. False religion would rather hear lies than hear from God. That’s because false religion has no real desire to hear from God. That’s the claim of this sermon: false religion has no real desire to hear from God.
We will study this in four points. First: the covenant is broken. Second: the plot against Jeremiah. Third: Jeremiah’s complaint. Fourth: God’s answer. We see that the covenant is broken in verses 1-17 of chapter 11, the plot against Jeremiah in verses 18-23, Jeremiah’s complaint in verses 1-4 of chapter 12, and God’s answer in verses 5-17. As you can see, we are just borrowing our points from the NIV.
First: the covenant is broken. This first point is, in some ways, the culmination of our study in Jeremiah to this point. Jeremiah has pleaded with the people to repent because judgement was both underway and still coming. In this passage we see that explained in terms of the covenant. The covenant curses for disobedience were happening all around the people and they were still to come. You see the “already” aspect in verse 8, “they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubbornness of their evil hearts. So I brought on them all the curses of the covenant I had commanded them to follow but that they did not keep.”
The people could see society unravelling around them. Their wicked rulers were acts of judgment from God. Their public conversation had descended into delusion. God was giving them over to sin and its consequences.
You see the “still coming” aspect of these curses in verse 11, “I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.” The people who were hearing Jeremiah were meant to understand that judgment was already underway, and it was still coming. It’s a bit like those late night infomercials—“but wait; there’s more!” The people were to look at the disaster around them and recognize that it would get even worse if they didn’t repent. That’s a necessary reminder because people who are suffering the consequences for their sin often think that life can’t get worse than it already is. It can always get worse. The logical extension of that is hell. The call here is to repent now because it certainly can get worse than it is right now.
It’s likely that Jeremiah spoke these words when it became obvious that the reforms begun under Josiah were abandoned upon his death; verse 9, “There is a conspiracy among the people of Judah and those who live in Jerusalem. They have returned to the sins of their forefathers, who refused to listen to my words.” The people, by and large, didn’t take Josiah’s courageous reforms to heart. Their hearts were not in it. They were the spiritual equivalent of a lazy man who can only be forced to do anything around the house under extreme duress from his wife and then returns to the couch again as soon as he can. His heart isn’t in it.
It was clear after Josiah that the people’s hearts were not in the covenant. Their hearts did not belong to the Lord; that’s what leads to the shocking verse 14, “Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them, because I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their distress.” You need to see the gravity of this statement. The Lord is telling His prophet not to pray for the people to whom he was sent. That is the most terrifying condition imaginable. These people were committing the unforgivable sin, if we want to use that language. They were utterly unresponsive to the Holy Spirit. They were making themselves hopeless. The people didn’t want to hear that. That leads to our second point: the plot against Jeremiah.
The plot to kill Jeremiah arose in his hometown of Anathoth. These people knew his parents. They probably knew his grandparents. They didn’t decide to kill Jeremiah because they were unusually violent people. They did so because Jeremiah told them the truth about themselves and they would not accept that truth. We are to understand that this could happen anywhere. Jesus ran into the same situation with the Jews, “you are looking for a way to kill me, because you have no room for my word.” Paul ran into a modified form of it with the Galatians, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?”
False religion has no real desire to hear from God. True religion does. “These are the ones I look on with favor,” said God through Isaiah, “those who are humble and contrite in spirit, and who tremble at my word.” That willingness to tremble did not describe the people of this remarkably religious town of Anathoth. The necessary question about each of us and about us as a church is, “does that describe us?” Do we tremble at God’s word? Sit with that question awhile because false religion feels troublingly comfortable while the word of God, “penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
The word of God is never merely natural. It is always an intrusion, which means that at times it is gloriously surprising as John Newton captured in Amazing Grace and at other times it is offensively necessary as John Newton captured in While I Lived Without the Lord: “Your rod will bring my spirit low, Your fire my heart refine, and cause me pain that none can heal by other love than Thine.” Jeremiah’s message fell into the offensively necessary category. Those are the ones that bring the trouble. The gloriously surprising ones rarely do, which is why so much of organized religion is an attempt to hold out the gloriously surprising messages and hide the offensively necessary ones. That, we are told, is the trick. That’s also a way toward false religion.
Jeremiah didn’t hide the offensively necessary truth and so this is what he faced; verse 18, ‘the Lord revealed their plot to me, I knew it, for at that time he showed me what they were doing. I had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter; I did not realize that they had plotted against me, saying, “Let us destroy the tree and its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name be remembered no more.”’
Jeremiah didn’t set out to make trouble. He just wanted to obey God and he wanted others to obey God. He tried his best to do what God would have him do. He was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter. He hoped the people would listen. He hoped they would repent. That’s not the way it went.
Now don’t imagine for a second that the people of Anathoth understood the situation in those terms. They weren’t saying to themselves, “you know, Jeremiah’s right about all of this, but we are in too deep to change now.” They thought Jeremiah was the wicked one. They thought he was the ungodly one, as in not acting like God would, or if we want to use church language, “not doing what Jesus would do”, which the more I think about it is so strange to fault anyone for not doing exactly what Jesus would do in a complex situation because it’s hard to know what to expect with Jesus. The people of Anathoth thought Jerimiah was a troublemaker. They thought he was toxic, and they thought that the best path forward was to get rid of him and his influence. “Let us destroy the tree and its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name be remembered no more.”
Now this is still tame compared with what we will see as the book progresses. Walter Bruggeman is right, “The danger of prophetic truth will grow more severe as the judgment draws closer.” Just reading through what is called “holy week” in the gospels should drive that message home. ‘Then “Crucify!” is all their breath, and for His death they thirst and cry.” God have mercy on us all because what we are seeing is not limited to so called Bible times.
I hope you’ve been putting yourself in the people’s place to see where they might be more like us than we would like to imagine. I hope you’ve also been putting yourself in Jeremiah’s place to feel what the man was going through. That’s simply exercising your muscles of love in this situation. If you have, you’ve possibly been thinking some of what he was thinking in our third point: Jeremiah’s complaint.
When faced with difficulty some people are remarkably willing to throw God under the bus in the name of self-expression. Others seem almost constitutionally unable to ever express anger with God. Jeremiah was neither. He expressed anger without throwing God under the bus; verse 1, “You are always righteous, O Lord, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?”
This wasn’t a question of the sort that an intro level philosophy student might pose—“why is there evil?” This was a personal question. Jeremiah’s hometown was trying to kill him. These were respected and respectable people while Jeremiah was apparently disturber of the peace. They were seen as doing good even as they refused to hear God. Jeremiah was seen as doing evil for speaking God’s word. Everything is upside down.
Jeremiah’s language borrows heavily from the Psalms because the Psalms are tailor made for this sort of anguish. Jeremiah, like many Psalmists, wanted to know why God allowed this situation to arise. If God was truly in charge why was God’s prophet rejected while false religion flourished? Why did it seem that false religion was apparently the true religion and true religion was false? Many generations have asked that question since. Calvin did. His commentary on these chapters are inescapably autobiographical. He wrote, “when the happiness of the wicked disturbs our minds two false thoughts occur to us—either that this world is ruled by chance and not governed by God’s providence or that God does not perform the office of a good and righteous judge when He suffers light to be so blended with darkness.” That is the question that inevitably arises in the minds of true disciples—if God is in charge, why is false religion so popular, persuasive, and powerful and why does speaking and living God’s truth get you so much trouble even within religious circles?
Jeremiah knew that God had something to do with this; verse 2, “You have planted them, and they have taken root; they grow and bear fruit. You are always on their lips but far from their hearts.” If you live with the mindset that the Bible clearly teaches, you can’t just get God off the hook when it comes to frustrations like this.
Jeremiah was spitting mad about this and wanted God to set the record straight; verse 3, “Yet you know me, O Lord; You see me and test my thoughts about You. Drag them off like sheep to be butchered! Set them apart for the day of slaughter!” Those words might surprise us, but Jesus meant essentially the same when he said, “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.” Jesus’ words are part of the answer, but there’s more. That’s our final point: God’s answer.
God didn’t immediately vindicate Jeremiah. He didn’t vindicate the man all that much during his lifetime. He told him it was going to get worse; verse 5, “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?”
The message was that it was going to get a lot bumpier. As JA Thompson put it, “Jeremiah’s place was to keep faith and courage in his present sufferings, which were negligible in comparison with those that lay ahead.” Jeremiah was only dealing with his hometown. He was going to be dealing with his family; verse 6, “Your brothers, your own family—even they have betrayed you; they have raised a loud cry against you. Do not trust them, though they speak well of you.” It’s impossible to hear that and not hear Jesus’ words to his disciples, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.” We tend to ignore that verse. Such ignoring is a dangerous step toward false religion.
Jeremiah was only dealing with his hometown. He was going to be dealing with kings; verse 10, “Many shepherds will ruin my vineyard and trample down my field; they will turn my pleasant field into a desolate wasteland.” It’s left ambiguous as to whether these were going to be foreign kings or unfaithful sons of David because in the end it didn’t really matter—both were part of the process of judgment that was falling upon the nation. Jeremiah was going to be dealing with dangers beyond anything he had known and so God said, “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?”
The stage was set and Jeremiah could not run away from playing his role. He was a prophet sent by God to the people of God to speak the word of God. It didn’t matter that the people didn’t want to hear. It didn’t matter that the people had become a roaring lion or a bird of prey who had turned on their maker to use the images of verse 8. It didn’t matter that they hated Jeremiah. They only did so because when the veneer of their religion was removed, their hearts were far from God. Again, it’s hard to hear this without thinking of Jesus’ words; “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” Jesus was including false religion in this system of the world.
Jeremiah couldn’t escape the opposition. Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Got to go through it. As Andrew Dearman put it, “there is no way around either persecution or the wearying strain of prophetic work, yet there will be a way through it.”
That is the message of the cross. You can’t have resurrection without the cross. Can’t go over the cross. Can’t go under it. Got to go through it. You can’t have finding your life without losing your life. “The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ,” said Bonhoeffer. “Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.”
The people of Anathoth were deceiving themselves with false religion. The question is, are you? You know by the way in which you respond to God’s servant. We’re not talking Jeremiah here as was the case in Anathoth. We are talking about Jesus who is the litmus test today. How do you respond to him? The question is not just, “how do you respond to what it is about Jesus that you find gloriously surprising?” The question is, “do you consider whatever it is about Jesus that you find offensive to also be necessary?” That’s how you know whether you actually want to hear from God. That’s how you know whether you actually have true religion. Amen.