01/25/2021
Pastor Rich’s Notes on Jeremiah
Jeremiah shows the fullness of the character of God and I want you to know something, we live in a world that has listened to an impoverished view of God. Jeremiah challenges us by putting on display the full range of God's character. In addition to showing the fullness of God's character, Jeremiah illustrates the brokenness over a nation's rebellion. I want to challenge you, I mean this with my heart, my generation has done a really poor job of reflecting brokenness over our nation's rebellion. I don't want to be mad that people are stealing from my children the America I had dreamed for them, rather I want to be broken that my children may not experience America as a nation that would be under God. I want to be broken for that because I think the brokenness drives ministry, I think when you can see other people and you're not mad at them but rather you're hurt for them, they can detect in your voice a love that needs to be there for them to respond to God through you. Jeremiah watched Judah fall apart and as he wept over her (Ch. 9), he understands how sinful and treacherous his people are. The lesson I learned from this is that when we have to say something that is hard, we should make it hard for us to say, rather than doing what many Christians do and that is with sarcasm and judgment (with no brokenness) post something on Facebook. Posting flippant sarcasm about immorality on Facebook isn't changing people. Jeremiah shows us the depths of sinfulness. We live in a world that denies or minimizes the reality of sin. Jeremiah penetrates this delusional fog that somehow you can just rewrite the rules by creating new moral boundaries that our culture has decided were to be accepted and everything will work out swimmingly. God wired us to be worshipers and its absolute folly to exchange the truth of God for a lie! It won't work, so when you see people redefining morality, relationships, and cultural norms we must seek the brokenness in heart for them as we share the hard truth with them.
Jeremiah shows us the power of a savior and it's interesting to me when you read Jeremiah 23:5-6. 5 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’
What Israel/Judah couldn't do for themselves, messiah will come and do for it for them. Just as He has done for us. I think that in addition to all of these beautiful pictures there's a great foreshadowing of a coming Messiah.
I’ll close with an illustration a Pastor shared to help people understand the book of Jeremiah.
“When my oldest son was about three years old I was outside doing some yard work one afternoon I took Kevin outside to play while I trimmed the hedges holding his hand I knelt down beside him so that we could look at each other face to face. Slowly and carefully I said, “now Kevin you can play here in the front yard, you can go next door and you can play in your friends front yard, you can take your big wheel and ride up and down the driveway, you can go real fast, you can go in the backyard, you can play with the dog, you can play on the swing, or you can stay here and watch me trim the hedges, all of those things are things that you can do. Now listen to me son, listen to me, you cannot go out into the street. Do you understand? Three-year-old Kevin nodded his head yes daddy.
I let go of his hand and he ran directly to the curb and put one foot in the street and turned his head toward me and smiled as if to say, “foolish mortal”. WHY! WHY! After understanding all the freedoms his father had allowed him, why would he deliberately go to the one place his dad told him not to go?!?
Because that's the nature of broken man. We want to be free, doing it our way. We want to be free to make our own rules. We want to be free to make our own decisions about what's right and about what's wrong. We don't control reality and our father gave us the boundaries and that's the rejection Jeremiah experienced. Judah did the opposite and as they wept being carted out in chains from the city, they blamed the God that warned them for 42 years from his pulpit. There are still people in your life that believe they can do everything the opposite of what God's Word reveals and somehow it will all work out well for them. I am here to tell you on the basis of the authority of the word of God that God wasn't wasting words in eleven hundred and eighty-nine chapters of scripture. Listen to Him, because He's not fooling around!
Watch our overview video on the book of Jeremiah, which breaks down the literary design of the book and its flow of thought. Jeremiah announces that God will...
