Let us continue to look at Jeremiah and what he said to an age so much like our own. Jeremiah, you know, is called the “weeping prophet,” for we find him crying over his people. And his attitude must be ours: we must weep over the church as it has turned away and weep over the culture that has followed it.
Jeremiah himself was born in Anathoth, as we are told in Jeremiah 1:1, and he died probably in his early sixties in Egypt. He did not have an easy life. In fact in Hebrews 11:36, 37, we read this: “And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder.” As you investigate, you can locate certain people in the Bible who went through all but one of the persecutions outlined in Hebrews 11. You don’t find anybody who was sawn asunder. Tradition, however, tells us that after the Jewish nation was taken over by the Babylonians, some of the Jews carried Jeremiah down into Egypt, precisely where he did not want to go and where he told them not to go. The tradition (which may or may not be true) goes further and says that they put him in a hollow log and sawed through it. This might be what the writer of Hebrews is referring to. In any case, Jeremiah’s life, which we will look at in more detail, was not an easy one.
His message was not an easy one either. We learn what that basic message was in Jeremiah 1:10: “See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.” Notice the order. First, there was to be a strong negative message, and then the positive one. But the negative message was first. It was to be a message of judgment to the church which had turned away and to the culture which flowed from it. Judah had revolted against God and His revealed truth; and God says that Jeremiah’s message was to be first a message of judgment. I believe the same message is to be ours today.
Christianity is not romantic, not soft. It is tough-fibered and realistic. And the Bible gives us the realistic message that Jeremiah preached into his own days, a message I am convinced the church today must preach if it is to be any help in the post-Christian world.
Let us not be surprised at the world’s reaction. The Bible makes it plain that this message is going to be poorly received by a church in revolt and by a culture in revolt. We read in Jeremiah 1:18, 19, “For, behold, I have made thee this day a defensed city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee.” In other words, God says, “This is the type of ministry you’re going to have, Jeremiah.” So if you are a Christian looking for an easy ministry in a post-Christian culture, you are unrealistic in your outlook. It was not to be so in Jeremiah’s day, and it cannot be so in a day like our own.
Jeremiah in the book of Jeremiah then turns to analyze the various ways in which his culture was turning away from God. He focuses on a number of faults: the inadequacy of a merely external religion, the general apostasy of the church, a few specific sins, and the tendency to search for meaning and security apart from the God who is there.
Jeremiah points out that although there was plenty of external religion, that was not what God wanted. We read, for example, in Jeremiah 6:20, “To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me.” There was plenty of sacrifice, but it was no good. They were functioning in the wrong way, with the wrong motivation and the wrong propositions. So God said, “What good is your religion to Me?” The point is the same in Jeremiah 7:4: “Trust not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord.” In other words the people said, “Is not the temple of the Lord with us? Then all will be well!” But God brought down His hands in anger and said, “I don’t care anything about your temple once you have turned away from My revealed truth. Once you have done this, you can have the temple, but it doesn’t mean a thing to Me.”
So it is in our own generation. The fact that there is much religion means nothing to God and does nothing to remove His judgment. The new theology and the compromises, including compromises in regard to the Bible that one finds at times even in some so-called evangelicalism, remove the real thing that makes religion acceptable to God. As we saw in Lamentations, the Jews had turned away from the revelation of God; and when men turn away from the propositional revelation of God, it destroys the acceptability of our worship to God. We are not jousting over abstract theological terms. We are dealing with a question of believing God and believing His revealed truth.
Jeremiah, however, goes further in 7:10: “. . . and come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?”
That is, “You come into the temple and then you go away and say, ‘Now I can do anything I wish. I can live the hedonistic life.’” But God says through Jeremiah, “Not so. Mere external religion means nothing to Me.” In 9:25 we find the same emphasis: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will punish all them who are circumcised with the uncircumcised.” They were circumcised, but what did it amount to?Nothing in the sight of God unless it was rooted in the truth of the revelation of God. The external forms alone mean nothing to God.
But through Jeremiah, God says more than this. Jeremiah speaks out expressly against apostasy. Here is a hallmark of our generation, one that shows that the church today has been infiltrated by the relativism, the concept of synthesis: more and more since the thirties the church has ceased to use the word apostasy. It is easy to use the word in a hard and harsh way. That’s wrong, of course. Nevertheless, on the basis of the Word of God, there is such a thing as apostasy; and when we see a real turning away from God, we are not faithful to the Word of God unless we call it what it is.1
Through Jeremiah God speaks in strong, strict, even shocking terms about it: “They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? Shall not that land be greatly polluted? But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers” (Jeremiah 3:1). And then he gives the invitation, “Yet return again to me, saith the Lord.” But the invitation is rooted in accepting the fact that what had been done before was real apostasy.
The picture in which the invitation is given is highly significant. Throughout Scripture God continually says, “You are My bride.” For the church of God to turn away is spiritual adultery, apostasy. One must be careful not to use the word proudly, harshly, without love, without tears, or too easily, but there is a proper way. The picture is repeated in Jeremiah 3:6: “The Lord said also unto me in the days of Josiah, the king, Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? She is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot.” The Jews were turning away to false gods. But turning away to false theology is equal to turning away to false gods. Whenever the church of Jesus Christ turns away from the living God and His propositional truth, she is playing the harlot. In Jeremiah 3:9 we find the same: “And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she hath defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with stocks.”
Therefore, in a post-Christian world and in an often post-Christian church, it is imperative to point out with love where apostasy lies. We must openly discuss with all who will listen, treating all men as fellow men, but we must call apostasy, apostasy. If we do not do that, we are not ready for reformation, revival, and a revolutionary church in the power of the Holy Spirit.
We are all too easily infiltrated with relativism and synthesis in our own day. We tend to lack antithesis. There is that which is true God, and there is that which is no god. God is there as against His not being there. That’s the big antithesis. And there are antitheses in relation to His revelation from Genesis 1 on. There is that which is given which is antithetical to its opposite. When we see men ignore or pervert the truth of God, we must say clearly—not in hate or anger—“You are wrong.”
Jeremiah not only speaks against religious apostasy, but also against specific sins. This is likewise imperative in a generation such as our own. So God says, in Jeremiah 5:7, 8, “How shall I pardon thee for this? Thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods.” That’s the religious side again. But note the effect of the affluent society: “when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses.” They used their affluence for sin. Does that sound familiar?
Jeremiah continues in 5:8: “They were like fed horses in the morning.” If a horse is well fed, says Jeremiah, it turns to sexual things. So, he says, that is the way you are in your affluent society, O Jews. And that is the way you are, O affluent United States and northern European Reformation countries, turning from the Reformation faith. “They are as fed horses in the morning; every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.” Think of the novels today which express this escape into an adulterous community. In the 1960s many young people said to me, “Why shouldn’t I take to drugs when the generation before me finds its escape in alcohol and adultery?” They were right: one is as bad as the other. Now in the 1980s drugs and alcohol are taken together for an attempted greater escape.
When the church does not speak against the prevailing sins in the post-Christian world, it does not follow God’s example through Jeremiah as to what its message should include. External religion, apostasy, sexual sins, and lying—that too Jeremiah speaks about. In Jeremiah 9:2 we read, “Oh, that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my people, and go from them! For they are all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men.” And in 9:5, “And they will deceive every one his neighbor, and will not speak the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary themselves to commit iniquity.” God is also concerned about men speaking truth.
Men no longer believe that there are absolutes, and more and more it has become the accepted thing not to speak the truth. The business contract is not honored if, legally, a way can be found around it. The employer does not honor his promise. The employee responds in kind. As men have turned away from God, who alone gives a basis for absolutes in truth, men have become untruthful and hypocritical with each other. We accept hypocritical language in TV ads, and in medicine when the child, after it has been born, is called the “fetus-ex-utero” so that it can be gotten rid of more easily. We know we are surrounded by the untruthful and hypocritical, but our generation has come to accept it as normal and thus to be manipulated by it.
The younger generation had a phrase that relates to all this. They used the term, “a plastic culture.” It fits. Ours is a plastic culture, and often ours is a plastic church. Men are simply carrying on by memory. They are living only by habit, not because they have a firm, rational, Christian base for their actions, and it is indeed ugly. It is so easy to see this hypocrisy and ugliness in both culture and church that we should not have had to wait to come to the present extremes. The church should have been saying these things for years. The beauty is gone if we continue outwardly to do even the right things once the base which produced these is gone.
We live in a day when truth is torn down in the philosophy of our generation. This is not so just in the chairs of philosophy, but in the places where living philosophy is being hammered out now; and we cannot expect truth to be torn down either in the university or in the arts without a result in the practice of society.
But Jeremiah speaks for God and says, “I’m not only speaking against sexual sin; I’m speaking about cutting down the force of truth.” In 9:8 he says, “Their tongue is like an arrow shot out; it speaketh deceit. One speaketh peaceably to his neighbor with his mouth, but in heart he layeth his wait.” It is easy for both the orthodox and the liberal church to talk of love and yet live without it. And it is easy for the modern generation outside the church to do the same. In the 1960s, drawn by the cry of “love,” many a “flower child” was exploited and sucked empty of life by the time she was fourteen. And in the 1980s the word love continues to be used to mean hedonism, unlove and ugliness. Both inside the church and outside the church, to use the word love and other peaceable words in order to deceive is simply exploitation.
God spoke to Jeremiah against such falsehood and exploitation. And if the church is not speaking in strong terms against both the apostasy and the sins of our own day, we are not ready to see any sort of revolutionary movement into our generation. Our generation is properly sick of god words.
Jeremiah also speaks against looking to the world for help. In his day this was very specific. It was looking to Egypt and other great nations for protection against Babylon. In 2:18 we find Jeremiah saying, “And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Shihor? Or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the river?”That is, “What are you doing looking to Egypt? What are you doing looking to Assyria? Why don’t you look to God?” For Jeremiah it was a literal Assyria and Egypt. Our Egypt is the world and the world’s cleverness. We cannot expect a cynical generation saturated by the glib and the plastic to take the church seriously if it uses the world’s way. As Jeremiah says in 2:36, “Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way?Thou also shalt be ashamed of Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria.”
Or again in 37:7, 8, Jeremiah says, “Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, Thus shall ye say to the king of Judah, who sent you unto me to inquire of me, Behold, Pharaoh’s army, which is come forth to help you, shall return to Egypt into their own land. And the Chaldeans shall come again, and fight against this city, and take it, and burn it with fire.”
“Are you looking to the world for help?” God asks. “It is going to fail. You’re going to be ashamed.” The church that says there is truth in a generation of relativism, a church that says God is there, when the new theology turns religion into mere psychology—such a church must demonstrate that it really believes God is there. We must look directly to God for help. As Hudson Taylor used to say, it must be the Lord’s work done in the Lord’s way.
So what then is the message Jeremiah gave to the Jews?Was it a light message? What he said was, “You are going on to utter destruction because you have turned away from God and because you will not repent. The God who works in history is going to bring upon your culture utter destruction.” And so he writes in 1:14, “Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.” And in 5:15, “Lo, I will bring a nation upon you from far, O house of Israel, saith the Lord; it is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say.” The whole book is full of such prophecy. Utter destruction is coming upon your whole culture, utter destruction, unless there is reformation.
What we need are new John Bunyans to point out what occurs when men turn to Vanity Fair. When men turn away from God, the city becomes the city of destruction. “And I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant” (9:11). “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands” (21:4). To our generation God says, “O nation, O culture, do you think because of the knowledge you now have, a knowledge that’s separated from what is really there (the universe in which there is a supernatural as well as a natural, in which everything is not merely economic cause and effect), do you think you can build weapons that will meet your need? No,” says God, “these things are going to turn as a sword in a weak man’s hand, and it’s going to cut the man who holds it. You’re trusting in increased technology. The technology will destroy you.” Until we hear men preaching with this kind of contemporary courage, we cannot expect the church to be taken seriously.
I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, with which ye fight against the king of Babylon, and against the Chaldeans, who besiege you without the walls, and I will assemble them into the midst of this city. And I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath. And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast; they shall die of a great pestilence. And afterwards, saith the Lord, I will deliver Zedekiah, king of Judah, and his servants, and the people, and such as are left in this city from the pestilence, from the sword, and from the famine, into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. (Jeremiah 21:4-7)
Our generation needs to be told that man cannot disregard God, that a culture like ours that has had such light and then has deliberately turned away stands under God’s judgment. God is a God of grace, but the other side of the coin of grace is judgment. If God is there, if God is holy (and we need a holy God or we have no absolutes), there must be judgment.
I want to ask a question as I conclude this chapter. Do you really believe He is there? Why is there so much unreality among evangelicals, young and old? What is the final reality? The final reality is that God is really there. The Bible is what it is because the God who exists has spoken it in propositional, verbalized form. But does your Christianity end with something less than God who is there? In the teaching of your courses in Christian schools, do you believe He is there? In your learning, do you believe He is there? Do you really believe He is there, or are you only living in some sort of sociological belief? Are you only making the right theological statements, or do you believe God is there and you live before Him?
If He is really there and if He is a holy God, do you seriously think that God does not care that a country like our own has turned from Him? There is only one kind of preaching that will do in a generation like ours—preaching which includes the preaching of the judgment of God.