Sermon: Hope on the Other Side of Judgment (the book of Jeremiah)

This is the English translation of a sermon that I am preaching this coming Sunday in San Cristobal, an agricultural area on the outskirts of Medellín. I was invited to preach at the church by their pastor, Samuel, who is a student at the seminary. One of my students in my Saturday class also attends the church. The church has been preaching a series on the whole Bible, dedicating one week to each book. This sermon is an attempt at expositing the entire book of Jeremiah in one message, looking at the big picture of what we can learn about God through this powerful prophetic message.

“Therefore do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer on their behalf, for I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their trouble” (Jer 11:14).

What kind of God would give a message like that? Is this the God that we have come to know in Jesus Christ?... One of the most common doubts of Christians is the question, “What do I do with the Old Testament? How is this the word of God for me?” It would seem that this God is way too strict, that he lacks love, and that he could learn a thing or two from Jesus.

Today we’re going to wrestle a bit with this question: Who is the God of the Old Testament? And we’re going to do so by studying the longest book in the Bible—not Psalms, which is the longest in number of chapters, but Jeremiah, which is the longest in number of words. It seems reasonable that if God would go to the trouble to inspire a book of such length, he would have something important to speak to us through its message.

More than any other message that the book of Jeremiah contains, it has a message about God. Who is God? How does God look at and respond to sin? How does God show his faithfulness to his people?

Before we start looking at the details of the book, it will help to orient ourselves a bit regarding the place in history that Jeremiah was writing from. Jeremiah was a prophet that received a call from God during one of the darkest times in the history of God’s people. A little over 800 years had passed since Moses had received the Law, and around 400 years since the time of King David. In the days of King David God did something supremely important for the future history of his people—he made a covenant with David to establish a perpetual royal dynasty from his family line. 2 Samuel 7:16 says, “And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.’”

To get an appreciation for the impact of the Davidic promise on the self-conception of an Israelite in Jeremiah’s day, think with me for a minute about the history of Colombia as an independent nation, since the Battle of Boyacá on August 7, 1819. Quite a lot has happened since then, hasn’t it? Generations have come and gone, political parties have risen and fallen, Colombia has had various constitutions. A lot happens in nearly 200 years. Now go back in time the same number of years and a bit more to the year 1600. That seems like ancient history. We certainly live in a very different world than the world of 1600. Now this time between 1600 and today is about the same amount of time that had elapsed between King David and Jeremiah. And in the space of this immensely long time, there had been one constant in Israel—God was faithful to his promise. There had always been a king of the line of David seated on the throne in Jerusalem. There were turbulent moments, to be sure, and eventually the Northern kingdom, Israel, fell to the Assyrians in 722 B.C., about 100 years before Jeremiah.

God judged the Northern kingdom for their idolatry and their injustice, but the kings of Judah had two things that the Northern kingdom never had: The promise that God would establish the line of David forever, and the temple, the house of God, in their capital, Jerusalem. If one had the promise and the presence of God, what else did one need? Now in the days of Jeremiah the kingdom of Judah was surrounded by great nations more powerful than themselves—Egypt to the south, Babylon pressing in from the north. And in the middle of this precarious situation, Jeremiah receives a call.

The central characteristics of Jeremiah’s call to be prophet are found in 1:9-10: “Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said to me, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.’”

Within this call we find two fundamental aspects of the prophetic vocation, which we can understand a bit better if we think about the world of agriculture. If I, as a farmer, am going to plant onions, like many of you do here in San Cristobal, one of the things I have to do first is prepare the ground. If I come across a nice plot of land but it is covered in weeds, I shouldn’t expect much of a harvest. First I need to clear out the weeds and then prepare the ground in order to get a good harvest. I might even have to burn the field. If the weeds are cleared, the seed can germinate and grow. If not, growth will be hindered.

Now the call of Jeremiah was something like that. God had a message of hope to give through Jeremiah. God was going to intervene and save his people. God was going to fulfill his promises. But first God had to clear out the weeds. His people would have to pass through the fire, and only after coming out the other side of the fire would the shoots of new life begin to sprout up. This is what is involved in Jeremiah’s call to pluck up, break down, destroy, overthrow, build, and plant.

The first four verbs primarily have to do with Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet for his own generation. One way to think of this is that the prophets were God’s prosecuting attorneys. They were called to apply the Law to Israel and make God’s case, showing them where they had fallen short and why they were going to experience God’s judgment. But beyond that, the prophets were also messengers of future hope, who announced hope for Israel and judgment against her enemies. This is what is involved in the call to build and to plant. Now both roles are based on the fact that the prophet is the one who explains for the people of God the implications of the covenants that God has made with Israel. They told them when they failed to measure up, but they also preached the unconditional faithfulness of God to make good on his promises and redeem his people.

The challenge for Jeremiah—as in some ways it is for us too—was how to be faithful to God’s call while living in a culture where he was surrounded by prophets of prosperity. Jeremiah had a difficult message: “It’s too late to avoid the judgment of God. You have to accept his judgment, humble yourselves, and hope in future salvation.” Most of the rest of the prophets had a gentler message: “God isn’t going to judge Judah. Babylon will be destroyed.” Now, which of these two messages seems more spiritual? It would seem like Jeremiah had fallen into a defeatist mentality and that the other prophets were the optimists who had faith that God would do great things. But the problem was a simple one: these prophets were false prophets. They didn’t speak for God. They wanted the good news without the bad news. They wanted salvation without recognizing their sin.

So, the first part of Jeremiah’s call is the call to be a messenger of judgment. Throughout the book, Jeremiah over and over again indicts Judah for its many sins. While we can’t be comprehensive here, let’s look at a few of the problems that Jeremiah identified in Judah’s spirituality. First, Judah’s problem was that they denied their sin. Jeremiah 2:35 tells us: “You say, ‘I am innocent; surely his anger has turned from me.’ Behold, I will bring you to judgment

for saying, ‘I have not sinned.’”

Second, Judah assumed that God wouldn’t judge them, because they presumed that God would always have to protect his temple. Jeremiah tells them, “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord’” (7:4). If we look at the whole context of the passage (7:1-11) we get a better idea of what is going on in this act of spiritual presumption:

¹ The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ² “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you men of Judah who enter these gates to worship the Lord. ³ Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place. ⁴ Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’

⁵ “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, ⁶ if you do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, ⁷ then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever.

⁸ “Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. ⁹ Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, ¹⁰ and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? ¹¹ Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord.

Judah was right in one thing: God had committed himself to his people unconditionally. But they were blissfully ignorant of the fact that God gave the Law to show his people how to live in relationship with him. If they disobeyed, there were consequences, up to the point of exile. Just as the Northern kingdom went into exile for idolatry and injustice, Judah was now facing the same fate and for the same reasons.

If we go back eight centuries or so to the time of Moses, we find that God had made it pretty clear up front what would happen if his people didn’t obey him. Deuteronomy 28 outlines the blessings for keeping the covenant and curses for breaking it. Listen to what it says about exile:

¹⁵ But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you…. ³⁶ The Lord will bring you and your king whom you set over you to a nation that neither you nor your fathers have known. And there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone. ³⁷ And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you away.

So, basically, Jeremiah’s preaching is pretty simple: “Pay attention and realize that what Deuteronomy said was going to happen if you disobeyed is going to happen soon, and it’s too late to avoid it.”

Third, Judah had a problem of listening to the false prophets. Jeremiah 6:13-15 tells us: “‘For from the least to the greatest of them, everyone is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time that I punish them, they shall be overthrown,’ says the Lord.”

The false prophets provide the easy cure for sin, but not the needed cure. For them, ignorance was bliss. It’s easier to preach peace than face up to one’s depravity. The problem is that when one thinks there is peace, but there really isn’t, one heals the wound lightly. Whenever I read this passage, I think of when my brother was in high school and broke his collarbone snowboarding. A broken collarbone is pretty tricky to keep in place. You can’t just put a cast on it. So, when his collarbone healed it didn’t quite line up right. One side was a little too high compared to the other, which made it so he couldn’t sleep on one side due to the pressure on the bone that healed wrongly. While that is a mild example, sometimes the doctor has to go in and break the bone again in order to promote proper healing. Sometimes one has to accept the painful experience voluntarily in order to heal well. That is what the false prophets were unwilling to do for their sin.

The other problem Jeremiah mentions is that the spiritual leaders, the prophets and priests, have not been ashamed at their sin and don’t even know how to blush. Not being capable of shame or blushing is what happens when a person is completely desensitized to sin. They see sin as something so normal that it isn’t even necessary to hide it or try to justify it. For instance, some men have two families at the same time and think they’re well within their rights to have their mistress on the side. Some politicians are openly corrupt, not even attempting to hide the fact that they’re in it for personal gain. Those were the kind of leaders Judah had in the days of Jeremiah.

So then, in the middle of a situation so hopeless, is it possible to find good news? Judah didn’t have the capacity to reform itself. Jeremiah was faithful, but the faithfulness of a lone prophet was nowhere near sufficient for the nation as a whole. So, where can we find hope? Only in the faithfulness and promises of God himself.

God’s promise in Jeremiah has various aspects, but we’re just going to focus on two of the most central this morning. First, part of the promise that God makes has to do with the restoration of the nation. It’s likely that the most famous verse of Jeremiah is 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Sometimes we take this verse in an isolated manner as a promise directed directly to us, and it is true that God does work in all things for our good.

Nonetheless, the message is something much deeper. Basically, God was trying to say: “Look, you think that I have abandoned you because I allowed Babylon to defeat you. But you need to know that I still am going to fulfill my promises to Abraham and David. I am faithful to my promises, even when I am judging you.” Hear now what the passage (29:1-14) says when we look at the whole context:

¹ These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. ² This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the eunuchs, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen, and the metal workers had departed from Jerusalem. ³ The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. It said: ⁴ “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ⁵ Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. ⁶ Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. ⁷ But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. ⁸ For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, ⁹ for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, declares the Lord.

¹⁰ “For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. ¹¹ For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. ¹² Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. ¹³ You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. ¹⁴ I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

Jeremiah 29:11, then, applies to all of Israel and Judah as a nation. God knew the plans he had for them. He hadn’t abandoned his project with them. To put it in terms of the New Testament, the message is basically the same as that of Galatians 3:17-18: the Law didn’t invalidate the promise. They were not faithful, but God always continued to be faithful.

The second part of the promise that I want to look at today is the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31:31-34. If God promised that he would bring Israel and Judah back from captivity, why was a new covenant necessary? It was necessary because God recognized that Israel needed more than just another opportunity. It wasn’t enough to get them back in the land and assume that they could reform themselves. To some extent we see the attempt that Israel made to do just that in the post-exilic period. And what happened? They avoided some of the worst sins they committed before the exile, but they also ended up falling into a dangerous legalism. Israel needed more than just another chance because the root of the problem wasn’t an isolated bad decision but a hard heart. It is precisely that problem that the new covenant would fix.

Maybe it will help a bit to understand this point if we think about the elections that are happening today in Medellín. Do any of us go to the polls with the expectation that if we just vote for the right person they will transform all of Colombian society? Not likely. A good politician can minimize corruption and help make Colombia a better place. But whomever we elect, we’re not going to get a perfect society. Far from it. Human attempts to reform ourselves spiritually are a lot like our human attempts to reform ourselves politically—they might have some limited gains, they might keep us from the worst atrocities, they might promote peace and goodwill for a time. Yet compared to the perfect standard of holiness that God requires of us and desires for us, they fall far short. That’s why God decided to establish a new covenant.

Jeremiah describes this promised new covenant in 31:31-34:

³¹ “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, ³² not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴ And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Now what is it that’s new about the new covenant? Hebrews 8:6 tells us that the new covenant “is enacted on better promises.” It’s not that the Law was bad, but that the Law had no capacity to give life (Galatians 3:21). Israel and Judah’s disobedience to the Law made them slaves to sin and in need of better promises (see Galatians 3:22). God describes part of those better promises in Jeremiah 31:33-34. The solution to the human sin problem is that God will intervene to write his law on the human heart. When this happens, all in the covenant community will know God and there will be a complete forgetting of our sin.

Even today that promise still sounds rather idealistic, and in some ways it is. The new covenant, like the kingdom of God, is a reality that believers in Christ already experience, but not yet in its fullness. What do I mean by that? We already have forgiveness through faith in Christ. God already dwells in us by his Holy Spirit to begin the process of transforming our hearts and giving us the desire to follow him. But we do not yet live the fullness of this promise. Christ has saved us, but there are dimensions of that salvation that we still are waiting for. One of those dimensions is the promise of having God’s law written on the heart perfectly. When this happens, we will live perfect lives, free from sin. That will only happen when Christ returns and gives us resurrected bodies over which sin will have no dominion. So then, our only hope is a new covenant founded on better promises. This is what Jeremiah prophesied and what Christ accomplished. The fullness of this promise if the future dimension of salvation. Therefore, 1 Peter 1:5 can talk of salvation as something future, writing to those “who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time”.

To return back to our initial question, who then is the God of the Old Testament? Up to this point we have seen that, first, he is a God who takes the sin of his people seriously and judges it in accordance with his Law. Second, he is a God who stays faithful to his covenants with his people even when they are unfaithful. Third, he is a God who intervenes to restore his people and transform the human heart.

But when we arrive almost to the end of Jeremiah we find a series of prophecies that quite possibly worry us a bit, prophecies that might seem to return to a vision of a vengeful and merciless God. In Jeremiah 46-51 we have six chapters of prophecies against the nations around Israel. How is it that this also is part of the vision of God that Jeremiah presents to us?

After reading the prophets various times, I am convinced that these prophecies of judgment are an expression of the goodness of God. Why is that? I say that because if God did not judge sin, there would be no hope. If God did not judge sin, sin would eternally frustrate God’s plans.

            Remember what the false prophets said? “Babylon will be destroyed.” They were wrong in the short term, but yes, Babylon would be destroyed—yet only after Judah first was forcibly displaced at their hands, taken off into exile. After an entire book that speaks of the necessity of accepting defeat at the hands of the Babylonians, Jeremiah 50-51 prophesies the destruction of Babylon.

            Perhaps the best succinct summary is found in 51:49: “Babylon must fall for the slain of Israel, just as for Babylon have fallen the slain of all the earth.” God took the evil of this world—the arrogance of Babylon—and he used it for the good of his people in the long term. But when he was done using Babylon for his purposes, they were called to account.

When there is evil in the world there are only three options of how God can respond: he can redeem it, he can ignore it, or he can judge it. If one does not want to follow God and accept his redemption, God has to judge evil. If it weren’t like that, God would always ignore evil and could never make good on his promises. God knows that with sufficient time evil will not work itself out of the system. There comes a point when God says, “Enough! No more!” That point is judgment day. Judgment day ought to be one of the great comforts for the Christian, because the reality of future judgment means that there is nothing opposed to God that can keep God from fulfilling his promises, because eventually God will call his unrepentant enemies to account and put them in their place. While it is a harsh message, it is also a message of hope for God’s people who have been oppressed by evil.

In the midst of so many details, the message of Jeremiah is simple: There is hope on the other side of judgment, not because humanity is so holy in itself, but because God continues to be faithful to his promises to his people.

What does it mean for us that there is hope on the other side of judgment? Does it mean that first we have to suffer for our sins, for all the bad that we have done, and only then will God treat us well? No, not at all. The gospel tells us that there is only hope on the other side of judgment, but that judgment fell on Jesus. At the cross Jesus suffered the exile that our sin deserved. He took upon himself the punishment for the sins of the world. And through his resurrection he conquered death, giving us the hope of eternal life.

But to receive this grace we have to do something that the nation of Judah was not willing to do in the days of Jeremiah: we have to recognize our sins, repent, and turn to God in faith, trusting in his grace and not in our goodness. The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day wanted good news without passing through the bad news first. They wanted blessing. They wanted prosperity. But they didn’t want to repent.

When you repent and put your faith in Jesus, God will forgive you. Yet God does something more than just forgive you your sins. He makes you a participant in the new covenant. He begins a process of transformation that will not finish until we are in his presence fully, completely free from sin. This is the promise that every follower of Jesus has—that God begins now the transformation of our heart, but one day he will finish the work, and the promise of Jeremiah 31:33 will be perfectly fulfilled: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” This complete transformation of the heart is our only hope, and we can only find it in Jesus, who fulfilled God’s promises, bearing our sins and, in that way, establishing the new covenant in his blood.

So, what kind of God would say that his people’s sin was so serious that it had to be judged? A God so compassionate that he became human to live and suffer in our place so that our sins might be forgiven by his grace. That is the God that we find in the gospel who makes good on Jeremiah’s promises of hope on the other side of judgment.