The Fearless Prophet

BY DAVID FEDDES

Jeremiah 2:13
He was the man people loved to hate. It seemed he was always saying something nasty. He compared his country to a donkey in heat (Jeremiah 2:24). He said the people were no better than shameless prostitutes (3:1-3) and the religious leaders were nothing but liars and thieves and charlatans (6:13,14). Jeremiah also warned of impending disaster. He said the nation would be conquered and pillaged by invaders.

When people heard Jeremiah, they heard gloom and doom. He seemed like a man who hated his own country. Didn't this traitor know the meaning of patriotism? The people saw Jeremiah as a man who tore into
them without any concern for their feelings. They saw him as a man with the hide of a rhinoceros.

But this man who seemed so tough was actually very shy and sensitive. And he was the greatest of patriots. Ultimately, his message turned out to be the thing that kept the people's hope alive in their darkest hour.

Prophet of God. You see, Jeremiah was a prophet of God. He didn't speak of judgment because he liked to, but because he had to. At one point, when it was really getting to him, Jeremiah wrote:

I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. (20:7-9)
Heartbroken. Jeremiah didn't enjoy telling the people that God was sending a vicious army from Babylon to punish them. In fact, Jeremiah was so heartbroken that he is sometimes called "the weeping prophet." He wrote, "Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me" (8:21).

When the Babylonians finally stormed into Jerusalem, slaughtering people, burning houses, and destroying the splendid temple, Jeremiah didn't gloat and say; "I told you so." He felt his people's pain, and he composed the sorrowful poem that is recorded as the Book of Lamentations. In Chapter 3 verses 19-23, he said,

I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Jeremiah spoke of God's great faithfulness even in the midst of judgment. This prophet of God, this courageous reformer with an unpopular message, is someone we desperately need to hear today. Let's take a closer look at his message.

The Basic Problem

Early in the book of Jeremiah,
God states the basic problem with the people of Israel:
My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water (2:13).
That was a problem back then, and it's a problem now. We forsake the One who gives eternal life as a free gift, and we sweat away digging cisterns that offer nothing to drink but dust. We prefer man-made religion to God-given salvation.
According to Jeremiah, if you called such people birdbrains, youíd be insulting the birds.

Jesus said, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him" (John 7:37,38). By trusting Christ, we can drink cool, fresh water from the bubbling spring of his Spirit. But for some reason, we'd rather dig our own dry hole in the ground.

Worldly fads. Why? According to Jeremiah, we prefer trendiness to truth. The prophet was addressing people who enjoyed listening to up-to-date preachers, men who preached the kind of stuff people liked to hear. God thus said, "They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace' they say, when there is no peace" (6:14).

Thanks to the new trends in preaching, the people felt good about themselves. They never gave a thought to their sins. "Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct?" asks God. "No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush." Of course not!

Why should they blush? Sure, they weren't living according to God's Word, but that didn't mean they were wrong. Scripture was 
wrong. It was out of date. It was for a different culture. Hey, it had been 900 years since Moses wrote the Torah. It had been 400 years since David wrote his Psalms. Ancient history! It was time to change God's way and bring it up to date. So the religious experts proceeded to reform the old-fashioned teachings.

We, too, are so in love with progress that we fall for every fad. What we really need, though, isn't something new, but something ancient. We need to stop chasing new worldly ideas and hold fast to time-honored truth. Jeremiah made that very clear.

Human institutions. He also made clear that an institution is no substitute for integrity. When Jeremiah spoke of God's judgment, they didn't believe him. They had their splendid temple, God's temple! God wouldn't let anything happen to His temple. Or would he? Jeremiah stood at the gate of the temple and said,

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!" If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever. But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.

Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, "We are safe"safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching! declares the Lord" (7:3-11).

Temple destroyed. When you turn a house of prayer into a robber's roost, you can't expect God to keep you safe. The Lord destroyed that magnificent temple, and if he did that, do you really think he's going to spare a denominational headquarters or a congregation that no longer follows his Word?

When someone stands up to challenge evils that have infected the institutional church, it's easy to label that person a troublemaker who wants to destroy the church. But remember Jeremiah. He didn't hate the temple; he loved it. He didn't look down on the priesthood; he was a priest himself. He didn't despise religious institutions as such; he wanted to reform them.

So don't say, "My church, right or wrong," or, "My denomination, right or wrong." Only God deserves unconditional loyalty. The legitimacy of everything else depends on faithfulness to the Lord and to his Word. If you really love your church as Jeremiah did his, you won't ignore its failings. You'll repent, and you'll call others to repent.

There's nothing more foolish than rejecting God's Word and his way. According to Jeremiah, if you called such people birdbrains, you'd

In the Christian faith, reform doesnít mean progressing beyond Godís revelation in Scripture.
be insulting the birds. He says, "Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord" (8:7).

Academic credentials. Sometimes when we want to follow a new trend, we take comfort in that it has been approved by biblical experts. After all, they have great credentials; they teach in well-known seminaries. But as the Lord asked,

How can you say, "We are wise, for we have the law of the Lord," when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely? The wise will be put to shame; they will be dismayed and trapped. Since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what kind of wisdom do they have? (8:8,9)
When special committees of experts study the Bible and then suggest brand-new ideas that contradict the teachings of the prophets and Jesus and the apostles, we've got a problem. Scholars who revere God's Word can help strengthen our faith, but when they treat the Bible as just another document, they are handling it falsely. These experts often talk about reforming our understanding of Scripture, but what they're really doing is deforming it.

In the Christian faith, reform doesn't mean progressing beyond God's revelation in Scripture. Reform means to keep going back to the historical faith. It means returning again and again to the unchanging God and to Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We apply eternal truth to new situations; but we can't invent new "truth" to improve on what God has declared. When scholars start doing that, they become scribes who distort the Word of God.

Criticisms like this made everyone angry at Jeremiah, His fellow priests had him beaten and then confined with his arms and legs in stocks (20:2). Another time they dumped him down the shaft of an empty cistern, and they would have let him die there if a courageous official hadn't intervened (37:1-13). But no matter how much people harassed Jeremiah, they couldn't change the truth.

God's word always prevails

The king had a scroll of Jeremiah's prophecies. He did not like what he was reading, so after every few sentences, he would cut off a chunk of the scroll and toss it in the fire, till he had burned the whole thing. But Jeremiah produced another scroll containing everything that had been on the first one. "And many similar words were added to them" (36:20-32). God's Word doesn't go away just because somebody slices it up.

Ultimately, God's judgment came upon Jerusalem, and when it did, nobody got any comfort from the preachers of platitudes. The people needed someone who could speak honestly of their guilt and wickedness, who could empathize with their grief and despair in defeat and exile, who could face the situation in all its horror and darkness and yet declare hope. The man who had infuriated themJeremiahwas now the one whose message was their only ray of hope.

Case history. A pastor friend told me of a man and woman who asked him to marry them. The pastor knew that the couple didn't share a commitment to Christ, and he was convinced that their relationship had problems so serious that the marriage wouldn't last. He urged them to put their wedding on hold, and he refused to officiate at their wedding unless they worked through these issues first. The couple stormed out of his office in a rage, and they got another minister to marry them.

Several months later, the pastor's doorbell rang. He was surprised to see the newly married couple who had been so furious with him. "We're having problems, and we're wondering if you would help us," they said. The pastor said, "Why come to me? Why not the minister who did your wedding?" The couple said, "Oh, we can't trust him! He just did as we asked. You're realistic about our problems. You cared about us enough to challenge us and say no. That's the kind of person we need."

So he sat down with them. His tough love had infuriated them, but when things fell apart, the one they trusted was the one who recognized how serious their problems were.

That, in essence, was what Jeremiah experienced.

God is sovereign. Through Jeremiah God showed the people that He is in control. God is like a potter with clay. If the lump he's working on doesn't turn out, he can crush it back into a lump. But he can also take that crushed lump and start afresh and form something new from it (18:1-10). Even in the time of judgment, they were still in the hands of the sovereign God. That was their only hope, but it was enough.

Through Jeremiah the Lord said:

I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you
back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart (29:10-13).
In the midst of their despair, the broken people of Judah remembered Jeremiah's words, and they learned to trust in God alone. They knew they could believe God when he said, "I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow" (31:13).

The only hope. Beyond all human hope, the people learned to hope in God. Jeremiah taught them to give up on their self-righteousness and to trust in a leader yet to come, whose title would be "the Lord Our Righteousness" (23:1-8). Jeremiah taught the people that in spite of their corrupt hearts, they could be saved, because the Lord would provide new hearts. God said:

"I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the Lord. "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." (31:33,34)
This word from the Lord is the only message that brings a realistic hope and salvation to sinful people like you and me. According to the Bible, "this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe" (Romans 3:22). This is the historical faith of God's people. We submit to God's judgment and trust his mercy. We give up on our own cisterns, cracked and dry and we drink from the spring of living water. o

Rev. David Feddes is radio minister on The Back to God Hour, a ministry of the Christian Reformed Church, 6555 W. College Drive, Palos Heights, IL 60463.

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