Thank you for this glorious subject matter, Lord,
and it's too rich, and our time is
too short, my God, to be adequate in
any way, so lead us into those highlights
for which your wisdom, my God, has brought
us, and we thank you and give you
praise as we invite you again to be
our anointed teacher and to give us anointing,
Lord, to hear, and free spirits to discuss
this precious material.
Thank you for the man himself, Lord, whom
you raised up and formed even from his
mother's womb, though he has passed on what
he has been serving generations ever since.
What a privilege that we're related.
Thank you, Lord, that he's in the great
book.
We bless your name now.
Bless us and be blessed with us.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, I thought to speak something about the
persecution of Jeremiah.
Maybe we need first to consider the offense
of Jeremiah.
What is it that led to his being
cast into cisterns, put into the stocks, forbidden
entry into the temple?
What was his terrible offense?
What was the root of the offense?
Because I suspect that that root remains still
and will bring or evoke the same kind
of angry response to those who bring it
as it was for him.
You know that not only did Jeremiah prophesy
destruction for Jerusalem, but he advised the king
and the inhabitants not to oppose the Babylonian
captivity of Jerusalem.
That if they opposed it, they would be
opposing it to their own destruction because they
were the rod of God's chastisement.
It was not just some military or political
thing, but that it needed to be understood
as a spiritual thing.
And to oppose Babylon as the rod of
God's chastisement was to oppose God and would
bring further and greater ruin upon themselves.
He even wrote a letter to those who
were already in captivity.
I don't know that we'll look at it
now, but it's in chapter 29 from verse
4, where those who were sent into exile
from previous captivity are encouraged to remain there
and even to pray for Babylon and to
take, to have your sons and daughters marry
and raise your families and prosper and that
you're going to be there for a length
of time.
See, the popular prophets were technically against the
issue of exile and they would have encouraged
maybe even a revolt against Babylon and a
return, which would have been premature because Jeremiah
tells them you're going to be there for
70 years.
So settle in and find your prosperity there
and grow there.
There'll be a time the Lord will himself
restore you.
That is to say that the practical counsel
that Jeremiah was giving went against the grain
of that which was spoken by the other
prophets who seemed to be more patriotic, more
for Israel's sake.
Yes, oppose Babylon.
Let's put up a fight.
God is with us.
He's not going to allow the city to
be destroyed.
Jeremiah is saying exactly opposite.
He will allow the city to be destroyed
and your own opposition to Babylon will guarantee
it.
So from every appearance, he seems to be
a traitor speaking against the best interest of
Israel saying, accede to the Babylonian conquest.
You see how detached we must be from
any conventional wisdom and how much prayer is
going on now and thought with regard to
present Israel that is doctrinaire, that is mechanical,
that is human wisdom, that actually is in
opposition with God's detailed plan for that nation.
And they just assume that God will come
behind them to vindicate and confirm their own
human suppositions because they've not heard from God
in the counsel of God and their assumptions
are presumptuous.
So if Jeremiah serves no other purpose than
to give us a certain caution about not
running off in our own thoughts and that
God's thoughts are not our thoughts, nor his
ways our ways, then the example of Jeremiah
should do just that.
We cannot presume upon God that we would
assume, well, he's brought it Russians and Ethiopians,
he going to and bring them all that
way that they should face disaster and expulsion.
It's contrary to logic.
Well, God is not under any obligation to
be submitted to your logic.
And maybe he's brought them for destruction because
two thirds of those that have come from
Russia are not even Jewish.
And so there are other things, but you
can see how Jeremiah would be a fly
in the ointment.
More than that, he would be a continual
irritant and be looked upon not only as
sounding something discordant, but actually being a traitor
at a time when the nation needs solidarity
because Babylon is at the door threatening Jerusalem
security.
So how can we afford a man to
speak like that?
He's going to demoralize the nation and rob
them of their stamina to defend themselves against
Babylon.
So he's not just a casual point of
disagreement.
He's an actual threat to national security.
And such men have to be dealt with.
And the fact that I'm hearing myself called
traitor and giving aid to the enemy is
the first echo of the same kind of
thing that will grow louder as we grow
on.
And the issues become joined and much more
serious.
Well, I want to share a little bit
from a condensed version of the two volume
study of Dierhard von Raad on Old Testament
theology, where his remarks about the prophets were
extracted and made into a single volume by
itself called The Message of the Prophets.
So this is a handy single volume published
by Harper and Rowe, but it's the same
theologian that we have been considering.
If there was a thought about the necessity
for exile, the conventional wisdom would have said
there would be a return and then Israel
would go on.
But Jeremiah even had a different view of
what exile and restoration would mean.
That Israel would not come back and take
up where it left off, for it would
only assure the same apostasy again, that Jeremiah
had a depth of insight about the condition
of human nature beyond any prophet before him.
And it's in Jeremiah that we read that
can an Ethiopian change his color or leopard
her spots, that there's something about Israel's condition
of sin that needs to be radically altered.
There cannot be just an exile and return
for the characteristic nature of the nation.
The people as man will again express itself
in a new apostasy and a new judgment
and a new expulsion.
What Israel needs is a radical alteration of
its own nature.
It needs a new covenant.
It needs to be changed from within.
And that is God's promise and will be
the basis for the restoration.
So we come to a juncture in the
history of Israel where something is being sounded
for a first time of a radically different
kind that grows out of Jeremiah's depth of
apprehension of what is the root of Israel's
unchanging condition and propensity for sin and her
inability to keep covenant, namely the condition of
man himself.
That is lawless, self-seeking, disobedient.
And Israel is only man writ large and
that something needs to happen that only God
himself can provide.
And that, strange to say, is the greatest
root of the offense of Jeremiah.
That he's showing Israel that it can never
succeed on its own basis.
It can never attain to its own righteousness.
God himself has got to become the righteousness
of the nation.
And that is the heart of offense to
man, then, now, and always.
The reason my mother is bucking against the
salvation of God, or others whom we know,
is for very much the same reason.
Man wants to establish his own righteousness by
his own acts and by his own merit.
When you rob a man of that possibility,
you are threatening the deeps of his life
and his reason for being.
Strange to say that men will oppose themselves
in their own ignorance and will go down
fighting and oppose God because they want to
be the basis of their own success and
their own establishment and their own righteousness.
So it's not that Jeremiah is anyway moving
away from covenant or Torah, the law of
God, or what was given at Sinai.
He's all the more standing on that ground
and saying that unless God gives you a
new heart and a right spirit, you'll never
fulfill it.
What he is is he's a precursor.
He comes before Paul.
Paul says the same thing, that there was
nothing wrong with the law.
The law was holy.
What was wrong was your inability to fulfill
it.
And for that reason, God has given a
new heart and a new spirit.
So I like the remarks that Von Raad
makes about this.
If God puts his will directly into their
hearts, with this new heart that is spoken
of in Jeremiah chapter 30 and 31, is
the first speaking of a new covenant.
If God puts his will directly in their
hearts, remember he said, I will write my
law in your hearts.
Then properly speaking, the rendering of obedience is
completely done away with.
For the problem of obedience only arises when
man's will is confronted by an alien will.
The conflict between Israel and God was God
calling a nation to righteousness and the nation's
inability or unwillingness to perform it on God's
own terms.
But now that whole ground is removed because
the righteous requirement of God is not external
but has been deposited into the new heart
that he will give to the people, which
will be the basis for their restoration and
return.
Men are to have the will of God
in their heart and are only to will
God's will.
So what is here outlined is the picture
of a new man, a man who is
able to obey perfectly because of a miraculous
change of his nature, a change that is
wrought by God exclusively in which man himself
has no part, but only to receive the
gift of a new heart and a new
nature.
Strange to say that men will fiercely oppose
that gift and prefer on the basis of
their own humanity and sufficiency to establish themselves.
Man has no part in this.
And just quoting from that Jeremiah 30, 31
through 34, you might look at that.
Behold, the days are coming, says Yahweh, when
I will make a new covenant with the
house of Israel, not like the covenant which
I made with their fathers when I took
them by the hand to bring them out
of the land of Egypt, which they broke
so that I had to show myself as
Lord, says Yahweh.
But this is to be the covenant that
I will make with the house of Israel
after these days.
I will put my law or my instruction,
my Torah within them and write it upon
their hearts.
And so I will be their God and
they shall be my people.
Then no man needs any longer to teach
his neighbor and no man his brother saying,
no Jehovah, but they shall all know me
from the least to the greatest, says Jehovah,
for I will forgive their iniquity.
I'll remember their sins no more.
So what am I for?
God's reversing the whole foundation of the call
of the nation.
It's finally to be fulfilled, not because there's
any change in the law or its requirements,
but there's been a profound change in the
way in which the law can be fulfilled,
that the lawgiver is now the law enabler
by a supernatural miraculous act of creation, of
creating in the nation a new heart and
a new spirit.
I will put my law in their hearts.
God is the agent and Israel is the
passive recipient.
Man has no place in what God is
to do and therefore all glory and honor
goes to him who does it and nothing
for man at all.
And if Israel is anything, it's man seeking
to establish himself.
Even the present state of Israel is that
very drama and the fact that present Israel
is encouraged in succeeding in that by Christians
is a remarkable statement of the condition of
those Christians who, though they give outward and
overt approval of the doctrine of grace in
their deepest and secret hearts, they admire a
people who will succeed on the basis of
their own merit and they love Israeli heroism
and Israeli exploits because in their own secret
heart that's the basis upon which they would
like to succeed and find approval and significance.
That is to say that though God says
that in man is no good thing at
all and that if God were to mark
iniquity who can stand and that the foundational
doctrine of the Christian faith is the depravity
of man, the hopeless depravity of man, still
in their secret hearts and in their identification
with present Israel there are those who reveal
that what is doctrinal for them is not
actual.
That they give verbal support to the doctrine
of depravity and to the necessity for grace
but in their own hearts they love and
admire those who will do it on the
basis of their own merit and want to
encourage them in that.
So I wrote at the bottom of this
page, large segments of the church want the
establishment of Israel to be Israel's own accomplishment
because their own ultimate hope and desire for
accomplishment equally rests in themselves.
They are enamored of human heroism and accomplishment
and want to succeed themselves on that same
basis.
Despite their credos and those ostensible doctrines they
have never despaired of flesh or agreed with
God about its depravity.
Though they are New Testament saints in actuality
they are living Old Testament lives.
That's a remarkable thing that present Israel is
revealing.
So, you may want to mark in Jeremiah
31 in that text, I will put, showing
the exclusive power of God in performing this,
the creator creates a new heart and so
I will be their God which is to
say only so, only on that basis can
I and will I be their God and
they shall be my people.
There is no other basis by which Israel
can be related to me.
Then no man needs any longer to teach
his neighbor.
Well what is that going to do for
the rabbis?
It's going to put them out of work.
Something inward has been wrought and a whole
class who profit from being the so-called
shepherds of Israel and teachers will find themselves
without occupation.
Little wonder that it's that same class of
men going back to the time of Jesus
who were then the Pharisees or today the
leaders of rabbinical Judaism were the ones who
were most viciously opposed to Jesus and required
his death.
For the same reason that Jeremiah's death is
to be required because he's fingering and touching
and striking at one of the foundational things
about life itself where man wants to succeed
on the basis of his own merit, his
own righteousness and his own works, on the
basis of his own flesh.
We'll look at Jeremiah 17 that I was
looking at earlier this morning to show you
the depth of Jeremiah's insight into the human
condition given him by God that had so
much to do with being also the vehicle
of speaking of a new covenant to come.
The first verses speak of God's condemnation of
Israel and her sin and the judgment that
would follow and then from verse 5, thus
says the Lord, curse it are those who
trust, it says here, in mere mortals, what
do you have in your edition, curse it
are the men who trust in men and
make mere flesh their strength whose
hearts turn away from the Lord.
Isn't that, that's not an accidental after effect,
that's an intrinsic component to the degree that
you trust in the arm of flesh to
that same degree, your heart will be turned
away from God because he's no longer your
dependency and so long as he's not your
dependency, he's no longer the object of your
gratitude and so long as he's no longer
the object of your gratitude, he'll not be
the object of your praise or your worship
or your devotion.
He's got to be God as a sole
dependency or we will not be in that
kind of relationship with him that evokes the
kind of worship that is to him.
When you make the flesh of your arm
your trust, you depart from the living God.
It's a curse and what is the curse?
They shall be like a shrub in the
desert and shall not see when relief comes.
They shall live in the parched places of
the wilderness in an inhabited salt land.
Well that's both literal and symbolic and figurative.
I know people right now who are living
in physical places that are opposite to this
description but the condition that they are, that
is to say insisting upon living on the
basis of flesh, they are unhappy, wretched, and
for all effects and purposes, might just as
well be living in a parched place, in
a dry land, in an uninhabited and a
salt land.
Salt is death to any kind of vegetation,
any kind of growth.
Can you picture that?
The insistence to live by flesh brings you
to a dry, parched, and uninhabitable land.
You could be surrounded by people but as
far as your ability to relate to them
or to receive the joy or the pleasures
of fellowship, it's gone.
For all effects and purposes, you are living
a very solitary life, detached and unrelated, and
it's a dry land and uninhabited because it's
a curse when you predicate your life on
the arm of flesh.
If Jeremiah wrote nothing else but that, he
would be memorialized forever for the depth of
that insight that God expressed as a verse
saith the Lord.
Then he gives us the opposite, but blessed
are those who trust in the Lord, whose
trust is the Lord.
God himself is their trust and their confidence,
is their righteousness.
Isn't it interesting that our prayer at the
table was, Lord we're helpless, we can do
nothing without you?
Thinking back now, where did that come from?
I didn't think to pray that because that
would necessarily reflect what we would be discussing.
It came out as a prayer.
So even here in our own conduct, our
own activity, where great things are at stake
that will affect the future, we acknowledge at
the very commencement, without you Lord, we can
do nothing.
We are as dead men.
We need your life.
Remember Watchman Lee?
Raised his hand to knock on the door
to bring correction and he couldn't lift his
arm.
The life had gone completely out of it.
Everything was predicated on God's life.
That's what it means to trust the Lord.
Maybe we don't understand that deeply enough.
It's not trusting his principles or his truths.
It's God himself as source of life rather
than our own.
That's a radical, two radical alternatives.
The arm of the flesh or God as
the source of life.
And the new covenant gives opportunity to live
from God.
I will, he says.
So they shall be like a tree planted
by water sending out its roots by the
stream.
They shall not fear when heat comes and
its leaves shall stay green in the year
of drought.
They are not anxious and they do not
cease from bearing fruit.
Remarkable stark contrast for these two ways of
life.
One a curse and one a blessing.
The remarkable thing is that Israel in rejecting
Jeremiah and the new covenant of which he
spoke chose curse and they got curse.
And for all effects and purposes are still
under it until they will come into the
new covenant that is available and waiting.
But it waits for someone who will despair
of his own life and recognize its futility.
And that despair is the end of the
time of Jacob's trouble.
That's why Steven Spielberg has got to be
lifted up out of his dream factory and
all that he represents and symbolizes and be
brought into the wilderness of the nations, stripped
to the bone and having no recourse or
alternative to anything.
Wilderness is an entire stripping and come to
a place of total and abject despair and
any confidence, any hope that he can have
in himself, then he will be a candidate
to enter the new covenant of God.
I will meet with you in the wilderness
of the nations face to face and there
you will come under the rod of my
authority and into the bond of my covenant.
That's Ezekiel, but the covenant is the one
that Jeremiah is speaking of in my new
covenant.
For there you will realize that you have
no virtue and no strength in yourself and
then you will appreciate and receive and enter.
This covenant that I'm making available by which
my life, my righteousness will become yours.
Jerusalem becomes the city of righteousness and their
slogan is God is our righteousness.
What a complete antithesis of what Israel and
Jews have been until this day, because we
Jews are the epitome of self-made men.
We are the epitome, you know this word,
the final ultimate expression of man in his
own self-sufficiency and self-confidence.
That's why God's dealing with us must be
the most ruthless because we represent man worldwide
and therefore his dealings with us is a
dealing with them.
Why is that dealing necessary?
Why is this new covenant the only alternative
and why God must be the exclusive provider,
the creator, the agent of it?
Because in verse 9, the heart is devious
above all things.
It is perverse.
Who can understand it?
There's a root.
The innate condition of man is of such
a kind that the heart itself is corrupt
and that's why I will create in you
a new heart and put a right spirit
within you.
And my law will be in your heart
and not some external observation for which you
will fail as you have historically failed and
have faced judgment and expulsion in exile as
the result.
A version says it's indesperately wicked or incurably
sick.
Yeah, that's good.
Praise the Lord.
The word incurable shows there's no alternative.
There's nothing to be hoped for for man
in that condition.
And what we have come into is that
covenant.
And this is the thing that is supposed
to move Jews to envy, that they can
see in Gentiles what would have been their
benefit had they received this promise.
They will see the fruit of this covenantal
relationship enjoyed by Gentiles that is yet outside
their experience.
And it's a fruit of such a kind
that they will be moved to envy as
they observe it.
That's God's stratagem.
To what degree it's succeeding, I'll leave you
to assess.
And maybe it's not succeeding because of what
I said earlier.
Massive numbers of Christians who subscribe to the
doctrine of grace are actually living Old Testament
lives, where they're not living out of the
life of the new covenant, but still out
of their own sufficiency, their own religious ability,
their own humanity.
And therefore they're not exhibiting a fruit that
will move Israel to envy, and yet actually
go to Israel to support and encourage Jews
in exactly the same kind of conduct and
practice.
These are the ones who are most vociferously
opposed to what we express.
And it's much deeper than the level in
which they're arguing.
The heart of their real enmity against our
view is the same opposition to Jeremiah.
That is, they want to continue and to
succeed in the flesh, and want Israel to
succeed on that basis also.
It's a real deep ideological issue and conflict.
Jeremiah 32, verse 37 through 41, where this
new covenant is again reiterated, is a statement,
they shall be my people, I will be
their God, and I will give them a
heart and a way that they may fear
me forever and for their own good, and
the good of their children after them.
All of the emphasis is, I will.
I will give, I will do, I will
put, I will, I will, I will.
God, the exclusive agent, because he's creator, and
man only the recipient to receive.
It's the greatest insult to the pride of
man to be a recipient of something that
comes as gift, and in which he has
no part whatever.
Remember when Jesus said, no man can come
unto me except the Father draw him?
And many were offended at him from that
day, because they wanted to come to God
even on the basis of their own zeal,
their own religiosity, their own integrity, their own
character, their own accomplishment.
No man can, Jesus, the absoluteness of his
statement, no man can come except the Father
draw him.
You are helpless.
You can be religious as all get out.
You can subscribe to the most profound, most
humane principles.
It will not bring you to the Father
except he draw you.
Nothing from you has any value at all.
In you is no good thing at all.
And who is there who has really said
yes and agreed with God in his indictment
of the condition of man universally and everywhere?
Even Christians in their secret hearts have not
given God a yes to that, and the
evidence is the persistence of themselves in seeking
to succeed on the basis of their flesh.
Though God says in the flesh is no
good thing, that which is of the flesh
is death, and numbers still persist in seeking
to establish themselves on that basis.
I will put the fear of me in
their hearts, and I will plant them in
their land, it says at the end of
the statement, in faithfulness, with all my heart
and with all my soul, I will plant.
What an alternative to, how shall I say
this politely, the Zionist enterprise, the undertaking to
establish the present state of Israel that has
brought such discord to the Middle East, that
has so exacerbated the people who are resident
there.
The recent issue of the Jerusalem Report has
an article on the problem of Arab refugees,
Palestinian refugees who were expelled or left for
one reason or another from 1948 with the
establishment of the state of Israel.
There's a whole controversy over this, whether they
were prompted by Arab sources themselves to get
out of the way so the Arabs could
come in and clean up Israel and then
they could take over, or whether the Israelis
themselves gave them reason to fear the prospect
of terror and annihilation, or actually physically moved
them out.
And in one case, at least, there's a
whole village that suffered from Israel's military and
were virtually wiped out.
The fact of the matter is that there
are millions of Palestinians who once lived in
what are now Israeli cities, who were expelled
or fled from that nation.
And one of the great hindrances now for
the establishment of this peace is how to
negotiate and settle the Palestinian refugee problem.
There are still hundreds of thousands of them
living in refugee camps in Jordan and in
Gaza, and they are compressed and living in
terrible conditions.
And the irony is that Israel is so
absolutely insistent on reparation and being recompensed for
any loss suffered by Jews as the result
of the Holocaust, making the Swiss banks pay
through the nose billions of dollars for accounts
that were not paid to those who perished
in the Holocaust that should go to their
survivors, or properties that were taken from Jews
during the Nazi time, or from even Jews
that were driven out of Morocco or other
Middle Eastern Islamic cities and nations want their
compensation.
And so the Palestinian authorities are saying, you
guys are teaching us how to do it.
If you're justified in being compensated for your
loss, what about our loss?
And thank you, we'll take interest on that
for 50 years.
You've got our cities.
What used to be Lod is now where
the airport is in Tel Aviv.
And many of those places had flourishing Palestinian
or Arab communities that go back through decades
and generations that were overnight looted out and
expelled.
So the refugee problem is fierce.
I only cite that to say, this is
the kind of thing that's inevitable when many
by their flesh are seeking to establish what
only God by his spirit and his power
is able to do.
And what God says, I will plant them
in their land as being part of the
new covenant provision.
There's a difference between planting and between, what's
the word for it?
An aggressive human attempt to establish that is
necessarily going to bring frayed relations, to say
it politely.
So that Israel will have an opportunity to
see the difference between what man out of
the flesh of his own arm has sought
to establish, which has left Israel with no
peace.
To this day, they're living in continual threat.
Their enemies have unrequited sense of vengeance for
their loss.
And that Israel has sought to put a
lid and to keep down this complaint by
intimidating and by threatening expulsion and to make
Palestinians uncomfortable, even in the communities where they
are in order to maintain some kind of
security, which further exacerbates and produces a desire
for vengeance and those people.
And there will be a hell to pay
for this.
So if there was ever a last days
and final revelation that the works of the
flesh consummated death, we're going to see it
when this tide of implacable resentment and hatred
breaks forth and finally overflows Israel and devastates
it.
The PLO has never removed from its charter,
the statement about Israel's demise, that they will
end that nation and, and plunge its inhabitants
into the sea.
And part of the Oslo agreement was the
removal of that statement and they've never done
it.
And even if they did it, it would
mean nothing because for Muslims, you can act
in the most facetious ways.
It doesn't matter because for Allah's sake, their
presence in that land is a disgrace to
the whole Islamic faith and therefore they need
to be expelled.
Only God could have established this people in
their own land and he will, and I
will plant you, is the same God who
I will put a new heart within you.
That means that it's not the result of
our effort, but the result of his gift.
The only requirement from us is the humility
to receive it, which means the acknowledgement that
in ourselves is no good thing at all.
So Van Raad calls Jeremiah's description of the
new covenant, Israel's full and final return to
her God, which has not yet taken place.
Jeremiah spoke it, but we're yet waiting for
its fulfillment.
Had the prophets been preachers of revival, we
should expect to find their statements on conversion
in the form of exhortation, but that is
not the case where they are found rather
amongst their preaching of judgment.
I just put the two words revival and
judgment in parentheses, that the false prophets who
had no stomach for a new covenant, and
even today Jewish authorities denigrate and speak in
a demeaning way to any reference to a
new covenant as if it's not a valid
biblical proposition.
There's a strange correspondence to the emphasis today
on revival.
There are people who want something revived that
does not require a radical alteration but an
improvement of that which is presently existing.
There's something of the same issue today between
those who think that revival is the route
for the kingdom and those who say no,
but only the most radical alteration, conversion and
change through repentance.
Jeremiah would today be on the repentance side
and the popular prophets of today would be
like their companions in Jeremiah's time speaking about
revival, that there's no necessity for a more
radical change but only an improvement of what
presently is.
And the root of that is that they're
not persuaded that in man is no good
thing at all.
They do not condemn the flesh as God
does, that he condemns it so severely that
the only answer for it is its crucifixion
and burial.
So revival, the kind of emphasis that we're
seeing today could be something like reviving flesh,
judgment would be flesh destroyed and out of
that destruction would come the new and the
enduring thing.
God is so insistent upon being the sole
agent of Israel's restoration on the basis of
a new covenant that he does not even
allow Israel's repentance to be a condition for
that newness.
It's not that they're saved out of repentance
but they are saved and restored and repent
after the fact.
The repentance of Israel in Ezekiel 36, you
might want to look at it, comes not
before the return but after.
That's a good point.
It's a tricky thought.
What verse is that?
Verse 31, then, which is to say after
your return, you shall remember your evil ways
and your dealings that were not good and
you shall loathe yourselves for your iniquities and
your abominable deeds.
It's not for your sake that I will
act, says the Lord God.
Let it be known to you, be ashamed
and dismayed for your ways, O house of
Israel.
Thus says the Lord God, on the day
that I cleanse you from all your iniquities,
I will cause the towns to be inhabited
and the waste places shall be rebuilt and
the land that was desolate shall be killed
instead of being a desolation that it was
in the sight of all that passed by.
So the restoration of Israel physically and the
repentance of Israel comes after their return from
the land when I will plant them.
God does not even give to Israel the
luxury of repentance.
Restoration of Israel physically and the repentance of
Israel comes after their return from the land
when I will plant them.
God does not even give to Israel the
luxury of repentance, lest they boast that their
repentance was the key to their return.
And that's reiterated in Zechariah, that in a
day when every family prays apart, when I
will pour out the spirit of supplication and
prayer on the city of Jerusalem, that before
that pouring out, there's no possibility of repentance,
but it requires first the visible seeing of
him whom we have pierced.
And then through the spirit that was poured
out on the city of David, of the
spirit of supplication and prayer, they are able
to repent.
The enablement even for repentance is the gift
of God.
And in that we have such a picture
of God's hatred of that which in man
seeks to establish itself independent of him.
And I don't think that the church has
sufficiently understood and said yes and agreed with
God on that condition.
I will meet with you in the wilderness
of nations and there you will come into
the bond of my covenant.
So there will be those who are saved
by a demonstration of God in that wilderness
situation, but those who have either remained in
Jerusalem or were not expelled with others, or
maybe even those who have passed through it
and have returned and have yet to experience
conversion, must wait for the day that they
shall see him whom they have pierced.
I think it was Regius, someone who said
that in that moment God will bring to
the recall of those who see him whom
they have pierced.
All of the testimony and all of the
witness that they have heard in a lifetime
from Christians who have brought a word to
them that gave every appearance of being the
water that bounces off the duck's back, that
they were unaffected.
But nevertheless it was the word of God
that does not return to him void.
And in that moment when they shall see
him, he'll bring like a flood of remembrance
all of the witness and testimony that had
been spoken to them that seemed to have
been in vain.
And it's the combination of the visibility of
Jesus as their crucified and resurrected one, compounded
by the weight of all of the rejected
testimony that was not in vain and did
not return, that will really bring the enormous
breaking that will come to Israel.
For there will never be again or ever
before be a demonstration of a repentance of
a nation of such a depth and magnitude
as will take place in that day.
Of so deep a kind that they cannot
even repent in the same room together.
The families have to be apart and the
husbands and the wives have to be apart
because they have to be so before God
alone in the depth of that breaking and
the pouring out of their souls that they
cannot even abide the presence of another.
Each one has got to find his own
place.
Can you imagine this proud Jewish people who
are doing it by themselves, the never again
boasters when you go to their concentration camps,
whether it's Dachau or the one I went
to in Poland, Treblinka, that you see right
in front of the monument in large letters,
never again.
This proud defiant people never again stretched out
before God with such a heaving sighs and
sobs, a racking of their bodies, you wonder
if they'll survive it.
And the fact of the matter is that
they won't.
It's a repentance unto death.
Repentance is death and out of that death
will come the newness of life.
But God himself is the author of it,
brings the moment of it and gives the
enablement for it that no man can boast
that I have obtained this new life by
any virtue of my own.
It is the gift of God.
What does it take to break it?
But wretchedness, a wretchedness unto a despair unto
death where you finally come to the realization
of the spirit that there's no hope to
succeed on this basis and then you become
a candidate for the revelation of the grace
of God that was always waiting in the
wings as a gift if only you could
humble yourself to receive it.
It's not Judaism versus Christianity.
It's living by the flesh and self-will
and self-attainment or surrendering to the grace
of God as a gift.
That's the issue.
So we have a little drama going on
within the drama and they're interesting that you
come up as part and this is the
heart and the root of the offense of
Jeremiah to the nation.
He's striking at the very cord of self
-sufficiency and religiosity and self-righteousness in men
and for that they will kill him and
for that they killed Jesus.
That was exactly the offense of Jesus and
they would not come unto him.
Remember in John chapter 11 the high priest
said it's necessary that one man die for
the nation.
What he's saying is we've got to get
rid of this guy because he's threatening the
nation on the foundation on which its life
is predicated.
He's a subversive of such a kind that
he's threatening the whole mode of our being
and our priesthood and our celebrated place of
respect and establishment.
He's calling us to another mode of being
and we cannot afford that.
He's got to go.
And Jeremiah was at the same offense and
we are at the same offense.
And I can just tell you and I
think I mentioned it somewhere in the course
of these days.
As I look back on my 35 years
as a believer and our 25 years here,
the greatest offense that has provoked the catcalls
and the opposition of anything that could be
named is our naive assumption that we are
living from Christ and that the words I
speak are not my words but the words
that the Lord gives me.
That there's a whole dependency upon God and
that if my marriage is to survive let
alone to be established or to be a
success it will not be because I have
more flowers or candy or spend more time
or do those kinds of things that you
would think would bring improvement or revival but
it would be a grace that comes from
above in the moment of God's own choosing.
That has offended men because they want this
marriage resolved and our ministry and life to
be established on the same basis by which
they want their life established, namely human merit
and effort.
This is the offense, guys, this is the
offense.
And we've got to know it and recognize
it.
Whether we speak it or just exhibit it
or exude it in the kind of atmosphere
that we give off.
I went up in an elevator at one
of the full gospel regional conferences years ago
with one of the leading faith and prosperity
men.
I had never seen him before, I knew
of him, he had never seen me before,
nobody ever knew of me.
The moment we came into the elevator together
and the door closed and our backs arched
like cats.
You could hear the hissing and not a
word had been spoken.
We represented such totally opposite things.
So this is where the vectors cross and
that's why Jeremiah was scheduled for his own
annihilation.
He's not fit to live.
You remember with Paul how men vowed that
they would not eat nor drink until this
man was dead.
They threw dust on their heads and cried
out, he's not fit to live.
Because Paul was the promulgator of the same
issue of the grace of God as against
American men as being a basis for righteousness
and for life.
He's not fit to live.
We cannot afford his existence.
Nothing has changed.
So I think we'll just take a breath
and a prayer.
Can you pray something?
What do we pray?
The triumph of God's grace and the remarkable
tenacity of man in his stubborn insistence of
being sufficient on the basis of his own
merit and succeeding independent of God.
Though he will allude to God and attend
services and do a lot of religious things
and even subscribe to the doctrines of grace,
he will not in fact live by them.
And our God is patient and waiting and
he has made available at great cost an
alternative.
His own life that was released through suffering
of death and we still spurn it.
So Lord, my God, write these things in
our hearts, Lord.
Stab our consciousness and if there be in
any of us, and I'm sure that there
is more than we know, lingering aspects of
self-life, of self-attainment, of wanting recognition,
success, respect, acknowledgement on the basis of what
we are, what we do.
And unwilling to surrender to the truth of
what you say is our condition, the hopelessness,
the futility.
May you have that surrender, may we give
up the ghost, may you have our rags,
my God, that we might have your righteousness.
But how shall we preach this if we
are not yet totally in that place?
And how shall Israel be moved to envy
until you have a church that can exhibit
the fruit of this grace?
And so thank you Lord for reminding us
of the unchanging issue of the ages, the
stubborn, relentless disobedience of men, the self-will,
the pride of man that wants to be
its own God and to establish itself, its
own name, its own honor, its own way.
We bless you Lord.
Oh my God, thank you Jesus.
That if there is any conversion, if there
is any repentance, it's only because you've made
it a gift out of your kindness.
It's not something we could have prompted and
performed.
You are all in all.
You are the living God.
You are the creator.
There's no hope in anyone other than you.
We bow before you my God.
We don't know how to continue.
We didn't know this morning how to continue.
We don't know how to continue after this
break.
We're totally cast upon you Lord.
And willing to suffer the embarrassment of the
failure rather than we should attempt to succeed
on the basis of our own filthy rants,
our own human ability.
We have no ability.
We're dead men and we prefer so to
be that your life might go forth and
you might be glorified for glory.
Oh my God, raise up prophetic men on
the basis of your life who will speak
your words in your power.
For nothing else will succeed in an hour
and a generation so perverse and so opposed
to your so great salvation.
Thank you my God for this morning and
what you're saying and putting in our hearts
and making new and deep path on Yeshua's
name.
Feel free to pray if you have a
personal...