About this sermon
Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon, telling them to build houses, plant gardens, and seek the welfare of the city where God has sent them. False prophets promised a quick return home, but the Lord declares that the exile will last seventy years, and only then will he bring his people back. ‘I know the plans I have for you,’ he says, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.’ God’s people must speak hard truths with tears, and they can trust his good purposes through long seasons of suffering as they look to the risen Christ.
Sermon transcript
It’s an honor to be with you once again and to open the Word of God for you. Let’s do turn our hearts to the Word of God once again. We’ll focus on perhaps a familiar passage, Jeremiah 29, 11, but in order to stir our hearts and to get our thinking aiming in that direction in light of the fullness of God’s Word, let’s turn to two passages prior, both of them in the New Testament. Please open first to 1 Peter 2. 1 Peter 2. be working our way backward in God’s word and also backward in time to see these themes in their development and then in God’s faithfulness and bringing them about in the past. 1 Peter chapter two. And I’ll be reading verses one through 12. This is on page 180 of the Pew Bible, if you’re using that.
First Peter chapter two, starting in verse one, this is the word of the Lord. Therefore putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babies long for the pure milk of the word so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation. If you have tasted the kindness of the Lord, And coming to him as to a living stone, which has been rejected by men, but is choice and precious in the sight of God. You also as living stones are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For this is contained in scripture. Behold, I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious cornerstone, and he who believes in him will not be disappointed.
This precious value, then, is for you who believe, but for those who disbelieve. The stone which the builders rejected, this became the very cornerstone and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word and to this doom they were also appointed. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. For once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.
And now please back to the gospels, specifically to Matthew chapter 16. Matthew chapter 16. We see our Lord’s words to his beloved disciple, Peter. Peter, who goes from a wonderful affirmation of faith to needing to be rebuked in what seems like just a few moments. Matthew chapter 16. And I’ll begin our reading in verse 13. Again, Matthew 16, starting in verse 13. Again, the word of the Lord. Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he was asking his disciples, who do people say that the son of man is? And they said, some say John the Baptist and others Elijah, but others still Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered, you are the Christ, the son of the living God.
And Jesus said to him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. Then he warned the disciples that they should tell no one that he was the Christ. From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day.
Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, God forbid it, Lord. This shall never happen to you. But he turned and said to Peter, get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s. Then Jesus said to his disciples, if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. And now please to Jeremiah chapter 29, our primary passage for this evening. Jeremiah chapter 29. echoes of which we hear in the passages we just read in the language of the Lord Jesus building his church, building a holy priesthood and people as a temple.
Jeremiah chapter 29. And I’ll begin our reading in verse one. Again, God’s holy word. Now these are the words of the letter which Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the rest of the elders of the exile, the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the court officials, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem. This letter was sent by the hand of Elasa the son of Shaphan and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon saying, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and live in them and plant gardens and eat their produce.
Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands that they may bear sons and daughters and multiply there and do not decrease. 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 have welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Do not let your prophets who are in your midst and your diviners deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams which they dream. For they prophesy falsely to you in my name. I have not sent them, declares the Lord. For thus says the Lord, when 70 years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill my good word to you to bring you back to this place.
For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. 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 search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord. And I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord. and will bring you back to the place from where I sent you into exile. And we’ll end our reading of the word of God at that point. Let’s pray, brothers and sisters, and ask for God’s blessing in both the preaching and the hearing of the word that we’ve just read.
Let’s pray together. Father in heaven, we have read and even sung this evening much of your word in a short time, and we pray for your Holy Spirit’s power and activity among us that you would, by him and through the word that he has given to us, order our thoughts and bring them to an intensified focus upon the one in whom all of these words are fulfilled, your Son and our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray, O God, that your word would now be proclaimed in truth and that it would be received by your people with faith and love and an eagerness to put into practice that which the Good Shepherd would say to us this evening as we continue to worship you through him. We pray, O God, that this very same word would call to faith and salvation and repentance any in this assembly who do not know Christ as Lord and Savior.
And we pray that for all who do, that this would be a time of true strengthening and grace, that we would together grow in the grace and knowledge of our blessed savior and your only begotten son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose matchless and majestic name we pray, amen. Well, following the sermon this evening, as you know, we’ll have opportunity to participate in the blessing that the Lord Jesus gave to the church that we refer to as the Lord’s Supper. It’s a means of grace which is designed to advance us, which is designed to confirm and to continue us in the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. I wanna begin the sermon this evening with a quotation from someone who did not continue along in his life of professed faith. Someone who now as a professional writes and speaks the very stuff which encourages others like him in their own exodus from the church. which gives them reason to disbelieve and a reason to abandon the faith in which many of them grew up, or at least to which they were exposed.
This is from a scholar named Bart Ehrman. And Ehrman writes in a book called God’s Problem, how the Bible fails to answer our most important question, why we suffer. Ehrman writes of his own personal journey away from the God of the Bible. And he writes this, the God I once believed in was a God who was active in the world. He saved Israelites from slavery. He sent Jesus for the salvation of the world. He answered prayer. He intervened on behalf of the people when they were in desperate need. He was actively involved in my life. But I can’t believe in that God anymore. Because from what I now see around the world, He doesn’t intervene.” End quote. Now, Ehrman might be considered an apostle to the apostate. His material gives encouragement to those, and very many of them are young adults, again, who have grown up within the church, who begin to take a very adult look at life and to recognize the profound suffering that exists, not necessarily in their circumstances, although certainly sometimes, but especially beyond them and around them.
And they begin to think of the Bible as utterly inadequate to deal with the real hardships of life. And the stories within scripture as little more than morality tales, if not fairy tales, which if believed actually serve to mock the pain that people go through by constantly calling them to faith in the very God who is putting them through it. A God who in Airman’s mind, in reality, just does not intervene and does not save in the way that we’re told to believe he does in the pages of scripture. And what does all that have to do with our passage this evening? Well, it’s very common and it’s necessary for those of us who are in reformed theological circles to speak against the abuses of our primary passage this evening, Jeremiah 29, 11, in which God promises that the plans that he has for us are for our well-being and for our peace and prosperity.
Jeremiah 29 11 is a very popular verse among Christians. And the thinking among some professing believers goes that if we have not found peace and prosperity in terms of material wealth and good health, then we must not be seeking God with our whole heart. If our lives are filled with illness and pain and deprivation, then that can only be because our hearts are not filled with true faith. And so, as we ought, we critique that terrible abuse of this particular passage and those like it. But this evening, we need to dig deeper and to explore the ways in which we who might openly and loudly criticize the health and wealth gospel might set ourselves up not only for devastating disappointment within the faith, but if we are not careful, and if the word of God is not truly rooted within us, for a departure from the faith that we once claimed to believe, similar to so many others, and as exemplified by Mr.
Ehrman, from whose work I read earlier. Jeremiah 29 is a passage that is full of the very realism which Mr. Ehrman denies. It is full of the demonstration of who God is and what he does in this a fallen world. And it proclaims to us the grace and the patience and the perseverance of this God in bringing people to himself. And as such, it is a wonderful passage for us to look to, to strengthen our hearts in that which we claim to believe, especially as we do come in more contact with the deep and pervasive suffering in this world. We’ll have a very simple outline for any of you taking notes tonight. We’ll spend most of our time on the first point. Point number one is God’s prerogative. God’s prerogative, and then secondly, God’s plans.
So God’s prerogative, and then secondly, God’s plans. Look with me please again at verse 11 of Jeremiah 29. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. Once again, we so often, at least it’s popular in Christian circles to interpret this passage as promising us a this worldly wealth and prosperity. God’s plans for us are indeed glorious and for our peace and for our welfare, but not always according to the terms by which we would like to see those promises fulfilled. There were prophets in the days of Jeremiah. This is the time of the Babylonian captivity who were rising up among the people and who really foreshadowed the health and wealth preachers of our day. And who said to the people, it’s time to go, pack your bags.
God has our deliverance right in front of us. If you just trust and believe, we are going home. Notice verses eight and nine, God’s commentary on these prophets. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, do not let your prophets who are in your midst and your diviners deceive you. And do not listen to the dreams which they dream, for they prophesy falsely to you in my name. I have not sent them, declares the Lord. These prophets were speaking exactly what the people of God in Jeremiah’s day and in Babylon would have loved to have heard, would have loved to be true, that they were going to go home, but they were lying. And the Lord reveals that through this letter from Jeremiah. He tells the people through Jeremiah the very hard truth that yes, they would go home, but not yet. not for a very long time.
Verse 10, for thus says the Lord, when 70 years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill my good word to you to bring you back to this place. Think of it, that’s good news, but it also contains some very bad news for many who were hearing it. Imagine being one of the exiles and hearing that news. 70 years would come and go before the people would go home. Seven decades. Now when you and I read history, 70 years can pass in the turn of a page or even a paragraph. But as we live history, 70 years may in fact be the full expanse of our lives or far longer for some of us. Now think therefore of the elderly people hearing this news. They were essentially hearing that they were not going home.
They would die in exile. Now young people, imagine yourselves among the exiles and hearing this news at your age. How old will you be in 70 years or even 50 or even 40? I don’t know your ages, but I do know that the answer is much older. And so the old and likely many of the young would not see their homeland again. And this is all beside issues of illness, which may arise as they were in Babylon and take them. Yes, the people of God as a whole would return, but some among them would not have the joy of that journey. They would die in exile. Imagine hearing those words. What would you think of God? And how could you then think in terms of the very next words of this promise in verse 11, that God’s plans for you were actually good and not evil, when such evil had already been unleashed upon you through Babylon and its psychotic king, Nebuchadnezzar? and especially if you are not among those whose rebellion against God brought about the Babylonian captivity.
Imagine yourself as a God-fearing Hebrew person seeking the Lord in great sorrow in Babylon, not having been someone who had contributed so far as you know to the significant sin, and yet having that judgment sweep up you and everybody else around you, those who truly loved the Lord and those who did not. What would you think of God then? Let’s switch it to present tense and present times. What do you think of the Lord as you find yourself or even worse, loved ones swept up into the essential pains of our day and of life in a fallen world? Again, there are some people who claim to know Christ and who will say, well, the bad stuff can’t be from God. And this is one of the passages that proves it. God’s plans are for peace and prosperity, not war and devastation.
God isn’t the one bringing about terrorist attacks. God isn’t the one who ordains the bad news X-ray, the natural disasters we see and we sometimes experience. But twice in verses four through 14, God makes it very clear to the people that he was the one who did this. Yes, it was Babylon. And yes, it was Nebuchadnezzar, these kinds of secondary causes. But look again to verse four. God refers to the people as the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem into Babylon. God did this. God decreed this disaster in light of his people’s refusal to repent. Their sin was, and our sin is, that serious. We must truly take to heart the fact that God is truly holy, and that we are truly sinful, and that whatever we may have in this world, it is more than we deserve. and that God freely and rightly ordains whatsoever comes to pass.
From Isaiah 45, the Lord speaking, I form light and create darkness. I make wellbeing and create calamity. I am the Lord who does all these things. If you hold this view of God, a view clearly expressed in our confessional standards, even as we read this evening, you must hold it forth to others through trembling hands, as it were, as we see disaster in our day. Because holding this view makes you relatively rare in our contemporary American Christian culture. And therefore you have the rare opportunity to tell people that while God’s plans for his people are not plans for evil, he does in fact employ evil. These plans do make use of catastrophe and calamity and captivity of all kinds. We may tell the truth, the hard truth with a soft voice and perhaps a voice choked up by tears.
We must never be brash and harsh in our declaration of the truth, but we must declare it, especially in a day when professing believers in Christ are disposed to despise such truth. And when we feel the weight of this, we might ask, Well, how can I possibly do that? Or even beneath that question, why would I want to do that? Why would I want to say those things when I know what kind of reception I’m going to get? Well, welcome to Jeremiah’s world. This is part of why he is called the weeping prophet. No one wanted to hear what he had to say, true as it was. We feel this personally in our own lives. Sometimes those who refuse these kinds of truths from scripture, they’ll be so well-intentioned in the counsel they bring to us when we’re in pain.
They’ll say, I’ve prayed for you and I just know you’re going to be healed. I have faith for it. I just know the next time the x-ray comes back, it’s gonna be clear. I just know and I claim it in the name of Jesus that you will get this job. They don’t realize. how closely their words match those of the prosperity preachers in Jeremiah’s day. We’re going home. God has told us we’re going home soon. We so often interpret Jeremiah 29 11 in terms of what you might call individualized earthly prosperity. Personal peace and happiness with regard to the circumstances in this world. Individualized earthly prosperity. Prosperity having to do with marriage and family and work and health and weather and whatever. Something we so often miss, which is a clear strike from the Holy Spirit against that kind of individualizing and distorting of the truth revealed here.
Something we often miss when interpreting and applying this passage happens especially in verse 11. I know the plans that I have for you. If we look at that in the original language, the you is plural. The you is plural. God is addressing the church. Yes, certainly the individuals who comprise the corporate body, but fundamentally and most essentially, this passage is directed to the church as a whole. In verse 11, dear brothers and sisters, God is not promising us as individuals money, marriage, a job, healing for a loved one, political freedom, all of which we tend to feel entitled to in this culture. And if this passage does in fact promise us individualized earthly prosperity, well, that sets us up for shipwreck in our faith. Because if we don’t have it, despite our having prayed for it, then we must either conclude that God broke his promise, or that somehow this promise depends upon our faithfulness to bring to fruition, and that we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain, and that the reason the healing didn’t come is because there wasn’t enough faith in here.
Otherwise, God would have done it. The word of God tells us though, brothers and sisters, The things of this life come and go, jobs come and go, wealth comes and goes, political freedom comes and goes, as the Israelites were experiencing here. And most painfully, people come and go from our lives, in and then out of our lives, all according to the will of our sovereign Lord. and all according to God’s big picture plans for all of his people. Again, the plural you is significant. Or as we might translate it around here, yins, or y’all, or whatever colloquialism applies to you and your background, it’s plural. It’s what Peter is referring to in the passage we read earlier. We are spiritual stones, individual stones, each of which matters, but being built together and fitted together for the sake of the whole, the holy priesthood, the holy place of God.
The details of God’s providence differ in our lives from one to another, but his providence serves his promise to build his people. Every providence serves that promise. Now when we read the promise of Jeremiah 29 and others like it through the lens of individualized earthly prosperity, we begin to wonder what pains in our lives are the direct result of our personal sin. It’s an ironic and sick twist on the fact that the Israelites were here at Babylon because of their sin. And whatever your background theologically, When hardship comes, do you find yourself asking questions like this? Did I do it? Did I cause this? Is this punishment? Certainly there are sometimes very easy to see cause and effect relationships between our sin and certain consequences, but not always. There is not always a perceivable direct relationship or even one at all between our personal sin and the pain that we find in our lives.
God does not play manipulative mind games with us, making us guess and worry about what’s our fault and what is not. He gives us clear guidance in his holy word. We do not have what Jeremiah’s people had, a direct word from God that their captivity as a whole was a direct result of the nation’s sin. Times of hardship in our lives do indeed occasion a hard look at our hearts. We ought to take opportunity during those times to ask the Lord through his word to search us and to see if there are false ways within us. but without a direct word from scripture as to the situation in our lives. Brothers and sisters, we need not look for a sin behind every sneeze. At the same time, and in a very real sense, we all caused every instance of misery in this world.
Sin and death and suffering are in this world. because of what we did in our first parents through Adam. In our first father, Adam, we fell into that estate of sin and misery. And that statement, that confession of part of our faith is no mere theory and each of us knows that. Life in this world is at times so hard and so hurtful and so miserable. And it’s precisely when our hearts are awoken to the severity of life in a fallen world that we must be so careful to know and to trust the word that God has given us. So again, let’s drive this home for any of us here this evening, and certainly as a congregation and as a denomination steeped in the Reformed faith. Now, perhaps unlike believers who refuse to believe that God is in these things, you know very well that he is.
You know the statements from our confessional standards. But for those of us who can quickly agree that God has the prerogative to bring about such terrible things in such a sinful world and that he does so sinlessly, please consider this question. Do our doctrinal affirmations, do they serve as an anchor in life or as an anesthetic which keeps us from feeling life’s pain? Here’s what I mean by that. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of affirming the truth but putting it to false use. All our doctrinal statements about God’s sovereignty, rightly rooted in God’s holy word, can become an anesthetic by which we numb ourselves to the pain that sin has brought into this world. They can become cliche, they can become quick gut reaction, knee jerk, easy answers, by which we don’t let the pain in, or by which we encourage someone else or think we’re encouraging them. while not really understanding the weight of what they’re trying to communicate to us.
If we’re not careful, our false use of good truth can prevent us from really taking into our souls the severity of our fallenness as a people. We can keep the pain at bay until it hits us like a shockwave, just how bad things really are and can be. until that pain comes calling personally. And we’re tempted to think, like Mr. Ehrman, I don’t think God’s word actually is equipped to deal with this. This is just too much. How can God not stop this? Mr. Ehrman fails to account, among many things, he fails to account for the crucial fact that this often deeply difficult state of things is exactly how our Lord said it would be in His holy word. And so we move now from God’s prerogative to think secondly and more briefly about God’s plans.
Once again, verse 11. For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. When we’re doubting the truthfulness or at least the realism of God’s holy word, what we’re doing is we’re treating people like Jeremiah in situations like the Babylonian captivity as if they were mere myth. Again, a morality tale or a fairy tale and not real flesh and blood human beings in the midst of truly traumatic devastations. Jeremiah understood how bad things could be in life. The other prophets of the Old and the New Testament really and viscerally and personally understood these things. And of course, Jeremiah, the weeping prophet who can not only sympathize, but empathize with our pain. His tears foreshadow those of the Lord Jesus himself, who is our sympathetic high priest, who has carried our sorrows.
See, all of them, the Lord Jesus and those prophets who served him in the old and the new covenant eras, they understood a basic cause and effect relationship to these things. If we as humanity have willingly walked away from the one who is life, what do we have reason to expect but death? The reason life in a fallen world can be so hard and so severe is because God is so good. These are not, if honestly understood, reasons to deny God’s goodness, they are reasons to affirm it, to recognize that to walk in the way of the Lord is to walk in life, but that we, in Adam, have chosen the opposite. While we need not look for a sin behind every sneeze, it is at the same time true that every bitter tear, every bad news x-ray, every betrayal, every broken heart, every famine, and every violently active fault line is ultimately a result of original and at times actual human sin. of our collective fall into sin and our first father, Adam, and our continually singing against God daily in word and thought and deed.
We must see ourselves as the word of God teaches us to see ourselves as exiles, suffering the effects of our sin and Adam. And Jeremiah’s letter then gives us a sketch of the church’s condition in this world. It is no mere coincidence, it is purposeful under the leading of the Holy Spirit that Peter refers to his Christian readers in the New Covenant era some 600 years later as elect exiles, sons and daughters of God who live in a sin-filled world as strangers. And so we must admit our fall in Adam. but praise the living God. That is not all we have to confess. As God’s people, we must also affirm our forgiveness and our life through the second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is precisely that salvation through that savior to which God points his people in this passage.
Notice with me again, please, verses 12 through 14. 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 search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord. And I will bring you back to the place from where I sent you into exile. God brings the reprimand. And he also brings the restoration. He brings that pain and he produces from it peace. You will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
We hear echoes of that. in Jesus and what he says in Matthew 6. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Everything that we need to serve the kingdom. Seeking God for the sake of God and his kingdom. Not just what God can give us in terms of temporal comforts in this life. Seeking with our whole hearts. But notice brothers and sisters, It is God himself who supplies the seeking. God doesn’t stand back and wait for us to gin up enough strength in our hearts to really go after him. Again, he’s not an endorser of that health and wealth kind of approach to life. If I just have enough faith, God is bound to do this and that for me. No, God is a God of grace.
And he tells us in our passage, when we seek him with our whole heart, we’ll find him. and that he will supply that seeking. Just a few chapters over in this prophecy, we have that promise that God will supply us with a new heart, one that is alive and responsive to him and which seeks him through faith. Here again, these words as emphasized from the standpoint of God’s sovereignty, You will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. This is what God was doing in Jeremiah’s day. He was purifying for himself a people and he’s doing the very same thing today in and through every last detail of life for you, plural. and all of you living stones who comprise that plural.
In order to beat back despair whenever we feel like the world is crashing down around us, and in some cases where that seems to be literally true, as we hear of natural disasters around the world, whenever we’re crushed because we know our Lord has brought this about, We must get our hearts and minds off of and above ourselves and realize that whatever situation is vexing us is not ultimately about us. It involves us deeply, but it’s bigger. The assurance that this passage brings to God’s people of all time is that God will use the circumstances of our lives and the circumstances of history in order to build his church. He knows the plans he has for you and they are glorious. There is always something much bigger happening, something gargantuan in scope and glorious in content.
The big picture which the circumstances in our lives ultimately help to paint. Think of it. Even for the people of Jeremiah’s day, this letter, And this prophecy, in particular, was not ultimately fulfilled when God did, in fact, bring them back to Jerusalem after those 70 years. After their return, foreign power after foreign power played out their respective times on the world stage, each exercising political and geographical dominion over the promised land. The people of Israel were rebellious again and again, and in AD 70, The temple, which God sent them back to build, was destroyed, utterly shattering the dreams of a united Israel, worshiping God in the promised land in that blessed building. And yet, what did that destruction do? It declared to the world that the temple building was no longer the focal point for God’s people. and that in reality there had always been a bigger and more essential focal point.
It declared to the world that the church was coming to maturity and that she included, as she always had and yet all the more explicitly in the New Covenant era, people from every tongue and tribe who would worship God from all kinds of places on the planet, not just a building in Jerusalem. And as we read about in the book of Acts, it was precisely the persecution of Christianity which brought the gospel beyond the bounds of Israel. Right into the new covenant era, we see God not only allowing but ordaining catastrophe. and using it to serve his ultimate purpose in this world. The building of the church, and of course, nowhere is that principle more fully realized than in God’s ordaining the crucifixion of his sinless son, out of which he brings victory over sin and death and hell for all whom the Lord gave himself to redeem and rose again to justify.
Think of it. In God’s providence, here this evening, a little town in Pennsylvania, we’re singing to and about, hearing about, talking about a risen Christ. How did that happen? Our faith is the product, humanly speaking, and yet God working through those means, Our faith is the product of persecution. Our faith is the product of evil men driving Christians from their homes. The gospel spreading beyond those homes into empires and across seas and oceans till it finds its place here among us and so many other places around the world, all various corners of Christ’s kingdom. Should we not also therefore be willing to endure whatever hardship the Lord sends us for the sake of the gospel? So that the great shepherd’s other sheep will be gathered into the fold. And so that we, the church, can exert by his grace, his redemptive influence here in this fallen world.
That’s what was happening in the days of Jeremiah. And that’s the promise that Jesus picks up and makes all the clearer in Matthew 16 when he says, I will build my church. The exiles in Jeremiah’s day knew that 70 years must be accomplished before they could go home. We are not given the number of years before our own personal home goings. But we do know that as the psalmist says, our times are in God’s hands. And that at the appointed time, a time known only to him, he will bring the full number of sheep into the fold. And we will fully and finally, as the plural you and every single individual you that comprises it, be home. We don’t know when, but we do know that it will happen. As part of the glory of believing that God really is in that much control over life, he can do it and he will do it.
Christ is building his church and he is with you as you endure the trials he sends in order to perfect you in his grace. Know the love of God the Father which sent Christ to redeem you. Know the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit whose ministry is to comfort and counsel you along your journey home. Know and trust that God knows the plans he has for his people, the thoughts he thinks toward us. Those which are confirmed in the sacrament we’ll observe here in just a few moments. And when in the process of your journey, the reality and the severity of life in a fallen world really does settle in on your hearts. And when you need to cry, cry along with the weeping prophet. Don’t look away from the word of God as inadequate.
Look to our own understanding as inadequate and to what he has given us. You can cry along with the weeping prophet who says this in Lamentations 3. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Let’s pray. Thank you, our God and heavenly Father, that you have not left us lightless or lifeless here in this fallen world.
You’ve given us your word as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. You’ve given us the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, giving us something tangible, something that is seen to strengthen us in our trust in that which is unseen. You have been so good to provide so many mercies every single day of our lives, and in particular on this day, as we gather morning and evening as the plural people of God to worship our Savior, who is risen and reigning at your right hand. We pray for the comfort and the wisdom and the counsel of the Holy Spirit. Oh God, that he would guide us ever deeper into the word that he has provided for us. that we would all the more fully, at times through tears, focus the eyes of our faith upon our risen Savior, in whose blessed name we pray, amen.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.