We’ve been going through the book of Jeremiah in conjunction with the study of the kings because Jeremiah lived and ministered during the time of Josiah and Josiah’s sons and he was one of three major prophets that are recorded in the scriptures that were used of God to minister to the nation of Israel as it was being taken away into captivity and as it was taken into captivity. Last week we looked at chapter 10 and in chapter 10 it was Jeremiah challenging the people which God were they going to serve. The false gods of their making are the true and the living God and he just challenged in in verses 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, and 16 by giving various characteristics which made God unique and truly how he was the only God.
Verse 6 talked about the fact that there was none like him. He is the true God. Everything else is a false God and not a God at all.
In chapter 7, verse 7 rather of chapter 10, it said that the people should fear him and that they should draw close to him instead of turn against him. In verse 10 it says that the Lord was true and he is the author of truth. All these other false gods, they represent lies and their lies were based on man’s perceptions and beliefs instead of the truth of who God is and his character.
Verse 12 was the fact that he is a creator and these other things were just things made out of part of God’s creation by man’s imagination and were not living at all. And yet they worshipped stumps of trees that they carved out and put gold and silver on, put fancy clothes on and somehow that became a God that was worthy of worship yet it couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, couldn’t respond, it needed to be carried wherever it went because it couldn’t move. It was just a stump of a tree that had been carved into something that represented a man’s imaginations of what God was.
In verse 13 it talks about his control over creation, that he can speak and things will happen. These other gods can’t speak and nothing happens if they could speak because they’re not gods that don’t control anything. It talks about the fact that he is a creator and these other things were just things made out of part of God’s creation by man’s imagination and were not living at all.
And yet they worshipped stumps of trees that they carved out and put gold and silver on, put fancy clothes on, put fancy clothes on and somehow that became a God that was worthy of worship yet it couldn’t hear, couldn’t respond, it needed to be carried wherever it went because it couldn’t move. It was just a stump of a tree that had been carved into something that represented a man’s imaginations of what God was. In verse 13 it talks about his control over the seas, his control over the rain, his control over all the elements of creation and he uses those things to show his power to man.
And finally in verse 16 it talks about the fact that he is the Lord of Hosts, he is the Lord of the armies. And whenever you see the Lord of Hosts in the Old Testament it’s referring to Jesus. In fact that he is the Lord of Hosts, the one who has power and control over all the angels and he is also the one who is our Redeemer and Savior.
And so we saw that Jeremiah laid all those things out to the nation of Israel. Why would you choose to worship something that you made with your own hands and came about with your own imagination? Yet we see that’s no different than the world today because they teach in public schools that we all come from primordial slime and from monkeys and weren’t created in God’s image. And everything that Israel or rather that Judah was doing, people today do that don’t love the Lord.
Well tonight we are going to be looking at chapter 11 and we are going to see exactly why God is so upset with Judah and what they have done. So let’s begin and we’ll just quickly read from chapter 11.
Jeremiah 11:1-5
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, Hear ye the words of the covenant and speak unto the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and say thou unto them, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel. Blessed be the man that obeyeth not the words of this covenant which I commanded your fathers in the day that I brought you forth out of the land of Egypt from the iron furnace, saying, Obey my voice and do them according to all that which I command you. So that ye shall be my people and I will be your God. That I may perform the oath which I have made, which has been sworn unto your fathers, to give him a land filled with milk and honey as it is this day. Then answered I and said, So be it, O Lord.
And I just want to stop here, this will be our first break this evening. Let’s just have a word of prayer.
Prayer by Pastor Glenn Knudsin
Heavenly Father as we come before you Lord I pray that you just help us to understand the problem lies with Israel not with God. And Lord I pray that you would just open our eyes to see that we have some of the same issues going on in the church today where people know the truth but they reject the truth and don’t want to follow the truth. Lord help us to see that God had made a special covenant with Israel and that this covenant had been broken by them, not by him. And Lord help us to see the consequences of that. Speak to us now through your word we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We see here that in the first portion of chapter 11 the issue is whose land is it and who has the right to live there? Does it sound like the same issue that is going on today in our world? And part of the problem is people don’t know whose land it is. First of all it is God’s land. It is not any group of people.
And God had made a covenant dealing with this land which we refer to as Israel today. And he made a covenant with God’s people dealing with the land of Israel that had been given to the twelve sons of Jacob or Israel. And they were each given a portion of the land to inhabit and it was to be their domain or docile.
And we see that as long as they obeyed the Lord they would be able to live in the land. But the minute they disobeyed God and didn’t follow the Lord, which they are doing here, what they are doing is following other gods that have nothing to do with the Lord. They were in the land because God had given them the land to live in.
It was his land and he had made a covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Now in the first portion of this covenant that was a non-conditional covenant, if you go back to the book of Genesis, you remember that God caused a deep sleep to come upon Abraham and he cut animals in two, which was a way that they made a covenant between men back then. But he cut these animals in two and laid each half on one side and then the people that were making the covenant would walk between it.
And really what it is saying is if I violate this covenant, let this happen to me. Well, the Lord caused a deep sleep to come on Abraham. He cut these animals.
Abraham saw the animals cut in two, but only God walked through the animals. He didn’t make Abraham walk through the animals. So this was unconditional, this portion of the covenant.
And the covenant was a promise given to Abraham, and we still have that promise today, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would be his descendants in a special way, that everyone who would bless Abraham, he would bless them, and everyone who would curse Abraham or his descendants, he would curse them. And that there was going to be a special way that he was going to work through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to bless the whole world, and that would be the coming Messiah. And this would be done and based not upon Abraham’s performance, but based upon God’s promise.
However, later on, there was another portion of this covenant that was given and that dealt with the land. And this was conditional upon the nation of Israel, the descendants of Abraham. God gave Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the land, but he said it’s conditional.
As long as you live in the land, the land will be prosperous and you’ll be blessed by the land. And as long as you are obedient to me in the land, this is what will happen. But if you disobey me, I’ll remove you from the land.
The land will still be there. It’s going to still be yours for a blessing, but I’m also not going to bless the land while you’re not there. And then I’m going to remove you, and it’ll be a time of chastisement until you repent and come back to me, and then you’ll be replaced into the land.
And this was the conditional part of the covenant. Now, it’s interesting as you look at what Jeremiah is talking to him. He’s saying he’s reminding them of the fact that this covenant was given and the conditional part was reminded to them through Moses.
And Moses told Joshua, when you get into the promised land, take the people and break them into two groups. Have half the people on Mount Ebal and half the people on Mount Gerizim. And as you have them on Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal in the center, have the priests stand and then recite the cursings and the blessings.
Mount Gerizim will be the blessings and Mount Ebal will be the cursings. And have them respond back to one another with the blessings and the cursings. And what they will remember is the blessings come when they walk in obedience to the Lord.
And these are the conditions of the blessings. The cursings come when you walk in disobedience to the Lord. And these are the conditions of the cursings.
And one of the conditions is you be removed from the land. Now, as I was listening to Dr. Randall Smith talk about Jeremiah here, he gave an apropos example of what this would be in our lives. You’ve got a child and you decide to buy them a car.
And so you get this car for them. And the car is their car to use. And you give them the keys.
They get in the car, they use the car. All of a sudden they do something that is totally against your wishes and your will. And so you take the keys away.
The title of the car is still in their name. They still have access to the car, but they only get it when their attitude changes and their actions change so that you give them back the keys. That’s kind of the way it was with God and the land.
The land was always God’s. It was His to give. He gave it as a covenant to the nation of Israel conditional upon their response and their ability to walk with Him instead of in rebellion to Him.
They’re coming now during the time of Jeremiah and their rebelling. We saw that during Josiah when we studied the kings, there was this great revival that occurred under Josiah. But as we studied when we began to look at Jeremiah, the revival was only as, as we say, partial revival.
It wasn’t a revival of the majority of the people’s hearts. It was an external revival. It was a revival of Jeremiah.
It was a revival of the priests and the Levites. But the people themselves didn’t change. What they did is they took their sin into their houses and hid it so that the people, the priests and Josiah couldn’t see it, nor Jeremiah.
But when Josiah died and his sons took power, his sons were of a heart after the people and in a rebellious heart against God. So the people brought out their gods all again, their little statues and stuff from their houses, began to worship them, set up the high places again, did everything they’d been doing, except it was more, even more awful now because they had been shown the truth under Josiah. And now they went back, even as referred to in the book of Proverbs as a dog to its vomit or a pig to the mud.
They had been cleaned up, but it was only externally for the majority of them. And so now they’re back and judgment is coming. As we studied in the previous chapters, we saw that people figured, well, judgment really isn’t coming.
It’s not really going to come for us because we’ve got the temple. And as long as we have the temple, we’re not like Israel. They didn’t have the temple and they rebelled.
But we’ve got the temple and God hasn’t removed the temple. So as long as we’ve got the temple, it shows that God’s still with us and his covenant is still with us. But Jeremiah is telling them, no, it’s not.
And so we see in the first five verses, verses five to three, that the covenant is on the land and it’s conditional upon their ability to walk with the Lord. That’s the only time that they will be blessed and live in the land. And we see here that also it talks about that this was shown to them as they walked and were delivered out of Egypt.
And he said that I took you through the fires to reveal to you my power and authority. And it was noted that if you go to the land that they walked through the desert area in part of that area is where Egypt smelted copper. They had copper mines there and they smelted the copper out of the rocks.
And so there’d be tremendous heat. And the purpose of that was to test and try the copper and get it to be withdrawn. That was precious to be removed from that which was not.
And this is part of what the Lord was doing as they walked through the desert and walked for 40 years. He was trying them and testing them. The vast majority of them didn’t meet the test.
But the ones that were younger, the ones plus Joshua and Caleb, they were able to enter into the land because they saw the power of God. They believed that God would give them the land that he had promised them. The other ones did not.
And when their time of trial came, they rejected going into the land and doubted God’s ability to give it to them. So he said, OK, I’m going to continue to allow you to be tried and tested and see who will go. And none of the generation that came out of Egypt as adults ended up going into the land except Joshua and Caleb.
Now, as we come down to the next portion, let’s begin to pick up at verse 6. Obey my voice. This is what God’s just asking you to do. Obey my voice.
As we open this, we saw all the characteristics of God, just mentioned a few of the non-characteristics of the demonic gods, the false gods. Why would you not obey the voice of the one who could deliver you, the one who could do miracles, the one who could deliver you from your enemies, the one who could give water out of rocks, manna from heaven, deliver you from Pharaoh? Do all of these marvelous things that you’d seen, yet you don’t want to obey his voice. You want to do your own thing.
And so Jeremiah says, Obey my voice. Yet they obeyed not, nor inclined their ear, but walk, everyone, in the imagination of their evil heart. Therefore I will bring upon them all the words of this covenant when I commanded them to go, but they did them not.
And then the Lord said unto me, and then we’re going to be looking at a conspiracy that is found among the men of Judah and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem. See in just a moment what that conspiracy is. But he said the real problem is you’ve seen it all, you’ve heard, but you have no desire to follow.
Later on in Jeremiah’s prophecy he says, It is so bad that every city has their own god. And that’s how bad it’s gotten. You know, at least in Israel, every city didn’t have their own god.
They all worshipped a false god, Baal being the main one. But every city didn’t have a god named after it, and every city didn’t have their own god. And if you look at what is going on in the Middle East, what has gone on in the Middle East, in paganism in the past, cities would have city gods.
And the nation of Israel did that as well during the time of Jeremiah. For example, people think that the Muslim faith really is a faith that it’s patterned after Christianity. No, it’s not.
Islam came out of the tribal god, and it was the moon god of Muhammad, and he made up the religion, and he made up the name of the god. And it’s all a lie, and it’s all paganism, and its roots are the moon god of the tribe of Muhammad, which was celebrated by a black rock where Muhammad had grown up. And so we see that that was the common thread of the people throughout that region, as they had rejected God.
They’d all known the truth at one time, their ancestors, going back to Noah and the flood, and prior to that, all the way back to Adam. Everybody grew up there, knew about the true God, but they’d all rejected him. Now Israel’s doing the same thing, and God is not happy.
And so he’s saying, there’s going to be consequences to your decisions. And so the Lord said, there’s a conspiracy found among the men of Judah. And they turned their back to the iniquities of their forefathers, which refused to hear my words, and they went after other gods to serve them.
The house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant, which I made with their fathers. Therefore, thus saith the Lord, behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they should not be able to escape. And though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.
Then shall the cities of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem go and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense, but they shall not save them at all in the time of trouble. Now what is he saying here? Okay, what’s going to happen is trouble is going to begin to come. Now we can see Jeremiah at this particular time is giving the prophetic happenings to the nation of Judah.
Things haven’t begun to happen in earnest yet. He’s telling them, this is what’s coming. We can look back and see exactly how it came.
It came in three stages. Babylon invaded Judah in three stages. The first stage, they invaded, but they didn’t destroy much.
And they didn’t take a lot of people into captivity. They took some, but not all. It came the second phase.
They took more people into captivity and destroyed more things. But the final phase, they came and took pretty much everybody into captivity. And they destroyed the temple.
They destroyed Jerusalem. They stole all the wealth that they could get their hands of from the king’s palace and the temple. And actually they took some of the temple instruments with them back to Babylon.
And the very thing that the people were saying, well as long as we’ve got the temple, nothing can happen, it began to happen. When these things began to happen, some of the people began to cry unto the Lord. But the Lord said, your crying isn’t going to do any good because it’s not from the heart.
I remember a number of years ago, there was a man that was caught stealing. And the evidence was black and white. It was totally right there that he had stolen all these things.
And he began to weep and to cry. But there were tears of remorse because he’d gotten caught. He didn’t have a change of heart.
And how do I know that? Because he was let off fairly easy from that particular theft. And he went to work for another employer and did the exact same thing to him. And then he went to work for a third employer and did the same thing to him.
His heart had not changed, but every time he got caught, he would weep and he’d cry. And he’d say, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. No he wasn’t.
He was sorry he got caught. He didn’t want a change. That is Israel.
They’re sorry God caught them. They’re sorry that God said, listen, you’re not going to enjoy the land anymore. You’re not going to be prosperous in the land anymore because this was a covenant.
Your ancestors stood on Ebal and Gershim and said the blessings and the cursings. And the priests listened and everybody heard. And you all said, Amen, we’re in agreement with this.
But when the blessings come, you’re fine. But when the cursings come because of your lack of faith and your disobedience, you don’t want to hear it. And so you think, just cry and the blessings will come back without change of heart attitude.
And how do we know their heart attitude wasn’t changed? Because the minute their tears didn’t do anything with God, they went to their other gods and began to cry to them. But they couldn’t answer because there were no gods at all. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a child like that.
One of our girls, whenever I would get ready to discipline her and I had to give her a sphincon for something, I tell her, go downstairs and wait for me and I’ll be done in just a minute. And she would begin to cry. She would cry and cry and cry as if somehow all of these tears would lessen the fact that discipline was coming.
But it didn’t work because she still got disciplined for what she had done wrong and the consequences had to be realized. That’s like Israel. Cry, cry, cry, cry, but my heart isn’t really dealt with.
And discipline has to come. Verse 14, Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up a cry or prayer for them, for I will not hear them in the time that they cry unto me or their trouble. Now it’s interesting, this is one of the few times in scripture that you’ll see that God tells you not to pray for someone.
He’s telling Jeremiah, don’t pray for Israel. Don’t pray for them. They need to realize the consequences of their decision.
What hath my beloved to do in mine house? Seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many, and the holy flesh is passed from thee, and when thou doest evil, then thou rejoicest. The Lord callest thy name, a green olive tree, fair and of goodly fruit, with noise of a great tumult, and he hath kindled a fire upon it, and the branches of it are broken. For the Lord of hosts that planted thee hath pronounced evil against thee for the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done against themselves.
So provoke me to anger in offering incense unto Baal. And what they’ve done is, like I said, God had called them with a special calling. He’d done everything for them.
He’d done all these miraculous things. And yet what they did, he says, with the lewdness, and really what he’s making reference to is a husband who marries a wife, and he’s doing everything for her, and she runs out and commits adultery with all these other men, and doesn’t want anything to do with her husband. Until judgment comes, and then all of a sudden, oh, I’ll come back, but her heart isn’t changed, and she really doesn’t want him, and she really wants to stay with him, and God says, I know that you really want your idols, because you’re still making offerings to Baal.
If you really had a change of heart, if the lewdness and the adulterous attitudes were gone, you would be destroying Baal and coming back to me. But you’re not. And this is the sin of Judah and Israel.
And he said, there’s consequences. I’m going to take you from the land, but the amazing thing is, God is not going to remove the promise of the land from them. And he will go on and say later on that the land will never be taken from the fact that it is promised to them, and God’s land has been given to them as long as they seek to walk with him.
Then, let’s go to verse 18, where he talks about the consequences, 18 to 23. Now here, we have an interesting thing that begins to happen. The people, some of the men of Judah, and the name of the city is a city that is very close to Jerusalem, and they conspire to come against Jeremiah and kill him.
And they figure if we can get rid of Jeremiah, then the prophecies won’t come, because he’s the voice of the prophets, the voice of the prophecy. And in verse 18, and the Lord hath given me knowledge of it, and I know it, then thou shalt show me their doings. And so, this conspiracy of coming against Jeremiah to destroy him, the Lord reveals it to Jeremiah.
And what is Jeremiah’s response in verse 19? But it was like a lamb, but I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter. And I knew not that they had devised devices against me, saying, Let us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered. And so, they’re telling this of Jeremiah, why? Because it’s the fruit of his lips, it’s the prophecies he’s giving, and they say if we silence his lips, then he won’t be anymore and he won’t say anymore.
This also can be prophetically speaking about Jesus, because they did the very same thing to him. They cut him off from the land of the living and felt that if they silenced him, he wouldn’t be a thorn in their side anymore. He wouldn’t be able to condemn them any longer.
But really, they didn’t realize that by this plot that they had, it was bringing about their own destruction. And that’s what happened to those that came against Christ and sought to have him crucified. It was really ultimately their own judgment.
And here we see that the same thing is happening with Jeremiah. They’re going to try and kill him. But O Lord, host, that judges righteously, that tries the reins in the heart, let me see thy vengeance on them, for unto thee I have revealed my case.
And Jeremiah is saying, and you’re probably thinking, well this isn’t very Christian-like of Jeremiah to ask God to pronounce a curse on him. It’s not very much Jewish like Jeremiah to pronounce a curse on him, but he does. He asks God to pronounce a curse on them because of what they’re about to do.
Because they want to silence God’s word. And they want to silence him.