01 What to Do When Your Country Falls Apart (Jeremiah 1:1-3)

You are listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. What the Bible means and how we know. I'm Krisan Marotta. And today we'll be starting a series on the book of Jeremiah. We'll be looking at Jeremiah chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. You can follow along in the lecture notes at wednesdayintheword.com slash Jeremiah 1. Thanks so much for joining us. You may have noticed we have a presidential election coming up. I'm glad you're sitting down because I'm sure that was shocking news to you. Just about any way you measure it, this is the craziest presidential election in history. The candidates couldn't be more different. The stakes are high because things aren't really going that well in our country. If you turn on any news channel, it seems there's another terrorist attack somewhere, the unemployment rate's high, the housing market isn't great, government spending's out of control, health care is doubled and tripled and doubled again, and religious freedom is disappearing. Traditional biblical beliefs are now viewed as hate speech. Ideas that were considered the basic fabric of our society 20 years ago are now ridiculed and mocked. And the world just the country seems to be in a hard place and the world seems to be getting darker. And this summer I was studying Jeremiah in a coffee shop and I ran into one of my friends, and we were chatting, and there was a TV in there, and our conversation was interrupted by one of these breaking news reports of another race riot and police officers being ambushed. And when the story ended, we were both kind of stunned, and my friend turned and said, Why are you studying Jeremiah? Doesn't that book seem irrelevant given everything that's happening today? And I thought, well, that's a very interesting question. How can a book like Jeremiah, how can an old, you know, an Old Testament prophetic book, how can that help us face the challenges we face today? And that's the question we're gonna answer today. How can Jeremiah help us when the world is falling apart? So I'm gonna give you three reasons. I think this book is particularly applicable, applicable for today. The first is that Jeremiah is about national and political crisis. Jeremiah preached to the southern kingdom of Judah at a time when the nation was falling apart. In Jeremiah's lifetime, Babylon will become the dominant superpower and will come and wipe out what's left of the nation of Israel and will level Jerusalem and take her people into exile. And part of the message that God told Jeremiah to deliver is the Babylonians are coming and they're gonna win. The Jewish nation was headed for unthinkable disaster. In fact, they were facing the kind of disaster that no God-fearing Jew would ever believe that God would allow to happen to his people. After all, why would God let anything happen to his chosen people living in his promised land, worshiping at his temple in Jerusalem? It's unthinkable that they would lose all that. And yet it was about to happen. But while part of Jeremiah's message was that the unthinkable is about to happen, another part of his message is God is doing something wonderful. In that disaster, in that unthinkable thing, there is something wonderful about to happen. So yes, the world, as you know, it is about to end, but this is part of God's plan of redemptive history. He has not abandoned you, he is acting in history. So given all the global crisis, national, and political strife in our nation, it seemed like studying Jeremiah was a good, a good time to study it. So, second, Jeremiah is a book about personal crisis. Jeremiah's job was to talk about this impending disaster, which is why he's sometimes called the weeping prophet. Basically, his task was to say, the sand has run through the hourglass, it is too late, God's judgment is about to fall. And as you might imagine, that wasn't a very popular message. He had to tell his countrymen that they are facing imminent disaster because of their sin, and nobody wanted to hear that. Nobody wanted to believe him. He was very young when he started preaching, so you have this young man speaking a really unpopular message to really powerful people. Oh, yeah, that's gonna go well. No, people tried to murder him. He spent a long time in prison. He ended up running away to Egypt, which is the last place a Jew ever wanted to run to. And he includes in the book several of these personal laments, these expressions of deep depression and despair that we're gonna look at. So he preached that disaster was coming, but he also lived it because his life was filled with these personal crises. So I think we can learn from him when it's a personal crisis, when your life is in chaos, how do you respond? How do you find hope? How do you respond and know what God is doing? And I expect many of you are facing some kind of crisis now, so I hope that's one thing we can learn from Jeremiah. So, first, Jeremiah is a book about political and national disaster. Second, it's a book about personal disaster, but third and most important, it's a book about God. Because in the midst of this national disaster and personal crisis, Jeremiah brings God's word to his people. He reminds us who God is and what God's doing. And that's something we need to know. When life gets really hard, we need to know who God is and what he's doing. And because he's speaking about God in these times of great crisis and distress, his book addresses some of the deepest questions about God I think we ever face. So whenever you talk about God, you're doing theology. But this isn't the kind of theology that you'd learn in a classroom where it's systematic and reasoned. This is theology applied to real life where you're living in disaster, you're living in difficult circumstances. So I pray this year that Jeremiah will speak to us because as a nation, we're on the brink of some kind of political change. Don't know what it's gonna be yet, but it's definitely gonna be something. And we're also facing this kind of moral upheaval, and I think he will speak to us because we need to hear what is God doing in personal crisis? What is God doing in national crisis? Um, and we need to know who he is. Now we're not gonna cover the entire book by word count. Jeremiah's the longest book in the Bible, and given our format and our calendar constraints, we couldn't do it all. So we're gonna I'm gonna skip through and pick out major passages, some of the most famous passages in the book, and some that I think hit the major themes. We're gonna talk a lot about where it falls in redemptive history, what was going on in the life of Israel, and in the prophet's life, and then we're gonna try to apply that to today. So this study is gonna be more in-depth than an overview, but it's not gonna be as detailed as a verse-by-verse study of the whole book. So I picked the passages I picked because each one raises a major question, and you can see that on your on the first page of your handout. Each one raises a question about sin, judgment, sovereignty, faith, the Bible, religion, and so on. And our goal is gonna be to answer each one of those questions each week. So we're gonna tackle the passages in the order they appear in the book, but the order they are in the book is not chronological. They don't appear in the order Jeremiah preached them. Instead, they are grouped thematically by subject. Some of them are very easy to figure out when they were preached because he gives us a date or he gives us some historical marker. Others, we have to kind of guess when he preached them. And people kind of debate exactly what the theme is and why they're grouped the way they are, but everybody agrees they're not chronological, they're thematic. So we are gonna take them in their order in their book, but that means historically we're gonna jump around a little bit from week to week. So this morning we're gonna look at the first three verses of chapter one as an introduction to the book as a whole. And I'm gonna spend a lot of time answering the question: who wrote Jeremiah, who was Jeremiah? Why did he write this book? What was going on when he wrote it? And the question we're gonna try to tackle is what do you do when your country falls apart? Because in some ways, I think that is the question of the entire book. That's the question this book was written to answer. This impending Babylonian invasion, this impending national destruction is the background for the book of Jeremiah. Okay, so we'll let's look at Jeremiah 1, verses 1 to 3. The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anatoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah, the son of Amnon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the exile of Jerusalem in the fifth month. So this is kind of the preamble to the book. It gives us the first three things we need to know about any book of the Bible is who wrote it, who did he write it to, and what was going on at the time he wrote it. So that's what we're gonna answer first. So I'm gonna give you a little flyover of biblical history, and then we're gonna zoom in at the point Jeremiah lived. So this is hopefully review for a lot of you, but just in case. The history of the nation of Israel begins with God calling Abraham. That's what we call the patriarchal period. You have Abraham, who is one man, which eventually leads to a very large tribe. Through the story of Joseph, they become, the descendants of Abraham become slaves in Egypt, and that's what we call the captivity, which of course leads to God bringing them out of slavery through Moses and the Exodus. The Exodus leads to what we call the wilderness period, where they're wandering around in the Sinai Desert, and God gives them the Ten Commandments, and that ends with the conquest of the Promised Land, which is recorded in the book of Joshua. The conquest of the promised land then is followed by the period of the judges. And after the twelfth judge, Israel says, you know what, this isn't working. We want a central government like all the other nations. They ask God for a king, and so God gives them Saul and then David and Solomon. And that's the period we call the monarchy of the United Kingdom, which also had its ups and downs, but really was Israel's glory days of peace and prosperity. The country had the most peace under David and Solomon she ever had. Their territory expanded to its widest borders. But at the death of Solomon in 930 BC, a civil war broke out over which of his many sons would inherit the throne. And that ends up splitting the kingdom with ten tribes forming the northern alliance around one king and placing their capital in Samaria, and then the two southern tribes of Benjamin and Judah forming a separate alliance around a different king and keeping their capital in Jerusalem. So around 740 BC, the Assyrian Empire becomes the dominant superpower of their day, and for about a hundred years, a series of Assyrian kings will reign over little Israel. They take her as a vassal state and they exact a yearly tribute from each one of their the states they've conquered. And if you fail to pay that tax, there is swift and vicious revenge. So in 734 BC, Israel, the northern nation, decides we've had enough of this Assyrian thing. We're going to rebel. And as payback, the Assyrians deport, uh, they come in and conquer the northern tribes, and they deport most of the northern and eastern tribes. That's what's you, there's a chart in the back of the book that may help you follow all this, or there's a little outline on your page. That's what we call the first deportation. Then in 722, Israel rebelled again. This time the Assyrians conquered her capital city, wiped out Samaria, and ended her existence as a nation. So they took all ten tribes into exile, leaving Judah, the southern kingdom, to struggle on alone. Then in 627, which is the year of Jeremiah's call, Assyria begins to falter. Their king dies, sparking a civil war over succession and giving both the Babylonians and the Egyptians the opportunity to rebel. So they say, aha, Assyria's in civil war, we're going to break out and become the dominant superpower. In 626, Babylon defeats Assyria outside their capital city and gain their independence. And that gives Josiah, the king of Judah, his chance to enact reforms, because now Assyria is otherwise occupied, and he begins enacting a lot of reforms without Assyrian interference. So Jeremiah starts his ministry in 627 BC as the world is falling apart. The world as they know it is falling apart because Assyria is in decline. And as Assyria declines, Egypt and Babylon are rising up trying to become the next superpower. And guess where Israel is? Right in the middle of them. So I don't know if you've ever realized this. Israel sits at the crossroads of three continents. They've got Africa to the south, Asia to the east, and Europe to the northwest. I mean, you'd think that God would put his people someplace out of the way, like Australia, you know, or Iceland, or someplace nobody would bother them. But no, he put them right at the crossroads of three continents. And if you're an ancient king and you want to conquer the world, you have to control the land that Israel occupies because all the trade routes flow through there. So God placed Israel at the cross currents of the world, and the land they occupy is considered really valuable real estate by a lot of powerful people. In fact, even today. So eventually Egypt forms an alliance with Assyria, but the Babylonians defeat them both. So that's in 605 BC at the Battle of Carchimesh. The Babylonians defeat the confined forces of Egypt and Assyria, and not long after they turn their sights on Jerusalem. And then it will be in 586, Babylon destroys Judah and Jerusalem and takes the remaining Israelites into exile. So Jeremiah's job is to warn that this Babylonian invasion is coming and to predict it. So in verse 2 and 3, he tells us he begins his ministry in the reign of Josiah, which that date mentioned is 627 BC, and he continues until about 582 BC through the reign of one of Josiah's sons. Now Josiah was one of the greatest kings of Judah. You can read about his reign in 2 Kings chapters 22 and 23 and in 2 Chronicles 34 and 35. He became king when he was eight years old. And can you imagine? Some of you have eight-year-old sons. Can you imagine them becoming king? Well, for Judah, that was a really good thing because when Josiah became king, he tried to turn the people back to the Lord. Most of the people had forgotten about the Lord or how to worship him, and he set about to change that. Assyria was otherwise occupied with Babylon and Egypt, so he was free to institute reforms designed to bring the people back to God. When he was 26, he noticed the temple was in disrepair and there were altars to foreign gods in it, so he set about to repair and restore the temple. And when they started that renovation, they found a copy of the book of the law, which apparently had been lost for several generations. Most people think what he found was Deuteronomy, a copy of Deuteronomy. And as he began reading it, he realized we're in trouble. We are violating the covenant we made with God centuries earlier, we're on the wrong path, and he starts this massive reform to get the people to come back to God. He tears down the altars to the other gods, the temple's restored, and they celebrate Passover for the first time in decades. So domestically, life improves a lot under Josiah, but he's in this tricky political situation where he's a vassal state of Assyria, but Assyria's power is waning, and now Babylon and Egypt are both trying to take over the power vacuum. Judah's trying to maintain her independence. And we learn at the end of 2 Kings 23 that as Egypt was marching up to Babylon, Josiah decides to step into the battle in an attempt to assert Judah's power, and he is killed by the Egyptians. So Jerusalem becomes a vassal state under the Pharaoh, and they set one of Josiah's sons on the throne as kind of a puppet king. A few years later, the Egyptians will fight Babylon again, and this time they're defeated, and Jerusalem comes under Babylonian control at that point. And eventually, as Jeremiah will predict, the last king of Judah decides to rebel to stop paying his tribute to Babylon. Babylon will come in and wipe them off and take the last two tribes into exile. So life improves under Josiah, but it doesn't last long. At the end of verse 3, we get the end of the story when the people of Jerusalem went into exile. And that's where this whole book is headed. Now I imagine a lot of you tuned out. You're like, oh my gosh, all these kings, all these battles, who's fighting who, and you read that and you think, okay, that's ancient history. It happened a long time ago. All those people have come and gone. But think about how these words must have felt to a Jew of Jeremiah's day. This was an unthinkable conclusion. Remember that Israel came into being with Abraham. God called Abraham. God promised to make him a people. He promised to give him a land. They became a nation when God brought them out of slavery in Egypt. God gave them the promised land. He gave them peace and prosperity under David and Solomon. He promised there's going to be a king on the Davidic throne forever, and his promises stand. This is the one true God who made a covenant with his people. Those promises stand. His chosen people are living in his promised land, worshiping at the temple he gave them. And it's been 800 years. So what if these two superpowers are vying for power? God would never let us go back into exile again. That's unthinkable, right? Well, think about things are pretty bad in our country, but imagine if you went home today and you turned on the TV and some preacher, some present-day preacher, declares to you that God is on the side of the Islamic terrorists. And what if he said, look, God is judging America and He's raising up ISIS to judge us? He doesn't care anything about your Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution, doesn't care about your long history of religious worship that the nations has. In fact, he says, your claims to be a Christian nation, they're an offense to God. And what if this preacher said, ISIS is coming and they're going to win and you might as well surrender? How would you feel? I mean, that's the situation of the Jews that Jeremiah was preaching to. That's the kind of message we think that's unthinkable. That could never happen. It just won't happen. And what if this preacher, even though he was subjected to house arrest, he was flung into prison, his writings were publicly burned, he's half drowned in a pit of slime. What if despite all that he doubles down? He says, I'm not taking back any word, in fact, I'm gonna say it again and again. Would you believe him? Would you listen to him? We'd think he's crazy. We'd think that could never happen. That is unthinkable. And yet, that's what Jeremiah was called to do, and that's approximately how I think his contemporaries would have felt when he started preaching. Because America, we've had 200 years of existence. Well, Israel had 800. They were chosen by God to be a nation. He gave them the land, he cleared out their enemies. They were defined by the land and the temple. They couldn't possibly lose those things. It's just unthinkable. And I think that's one of the ways this book is going to challenge us. How do you respond when God asks you to think the unthinkable? What do you do when the country falls apart? What kinds of political change or personal change are unthinkable to us today? And are they really unthinkable to God? I mean, some pretty unthinkable things have happened already in our country. I look at just my short lifetime and I've seen social change I never thought I'd see. I mean, just look at how the concepts of family and gender have changed in the last five years alone. I mean, when did gender become a psychological construct instead of a biological reality? It's like I never thought that concept would change at all, let alone so drastically. So, what are we to make of this upheaval? Is God mad at us? At least he's allowing some unthinkable things to happen. Well, that's the first lesson of the book. What do you do when our country falls apart? And the first answer I'm going to give you is we learn to ask the right question. And the right question, when things get tough and everything falls apart, is not how could this happen? Or how much worse will it get? Or even how do I get out of this? The question we're going to see Jeremiah encouraging us to ask is, what is God doing through all of this? So when the world falls apart, we ask, what is God's plan here? How is God's moving? What is he doing in the nation? What's he doing in my life? What is his purpose and plan for what's happening? So that's the situation at the world when at the time when Jeremiah was preaching. So let me do a look a little bit more at Jeremiah himself. The first thing we learn is that he was a priest, and as a priest, he was part of this kind of powerful minority in Israel. He was part of the establishment. He's not a rogue prophet that's called out of nowhere. He comes from a priestly background. His father was a priest, and he lived in a village that was inhabited mostly by priests. So he's an insider. And when you're an insider, there are certain rules that you're supposed to follow and things that you don't question because that's what insiders do. They play by the insider rules. The establishment is the establishment because they protect their position and empower. And you've seen this. I mean, we elect people to Congress all the time where they're outsiders, they're mavericks, we're going to send them to Congress, they're going to be different. And then what happens when they get there? They say, Ooh, I'm part of the inside now. And they start playing by the insider rules. So when you're on the inside, you learn there are things you don't question. And in seventh century Jerusalem, if you were a priest, the one thing you don't question is that God wants his people living in his land, worshiping at the temple he gave them. That's unquestioned. That's how it had to be. God promised Abraham the land, he delivered it through Joshua, Solomon built the temple, they've been there 800 years. God has a place for them. Nothing's going to change that. So we don't care what the Babylonians and the Egyptians are doing, because as far as as a priest in Jeremiah's day, the one thing you know is God gave us this land and we're here to stay. And yet, that's exactly the message Jeremiah questions. He questioned the one thing you're not supposed to question. He told the nation, the Babylonians are coming and they're going to win. Jerusalem's going to be crushed and the nation's oops, the nation's going to be wiped out. And as you might imagine, that wasn't a very popular message. He was ostracized from his community. The other priests tried to kill him. Many people wanted him dead. Nobody wanted to listen to him. The king listened to him in private sometimes and then would ridicule him in public. The king had him locked up and tried to make him promise not to tell anyone else what God had told him, and he spent a lot of his life in prison. So he didn't just preach hard times are coming. He lived through them. And one of the things I love about this book is that we get to see it all. We get to see how he responds to this. We don't know much about the lives of, say, Ezekiel or Micah or Isaiah, but with Jeremiah, it's like we get to read his diary. There are points where he just speaks in the first person and it doesn't read like you think a good Christian's diary ought to read. He holds nothing back. His responses are raw sometimes. He gets depressed, he gets really, really angry, he gets so lonely it hurts physically, his faith wavers, he wants to give up and throw it all in at times. And then at other times he's joyful, he's filled with gratitude, and he gushes with praise. And we get to see it all. We get this up close and personal look at what he's going through and how he feels about it. And we don't get that glimpse into the other prophets' lives. So I mentioned earlier he's sometimes called the weeping prophet, but we don't just see him weeping, we see him weeping in worship. When he gets angry, he gets angry at God. When he starts complaining, when he gets depressed, we see him go to God. We see him turn in his laments to God, and we see him thank and praise God as well. So everything that happens to him, he turns around and relates it back to God. And that's worship. That's what a relationship is all about. So I think this is the second lesson of the book. In the midst of a personal crisis, like Jeremiah was facing, in addition to asking, what is God doing here? We learn from Jeremiah to go directly to God and say, What are you doing here? What are you doing in my life? How am I supposed to respond to this? What am I supposed to be learning to be learning? And it's okay to ask God those questions. We learn to worship even when we are weeping. Because ultimately, Jeremiah is a book about God. It's about God's word being applied to the midst of a crisis. And God and Jeremiah is speaking of something God is doing in the midst of history. And what he's going to assure us through all of this is that God is at work. He says, yes, the unthinkable is about to happen, but it's part of the plan. God is actually planning for the destruction of Jerusalem. Even though it's a disaster, it's taking place under the hand of a loving and compassionate God. And this will bring about glory, his glory, and our good. So what Jeremiah's message does is provide this kind of alternate reality where we look at our circumstances, and for the Jews, they must have seen Jerusalem under siege, the temple about to be destroyed, God's people being carted off to Babylon. And to us, that looks like failure. That looks like the world has gone crazy, God has abandoned them, everything's out of the control. But Jeremiah steps in and says, no, that's not the right picture. This is the hand of a compassionate and loving and yes, judgmental God. He is bringing this about because of your rebellion, but there is hope for the future. Even in the midst of this disaster, he prophesizes it is just as much a prophecy of hope. For instance, Jeremiah 27, 2 says, They will be carried to Babylon and they will be there until the day I visit them, declares the Lord. Then I will bring them back and restore them to this place. So in that same sentence, he says, Yes, the unthinkable is going to happen. They're going to be your children will be carted off to Babylon. But in the same sentence he says, he says, There is hope. I will bring them back, there will be restoration. So in Jeremiah, we see this pain of disaster dealt with honestly. We see grief dealt with honestly, lament dealt with honestly, but we also see hope, a real gritty kind of honest hope. In fact, Jeremiah, I think, has some of the most beautiful passages of hope in the entire Bible. The middle section of the book, which is chapters 30 to 33, is often called the Book of Consolation because it contains these really hopeful promises that God gives his people, and we'll be looking at those. So what does all this mean to us? Why are we going to study this book? What are we going to learn, hopefully, by the end of the year? I think it means that whatever crisis we're going through, whether it's a national crisis or a personal crisis, we seek God and allow his word to interpret reality for us. We allow his voice to cut through the chaos and change us and give us the perspective, the proper perspective on our circumstances. So in the midst of our crisis as a nation, in the midst of whatever personal crisis you're going through, we learn to say, God, what are you doing here? What is your plan? Now the truth is we don't know exactly what God's doing in the midst of our current presidential election or our current national and global crises, but we do know what he's doing in history as a whole. And it's the same message he brought to the Jews of Jeremiah's day. Yes, there is destruction coming, there's disaster coming, but ultimately there is restoration coming. And that restoration is in the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of man. And as we'll see, he promises that he will do something entirely new. And that new thing involves the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. It involves his first coming and his second coming. And he's Jeremiah's going to insist when the world falls apart, when everything looks crazy and out of control, when it looks like God's abandoned you, there is hope, and there is always hope. But our hope is not that this world will be put right tomorrow. Our hope is in the new kingdom of God. So not that God would necessarily restore America's fortunes, but that God is preparing a place in his kingdom where thieves do not steal and rust does not destroy and time does not erode. As Peter says in his first letter, in this hope we greatly rejoice, even though now we are distressed by various trials. So the coming kingdom of God is our hope. And that's how God's word reinterprets our experience. So the book of Jeremiah is about a prophet declaring disaster and at the same time promising hope. And in many ways, that's the gospel. The first thing we learn in the gospel is yes, we are sinful. Our sin is a bigger problem than we ever thought possible, but there is a solution to that problem, and it is found in the cross of Christ. So the same news of there is a problem, but God has a plan. There is a disaster coming, but God has a plan to resolve it. That God is founding this new kingdom, and even if this earthly kingdom crumbles before our eyes, we know that God has not abandoned us, that He has a plan for all this. So, in the midst of our country being in crisis or whatever personal crisis you might be experiencing your life or will experience, my hope and my prayer for this study is that we will find God through it. So we started the morning by asking, what do you do when the country falls apart? And the answer that we've come to is we look for God. We seek God and ask, What is He doing? And we look to the new work that He is doing. So when our country falls apart, we look for the new kingdom he's building. And when crisis faces us, we ask, God, what am I to learn here? How what are you doing? How are you using this in my life? Let me summarize it the way Jeremiah does. This is from Jeremiah 29, verses 11 through 13. 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 seek me with all your heart. So that's the first lesson of Jeremiah. Seek him, and when you do, you will find him. Let's pray. Fathers, we just pray that as we embark on this study this year, that you would be with us, that you would teach us what you want us to learn, that you would be guiding our study, building our friendships, building our community, helping us to learn more about you and to learn and grow as a body and as a community before you.