10 Who Should We Listen To? (Jeremiah 23:9–32)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for downloading the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta. Today we'll be looking at Jeremiah chapter 23, verses 9 through 33. This is the tenth talk in our series on the book of Jeremiah. You can find links to everything mentioned in the talk and follow along with lecture notes on our website. Go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Jeremiah 10. So glad you joined us. Well, several months ago there were two health and fitness studies that caught my eye. The first study was very depressing. It said that even if you exercise an hour every day, you don't get any benefit if you sit too much the rest of the day. Now, for those of us with desk jobs, that was very depressing. But then I saw a second study that said exercising as little as 15 minutes a day would dramatically improve your health and fitness. It's like, okay. So one study says one hour of exercise is useless if you sit too much, the other says all you gotta do is 15 minutes. Doesn't matter what you do the rest of the day. So what do you do? Both of those studies can't be true. They contradict each other. So I found a third study, and it said, if you want to live forever, just eat chocolate. It's like, yes. Seriously, they said eating dark chocolate every day lowers your risk of heart disease by one-third and nearly a 30% decrease in your risk of stroke. So, hey. So, in other words, chocolate consumption can get you almost as much benefit as exercising 15 minutes a day. Now, who do you believe? All those studies are probably not true, and yet we're bombarded with that kind of conflicting information every day, especially in health news, but also in parenting. Like, what's the current wisdom on how a baby should sleep? You know, there's only three options side, back, and tummy. What what is it now? It's back. See, when I when my kids were little, back was forbidden. That was like, oh my gosh, you were a terrible parent if you put your child to sleep on the back. You had to put them on their tummy, which I understand now is like, ooh, you can't do that. So, and I've lived long enough to see every one of these side, back, and tummy, be the recommended way to go, and you were a rotten parent if you suggested otherwise. So, how do we know what to do with all that? We live in a world of a million conflicting voices, and they seem to grow louder every day and more insistent and more intrusive. You know, you get tweets and texts and alerts and notifications, and they all keep now we're all connected and they keep coming to our phones. So every two minutes you can get some kind of an alert. And I bet most of you, the first thing you do when we go on break, you're going to check your phones to see what did you miss while I was talking. So, how do you know which voices you should listen to? Which ones can you trust? Which ones have authority? Not just in parenting or health news, but how do you there's a lot of conflicting voices over who God is, how you know him, how you find him, what he expects of you between the different religions and also between the different denominations. There's all these different voices saying, no, I've got the inside scoop. And thanks to the internet, every voice has a blog now. Every voice has a platform. So you don't even have to be an expert. You can just get your own blog and put it out there, which is kind of what I've done. So I speak from personal experience. So that's the question we're gonna tackle this week as we look at Jeremiah. Last week we looked at the question, who's gonna help us out of this mess? And we looked at the failure of the political leaders and saw God responding by saying, I'm gonna send you a new leader who's going to be the one who will fix the mess. The problem is that while we wait for that new leader, life goes on, we have decisions to make, we have choices to make, we have to make choose a path, and we have all these experts saying, Here's the way to choose, here's the way to decide. So we want to follow the Lord, but how do we know who to listen to? Who speaks for him? That's what we're gonna talk about. So we're gonna be looking at Jeremiah chapter 23, we're gonna look at 9 through 32, and just to review where we are, Jeremiah was a prophet in Jerusalem. He began preaching around 670 BC and continued his ministry up and through the fall of Jerusalem in 588 when Babylon conquered Jerusalem and took the people into exile. And part of his task was to warn the king and to warn the people of Judah that the exile was coming, that Babylon was coming and they were going to win, and that God's plan for Jerusalem involved the fall of Jerusalem and the exile. But Jeremiah's voice wasn't the only one talking to the king. There were lots of other people who claimed to be speaking to God as well. Most of them had a very different message than Jeremiah. They were assuring the king, Jerusalem's going to be fine, Babylon's going to lose, God will never let his people suffer. Victory's close at hand, and the king and the people had to decide who do we listen to? Who is really speaking for God? And of course, the king of Jerusalem picked wrong. So last week we looked at God calling out the political leaders and their failure. This week he's going to call out the spiritual leaders and their failure. He's going to criticize the prophets who claim to speak for him but really don't. So it's this issue of who do you listen to? You've got Jeremiah on the one hand making claims, and then you've got all these other prophets making claims. How do you know who to listen to? And so as we look at this, we're going to try to answer the question: how do you recognize a false prophet? What distinguishes a false from a true prophet, and how do we know? So when we see all these voices, how do we know who to listen to? And the good news is God's going to say very clearly, ultimately, his voice will not be drowned out. His word will prevail. So I'm going to break the passage in two sections. We're going to look at 9 through 22, where God identifies and describes the false prophets, and then 23 through 32, where he responds to them. So in the first section, 9 to 22, he identifies some and describes who they are and what they're doing. And then in 23 through 32, he responds with judgment. Now those are bigger sections than I usually like to tackle, so we're not going to cover every detail, but we're going to hit the main themes and ideas. Okay, so let's dive in. Let's start with 9 through 12. As for the prophets, my heart is broken within me, all my bones tremble, I have become like a drunken man, even like a man overcome with wine because of the Lord and because of his holy words. For the land is full of adulterers, for the land mourns because of the curse. The pastures of the wilderness have dried up, their course also is evil, and their might is not right. For both prophet and priest are polluted, even in my house I have found their wickedness, declares the Lord. Therefore their way will be like slippery paths to them. They will be driven away into gloom and fall down in it, for I will bring calamity upon them the year of their punishment, declares the Lord. So Jeremiah is going to have a lot to say about all these other voices, the other prophets and priests. And his career, in a sense, was pitted against them. If you read through the whole book, you'll see they tried to kill him several times. They had him put in prison. They've been his opponents and disc discrediting him at every step of the way. And you'd expect him to respond and say, These people just drive me crazy. I hate them. But notice in verse 9, his response is not anger, it's sadness and despair. He says, My heart is broken within me, my bones tremble. He is so disturbed and upset by this that he's like a drunken man. So, as is usually the case in ancient Hebrew, heart refers to mind. For the ancient Jews, they used heart as the seat of the intellect or the seat of the mind. When they wanted to talk about the seat of their emotions, they talked about kidneys. So most translations change that to something else because we don't understand it, but that's the word. But when they're talking about your mind and your intellect and that seat, they would use the term heart. So the idea is not so much that Jeremiah is heartbroken emotionally as he is deeply disturbed, concerned, and bothered in a more rational kind of intellectual sense. One commentator translates this as shattered, and I think that captures it because it's the idea he is concerned and he has good reason to be. He's not just emotionally upset, he has got good reason to be concerned, and he's so concerned it affects him physically. And essentially he's going to point out three things about these prophets and priests. Now the first one is in verse 10. So the first thing we learn about false prophets is they're polluted. In verse 10, he says, or is it 11? It's verse 11. In 10 he says, the land is full of adulterers, and verse 11 he says, this is so, because both prophet and priest are polluted. And that's the idea, they are corrupt. Now he talks about adultery because that's an often used metaphor for rebellion. So in the Old Testament, adultery is frequently used figuratively for the people who have turned away from God. So the people who break the covenant, who begin worshiping other gods and practicing other religions, they're frequently pictured as an adulterous wife betraying her faithful husband, who's the Lord. Because they're sharing their allegiance with other gods. They're giving their loyalty to someone, other gods, hence the metaphor of adultery. Now, most likely they are also participating in the sexually oriented rites of other religions because many of the other religions of Jeremiah's day had temple prostitutes, and they had this mistaken belief that if they carried out the sexual activity with a prostitute, that that would ensure fertility in the land and they'd have a good harvest and so on. So when he says they are polluted, it could refer to this kind of inappropriate sexual activity. I think it's probably does include that because that was most likely going on, but it's also just that they have turned away from God. They've rebelled against him. They're not following him alone, they are following other gods as well. And then in my house, in verse 11, probably refers to the temple. As I just said, in the ancient Near East, many of the pagan religions closely tied in sexuality and religion. They were interlinked, and so they employed these sexual rituals to ensure prosperity, and Israel seemed to be adopting that. Now, ironically, they're engaging in all this bad behavior to ensure that the land will be fruitful and the harvest plentiful, and yet we see the exact opposite. It says the land mourns, the pastures have dried up, and they are in fact getting the exact opposite. So the prophets are encouraging inappropriate sexual activity in the temple, calling it religion. They have turned away from other gods, they're two other gods, and they are encouraging the people to do that, and all of that is what he calls pollution. They're corrupt. Now that should be shocking that the prophets of God would do this, but you know, for us, we kind of like, oh yeah, we've seen that. We've seen TV pastors on TV who've been caught having affairs with prostitutes or religious cults that get discovered where, of course, sexuality is a major feature of their activity. And probably many of you have been in a church or had friends who are in a church where it was shattered by some kind of sexual scandal. And the fact that that comes as no surprise to us tells us that people who are supposed to speak for God frequently end up being polluted by sin. And that's not surprising, but it ought to be surprising. So the first clue for King Zedekiah and the people of Israel that these people are false prophets is their lives show it. They live in contradiction to God's word. So the fact that they are engaging in activity which Yahweh and the Lord would find pre uh reprehensible is a good tip off. These are not the people I should listen to. Their lives demonstrate that they are not actually trying to be faithful to the God they claim for. And I think that's true today. Eventually, our life will st will give us away if we're false. So a true prophet will have the character and a lifestyle that reflects trying to seek the Lord and trying to follow Him. They may fail, but they will repent. They may sin or fall into some egregious error, as we've seen, like David or Abraham and some of the heroes of the faith. But when that happens, their response is grief, sorrow, and repentance. A false prophet is going to say, hey, everybody does it. And they'll be betrayed by their moral conduct. So that's something to look out for. If you're looking at a pastor, uh TV preacher, or someone that's talking about, what is their lifestyle like? Do they do they actually live or seek to live with what they're preaching? Okay, so the first thing we learn about prophets is they're polluted, they're corrupt, the false prophets. Here's the second thing we learn about them they're pretending. Look at 13 through 15. Moreover, among the prophets of Samaria I saw an offensive thing. They prophesied by Baal and led my people astray. Also among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing, the committing of adultery and walking in falsehood. And they strengthened the hand of evildoers, so that no one has turned back from his wickedness. All of them have become to me like Sodom and her inhabitants like Gomorrah. Therefore, says the Lord of Hosts of Hosts, concerning the prophets, Behold, I'm going to feed them worn wood and make them drink poisonous water, for the from the prophets of Jerusalem pollution has gone forth into all the land. So in thirteen and fourteen he says they're pretending. Now, you'll notice he starts out talking about the prophets in Samaria, and then he talks about the prophets in Jerusalem. The prophets in Samaria were the prophets of the northern kingdom who have already been taken into exile. And the prophets in Jerusalem would look at them and say, Hey, we are so much better than them. God has already judged them. They're gone. They were the false tribes, they didn't follow the correct son of David. And we they would look and at the northern prophets and say, We are far superior. But what Jeremiah does is say, the prophets in Samaria were bad. They prophesied by Baal and led my people astray. But you in Jerusalem have done something worse. You have prophesied by Baal and pretended that you weren't. So at least the prophets of the North turned completely away and admitted it. And that's a terrible thing. But in verse 14 he says, the southern prophets have done something worse. They may consider themselves better than the northern guys, but they're claiming to speak for God when in fact they don't. They're pretending to be something they're not, and that's worse. So it's really bad that the northern prophets prophesied by Baal and led the people away, but it's much worse to claim to speak for God when you don't. So if you're not going to speak the word of the Lord, don't claim to be. Don't pretend to be what you're not. And if you are claiming to speak for the Lord, you better be actually speaking for the Lord. And this is actually a common thing in Hebrew poetry to say, I've signed four things, and they go one, two, three, and then, but here's the fifth, and the fifth is always the worst, or I've seen A, but here is B, and it's worse. So that's a very common feature in Hebrew poetry. So he says, Here are the prophets of Samaria. But among Jerusalem, here's a horrible thing. It goes one step farther. So it's usually the last thing in the list that they're trying to emphasize. If you think about our culture today and you talk to people today who have a hard time believing in Christ, a lot of people will say, Well, Christianity turns me off because I've seen these phony Christians. Well, they don't maybe not call them phony Christians, but I would. So there's these people that claim to speak for God. They claim to be preaching the real gospel, but in fact, they're looking out for themselves. And we have them today. They're money hungry, they're power hungry, they claim to speak for God. The prosperity gospel is alive and well in in some of these megachurches that you see on TV, and they claim they're speaking for God, but they're not. And that's the people, that's what Jeremiah is pointing out. That additional step of pretending to speak for God when you don't is a bad thing. There's a movie that came out several years ago. It's called Believe. I don't know if you've seen it. It's on Netflix. It's actually made by believers, and it's about four college guys who are in need of money because their scholarships have run out. And they come to this realization that Christians will support almost any cause without asking too many accountability questions. So they make up a cause about clean water in Africa, and they go on this tour raising money. And then, as they are, they're like skimming some of the money off the top for themselves. So they're pretending to speak for God when they don't, in fact. And then it becomes clearer and clearer in the movie that these leaders are using the people to further their own agenda and they're pursuing their own financial gain. And then, of course, as they're found out, that's when their scheme begins to unravel and you start learning lessons. It's actually a good movie. It's made by believers, but if you're easily offended, they take all the Christian stereotypes and they just like portray them so well. I mean, you look at them and you go, I've met that person, you know, or I've seen, I've done that. And so it's kind of um, they're not, they are definitely criticizing the hypocrites who are up front, but they are also kind of skewering, satire, satirizing some other things Christians do. So that's my warning. I I enjoyed the movie. But if you're easily offended by satire, you might want to avoid it. But it's that kind of hypocrisy that Jeremiah is calling out. So it yes, it's a terrible thing to have abandoned the Lord and admit it, but it's even worse to have abandoned the Lord and pretend that you have it to still claim to speak for him. So these prophets are polluted and they're pretending. That is, they're corrupt, they're pretending to speak for God when they don't, and they will be found out, I think, by this third thing he's going to tell us, and that is they promise a false hope. So they're polluted, they're pretending, and they promise a false hope. Let's look at 16 through 22. Thus says the Lord of hosts, do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility. They speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord. They keep saying to those who despise me, The Lord has said, You will have peace, and as for everyone who walks in stubbornness of his own heart, they say, Calamity will not come upon you. But who has stood in the counsel of the Lord that he should see and hear his word? Who has given heed to his word and listened? Behold, the storm of the Lord has gone forth in wrath, even a whirling tempest, it will swirl down on the head of the wicked. The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has performed and carried out the purpose of his heart. In the last days you will clearly understand it. I did not send these prophets, but they ran. I did not speak to them, but they prophesied. But if they had stood in my counsel, then they would have announced my words to my people, and would have turned back from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds. So the third criticism has to do with their message, and that is they're promising a false hope. So they say to those who are in rebellion, don't worry about it, God, you're fine, you'll have peace. They say to people who are stubbornly rebelling from the Lord, Oh, don't worry, no problem. God's not upset with you. And that's a very common message that talking about peace, but notice there's no mention of sin or repentance. So they have all this stuff to say about you'll have peace and prosperity and everything will be good and blessings, but that part about you need to humbly seek your God, that's missing. You need to repent of your sins. Instead, those who despise me are just said, no problem. Those who were walking stubbornness, he's saying, no problem. They're missing that piece of sin and repentance. And in fact, if you study church history, every time a denomination begins to turn from God, the first doctrine to go is sin. That's just historically true. Every time the first thing that happens when a denomination starts to wander away is sin becomes minimized, it's downplayed, it's like, oh, no problem. We can solve that through these rules and rituals and um say these prayers or do these things, and then the dominoes start to fall because if sin is no big deal and you can just easily fix it, then you don't really need a savior because sin isn't a problem, and then they start moving away. So we see that same absence of sin and repentance here. The false prophets say, No harm will come to the people who walk in stubbornness. So you rebel against God, not a problem. And that's a message we'd all love to hear. Which is exactly what we want. You're fine, everything's going to be okay. You'll have peace and prosperity. Nothing to worry about. Nobody's going to get hurt. And God says, this is a vision of their own making. They aren't waiting to hear what the Lord has to say. Rather, they're making this up in their own minds. By contrast, true prophets stand in the counsel of the Lord. So the true prophet listens and obeys and speaks what God has has asked him to speak. Now, if you were a king in Jerusalem, who are you wanting who would you rather listen to? You've got Jeremiah saying, it's going to be bad. Babylon's coming, they're going to win. People are going to be taken into exile. You've got the false prophets going, no problem. Peace and prosperity right around the corner. And it's tempting to listen to the one that says, There's no problem. But as you know, the gospel begins with bad news. It starts with the recognition we have a problem. We have rebelled. We are a sinful people before a holy God. And that problem must be solved. And then the good news is how you solve it. But they're just trying to skip to the good news. And one thing we have seen continually in Scripture is that God takes his people through suffering, not around it. Just read about any letter in the New Testament, and they talk about suffering. They talk about trials testing your faith, about trials making you stronger, about people will persecute you as they persecuted Jesus. And God's plan often involves suffering, trials, and living in a fallen world involves them. And he takes us through them and makes us stronger. He doesn't take us around them. So God's plan for Jerusalem did involve what was unthinkable to them. It involved the exile. It involved Jerusalem being burned to the ground and the temple leveled, something they never thought they'd see. And yet that was part of the plan. In fact, if there's one word that characterizes, I think, the Christian message, it's redemption. But redemption implies there's a problem. If you have redemption, you've got to be redeemed from something first. Redemption means there was a problem that had to be solved, and redemption is solving that problem. So it speaks of something wonderful, but that something wonderful rises out of something painful. And we see that over and over. God will bring death out of life. I mean, bring life out of death, excuse me. He brings goodness out of evil. He brings justice where there was injustice, but they all start with the bad news first. There's always a problem that He's fixing. And this is how the world works. Faith in Christ is life through death. It's not comfort and ease and pearls and roses. It is hope in the midst of suffering, faith standing firm in a storm, and losing your life to gain it. In fact, that's basically the whole message of the book of James: that yes, your faith will be tested, and that testing will accomplish two great things for you. First, it will reveal to you that your faith is in fact real. So when you go through a trial or tribulation or suffering and you come out the other side and you're still hoping in God, you have tangible, real evidence I'm a believer, because I went through that and I'm still here. So that that trial put pressure on my faith, and in that moment I had to choose, will I follow God if it means going through this? And I said yes. And so now that crucial question of am I really a believer has been answered because I've gone through that test and come out the other side. But the second thing he says trials do for us is they lead to maturity and growth. So it's not only that my faith is revealed to be the real deal, it's refined and strengthened, and there's wisdom and maturity and a measure of holiness that is gained. So the strengthening of our faith makes us grow in wisdom. And our job for a lot of today is just to wait patiently for that, for the fulfillment of the Lord's promises. James also brings that up. This is at the end of the letter. He says, Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruits of the earth, being patient about it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. That's James 5, 7 and 8. And the point he's making is that life has seasons, and one season follows another. So as the farmer knows there's going to be rain, and then there's going to be drought, and then there's going to be rain again, and there's planting, and there's sowing, and there's reaping, and one season follows another. So you sow your seed, then you wait for the rains, and then you wait for the sprouts, and then you wait for the plant to bear fruit, and each season follows another, life has seasons like that. There will be seasons of spiritual drought, there will be seasons of spiritual plenty, there will be seasons of spiritual famine and spiritual harvest. And the seasons are going to come and go, and our job is to wait patiently for what the Lord will do. So we go through the hardships, the dry spells, because we know that's part of the process that will bring about the growth and the fruit. We don't get to just jump over the hard parts and skip along the top of life from good time to good time. That's not how it works. And that's the mess, that's the false promise that the prophets were preaching. No problem, no disasters, nothing bad's going to happen. They're just preaching this false hope that you will go through life only on the good times. And God says that's not how it works. He takes us through suffering, not around it. Alright, so they pr the prophets are polluted. That is, they're corrupt, their lifestyle reveals their corruption, that they're not following God. They're pretending because they claim to speak for God when they actually don't, and they are promising a false hope. Their message, they tell us what we want to be true, but not what actually is true. This idea that everyone there's a book out there now called Love Wins, and that it drives me crazy every time I run into it. Somebody who's read it, because he says, in the end, everyone's gonna go to heaven. Doesn't matter what God you follow, love's gonna win. You know, you can follow Jesus, you can follow Buddha, you can follow one of the Hindu gods, doesn't matter. In the end, love's gonna win, we all get to go to heaven. Well, we would love for that message to be true, but that is not the message of the gospel. God says, those who will go to heaven are those who are saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, and only those who are saved. So that message of just follow, you know, basic middle class morality and you're good is is a false hope. And if you think about it, they're promising peace and prosperity apart from God. So they're saying you can have peace and prosperity, but you don't have to have a relationship with God. You don't have to seek him in humility or repentance or forgiveness. You don't have to seek him through the cross. You can just have him without any strings attached. Well, that's not the message of the gospel. So they offer these kind of naive greeting card promises that simply aren't true. But God is bigger than that. And that's where we're going to go next. What is the actual hope? What is the hope we ought to count on? So the prophets are polluted, they're pretending, they promise false hope. What's the antidote to that? How do we know a true prophet? And we'll see the antidote is God Himself. Okay, let's look at 23 through 27. Am I a God who is near, declares the Lord, and not a God far off? Can a man hide himself in hiding places so I do not see him, declares the Lord? Do I not fill the heavens and the earth? declares the Lord. I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy falsely in my name, saying, I had a dream, I had a dream. How long is there anything in the hearts of the prophets who prophesy falsehood, even these prophets of deception of their own heart, who intend to make my people forget my name by their dreams, which they relate to one another just as their fathers forgot my name because of Baal. Okay. It's a little hard to read through all those questions, but the they're rhetorical questions and they call for a negative answer. So when he says, Am I a God who is near? it grammatically expects the answer, no. Am I not a God who is far off? They he's um and we can read that and we can say that's really confusing, because we're used to be thinking of God as a near God, as a close God, that we have a close personal relationship with him. So when he comes along and says, Am I a God who is near, it's like, wait, what what do you mean? Aren't you near after the cross? Don't we have reconciliation? Don't we have access through Jesus Christ and a personal relationship? So as modern Christians, we've been taught to think of God as being close to us, and this sounds confusing. But what Jeremiah's talking about is in his day there were regional gods. So they were little deities that controlled either a geographic area or a particular thing like rain or harvest or um fertility of the livestock, so they were little near gods in that sense. They were local deities responsible for their little fiefdom. And the pagan religions thought, you know, well, if you want to get have a good lot of little baby sheep in the spring, you have to go placate this god. And if you want rain for your barley harvest, you've got to placate this god, and if you want long life, you've got to go placate that god. And so you had little tiny kind of local deities, and that's what he means by a near God. He's saying, Do you think I'm just this little tiny god who's only over a little tiny aspect of life? And the answer is no, I am a god who is over all of creation, all of the universe. That's the idea. So the prophets of Jerusalem were treating him as if he was a little tiny local deity who affected only their local interests, and they had to placate him, but then if they wanted these other things, they had to go talk to these other gods and go through their proper rituals, and he says, You've got it all wrong. That is not how it works. I am not a local regional deity that can be manipulated or co-opted into blessing you. I am a god who's far off in the sense of I'm a God who is the creator of everything, the author of the universe, and I am in control of it all. And that's what he's saying by am I a God who is near and not a God who is far off? Can you hide? You can't hide from me because I am a God who is everywhere. I fill the heavens and the earth. That's what he's saying. So I'm not a regional, local, little fiefdom kind of deity who can be bought, bribed, and manipulated. Now, think about that. That is good news because we want a God who can't be thwarted. It is much more comforting to think God is in control of everything, I can't get in his way, I can't mess up his plan, I can't thwart his will for my life, he is in control no matter what. So whether I'm in a season of great success and spiritual uh plenty or whether I'm in a season of spiritual drought and I've just failed miserably, God is still in control. His plan is still going to happen. He's still the author of everything, and he can bring goodness out of all that. In fact, he promises that he will use all those things to bring about our maturity. So sometimes we want to treat him like a little, you know, local deity that we can kind of bribe into blessing our agenda. But ultimately, I think he opens our eyes to see we want his will, not our will. We want a God who is cannot be controlled, but whose vision will overrule our puny little vision and whose goodness will overcome our sin. So everyone tries to manipulate God at times, left, right, center, everything. We all claim God's on our side, and it's easy to start trying to treat him like a God who you just want to bless your agenda, but ultimately his voice will break through. And what this passage is affirming is that even though we try to use God for our own purposes, it will not work. He will not be used. In the end, his will will be done regardless of who tried to use him for what ends. And that, if you stop to think about it, is a comforting message. So there's always this kind of heresy out there about, you know, you can have God's second best will for your life. Like, you know, if you miss, you make a mistake, then this was God's best will, but now you chose this other thing, so now you're on his second best, and then and if you think about that, that's ridiculous. And they they're like, what if somebody, like, what if you married the wrong person? Or what if somebody four generations ago married the wrong person? So now I'm stuck because the person I was supposed to marry isn't even here yet, because or and never will be because we all got messed up. And there are actually Christians who believe that kind of thing. And I think this was one of those passages that says, no, look, my will will not be thwarted. I will bring about what I want to bring about for my glory and for your good, and it will happen, and it will bring wonderful, and and all those promises of hope and redemption, they're true, and I'm gonna bring it about, and you cannot mess it up. You cannot get in like God's second, third, and fourth best will. What he has planned for you is what is going to happen. That's where you see in the Psalms he talk about you're writing the days of my life and ordained every moment, and um, all those are the same kind of promise that ultimately his will be will be done. Okay, so the first thing he says in answer to the false prophets is, I can't be used. And the second thing he says is, my word will not be beaten. Let's look at the rest of the verses 28 through 32. The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has my word speak my word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain, declares the Lord? Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer which shatters a rock? Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who steal my words from each other. Behold, I am against the prophets, declares the Lord, who use their tongues and declare, the Lord declares. Behold, I am against those who have prophesied false dreams, declare, declares the Lord, and related them and led my people astray by their falsehoods and reckless boasting. Yet I did not send them or command them, nor did they furnish this people the slightest benefit, declares the Lord. So notice three times he says, Behold, I am against these prophets. That's three times is the emphasis of like good, better, best. When they were when Hebrew repeats something three times, it's like this is the superlative. This is what we're trying. I'm really emphasizing this point. And he says, if you have a dream, go ahead and tell it, because your dreams are nothing compared to my word. And then he goes on to describe his word as a fire that will burn brightly and overcome everything in it that contradicts it, everything in its path. He speaks of his word as a hammer that shatters anything that's that's contradicting it. And the idea is nothing can stand against the word of God. So you have these strong, powerful images of fire and a hammer contrasted with this flimsy stuff of dreams. Now, dreams didn't carry much weight in the Old Testament, and they were generally rejected by the Jews as a means of revelation. As far as we know, no Old Testament prophet ever received divine revelation from the Lord through a dream. They had visions, but in visions they were fully awake and fully cognizant. And there's no recorded instance of a prophet of God receiving direct or divine revelation in a dream. Now, it doesn't mean God could never do that, but as a general rule, dreams were considered an inferior method of revelation, and yet they were the chosen method for these prophets of Baal. So he concludes this pronouncement of judgment against them three times in a row. He says, I'm against them. So he says, I'm bigger than their agenda. My word is like fire and a hammer, and judgment is about to fall. And again, as strong as those words are, and as harsh as they seem, they're a word of comfort. Because it means we think, oh, God's word is going to get lost in all these voices. God's word is going to get drowned out by all the incessant voices that are clamoring against him. And he's saying, Don't worry about it. My word will break through. My word will prevail. So even in the midst of false prophets or religious professionals who are using God for their own agenda, or even our own some kinds of misguided, mixed motives and prayers, God says, I'm going to carry out my plan and I will make my word known. His word is bigger than any false message. Since I've become a Christian, it seems like every decade we get like the heresy de jour, and there's some new thing, new fad that blows through the church, and everybody gets taken up by it. And I remember when I was in my twenties, this new false message, I won't go into all the details, but it started going through the church and becoming really, really popular. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, we've got to debate this. We've got to go out and pull it apart, you know, and show everybody all the ins and outs of why this is false and how it doesn't line up with the pastor with the passages of scripture. And one of my older, wiser pastors said, don't worry about it. Just proclaim the truth. You don't need to try to take their argument apart, just keep proclaiming the word of God, what you know to be true. You don't have to counter them point by point and show what's false, just keep proclaiming the truth. And I have found that to be very wise advice over the years. As new heresies come and go, instead of said trying to point out why each one is wrong, just keep saying the truth that you know. He also told me something I found very comforting, and that was don't let your fear of teaching heresy keep you from proclaiming the truth. And I thought that's pretty good advice too. Because all of us will, well, you know, we all have our pet doctrine that's probably gonna we'll find out one day is wrong or we misunderstood, but we all know the basics of the truth. We all know the who Jesus is, what he did for us, what the cross means, how you find God, and you keep proclaiming that, and you let God take care of the rest. Because his word will prevail, and that's his promise here. His word will break through. He will not let it be drowned out, he will carry it out. Now, just to wrap this up, the problem for us is this usually means waiting. You know, we're waiting for his word to break through, or we're waiting for the um justice to be established. And most of us have a decision to make and we're asking the question, who should I listen to? And we want an answer like now or you know, by Friday would be good. And yet sometimes God is asking us to wait, and this process of seeking and searching for his word takes time, and the process of his word being vindicated takes time. And just as we see Jeremiah prophesying many, many years before the exile that it was coming, he had there was this long waiting of it's coming, it's coming until it finally happened. And then there was this long waiting of, well, the exile is still here, but restoration is coming. And that is true today. We the waiting is just part of the Christian life. And waiting means we have the time and space to make mistakes. So God can't be used and his word will not be beaten, but in the meantime, we stumble along trying to follow him and figure out who to listen to. And I think the only advice I can give you on that is we're gonna make mistakes. We just we are, because we are not yet mature, uh, perfected believers. We are somewhere in that process toward maturity, and in the meantime, we're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna give in to selfishness, we're gonna struggle with sin, we're gonna misunderstand the Bible, we're gonna misunderstand each other, we're gonna run into troubles. And yet, that's where we can come back to this passage and say ultimately God will make himself known and his word will not be beaten. So even in those mistakes, he has not lost control of us, he has not lost control of the situation, and it puts all those failures in perspective. We can't thwart his will. Even probably your biggest, most colossal failure, that that dark thing in your life that you hope none of your friends ever find out you said or did or thought or whatever it is, we all have them, even that is not going to stop God from fulfilling his promises. So no matter what, he will bring his word to pass. We can't mess it up. So that gives us the freedom to seek him in prayer, seek him in Bible study, talk to wise older believers who may have advice, try to listen, and then with humility and kind of honesty, you make the best decision you can. You jump in with both feet and say, This is this is what I can do with the information I've got, and you trust that God is at work. So knowing that you're not going to ruin his plan, you can't overcome his will, you won't invalidate his word, and then if the results aren't what you expected or what you hoped for, what do you do? You run back to him and say, Teach me, show me, heal me, show me how that how to respond to this. And the promise of the gospel is eventually we will understand. At once some in the future, probably not this side of heaven, but at some point all. All those things will be made clear. We will see clearly. And all those things that we didn't quite understand, we will look back and go, Oh, I see what God was doing. I see how it brought me to this incredible promise of the gospel. So, yes, there are many voices in our world, many competing ideas. They come from inside the church, they come from outside the church. Some of them naively tell us that everything is going to be okay, you don't have to follow Jesus, you can just follow anyone, and you know it'll all be all work out in the end. And yet God says, I won't be used, my word will not be beaten. And that's a comforting message. So when our leaders fail us, as we looked at last week, our political leaders, our heroes, and this week, if we have spiritual leaders who failed us, who people who we've run into who claim to be speaking for God but we're faking it, who promise this false hope, we can trust that God will make himself known. So when you're seeking him and you're thinking, I just don't know what to do, he will make himself known. He is, and false prophets, false teachers, people who fail us or disappoint us in our life, as heartbreaking as that can be, they don't threaten who God is and what he's trying to accomplish. And that gives us the freedom to fail and the security to face uh trials and turmoil and tragedy because God says, My agenda is still on track. Nothing we do will ultimately thwart his word. I'd like to close uh with uh some of the words of Jesus from John 10. They're probably familiar words to you, but think about them in light of what we've just talked about in Jeremiah and how the we have these false teachers who try to lead us astray. Note particularly, I'm gonna read John 10, 24 through 29, but not particularly verse 27. I'll point that out to you. The Jews then gathered around him, that is Jesus, and were saying to him, How long will you keep us in suspense? If you're the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name, these testify of me. But you do not believe because you are not my sheep. And then this is verse 27. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. His word will break through. We will hear him. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they will follow me, and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand. So God's will will be done, and his word will not be thwarted. Let's pray. Father, thank you that you are a God that breaks through all those confusing voices, and that when we're lost, when we're confused, when we're facing decisions or trials that we don't know how to how to respond to, or which way to turn or what decision to make, that we can seek you and know that you're in control, and know that we can step out in faith, uh, acting on the truth we know and the wisdom you've given us to whatever point we're at, and knowing that you are still in control, that you will not abandon us, um, that you will teach us, you will call to us, we will hear you, and no one will snatch us out of your hand or out of your control. In Jesus' name. Amen.