Jeremiah 2:1-13, 19
And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination.
Sermon Transcript:
Morning everybody. I invite you to take your Bibles. We’re going to be looking at the book of Jeremiah this morning. I’ve got a one off sermon this morning, which i’m excited about, which means we’re not in the middle of a series right now. And as we take our first Sunday in January, I have a message which probably isn’t going to feel particularly edifying when you hear the title.
A dissection of sin, but the second part of the title, and what it says about God. It’s actually a sermon I’m very excited about. We’re gonna look at Jeremiah chapter 2, verses 1 through 13, and then down to verse 19.
And this is actually a sermon, the first of a series of sermons that Jeremiah the prophet is presenting to people who are trying to figure out what’s wrong. Everything was going wrong with the country, they’re in danger of enemies coming, there’s famine, there’s a variety of things. And Jeremiah is presenting an opening sermon to them.
Which is kind of what I’m doing here in 2024. Jeremiah chapter 1, excuse me, chapter 2, verse 1. The word of the Lord came to me saying, Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord. I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness in a land not sown.
Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest. All who ate of it incurred guilt. Disaster came upon them, declares the Lord. Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord, What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went from me and went after worthlessness, and became worthless?
They did not say, Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that none passes through, where no man dwells. And I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things.
But when you came in, you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination. The priests did not say, Where is the Lord? Those who handle the law did not know me. The shepherds transgressed against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit. Therefore I still contend with you, declares the Lord.
And with your children’s children I will contend. For cross to the coast of Cyprus and see, or send to Kedar and examine with care. See if there has been such a thing. Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this.
Be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord. And then this key verse. For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters. And hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. And I’m going to dump down to verse 19, so to the conclusion.
Your evil will chastise you, and your apostasy will reprove you. Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God. The fear of me is not in you, declares the Lord God of hosts. Lord, we come to you this morning. And first off, Lord, I just, I want to agree with the songwriter. You are worthy.
You are worthy of all blessing and honor and glory and power. Lord, it’s such a privilege to gather this morning among people the vast majority of whom would say, yeah, he’s worthy of praise and honor and adoration. He is worthy of my devotion. He is worthy of my love. He is worthy of my yielding all that I am.
And Lord, I pray that this morning We might more fully see your worthiness. Speak into us through this passage, I pray, in Jesus name. Amen. 1973, Carl Menninger, at the time one of the leading premier psychiatrists in America, wrote a book, which was entitled, Whatever Happened to Sin? It’s an interesting book, of course, with the very question.
And it wasn’t written by, a Bible thumping preacher from the South. This guy was a prominent secular, psychiatrist. And, he was unhappy about an environment he saw in Western culture, which he described as everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault. He lamented the fact that American society seemed to be rejecting the concept of personal accountability.
The word sin, Menninger argued, was disappointing from the American vocabulary. For him, even if the concept was ignored, he believed that individuals as well as society would still suffer the negative consequences of ignoring some absolute direction of life, the will of God, if you will, for people’s lives.
In the years since Menninger wrote his book, this has of course continued in our culture. The idea that turning away from God is the root. Of the problems in my life can seem out of touch Archaic, it’s hard to imagine tomorrow that we are going to turn to Social media and find in instagram posts that that will be the way that There is a self description of LeBron James, or Johnny Depp, or Lady Gaga, or the Kardashians.
Yeah, my sin is the root of all the struggles that I’m facing in my life. Yet the entire teaching of the Bible and church history is founded on this reality. Sin is the root of our problem. It plays a part in all of our problems. But what is sin, actually? Is it breaking a rule? Is it falling short of a standard?
Is it rebellion against divine authority? In a broad sense, all of those things are involved. But it is not the ultimate perspective of sin. And this morning, in this passage, I want to join Jeremiah and try to dissect what sin actually is. And then I want to show what that shows about God. Frankly, I hope, and I think, what we’re going to find is going to surprise you.
Jeremiah chapter 2, as I mentioned earlier, is the first of a series of sermons. That jeremiah is giving to the people and it’s really an answer to the question Why is everything falling apart? Our culture is crumbling our family structures are Are collapsing and in this passage he is presenting to them A sermon a series on sin what it is and what its effects are
here. The lord gives the answer Through his prophet to his people notably in verse 13 and 19 He tells them a dissection of sin, and in it, he shows us about our sin, and he shows us about our God. I want to turn here and now look at a couple of things he says. First of all, the dissection of sin. And in chapter 2, and I’m going to focus here on verse 13, he presents the nature, first of all, of sin.
He says, For my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters and hued out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. The nature of sin is betrayal. Here’s what he says. They have forsaken me. They have turned from me. They forsake forsook God. In verse eight, verse 13, they left God for other things, other gods small Gs.
Sin is more like the act of a traitor. than of a criminal A criminal breaks the law of his country. A traitor betrays his country. A criminal violates the law. A traitor violates a trust, a relationship. What they betrayed was God had been their source of living water. And it says, My people have turned to cheap substitutes.
There were three ways you could get water at this time. One was you could get it from the ultimate source, would be a spring of continually life giving, healthy water that was clean, that came from the depths, and it was a pure water. source of water. The second was you could dig a shallow well and actually you would fill it with water.
Sometimes it would be some that would steep in, but it usually was a well that was basically a holding tank. And then there was this thing called a cistern, which were basically things that were constructed usually above the ground to hold the water. And they, they tended to, the water in there tended to get hot.
It tended to be a, a, a place where mosquitoes swarmed. It tended to get cracks. It was the worst place to get your water. The best place was this stream of bubbling life giving water that was, that was from the depths and would bring healthy water, cool water, refreshing water. God says, I’m that water and I want to be that water.
But my people have turned to these broken cisterns and they’re trying to drink. This faulty,
perverted water that’s warm and rancid. They went to other places, other things, to quench their thirst, to meet their need. They replaced God. They not only forsook Him, but it says they have turned to these other systems. In verse 19 it says, They no longer fear Me, but they fear these other things. Now, awe in the scriptures is a term that is used to translate fear.
There are two types of fear in the Bible. One is the fear of you’re in danger. You feel fear of potential harm. You’re in a room. You’re talking to a friend and, spiders are not your thing. And a spider crawls the floor across the floor. I’m sorry, right now you’re all weirded. Some of you’re weirded out already, but this spider goes across and you, you, you miss this thing and it’s gone.
And, and so you and I are sitting there and, and, and, and the spider’s going somewhere. I don’t know where it is. You can’t get your mind off this spider. You know, just where did it go? Where is it? And I try to help out. I said, don’t worry, it won’t eat much. I mean, it’ll be fine. But you’ve got to find out where that spider is.
Because who knows where it’s going to show up and what it’s going to do. Who knows what kind it is. The spider has become central. To everything that’s going on in that individual’s life at that moment. There is fear of danger and harm There’s another sense of fear in the old testament and the new testament And that is the sense of a fear not of something that we dread but of something that is Dominant to us It is something powerful But that is the sense that we could translate by the word all it is big To us, it is powerful, perhaps even dangerous, but there is delight in the object that we are drawn to the object.
We are not trying to get away. We are drawn to, to the object of our awe. And God is talking about I I was that to you? I was the one that, yes. Am I dangerous? Yes, but you know, I’m not dangerous to you. Am I for you? Yes. Do you know I’m big and powerful? Yes. There is a sense of awe, but the common denominator of these two fears is that this thing becomes a preoccupation.
Can become almost an obsession. That the thing we fear or the thing that we’re in awe of becomes central to us. It’s the dominating reality in our life. And God says, I want to be this to you. I want to be the one that you look to for your water. I want to be the one that, that, that is control center of your life.
But you’ve turned to this bro, these broken cisterns, to these other small g gods, these other things to provide that satisfaction in your life. And in that sense, you have sinned. You have betrayed me. You have turned from me a while back. I was really trying to, trying to think of a handle for the. What an idol is and I’d studied for Few years ago.
I did a study of Idolatry and did a whole series a 12 week series on American idols And I was trying I did two sermons on an anatomy of an idol. What is an idol? I was fascinated to find that there were three words that were constantly used in the scriptures to describe an idol and I realized recently that That those three words are the exact words that can fit into, a formula.
And here’s the formula. Idle is simply this. I D I O N I L An idle is something I depend on, or it is something I obey. Or it is something I love, and in that context, all of them are more than God. And in the scripture, the word depend on is sometimes called, trust in. But, The sense of depending on, obeying, and loving is throughout the scripture, the description of something that I have idolized in my life and have displaced God from that position of central in my life.
And here’s what he says, he says, you don’t fear me. You’re not looking to me. You’re not depending on me. You’re not ultimately. And ultimately, you’ve made these other things your love gods. And he says, this is the sense of what sin is. It is turning to something else. Something is more awesome, more captivating, more dynamic to God.
And at that moment, you will tend to live out sins. But the reality of sin is betrayal. And I’m going to come back to that because that says some very compelling things about God. The second thing that’s true in this, this, dissection of sin, we not only see its nature, but he also tells us the life support of sin.
And that is denial. It’s found in verse 19. God pulls the people together and he says this to them. Know and see that it’s evil and bitter for you. He says, look at what you’re doing. Look at know it. See it. See the result of the choice you’re making in turning from me. That it’s bitter for you. This is bad water.
This is not gonna satisfy you. It’ll give momentary thirst quenching, but ultimately, this is crummy water to build your life in and on. It’s a, it’s the language of intervention, right? It’s the wife who pulls in her husband’s friend and says, look, I can’t get through to him. Would you join us in this little gathering in our living room, where we’re just gonna speak into him and say, Hey, Fred.
Look at what you’re doing. Look at what these choices are accomplishing in your life. We’re here because we love you. Well, that’s what God’s doing here. In verse 19, it’s an intervention meeting. And why do you need an intervention? Because we deny reality. The problem is people deny that sin is really the issue.
That it’s wandering from God. That they have betrayed God and turned someone else, somewhere else for their sinner. It is not fatal. It is fatal to deny the significance of it. There is something about alcohol that puts out a force field of denial. It’s fatal to deny you’re an alcoholic. Lucy, he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he, she called him out in this cartoon.
I think we have it. You know what your problem is, Charlie Brown? The problem with you is Charlie Brown. No, I don’t want to know. Leave me alone. If you know Lucy, you understand that response. The whole trouble with you, Charlie Brown, is you won’t listen to what the whole trouble with you is. She’s speaking the language of intervention to a guy that’s denying.
I don’t want to, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t need to face it. I, I don’t need to hear from you. I don’t want to know. Denying that sin is the problem keeps us from finding a solution. The answer to Meninger’s question, whatever became a sin? Of sin is that we are choosing to think it’s not that consequential People don’t want to hear it’s a betrayal of god.
Yeah, I don’t do everything right but You know, it’s not really I I there’s people that live a lot worse than I do There’s people that have a lot bigger stuff going on in their life than I do. I mean that that that’s
And god wants to break through And show us the pervasiveness of sin In the context that we have turned away from God’s centrality and at the control center of our lives. I’m gonna jump, past this next illustration just for time. Ernest Becker, an author that I really have appreciated. I’ve read most of his stuff.
He’s a, again, a psychiatrist of days past, but he wrote, he won the Pulitzer Prize. one of his books was a book that was entitled The Structure of Evil, and in that he said the structure of evil, the real problem in the world, war, poverty, violence, et cetera, are a result of social structures. That they correct the social structures in a society, the educational system, the family structure, and how it’s designed.
Institutional structures, you will be able to correct the problems that people are having. It was a very contemporary perspective post World War II and the decades that followed. Later in his life, he wrote another book, and this was his Pulitzer Prize entree. It was called, Escape from Evil. And in the preface of the book, he had changed completely.
Here’s what he says in the preface. I’m now looking at humanity full in the face for the first time. In my previous works, I had failed to see how truly vicious human behavior is. This is a dilemma that I have been caught with along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the enlightenment tradition.
This enormous problem to see that humanity is so evil causing now requires some third alternative beyond bureaucratic science changing the social structure or just despair. We believe that third option is the option that is declaring himself the source of living waters. Our problem comes as a result of denying the role of sin in our life.
Let me just try to play this out practically. Worry is a result of some danger being more central in your life than God. It’s bigger to you than God. You’re more in awe of a danger than you are of God’s power and presence. When you engage in self pity, you’re more in awe of some benefit you have lost than you are of God.
When you yield to lust, you are more in awe of some visual stimulation than you are of God. When you are angry, you are more in awe of some offense done against you than you are in awe of God’s forgiveness of your offenses. When you are filled with guilt, you are more in awe of your failure than you are of God’s grace and his plans for bringing good from your failure.
Sin is our problem. It’s the root of all the struggles in our life. But sin is not so much looked at by God. As your acts, or your words, your failures, or your screw ups, but as betrayal. You’re turning away from Him as the true life giving fountain for your life. We’re looking to other broken cisterns, cheap substitutes, to give us what God wants to give to us.
So what does this tell us about God? What does it tell us about God that God’s primary metaphor of sin is adultery? That it is Going to other things, to other mistresses of, if you will, of, of a deity style. It tells me two things. It tells us that God takes sin seriously. He is holy. He’s set apart from sin.
He’s completely different. He’s never motivated by greed or maliciousness or vindictiveness. So what does that mean about how He views your sin? Well, it means He takes it seriously. But why? It is not ultimately because it’s an affront to Him.
But it is ultimately Because it is poison to you.
You may react, well, no, God cares most about his glory. I agree with that. God created us for his glory, to bring him glory.
But until you understand this reality of living with God, you won’t understand what I’m trying to say this morning. And this statement is this, God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. When that begins to, I remember when God, and John Piper is one, made that statement probably clearest to me, began to permeate my soul, and I began to think, wait, you mean God’s ultimate.
Pleasure is that and his design is that he would be glorified in my life, finding joy and satisfaction and contentment and my life purpose in him that that brings him more glory. And all the things I think, well, I’ll do this for God, or I’ll be this way for God. He says, no, Mark. The more you live, as Jared talked about last week, and embracing your brokenness, your need of me, your need of drinking at my cistern, the more you’re able to live.
to my glory. His glory and your joy somehow follow parallel tracks. And the more that we understand that reality of God, that yes, He is holy. He is the holy other, W H O L L Y. But He is also holy, H O L Y, different, set apart.
But in his holiness, the visual is not of God’s responding to your sin as a strict schoolmarm waiting to smack your hand with a ruler, but of a loving mother grieving over the destructive choices of her child. That’s one metaphor of a heavy hearted mother. Another one is this passage. It tells us that God loves sinners tenderly.
A grief stricken husband here whose wife betrays him in an adulterous affair. And he says, that’s what’s happened when you’ve turned from drinking at my spring and you turn to another cistern. He said, you’ve spurned my love. You’ve spurned what I want to give you. I have the real water.
And sin is betrayal. It’s spurning it. And he said, no, no. I’ll find it here. I’ll find it here. I’ll find it here. I’ll find it here. I’ll be the great one and find out the emptiness of living that way.
This statement is by Brennan Manning. It’s called A Glimpse of Jesus. Here’s what he says. God’s compassion enables us to be compassionate toward ourselves. It’s the divine compassion that Jesus embodies in human history and in his own compassionate life and death. Before I am asked to show compassion to my brothers and sisters in their suffering, I’m asked to accept the Father’s compassion in my own life.
To be transformed by it, to become caring and compassionate toward myself and my own suffering and hurt in my own failure and need. The Father’s loving graciousness is not in any way conditioned by or dependent upon what we are or do. He will be gracious and compassionate toward us no matter what we are or do.
He will be gracious and compassionate toward us because that’s the kind of father he is. He’s Abba, the intimate form, term, for Father in the Scriptures. We should never speak of losing the state of grace in this sense, for God never stops being gracious and faithful to us. His being gracious does not depend on us.
He will be unfailingly loving. In another book of his, he says this. It’s called Abba’s Child. It’s a short one. One of the most shocking contradictions in the American church is the intense dislike many disciples of Jesus have for themselves. They’re more displeased with their own shortcomings than they would ever dream of being with someone else’s.
They’re sick of their own mediocrity and disgusted by their own inconsistencies. I read a while back Karl Barth, a German theologian during World War II, brilliant theologian. He was analyzing Adolf Hitler’s view of God. I don’t know if you know this, I’ve said this before in a seminar I taught, but, Adolf Hitler, in his writings, talked about God a lot.
It was what caused the, the, the churches of Germany actually to be among some of his main supporters originally. He would have book burnings of pornographic books. He was a hero to the church. It was, it was people like Barnhofer and others, Karl Barth, that saw, you gotta look beyond the verbiage. But he always talked about God.
But interestingly, he always called God the same title. He called him the Almighty. Now, God is Almighty. But as Karl Barth said, Perhaps you recall how when Hitler used to speak about God, he called him the Almighty. But it is not the Almighty who is God. We cannot understand from the standpoint of a supreme concept of power who God is.
And he certainly was denying that God was that power. And the man who calls the Almighty God, misses God in the most terrible way. For the Almighty can be bad, as power in itself is bad. The Almighty can mean chaos and evil. The Almighty could be associated as the devil. We could not better describe and define the devil than by trying to think this idea of a self based free sovereign ability.
The reformer Martin Luther knew well how the, the, the fatherhood of God changes His concept of God he talked about how he said and he was a devout practicing quote Christian He was a monk. He was giving his life to the service of God, but he made this statement. He said I did not love, yes, frankly, I hated the righteous God who punished sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly, murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.
Luther goes on to talk about, it wasn’t until I understood. A God of compassion, a God of forgiveness, a God who says in Romans 1, in verse 17, where he talks about the just shall live by faith, not by their works. But then later in that passage, he talks about this God being for us. And he says many of us turn to transferring our affections to Mary and the saints, because it was them that we could love and to them that we would find ourselves praying.
So how can we be healed because here we are in the desert and he’s saying to people, you know you got lots of stuff going on lots of struggles lots of emptiness lots of conflict in your life and Most of all you’ve got conflict in you and he says you’re never gonna really be okay When you’re drinking at the wrong water source You’re never really going to fill up the the drought that you feel inside the thirst that My life is not how it ought to be.
It doesn’t mean you won’t have overt struggles and conflicts. I’m not saying that at all. But what I’m saying is, that internal anger, that internal turmoil, that internal stuff. He says, you gotta drink at the right cistern. He says, I’ve got to be central. And he says, sin is not so much, you did this, and you didn’t do this.
No, it’s that you turn and so you turn to all different as all kinds of things you live out because of that But he says ultimately you’re just not drinking at the right place You’re not allowing me to be the center of your life How did Jesus Christ make you and how does he make you what you have been trying to make yourself all these years?
First of all, he gave his life for you He accepts you who is rejected that you could be accepted. There is not another religion like this on earth. All religions say, do this, fail, and you’re out. Jesus Christ says, fail, and I will die for you. I will be here for you, and I will never leave you.
Today, as we start January 24th,
I think what God says to us is, turn away from these lover gods. Turn away from these other things you’re depending on, you’re obeying, you’re loving, and he says come to me Sin is not, you, you, you messed up, you did this, you, come on, come on You don’t really hear God speaking to your sin until you hear it in the voice of lament.
Until you hear it in the broken hearted mother who with, Augustine. His mother Monica would follow him around. At the time he was probably the most renowned philosopher in the world. He was just a brilliant, brilliant man. And he, and he probably slept with more women than anyone in his generation.
Every city, every place, he was into everything. And his mother would, would, would use her life savings and would follow him. and pray for him, plead with God for him. And eventually, when Augustine, Augustine was dramatically changed by the gospel of grace, he always pointed to his mother’s prayers. You don’t really see God until you see him in the mother’s heart of Monica, until you see the father looking at his prodigal and running out of his house.
Not a word of a rebuke rain, just. This is God. He is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him. He sees sin not ultimately as you didn’t get it right. He sees it as you turned from me. You spurned what I want to give to you. I mean, could there be any more powerful visual of God’s love than that the way He describes sin is adultery.
Adultery is pain. Adultery is loss. Adultery is rejection.
And all of that is sourced out of a partner who loves the person that has turned, turned from them. My greatest prayer for the people that are most close in my life, my greatest prayer for you as, as the church family that I am a part of,
is that you will find God the safest person in your life. You see that? The person you feel most comfortable with. The person you delight being with the most, because you know, I don’t know everything about God, hardly, but I know this. He’s crazy about me. When we begin to grasp that, we begin to say, Why in the world?
Would I choose this? Why in the world would I choose pornography? Why in the world would I choose these other addictive behaviors? I have this. I have him.
To me, that’s a bit of a dissection of sin, and I love what it shows me about God. Lord, we come to you this morning.
Lord, you’re the pursuing God because you’re a God of grace. God, how I pray.
That you would bring into our lives the things that are necessary to show us the emptiness of the things that we’re Holding on to so dearly that are keeping us from really drinking at your well God I trust you to do that and I ask you to do that only because I know that the alternative is to love in the the subhuman lives that we so often live in That our false idols offer to us, Lord, may we, we come to the, to the well
in Jesus name. Amen.
You guys can stand, we’re going to sing one more song.