If you turn in your scriptures
with me to Acts 28, we've come to the end of our
journey through this book. I'm trying to delay the end as
long as possible because there are so many delightful things
in here and I trust that there are some really significant things
the Lord might teach us This is the witness of this apostolic age
that we have recorded through the hand of the Holy Spirit by
Luke recording the activities of God, the activities of the
Lord Jesus Christ. These are the works of the Lord
Jesus Christ and he makes his witnesses and he takes his witnesses
to places where he will be glorified and his people will be brought
to faith. And so I thought we might read the last 11 verses
of Acts chapter 28 yet again. Paul, of course, is in Rome now
and he says in verse 19, he was constrained to appeal unto Caesar. And then he says in verse 20,
for this cause, therefore, have I called for you to see you and
to speak with you because that for the hope of Israel, I am
bound with this chain. And they said unto him, we neither
receive letters out of Judea concerning thee, neither any
of the brethren that came showed or spake any harm of thee. But
we desire to hear of thee what thou thinkest. For as concerning
this sect, this cult, this heresy, we know that everywhere it is
spoken against. And when they had appointed him
a day, there came many to him into his lodging, to whom he
expounded and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning
Jesus, both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets
from morning till evening. And some believed the things
which were spoken, and some believed not. And when they agreed not
among themselves, they departed after that Paul had spoken one
word. This is that word. Well spake
the Holy Ghost by Isaiah the prophet unto our father, saying,
Go unto this people and say, Hearing you shall hear, and shall
not understand, Seeing ye shall see, and not perceive. For the heart of this people
is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their
eyes have they closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and
hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should
be converted, and I should heal them. Be it known therefore unto
you that the salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and
that they will hear it. And when he had said these words,
the Jews departed and had great reasoning among themselves. And
Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house and received
all that came unto him. preaching the Kingdom of God
and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ
with all confidence, no man forbidding. What a glorious way the Acts
of the Apostles finish, and not only is it the end of the Acts
of the Apostles, it's actually the beginning in very much of
what lays the foundation for what will be the testimony of
the Church throughout the ages. The Church has a task, hasn't
it? The Church has a task, which is to expound and testify the
Kingdom of God, persuading them concerning the Lord Jesus Christ,
both out of Moses and out of the prophets. And we'll do it
to all who come. We'll do it to all who will hear.
And the end result is verse 24, isn't it? What a glorious thing. And some believed, and some believed
not. I want us, as we begin our time
together today, to see that wherever the gospel comes there is this
extraordinary division between people. And this is a division
that's between those in this particular situation who claim
to be worshippers of God, who claim to be zealous for the glory
of God, who claim to be those who will worship the Christ when
he comes. They are those who claim to be
obedient to the word of God and the commands of God. And as we
see, there is a division always. And I want us as we begin to
remember that the division is a division that God creates and
it's a division that grace makes. and that division does nothing
to hinder the responsibility of men for what they hear and
for whom they hear and for how they hear. I want us to see,
I want us to take careful note of the fact that when it says
that some believed, the tense of the verb is a passive. It's a passive It's an imperfect
passive indicative, if you want all the Greek details of it,
but nevertheless, if it's passive, then someone else is active.
Believing is the gift of God. It's a grace gift of God. Gift, faith, faith. comes by hearing and this by
the Word of God. It's a grace gift for you who
believe like Abraham did. For you who believe, all of the
glory goes to God for all of your believing. He creates the
believing. He provides the object of believing. He empowers the new life, a new
heart that believes. It means that passivity doesn't
cause for the child of God to be passive. Paul was made to
be what he was by the grace of God, but it didn't mean that
he was passive in his activities. And some believe not. And here
the verb tense is imperfect, Active, indicative. So unbelief
is an active activity of man, always, and it indicates that
there is always work. And so the great division in
the scriptures between them that believe and them that believe
not is the great difference throughout all the scriptures between grace
and works, between faith and law, between the works of man
in cooperation with God and the works of God, Alone. If you go down to verse 27 in
this passage that Lord Willing we might look at in the next
couple of weeks from Isaiah, the most quoted passage in the
New Testament. It's quoted six times in the
New Testament and obviously once in the Old Testament. Seven times
repeated, this passage in the Scriptures. But it says in verse
27 It speaks of the heart of these people as waxed gross,
and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed. Again, the tense of the verb
is extraordinary. I don't like to make people think
that without a knowledge of Greek they can't understand the scriptures.
As I keep reminding you, the Lord is able to speak English
very, very well indeed and he's able to make the words of his
spirit and life to his people. But nevertheless, it's an aorist
which is a completed activity and it's an active and it's indicative. When it says Their eyes have
they closed. They are active in closing them. They are active in closing them.
I trust that we might take heed to these things and be both warned
and be grateful to our God a space for revealing the object of faith,
for revealing the object of our hope. I wanted us today to spend
some time being reminded that these men who knew the Old Testament
so extraordinarily well, when Paul mentioned that word, as
he did in his interviews with the Jews on the previous two
occasions, when he speaks of the hope of Israel, they would
have known it just as we could recite the rest of the verse
in the beginning, or for God so loved, we can recite the rest
of the verse. The Jews were so well steeped
in the Old Testament scriptures, And it's a few distractions that
we have these days that when Paul spoke of the hope of Israel,
they knew exactly what he was talking about. They knew exactly
that he was referring to Jeremiah 14 and Jeremiah 17, and he was
referring to Joel 3, 16, and many other places. And Lord willing,
I would like us to go back to Jeremiah and consider the situation
of Jeremiah, because I think the situation of Jeremiah and
the situation of the people that to whom Paul is speaking are
so paralleled that if we miss it, we miss what God the Holy
Spirit is wanting to teach us as Acts comes to a close. So
that being said, we're going to sing again. Thank you, Tom. Paul received all that came to
him. In many ways the life of the
Apostle pictures so much of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ receive us. Sinful men make the message clear
and plain. Thanks Tom. Sinners Jesus will receive, Sound
this word of grace to all, Who the heavenly path may lead. All who linger, all who fall,
Sing it o'er and o'er again. Christ, receive His sinful man. Make the message clear and plain. Christ, receive His sinful man. Come and He will give you rest. Trust Him for His word is plain. He will take the sinful last. Christ received the sinful man. Sing it o'er and o'er again. Christ receiveth sinful men. Make the message clear and plain. Christ receiveth sinful men. Now my heart, condense me not. Pure before the law I stand,
He who cleansed me from all spot, Satisfied its last demand. Sing and o'er and o'er again,
Christ, receive the simple man. Make the message clear and plain,
Christ, receive a sinful man. Christ received this sinful man
Even me with all my sin Hurts from every spot and stain Heaven
with Him I answer in Sing it o'er and o'er again Christ received
this sinful man ? Make the message clear and plain ? ? Christ receive
the sinful man ? So if you turn with your scriptures
back to Jeremiah chapter 14, I just want to read these verses
to you so that you'll see something. I'd like us to go back and look
at some of the context of it. In Jeremiah chapter 14 verse
7, Jeremiah prays. He says, O LORD, though our iniquities
testify against us, Do thou it for thy name's sake, for our
backslidings are many. We have sinned against thee. One thing I want us to note right
at the very beginning is that the apostles and the prophets
throughout the Old Testament never put themselves above the
people that they were ministering to. They always owned the fact
that the sin of the nation was their sin as well. They never
stood above the nation and never stood above people and said,
I am better than them because of whatever I might have done.
And when Paul declares himself to be the chief of sinners, he's
not using hyperbole or exaggeration. It's actually what he really
knew himself to be. And so he is calling other sinners. We are but beggars who have found
bread. We are but wandering pilgrims
who found refuge in a wilderness. We have found a place to hide
from the storm. And it's all in the Lord Jesus
Christ and we're not above other people. It needs to be noted,
doesn't it? Because that's what religion
does and that's what the Jews had done. They had put themselves
above the people around them and above the Gentile dogs and
said, we're not like these other people. They go to the temple,
don't they? like the Pharisee did in Luke chapter 16 and say,
I thank you God, I thank you God that I'm not like these other
men. And I do this and I do this and
I do these things and I'm not like this dirty, filthy, public
and ugly. Jeremiah did not do that, neither did Daniel, neither
did Isaiah. He was a man of unclean lips
who lived among a people of unclean lips. We are but sinners. And we are but sinners saved
by grace. So the us and the we are real
statements from Jeremiah. And then verse 8, in the midst
of that, he says, O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof
in time of trouble, why shouldst thou be as a stranger in the
land and as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a
night? of Israel the Saviour. Turn with
me over to Jeremiah chapter 17. You might recall that Jeremiah
17.9 is one of those extraordinary well-known verses, and while
we're here we might just look at it. It says, The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, and who can
know it? He said earlier in verse 5, He
said, Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh
his arm, whose heart departeth from the Lord. And verse 7, he
says, So our hope is a person, and our great God is worthy of
hope. And our Lord Jesus Christ, as
we saw last week, hoped, and he hoped in the Word of God,
he hoped in the character of God, he hoped in the promises
of God, and he hoped perfectly. Our hope, like our faith and
like our love, is an extraordinary mixture and we need to be so
thankful that the Lord performed all that God requires from us. And he performed it perfectly
and he now sits in heaven gloriously representing his people. He says
in verse 12, A glorious high throne from the beginning is
the place of our sanctuary. He says, O Lord, the hope of
Israel All that forsake thee shall be
ashamed. They that depart from me shall
be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord,
the fountain of living waters. Back at the very beginning of
Jeremiah in chapter 2, he says that the people have committed
two evils, Jeremiah 2.13, for my people have committed two
evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain
of living waters, and hewed out cisterns, broken cisterns that
can hold no water. And I don't think it's for nothing
that later on in Jeremiah's life they were putting him into a
cistern that held no water but just held mud and dropped him
down there till the mud was up to his neck. And he had to, in
the mercy of God, be dragged out of it. There is, there is, in Jeremiah's
words, extraordinary picture of the prophet of God appealing
to the hope of Israel. And if you know the story of
Jeremiah well, you'll see that Jeremiah stood almost as one
man in Jerusalem. As Paul almost stood as one man
in Jerusalem some years beforehand and ended up in this prison and
ended up in Rome because of the words that he said in that place.
But Jeremiah stood as one man and he stood as one man declaring
the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to people who would listen
to him. He stood as one man as a watchman
upon the walls. And he stood as one man to a
people who were extraordinarily rebellious. If you go over to
verse 18, they had a hope. They had no hope, of course.
Verse 18, they said, and they said, verse 12 of Jeremiah, there
is no hope, but We will walk after our own devices
and we will everyone do the imagination of his evil heart. Let's remember the context. of Jeremiah, and for those who
know anything of the history of the Scriptures, there were
the most extraordinary promises made of God's destruction of
that nation Israel. In Deuteronomy 28 and 29 you
can read it. and read it with horror as the ultimate destruction
of those who turn against God, is that gentle women, gentle
soft-hearted women, will eat their babies and extraordinarily
not share them with their other people. Jeremiah is writing as
a watchman on the walls of Jerusalem, knowing what has been promised
by God, knowing what is around, and knowing something of what
lies ahead. And that, if you read the accounts
in Lamentations, is exactly what happened. Jerusalem was utterly
destroyed because of their apostasy, because of their rebellion And I don't have any doubt that
the Holy Spirit caused Paul, to use a phrase out of Jeremiah,
in reference to the Jews. And this, I might remind you,
is the last personal apostolic word to the Jewish nation that
we have in the scriptures. The next big event in Jewish
history was going to be the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And the
parallels between the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the
destruction of Jerusalem in 486 BC are so remarkably similar
that we do well to see the hand of God in both of them as a judgment
upon an apostate people. So Paul is speaking to these
Jewish leaders. leaders. We're now in Rome and
you might recall back in Acts chapter 18 that the Jews were
expelled from Rome and if the Jews were expelled from Rome
as Aquila and Priscilla had done, they were scattered, and most
of them were scattered back towards the east. And if they were scattered
back towards the east, they were scattered back to where Paul
had planted churches earlier. They were scattered to places
like Corinth. And when you went to Corinth as a devout Jew from
Rome, where would you go? The first Sabbath day you'd be
seen in the synagogue. And what was right next door
to the synagogue in Corinth? The church. And if you were a
devout Jew and you ended up in Ephesus or Philippi or Thessalonica
or Berea, you would have no doubt seen and heard of the testimony
of the Lord Jesus Christ. My point simply is that these
people, these Jewish leaders to whom Paul is speaking, are
not ignorant people. They're not ignorant of the Gospel.
They might be ignorant of the accusations made against Paul
and all we can do in terms of we must, I think in fairness
to them, accept their testimony that they hadn't heard and then
we must be thankful that the Lord has shut the mouths of people
so that Paul would have a witness there in Jerusalem. But these
are spiritual leaders of the people of the Jews in that particular
area. And Paul knew them, or knew of
them, and was known of them, and he knew exactly where they
stood. He knew exactly where they stood. He, like them, had the hope of Israel as something
in the future. In the big synagogue up just
around the corner from where Luz's mother lived in Sydney,
there's a huge synagogue. And if you go in there and across
this huge stone lintel, after you've just walked into the foyer,
is the great big sign carved into the stone. He is coming
soon. The Jews that are meeting today,
like these Jews there, were expecting the Messiah to come, and they
thought that both the Messiah that we know did come and Paul
met on the Damascus Road. They thought that he was a deceiver,
and they thought that all the apostles were deceived. See,
Paul had met the hope of Israel. He'd met the hope of Israel on
the Damascus Road, and all of a sudden, all of what he had
hoped for, he saw was actually fulfilled. So the Jews, the hope
of Israel was to come. The hope of Israel was going
to come as it had in Jeremiah's day. The remarkable thing about
Jeremiah is that Jeremiah not only prophesied and lived through
and witnessed the prophecies, his prophecies being fulfilled
in Jerusalem and Jerusalem was destroyed. was able in glorious ways to
proclaim the gospel. Jeremiah finishes with a sense
of great hope. He writes a letter to them in
Jeremiah 29 where he promises that after 70 years, after the
Sabbath, the Sabbaths that they had never kept are fulfilled,
the Lord would bring them back to that land. And so Jeremiah
is full of warning but full of hope, and the Jews had that same
hope. And if you remember from Acts 1, that's exactly the hope
that the apostles had. I love how the apostles were
extraordinarily ignorant, because I love how the fact that in their
ignorance they gave the Lord an opportunity to teach so many
extraordinary things. And so their question in Acts
1.6 is, will thou at this time restore
again the kingdom to Israel? And he says, in a way, he answers
their question and he doesn't answer their question. He says,
it's not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father
has put in his own power but you shall receive power after
the Holy Ghost has come upon you and you shall be witnesses
unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and
unto the uttermost part of the earth. You'll be witnesses unto
me. You'll be witnesses and that's what Paul is doing to these men.
He's witnessing the kingdom of God that's in the Lord Jesus
Christ. He is the king. He has a kingdom. See, for Paul, the hope of Israel
now reigned, and he was a prisoner, a prisoner of Christ, and he
was chained. He was chained because of the
hope. I'd love for us to be chained. I'd love for us to be chained
because of the hope. I'd love for us to be chained
to the hope of Israel. The Jews, we must remember, are
portrayed before us in the New Testament Scriptures and in the Old to give us pictures
of man's religion. Man's religion that has the Scriptures
in his hand. Man's religion that claims to
honour God. Man's religion that claims that
their works of righteousness are going to somehow merit them
and reward them with eternal life. They thought the kingdom of God
was going to be a kingdom in which they were going to be exalted
in their flesh, that they were going to reign and rule over
all their enemies and tread them under their feet. They thought
the kingdom was a physical kingdom. They thought that their hopes
were physical hopes. They had so little of what their
father Abraham claimed to see, didn't he? They had so little
of it. The point that I want us to lay
hold of today is that in Jeremiah's day, if you read Jeremiah and
Ezekiel and the other prophets that prophesied at that time,
is that the destruction of Jerusalem came about because of religious
idolatry. A religious idolatry that claimed
that the temple was a place of safety. They claimed that somehow
their heritage would keep them safe, that somehow they would
be protected. And if you read the accounts of Ezekiel
and Jeremiah, as we will, some of it in a little while, you'll
see that their rebellion against the word of God and the hardness
of their heart against the testimony of God against them and the wicked
idolatry was reprehensible in every way and they became fully
responsible for the destruction that came upon them. The Jews in Jeremiah's day were
cast out of Jerusalem because of idolatry. and they were returned. Their hope was fulfilled in a
sense because they were returned by a sovereign hand of God and
they were restored and Babylon was destroyed. The point that
I believe the Holy Spirit is teaching us is that the Jews
in the days of the Lord Jesus Christ And the Jews in the days
of the apostles were as apostate as the Jews
in Jeremiah's day. And the same destruction came
upon them. So their idolatry, their idolatry
was clothed with religious zeal. Their idolatry was clothed with
doctrinal purity. The Pharisees were extraordinarily
pure. Their idolatry was clothed with
morally upright lives. Their idolatry was clothed with
missionary zeal. They went and travelled across
land and sea, and the Lord Jesus Christ warned them in Jerusalem,
you travel across land and sea and you bring these Gentile pagan
idolaters back here and you make them twice the child of hell
that they were beforehand. Their idolatry was clothed with
legalistic righteousness. Their idolatry was clothed rejected the testimony. They
rejected the counsel of God, which was for their salvation.
Jeremiah had a word of salvation in his day. You flee. You flee to Babylon. You put
up the white flag. I'm a sinner. I deserve to be
cast out of here. I'm a sinner. You put up the
white flag and you go to Babylon and you'll be saved. And the
Lord says in Ezekiel that in Babylon he was a little sanctuary
for them. He was a sanctuary for them.
And the Lord Jesus Christ and the apostles are saying to the
Jews of their day, you flee to the refuge. You flee to the refuge. And that's exactly what happened
in Acts chapter 2 when Peter preached that great sermon. As
whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord, you are sinners.
You have the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ on your hand. God
has made this Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. whosoever shall call upon the
name of the Lord. You call upon him as a sinner.
You call upon him needing a refuge. You call upon him knowing that
without his mercy and his grace there is absolutely no hope for
you whatsoever. And the Lord cut them to the
heart. He cut their hearts. He wounded
them to the heart. The heart, as says Jeremiah,
is deceitful, above all things beyond cure. And the publican
beat on his heart when he was in the temple, saying, this is
the seat of my problems. And he says, God, you look upon
your son, and you look upon his sacrifice as you have promised,
and you be merciful to me. There was a refuge. There was a refuge. So religious, the point I believe
that we need to grasp hold of is that religious idolatry, religion
that claims to worship God, religion that claims to produce morally
transformed lives, religion that claims to have its doctrine Doctrinal
I's dotted and its T's crossed, and I don't want us to think
for one moment that doctrine doesn't matter because all doctrine
is a declaration of something of the character of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Paul was a doctrinal preacher. He persuaded them concerning
the Lord Jesus Christ. He was talking about the character
of God. So doctrine's not a little matter. But the reality is that
the Lord said, you honour me with your lips, and your hearts
are far from me. There are two hopes, aren't there? There's one hope that is yet
to be fulfilled, and there's one hope that has come. Our hope
has come and is fulfilled. that one hope that they had was
to see Jerusalem as a refuge. Instead of fleeing Jerusalem
in 486 BC, they stayed there and died in starvation and died
in the most appalling circumstances you can imagine. You read Lamentations
and you ought to be horrified. You read Josephus in 70 AD and
exactly the same thing happened. The Jews turned upon each other
and destroyed each other. And then when the Romans came,
they all joined hands together to stand against Rome. A million
people died. A million and 95,000 people died
in that city. And they fled there from all
over Palestine. And the history shows us that
the people, the Christians, all left. They heeded the warnings
of God and they all left. So Jerusalem, rather than being
a sanctuary and a refuge and a place of safety, became the
very place of destruction. Judgment begins at the house
of God. See, we have a refuge and it's
a person. We have a refuge, we have a city.
A city with foundations is builder and maker is God. We are the
children of God, are members and citizens of the Jerusalem
above and it's the mother of us all. It's the mother that
births us, it's the mother that nurtures us, it's the mother,
it's that glorious city that's going to come down adorned as
a bride, beautiful for her husband on that great day. That's our
refuge, isn't it? That's our city. One people have
a hope in what is seen. They had hope. They had hope,
these Jews that stood before Paul. They had hope in their
works and their obedience. Our hope is in heaven. Our hope
is in heaven. The other question that these passengers posed in Jeremiah
and in Acts call us to note is who speaks for God? Who speaks
for God in this world? Who speaks as God's representative? Who speaks as God's witness? Jeremiah in Jerusalem throw a rotten fruit at him.
You could put him in a cistern. You could abuse him in all sorts
of ways. He ended up down in Egypt, stoned
to death. Isaiah was put in a tree, a carob
tree it says, and he was sawn in half. The apostles were treated
appallingly. They were just men. And Paul describes himself It's
like Jeremiah. God creates his witness. If you
go back to Jeremiah chapter 1, it says in verse 5, there's verses of
this verse that you may well know. The word of the Lord came
to me saying, verse 5, before I formed thee in the belly, I
knew thee. which means that I was in a love,
covenantal relationship with thee. And before thou camest
forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee. It means he set him apart
for God's purpose and use. And I ordained thee a prophet
unto the nations. He was not just a prophet to
Jerusalem, he was a prophet unto the nations. And he said, Then
said I, Our Lord, behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say
not, I am a child, for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee,
and whatsoever I command thee, thou shalt speak. Be not afraid
of their faces, for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the
Lord. And then the Lord put forth his
hand and touched my mouth. You might recall Isaiah chapter
6, which Lord willing we might look at in the next few weeks.
Put forth his hand and touched my mouth and the Lord said unto
me, behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. Galatians chapter
one, Paul declares that he has a gospel that came directly from
God. He says in verse 10, For do I
now persuade men, or God, or do I seek to please men? For
if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. But I certify you, brethren,
that the gospel which was preached to me is not after man. He didn't
learn this from the schools of theology in Jerusalem. He didn't
learn it at the apostles' feet. He learned it directly from God.
For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it,
but by revelation of Jesus Christ. See, all human pride and wisdom
is put down because we receive by revelation. We always receive. Whatever we know, we know because
God has taught it. This is one of the most comforting
passages in all the scripture that the Lord promises. They
will all be taught of God. they'll be taught of God. He says, verse 13, For you have
heard of my conversation in time past in the Jewish religion,
how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God and wasted
it. and profited in the Jews' religion above many my equals
in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions
of my fathers. But, this is salvation, but when
it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and
called me by His grace to reveal His Son in me. No wonder he'd say in Colossians
1.27, Christ in you is the hope of glory. To reveal his Son in
me that I might preach him among the heathen. Immediately I conferred
with flesh and blood. He didn't need to confer with
flesh and blood. The question is who speaks for
God? Paul makes much of God's call
upon his life, as does Jeremiah and as do all of the other prophets.
And God's servants speak. speak because they've believed. They speak because God has been
a witness to who he is to them. God makes their lives a witness
to his word, to his grace and his glory. He makes their lives
a witness to his people. He makes their lives a witness
to the nation as he read. And God makes his servants to
know their weakness, the weakness of their flesh and their frailty.
And God makes their enemies to know their weakness in the flesh. You can dismiss the prophet of
God and walk away from him and his testimony without blinking
an eye, naturally. They heard God speaking these
Jews. They heard and they saw incarnated
God. They saw the Old Testament prophets
lived out before them. He was a living, breathing, working,
testifying Old Testament scriptures laid out before the people of
Israel for three and a half years. They could put him before them
and who he was. They could say of
him that he was possessed of a devil. The point is, of course,
that God reveals himself to his people by revelation, and that
revelation comes through the means that cause men to be most
humble. They know their weakness, But
as we'll see in Jeremiah, he says, God makes them a brazen
war. They'll fight against thee and
they'll not prevail. Ezekiel is told that God will
make his forehead as hard as adamite stone. And you will be
living amongst a people who will be like thorns and briars. And
you just stand there and you say, this is who God is. This
is what God says. You stand as a watchman on the
walls and a watchman on the walls can see what has gone on in the
past and sees the hand of God. He can see what is around and
he can see over the horizon and beyond what other people can
see. That doesn't mean that he's exalted in any way possible.
It just means that he believes what God says. That's what Jeremiah
did. He believed what God said. God
had promised in Deuteronomy. He promised hundreds of years
beforehand exactly what he was going to do. He'd promised and
he'd warned these people through Isaiah and all the other prophets
and Micah. They'd been warned and warned
and warned. Jeremiah didn't have to come up with something new.
He was saying this is what God has said and this is what God
must do because he has promised it. They don't need special insight,
although at times they are given it in remarkable words. God's
words to them are a burden. Jeremiah is called the weeping
prophet. All of God's people are weeping
over what they see around them. Please, I pray the Lord may not
let you stand above what's happening in the idolatry of this world. live in a world which is progressively
getting more and more apostate and more and more under the judgment
of God, as God in a sense hides himself in plain sight from people. You might recall, I want you
to recall the words that Ezekiel records for us of these angels
in Ezekiel chapter 9 as Jerusalem is about to be destroyed and
with the most appalling destruction coming upon it. And these destroying angels are
sent. In verse 4 of Ezekiel 9, he said,
And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city,
through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads
of the men that sigh and cry for all the abominations that
are done in the midst thereof. God's people sigh and cry. The religious self-righteous
see themselves as above and better. God's words bring a heaviness. They come as a burden. Throughout
the Old Testament we read of the burden of the word of the
Lord came to such and such a prophet. There is a heaviness in this
judgment. But God's words to them, as they
are to all of God's children, are light in darkness. And God's
words to his servants are that they are, as Jeremiah is instructed,
to take the precious from the vile. You take the precious words
of God and you separate them from the idolatrous notions that
people have in their own imaginings of who God is. God's words reveal
grace promised and grace delivered in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jeremiah
has the most extraordinarily comforting words to record, hasn't
he, of who God is and what he does. He records them for us
in that passage in Jeremiah 31 that speaks of the eternal covenant
of God, that they'll know him and he'll be with them and he'll
be their God. He declares that salvation is
so completely fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ in Jeremiah
50 that he says that the sins and iniquities of Israel will
be sought for and they won't be found. They won't be found
because the Lord Jesus Christ has taken them away completely.
So in the midst of the darkness there is the glory of the grace
of God. And God's servants speak God's words and leave God
to deal with the response of them. They are, as we've said
earlier, they are ambassadors. And the king takes responsibility
for the message. The king takes responsibility
for the life of the messenger. And the king takes full responsibility
for the response to the message. And so Jeremiah is told in Jeremiah
48 verse 10, He says, Cursed be that he that doeth the work
of the Lord deceitfully, and cursed be he that keepeth back
his sword from blood. He's told in 26 verse 2, he says,
You are not to diminish your word. You don't diminish a single
word. You have heard my words, you
just say them as they are. We just declare what God says. So that was the question that
was put before these Jews and it was put before them for three
and a half years in the Lord's ministry. It was put before the
Jews wherever Paul went and wherever the apostles went. Who do you
believe? Who do you believe? Who speaks
on God's behalf? Is Jerusalem, as the Jews did
in 70 AD, is Jerusalem the safest place on this earth? where the
presence of God is going to protect people, or is that Jerusalem
the most dangerous place that you could ever wish to be on
planet Earth? The differences are not minor,
are they? The differences are life and
death. So the watchman stands, as Paul
did, he says, therefore knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade
men, which is what he did to these people here. A glorious
thing, isn't it, that some believed. Some believed. Some of them.
They had been rebels for years. They had rebelled against all
the evidence. All the evidence of the Scriptures.
And yet, for some of these Jews, this was a day of mercy. So God's
watchmen stand and they blow the trumpet and they issue a
warning, don't they? They say, flee to the refuse,
flee to the refuse. They blow the trumpet. They blow the jubilee trumpet
of that glorious jubilee in the Lord Jesus Christ. They blow
the trumpet. to battle for the Lord's people,
to stand and be counted in this day of apostasy and rebellion
against God. Just stand, just stand by the
grace of God. You flee to the refuge and you
lay hold of the hope which we have as an anchor for the soul. Who speaks for God? Who do you follow? We are not
honoured by being declared sheep. We are flock animals and we live
in a world now where the word of God believed, the testimony
of God believed is as rare as it was in Jeremiah's day. When the Lord says that of the
faithful witnesses is just one in a thousand. There are many,
many voices in this world claiming to speak for God, aren't there?
There's a church that meets here as soon as we finish each Sunday,
and they claim to speak for God. They claim that they are the
true and faithful witnesses of who the Lord Jesus Christ is
and how he saves sinners. He saves sinners by free will. He saves sinners by their works
he causes. Anyway, I don't like to talk
about the apostasy of it. I did have opportunity to speak
to him because he stands before people claiming to be God's representative. And we claim as a church to stand
here and say, this is who God is. This is how God saves sinners. This is what the scriptures declare
about the Lord Jesus Christ and his salvation. So as we close this, I want us
to remember that Paul is led of God to quote three Old Testament
prophets, Isaiah at the finish. I love what Isaiah's name means. It means Jehovah has saved. When did Jehovah save? Jehovah
saved before the foundation of the world. When did Jehovah save?
Jehovah saved all of his people in the Lord Jesus Christ when
he died on Calvary Street. Jehovah saves when he reveals
himself to people in their rebellion and he plucks them out of religion
which he did to the Apostle Paul and he did to some of these rebellious
Jews that stood before him. Jehovah has saved. Jeremiah's
name means the Lord shall exalt or the Lord be exalted. That's exactly what happened
in Jeremiah's life. He just declared the word of
the Lord and the Lord was exalted. And Jeremiah was one of the very
few prophets that lived to see his prophecy fulfilled before
his eyes. Most of them are looking over
the horizon at something and holding on to it by faith, but
knowing that because it's God's word, it's true whether we see
it or not. And Joel, Joel's name means Jehovah
is God. is God. What extraordinary grace there
is in believing. What extraordinary gift it is
to have God's witness speak to us. We don't want our testimony
to be anything other than Paul's testimony. We don't want our
testimony and the things that we say and do to be anything
different. We just We wait and hope. And here's
Paul at the end of what has been, in many ways, a remarkable journey
and so often a discouraging journey. And some believed. Isn't that
wonderful? And some believed. Some believed. Okay, may the Lord bless this
word to our hearts. We'll come back and look at Jeremiah. Let's
have a break and stretch our legs.