There we go. If you'd open your
Bibles to the 30th chapter of Jeremiah, Jeremiah chapter 30. We will start reading at verse
18. This is what the Lord says, I
will restore the fortunes of Jacob's tents and have compassion
on his dwellings. The city will be rebuilt in her
ruins and the palace will stand in its proper place. From them
will come songs of thanksgiving and the sound of rejoicing. I
will add to their numbers and they will not be decreased. I will bring them honor and they
will not be disdained. Their children will be as in
days of old and their community will be established before me. I will punish all who oppress
them. Their leader will be one of their
own. Their ruler will arise from among
them. I will bring them near, or excuse
me, I will bring him near, and he will come close to me. For
who is he who will devote himself to be close to me, declares the
Lord. So you will be my people and
I will be your God. See, the storm of the Lord will
burst out in wrath, a driving wind swirling down on the heads
of the wicked. The fierce anger of the Lord
will not turn back, until he fully accomplishes the purposes
of his heart. In days to come, you will understand
this. Now, verse 23 is our theme for
this morning, excuse me, verse 22. So you will be my people, and
I will be your God. What do these words mean? Well,
these words do not indicate that God would not be the God of his
people until a future date, or that they would not be his people
until a future time. Rather, it's simply saying that
the time will come when he makes it very obvious that he is their
God and they are his people. Objectively, and I use that word
a lot, objectively, When we say, you know, objectively, that something's
objectively true, what we're meaning is it's a fact that's
outside of ourselves. It has nothing to do or does
not depend on our subjective experience of it. Actually, we
live in a time where it seems that the dominant philosophy
is that there is no such thing as objective truth. That is,
truth that is unaffected by how I respond to it. And so they think that all truth
is subjective. And that's why they'll say such
things if you make a declaration. Say you made a statement like,
salvation is in Christ and Christ alone. Someone might respond,
well, that's your truth. No, it's just truth. It's just truth. And so, objectively, this is
objectively true. There has never been a time when
God's people were not his people and when God was not their God. In fact, if you just turn over
here to the third verse, of chapter 31. Chapter 31, verse 3. The Lord
appeared to us in the past saying, I have loved you with an everlasting
love. I have drawn you with loving
kindness. Notice that. He says, I've loved
you with an everlasting love. Now, we have noted before that
When it talks about God doing something everlastingly, it doesn't
mean for just an infinite amount of time. It's talking about the
fact that in his essence, God doesn't even exist in time and
space. He's outside that framework.
So his love didn't have a starting point. And it doesn't have an
ending point. And I like that. He says, I've
loved you with an everlasting love. And in a sense, he's saying
the love that I bear to you now, it's already been from everlasting
and it shall go on to everlasting. Now, we don't have a good way
to talk about eternity and try to fit our experience within
eternity because we, you know, Human language just doesn't know
how to deal with things in eternity. But God's love is unaffected. It's objectively true. It's unaffected,
not only by how we respond to it, but even it's unaffected
by what happens within the framework of time and space. In fact, so
far as our salvation is concerned, the matters of time and space
are made subject to God's love for His people. All the works of God's grace
towards His people are at one place or another in the Scriptures,
cast within eternity. If you look at Ephesians chapter
1, I remember in my first year of
Bible school, and it was a free will Bible school, and the guy
that was the dean of the school was fiercely free will. And he did everything he could
to somehow or another make our salvation dependent on something
we do. But he was teaching through the
book of Ephesians, or trying to. For the first three days of this
class on Ephesians, he started this first chapter over again.
And once I came to understand what this chapter means, I understand
why he couldn't find a way to teach it. Because he could not
fit what this scripture says into a framework of free will.
But it says here in verse four of Ephesians chapter one, he
chose us in him before the creation of the world. Now, how long have I been chosen? Well, my election did not have
a beginning in time and space. Rather, it is out there in the
timeless eternity of God's existence. So there's never been a time
when I was not chosen. And then it says, and you can
look over to Revelation 13. And what we're showing is that God's
works of grace towards his people, all of them at one point or another
are cast within eternity in the scriptures. And so it says here
in Revelation 13 verse 8, all inhabitants of the earth will
worship the beast, all whose names have not been written in
the book of life belonging to the lamb that was slain from
the creation of the world. Now we know that about 2,000
years ago, our Lord Jesus was crucified. There was a time and
there was a place in which that event happened. Yet the scriptures
also speak of this event as being an eternal thing. Something from
that timeless, spaceless existence of God. So there never has been a time
when God's people did not have a substitute in the presence
of God. There's never been a time when there was not a sin offering
in the presence of God. Now, the things that God has
purposed and done, and we talk about him purposing these things
in eternity, For God to purpose a thing, it is for him to do
it. So these things that he purposed and did in eternity, they will
also find a corresponding version of them within the framework
of time and space. However, they are eternal things. And then look back at Romans
chapter eight. Romans chapter 8. We'll begin with verse 28. We know quite well, and we know
that in all things God works for the good of those who love
him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God
foreknew. Now, that's an eternal action. Some people read about God's
foreknowledge of his people and act as though it's him foreknowing
what they would do. Freewhellers try to explain election this way. God
chose those that he foresaw would believe. And they get that from
where Peter says that we're elect according to the foreknowledge
of God. But this knowledge, it's not knowledge about what we would
do, it's knowledge of us. So this, where it says that those
God foreknew, that's set in opposition or in contrast to when our Lord
talks about in the day of judgment, there are some to whom he will
say, I never knew you. Well, the Lord has always known
everything about everybody. So obviously when he's talking
about knowledge of people, he's not talking about simply knowing
what they would do. God's eternal decree is not based
upon him, you know, with those special binoculars of his looking
down through time and seeing what we would do. So those he
foreknew, so this is already casting this verse or two, these
couple of verses, casting them back into the eternity of God. Those he foreknew, he also predestined
to be conformed to the likeness of his son. Now I've heard some
preachers refer to old eternity. meaning eternity before time.
And then I guess the contrast would be new eternity, which
starts afterwards. But really, eternity's not like
that. The best I can try to picture it in my mind is time is just
this bubble floating around in eternity. But we kind of have to think in a
linear way. And so what he's done here, what
Paul has done here is spoken of things concerning his grace. It says, for those he foreknew,
as we're able to perceive it, that's in eternity before time
began. That he predestined, where am
I at now? Okay, he also predestined to
be conformed to the likeness of his son. Now, that takes us
to the far end of time. A predestination is not about
your destination being determined ahead of time. It's your destiny. So, way back yonder, in eternity
past, God knew a people And he determined
their destiny as this, to be conformed to the image of his
son. Now for every believer here,
for every one of the elect of God here, whether or not you
have yet believed, but here's your destiny. It's how you're
going to end up. You are going to be made like
the Lord Jesus Christ. Now the others, everyone else
is just gonna be left to what they are. They will be forever
in sin and rebellion against God. Forever in their corrupt
and fallen state. But God ordained something different
for his chosen people, for those he foreknew. And then look at
verse 30. And those he predestined, and
let me make this little note here. If you read this in Greek,
every one of these verbs is in the same tense, and it's called
the aorist tense, which always refers to something done, you
know, just, they call it punctiliar action. You know, like you might
say, well, I mowed the grass. And that's the closest in English
we can come to the aorist tense. And what it means is, at some
point, you did something. And that's it, you know, just
this one-time thing. Well, all of these are in that tense, and
that kind of bundles them all together in a singular act of
God. All these things were done all
at once. We read them in a succession,
and we might think that God did these things in a succession,
but in truth, because God dwells outside of time, all of these
things were done, for lack of a better way to put it, at the
same time. Now here in verse 30, those he
predestined, he also called. Now that's strange. We think
of God's calling of his people to happen at some point in their
lives. It does. But it also happened
in eternity. The work of the Spirit, the work
of the Father in election, is in eternity, Christ's sacrifice
for God's elect in eternity, the calling of God's elect in
eternity. And those he called, he also
justified. The justification of God's people
is an eternal thing. And those he justified, he also
glorified. He said, well, I don't feel very
glorified right now. In God's sight you are. From God's perspective, every
one of his people is glorified. So all these works of grace are
cast in eternity, but what God has done in eternity, he always
brings to pass in time. The time is coming when God will
make his eternal works evident within the framework of our existence. Now, I believe that in what's
commonly called the Lord's Prayer, that's what he means by thy kingdom
come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The word translated be done,
And it's the same word in Matthew and in Luke, both places where
the Lord's prayer is recorded. The word that's translated done
is the word quite often used to refer to birth or creation. In other words, what I believe
that that prayer is actually saying, thy kingdom come, and
here's how the coming of God's kingdom is described, your will
be realized on earth as it's already realized in heaven, heaven being where God is, timeless,
spaceless, eternity of God. And all these things there with
God, they're done. But what is done in heaven will
be done on earth. He will carry it out here within
our experience. Let us not fall into the trap
of mixing the eternal and the temporal in our reasoning. Some
want to emphasize the eternality of God's works of salvation to
such a degree they make the events of time insignificant. They follow the principle of
whatever will be, will be, whether it ever happens or not. That's
not how it is. What God has ordained will be,
that's for sure, but it's going to happen too. Some have said that God's people
were never under the wrath of God. And they get this from saying
things like, you know, that since they were chosen in Christ back
in eternity, since Christ died for them back in eternity, you
know, all of this was all wrapped up before time even started.
So we've never been. God's people have never been
under the wrath of God. The trouble is this flies right
in the face of the scriptures that speaks of the one who believes
as having passed from death unto life. So when we're reading the scriptures
and we read about eternal things, And then we read about things
happening in time. Understand this. Don't try to
mix them and then draw some kind of conclusion based on human
logic. Rather just keep it in mind. From God's perspective, all of
this is already done. It's already realized. But all
of this will want to be realized within the framework of time.
And others emphasize God's gracious works within the flow of time
to such a degree they deny any significance to the eternality
of those works. For example, they go so far as
to deny God's sovereign election. And they make the fact that he
chooses people dependent on something that happens in time. Like I
said, there's never been a time I wasn't elect, but there was
a time when God made my election known to me. So when it says, and we can go
back to Jeremiah 30 now, when it says, Let me find out. Verse 22. So you will be my people and
I will be your God. He's not acting as though those
things have not always been true. He's saying the time will come
when I will make it known to you and to everybody else. You are my people and I am your
God. You see, Jeremiah was writing
this just as Israel and Judah, both, they had been dispossessed of their lands. And many of them were in captivity
in Babylon. And from their perspective at
that time, I mean, their temple was in ruins. Everything they
knew regarding their religion had been destroyed. And so far
as they could tell, they were no longer the people of God.
No longer the people of Jehovah. And Jehovah was no longer their
God. Now, that's how it looked. But
he says, the time is coming when I'll bring you back. And you
will be my people. It'll be obvious, you are my
people and I will be your God. Also, notice the order here.
When he says, so you will be my people, that's him making
a declaration about them. It's not them saying, we are
the Lord's people. See, this always comes first.
Before we ever acknowledge God, the God of Scripture, before
we really ever acknowledge that He is our God, He first reveals
to us that we are His people. The Scriptures say, We are his people, it is he that
has made us. Meaning that he that has made
us a people, not talking about creation there, speaking of he
has made us a people. He made us his people and not
we ourselves. And he revealed that to them. So the first thing is, that is
so far as our experience of the grace of God going through the
flow of time here, the first experience of the grace of God
is Him revealing Himself to us saying, you are my people. That, I'm gonna go out on a limb here,
I think I know where this is, Isaiah 43. Yeah, verse one. But now, Isaiah 43, one, but
now, this is what the Lord says, he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel, fear not, for I have redeemed
you, I have summoned you by name, you are mine. So as God begins to do his works
of grace in our experience, within the flow of our experience, the
first thing is he speaks to us and he says, you are mine. See, it's he that calls us. Yeah,
we'll call on him, but we do that in response to him calling
us, summoning us and saying, you are mine. After that. Once he summons us,
once he says, you are my people. Then we respond. saying, you
are our God. And that's why the Lord put them
in this order. So you will be my people and I will be your
God. You'll call on my name. See,
that's one reason they were in captivity. They began calling
on other gods. Their disobedience against their
God had become so grievous that they were calling on other gods. And so he treated them as though
they weren't his people and he wasn't their God. It was not
for the purpose of extracting a price from them. It was for their instruction,
for their discipline. And he sent them away like that.
He said, but the time is coming. I will reveal to you, you are
my people and you will understand that I am your God and you will
confess it. Now, we who believe, this has
already happened to us in our life. The thing is, our salvation, we might say,
is only half done. That is, God working the benefits
of the work of Christ in us is only half done. Our spirit has
been revived. Our body is the same thing it
always was. So we're in a constant state of inner conflict about
these matters of being his people and he being our God. We stand
in doubt of His grace toward us. Some days we're perfectly
convinced of it, some days we're not convinced at all, and then
everything in between, because we're in this halfway stage of
salvation. The day's coming when it won't
be halfway anymore. And see, right now, believers,
they call upon the name of the Lord. But is it not true? that we also call upon the name
of money, which Paul says covetousness is idolatry. In other words,
we don't call upon the name of our Lord perfectly. We don't
call him our God and live like he's our God to perfection. But the blessed truth is a day
is coming when both of these things will be known to us in
absolute perfection without a shadow of a doubt and without one failure
in us calling upon His name. We will know with all the certainty
that can be known that we are His people. We'll be right there
in His presence. We will be gathered around the
throne of God, around the throne of Christ. One people, one body,
one Lord, one faith. We'll see it right there. We'll
experience that. And in response to that experience,
we will call Him our God with perfection, without the least
mixture. of all of our fleshly attractions
to idolatry and works religion and self-righteousness. Well, what are the things that
lead up to this? Well, going back to verse 18,
this is what the Lord says, I will restore the fortunes of Jacob's
tents and have compassion on his dwellings. The city will
be rebuilt on her ruins and the palace will stand in its proper
place. Now, I like the way the Lord
put this. He said, I will restore the fortunes of Jacob's tents. Now, what does a tent indicate? Out there, northeast of town,
Bonnie and I have a house. We do not have a tent. Now, we have slept in a tent. I think once we went camping
with our family and used a tent, never again. But we did it once,
learned our lesson. Do you know something? We slept
in that tent. Actually, when we were out in
the Black Hills, right there, by Mount Rushmore, and that's
why we were there. We wanted to see that. We enjoyed
our time there, but we didn't call that place home. Abraham the Hebrew, and from
what I understand, that word Hebrew means a tent dweller.
Now there were cities around him, and he could have gone into
any one of them, built himself a house. But instead he was a
tent dweller. He moved around. He was a nomad. And what did that indicate? That
even though God had given him a promise of that land, he knew
that that land as a natural reality was not really his home. So he
constantly lived in tents. It said he sought a city with
foundations whose builder and maker is God. Well, see, that's the life of
a believer. So the Lord says, I will restore the fortunes of
Jacob's pence. Well, many times we get caught
up in the things of this world, we get distracted from the things
of God, and then we suffer as a result. And it's God's disciplining
hand, and sometimes we might say it's just the natural consequences
of going the wrong way. You know, if you're standing
on the curb and then you step out right out in front of a car
that's going really fast and you get hit and get killed, well,
you getting killed wasn't a judgment of God, it's just the result
of doing the wrong thing. And you know, the things that
God has taught us to do, the things that our Lord has taught
us to do, they have benefit in the doing of them simply because
that's the way human beings were designed to live. And just like,
you know, when you buy a car, the manufacturer is going to
give you recommendations, change the oil ever so often. It's not
a law. You can ignore the oil. You can
never change it if you want. What's going to happen? Car is
going to fall apart. You're going to have to get work
done on it. Well, some of the same kind of thing goes on in
this life. The Bible says the way of the transgressor is hard.
If we lived as our Lord calls upon us to live, we would find
that our lives, our experience of this life, would be much more
enjoyable. But nonetheless, back to this.
Restore the fortunes of Jacob's tents and have compassion on
his dwellings, our Lord He's testifying to us that we
are his people. And our acknowledgment of him
as our God goes right along with us realizing we are not citizens
of this world. We are living in tents. And Paul referred to our bodies
as a tent, a tent. we'll eventually get our eternal
dwelling. But for now, we dwell in tents.
And I know this, no matter how good the tent is, it eventually
wears out. And you're probably noticing
your tent is wearing out. But he blesses Jacob's tents. Even now, you and I are blessed
of God. Even now, we find our soul restored
day after day after day. For he comes to those and reveals
himself to those who recognize that this world is not their
home. He comes to those who live in tents, hoping and longing
for the day. when they will enter the city
with foundations, whose builder and maker is God. But then it
says, the city will be rebuilt on her ruins and the palace will
stand in its proper place. Now, the city it's speaking of
is Jerusalem. And the palace, of course, would
have been the residence of the king. Well, why aren't these
in tents? Well, because God's temple God's
city, the real one, and God's king, they're eternal. That's
the city with foundations. And that's the throne that will
not be moved. Well, what's the result then
of God's blessings? Verse 19, from them, who? Those who've been restored. Those
upon whom God has had compassion, from them will come songs of
thanksgiving, this is verse 19, and sounds of rejoicing. If God is good to us, if he makes
himself known to us, and speaks to us in ways that make us realize
we are his people, and we respond, you are our God, And this works
in us, songs of thanksgiving and the sound of rejoicing. And
then what happens? I will add to their numbers and
they will not be decreased. Now, in former times, God had
added to their numbers, the nation had grown, but then it was sharply
decreased. But all of this is happening
under the auspices of a new covenant. And in that covenant, he says,
I will add to their numbers and they will not be decreased. That
immediately reminded me of that passage in Acts, where it says,
and the Lord added to the church daily. Daily. And God adds to his church. and never takes any away from
it. Now we might add somebody to
our church, and then later they're not part of our church. Because our visible church, our
congregation here, you know, membership in it, we pretty much,
if somebody tells us they believe, we take their word for it, we
can't see their heart. Sometimes people say they believe
in a religious excitement. They get caught up in, they say,
I believe. We say, okay, they're baptized,
they're part of the church and everything. And then the time
comes when they no longer walk with us. They no longer profess
this same gospel. Maybe they don't, maybe they
don't profess to believe anything. Well, those are removed from
the church. But when God adds someone to
his church, They are never removed because God adds people to his
church by a work of his, not by a work of theirs. He says, I will bring them honor
and they will not be disdained. We may resist the idea that we
will ever have any honor because we rightly say this, we're not
worthy of it. But here it does not say, I will
reward them with the honor they deserve. He says, I will bring
them honor. I will honor them out of my own
sovereign will. And I will honor, we might say
this word honor also means to glorify. And therefore he is
saying, I will glorify them, and I will glorify them with
a glory that cannot be denied. You know, in this world, the
world has no respect for Christ or his people. God's people are
disdained in this world. But he says, I will give them
an honor. And not even the world will be
able to disdain them. In my mind, I look to the day,
the last day, when the Lord returns, divides the sheep from the goats.
And there, all of his elect, redeemed, called, there they
stand. They have been brought to the
goal, so to speak, that destiny to which God appointed them.
They are like the Lord Jesus Christ. And the rest of the world is
going to stand there and look at them, and they're going to
have to acknowledge they are glorious. Because of the way the gospel
was preached in the church of my youth, we always thought of
hell in terms of fire. And we were simply, you know,
everybody wants to escape hell, nobody wants to get thrown in
a fire, you know? And so that was their goad to get people
to make a profession of faith. As I came to understand the gospel
more clearly, I became less and less concerned
with avoiding flames. than I did with missing out on
this wonderful, indescribable blessing of being made like Christ. If I were among the lost on that
day, and I'm standing there in my own wretchedness, And I'm
beholding the glorious people of God. If God were to say, all
right, all you unbelievers, look, I'm not going to send you to
hell after all. No fire, no flame, no torment. You just got to stay
like you are for all eternity. I would still be horribly, horribly
disappointed to have missed being that. Their children will be as in
days of old, and their community will be established before me." This is not saying that the children
of believers will be believers. The children of God's people
are those who come to Christ through their ministry. Spiritual children have been
born in this church. We have been blessed over the
years to see those who are dead in trespasses and sins being
born again by the Spirit of God. That's the children being spoken
of here. I will punish those who oppress them. And here's where I wanted to
spend a lot of time, but not gonna be able to. Maybe I'll
do a follow-up next week. but I'll briefly mention it and
then we'll be done. Verse 21, their leader will be one of their
own and their ruler will arise from among them. I will bring
him near and he will come close to me. For who is he that will
devote himself to be close to me? That word leader can mean
their majestic one, their glorious one, their radiant one, something
like that. The ruler, the authority, and
it says it will be one of their own. Now, at the time that this
was written, they were in a foreign land, and their ruler, their
high and mighty one, was a Gentile, Nebuchadnezzar. Their ruler,
he was not one of them, but he's saying the times come when one
will rise from among them. And for the church of the Lord
Jesus, their glorious one, their majestic one, is one of them. And this is a miracle of divine
grace. God is our ruler and our leader,
and yet God has made himself to be one of us. He was born
among us. A human being, the Word was made
flesh and made His dwelling among us. He rose up among us. And
the book of Hebrews puts it this way, that He was made in all
things like His brethren, that He might be a faithful high priest,
that He might call them brothers. We don't have a high priest who
is untouched by the feelings of our infirmities, but one who
is tested in every point just like us. What a blessed thing to think
of, brethren, that the one who sits on heaven's throne is one
of us, a human being who knows us thoroughly. And he says, I will bring him
near and he shall come close to me. He will approach me. Now
two things, or he's combining two things here now. He speaks
of the ruler, the king. Jesus Christ is our king. He's
king of kings and lord of lords. And yet he talks about someone
who approaches him. Who approaches God? A priest. A priest. Now we only read of
one natural man who is a king and a priest, and that's Melchizedek. He was King of Salem and Priest
of the Most High God. And it says our Lord's priesthood
is like Melchizedek's. Of course, it's much more glorious
than Melchizedek's, but the Lord Jesus is the King of Peace, which
is what King of Salem means. And he says King of Righteousness,
and that's what the name Melchizedek means. But here's the thing,
our king is also our priest. The one who rules over us is
one in the same with the one who devoted himself, who sanctified
himself. That's the word he used in John
17. For their sakes, I sanctify myself. He set himself apart
to be the priest and the sacrifice necessary to fix our soul's problems. to justify us in the sight of
God. And when we see that, when we see Christ, our priest-king, king-priest,
Savior and Lord, then we know we are His people. And then we
call upon Him and say, You are our God. And what a blessed peace
rests upon the soul of him who can say with confidence, I am
his and he is mine. Heavenly Father, bless your word
as only you can. We can preach it, but only you
can make it powerful to the hearts of those who hear. Blessed be
your name. Blessed be your name that you
made us your people. Blessed be Your name that You
worked in us so that we called You our God. Continue this work
in us until the day.