If you want to follow along in
the Bible, just turn back again to Jeremiah chapter 45. Now, to provide you with some
context about this particular portion
of Scripture, Baruch was Jeremiah's secretary. In fact, you might
consider him Jeremiah's valet, his right-hand man. Jeremiah
was a prophet. He spent his time in meditation
and prayer and preaching and writing. When he was writing, I say writing,
he was generally speaking dictating to Baruch and Baruch wrote it
down. If Jeremiah had handwriting,
anything like mine, you'll know why Baruch was writing it down. It was so other people would
be able to read it. I believe Baruch also tended
to Jeremiah's other needs. In other words, he did the common
work, the more or less unnoticed work necessary to help Jeremiah
with the work that God had given Jeremiah to do. In Jeremiah chapter
36, Jeremiah dictated some words
to Baruch, and he wrote them down. And then Jeremiah said,
you take that to Jerusalem, and you read it to the king. Now,
these were not nice words. These were words of judgment,
words of destruction. And so Baruch went to the temple
and read it aloud there. And then some who were there
went and told some of the king's attendants. And so the king's
attendants called on Baruch and Baruch went there and they said,
read it. And so he read it to them and
they said, give us that scroll. And so he handed him the scroll,
they rolled it up and laid it aside and Baruch went on his
way. But later someone told the king,
There's something you need to hear. And they brought that scroll
into the king and read it in his presence. And the king was
very angry. So angry, he determined that
he would get rid of Jeremiah. You know, that has been the lot
of God's prophets all throughout history. Actually, the king showed such
contempt for the word which Jeremiah had spoken, Baruch had written
down and had delivered to those who needed to hear it. After
he heard a little bit of it, he took his knife, cut it in
pieces, And it was in the middle of winter, so there was a fire
going, and he tossed them into the fire. How foolish of men
to think that by burning up a copy of the Word of the Lord, or silencing
the mouth of a spokesman for the Lord, maybe even killing
him, that somehow or another they have made the Word of the
Lord of no effect. Now, I pray that by the will
and grace of God, the things that I preach to you are indeed
the word of God. And I am so thankful that over
these many years, you have been happy to hear it. But not everyone
who's heard me has been happy with what they heard. And by one means or another,
they have distanced themselves from hearing it. I mean, in our country, you're
really not allowed to do anything to someone simply because of
the things they say. So no one has the capacity to
put me in jail for what I'm preaching. or otherwise seriously persecute
me, and I will confess that so far as I know, no evil has come
to me because of somebody's anger. Rather, here in the United States,
people express their displeasure with a preacher and his message
simply by leaving, going elsewhere. But here is a truth. If what
I am preaching is the truth of God, distancing yourself so that
you don't hear it does not change it, does not mean that it won't
come to pass. All that Jeremiah had Baruch
write down and then read in the presence of others and eventually
got into the ears of the king, every bit of it happened. The king in all his vain self-esteem,
and I'm the king of Judah, I don't have to hear that, slice it up
and burn it, did not change the fact that the day came when God
essentially sliced up Jerusalem and burned that. It did not change
the fact as what is said in Jeremiah 45, that God made an end to everything
he had built in Judah, in the land. He destroyed it all. When you listen to the Word of
God being preached, let me back up one step. When you listen
to a preacher, the first thing you need to do is determine if
what he is preaching is indeed the Word of God. And the only
way you can do that is to see if it agrees with this book. Because here's the only authoritative
record of what God has said and done. All that people say in
these days, is what they believe to be the word of God or what
they hope is the word of God or whatever, but there is not
a preacher in the world, since our Lord ascended on high, there's
not, has never been a preacher or prophet whose word had to
be accepted without it being checked according to the scriptures. But once you have determined
that what is being said is according to the scriptures, don't think, not for a second,
that by refusing to listen to it, you are changing what God
has said or made it so that it will not come to pass. Whether or not you believe me,
will have very little, if any, consequence in this world. Whether
or not you believe God will have consequence in this world and
in the everlasting world to come. Makes things kind of serious,
doesn't it? I'm not saying this to terrify
us, though maybe it should terrify some. One of the things our Lord said
was, at one point he said, here's the one I esteem, and he gave
a few characteristics, and one of them was, who trembles at
my word. Now, you don't tremble at somebody's
word unless you believe what he's saying. So this was the position of Baruch,
and even though he was not the God who said it, nor even the
prophet who received the message, but was only the guy who wrote
it down and carried it, his life, his freedom was put in danger
simply because he was associated with that word, with that message. Well, Baruch is a lot like us. The suffering that came on him
because of his association with the word of the Lord was difficult
and it caused his own dreams for his life to fall apart. In verse 3, now this is back
in Jeremiah 45. In verse 3, God says that Baruch
said, I don't know what his pain was. Maybe he had a health problem
that put him in pain all the time. While it's not recorded
that I am aware of, maybe he had been beaten. because of the message that he
carried. I don't know, but he was in pain.
But added to this was the sorrow. And he said, you say, well, what
sorrow is that? Well, it may be the sorrow that
came to him knowing what the Lord had in mind for Israel.
For example, to get an idea how that may have
affected him, because I mean, God said he's going to destroy
the whole place. He said, everything I planted, I'm pulling up. Everything
I built, I'm tearing down. Now, I am not a prophet, but
what if I were? And I stood before all of you
here, and I said, the Lord has said to me, at such and such
a time, he will come. And the United States of America
will be destroyed. And everything you have built
here, will be lost, and the people will be scattered.
Some of your family will die, and you will be taken to a foreign
land, and you will live under tyranny the rest of your life. Would that not put you in sorrow
of a country that, despite all its many faults, you love? Would it not add sorrow to your
pain? Because after all, Baruch was
a believer, and he was a citizen of Israel,
and he loved that nation. And God says, I'm going to destroy
it. And many of you are going into
captivity. Baruch would be among them. He said, I'm worn out with groaning.
Have you ever been so wracked with grief there were no words
to express it? All you could do was groan. Have
you ever had grief that didn't simply have the emotion of grief
but actually created within you pain? Pain of heart that manifested
itself in aching body? A body so full of stress that all you can do to find relief
is cry out? without words? Have you been so overwhelmed
you could find no rest?" For him, there was probably no
place he could go that he felt safe and out of the reach of
an angry king. And if he did find such a place,
maybe if he found a cave somewhere he could hide in, and at least
for a while he thought, you know, I'll be safe. Yet as he was in
that cave, his own mind wouldn't leave him be. And the thoughts of his troubles
kept him awake, kept him stressed and tense.
He found no rest. You know, You probably don't have to spend
a great deal of time in adulthood before you'll have experiences
similar to that. Sometimes they're the result
of actual circumstances. With me, they're more often the
result of my own odd way of thinking. At least, I think it's odd. Maybe
it's just not as odd as I think. I'm kind of like Mark Twain.
He said, I've suffered from many calamities, some of which actually
happened. Nonetheless, that's where Baruch
was. And when we are in that state
of mind, it is normal for us to think that the Lord has abandoned
us. or that we never were the Lord's. We begin to think, as did the
psalmist in the 77th Psalm, we begin to think, is God's mercy
clean gone forever? Have I done something so bad
that not even he will forgive? Or is he really not the kind
of God I thought he was? He's not as faithful as I hoped
he would be. And that promise upon which I
rested for so long is really not as ironclad as I thought
it was. Woe is me. If you've never thought those
thoughts, hang on. There will come a day when you
will probably think them. I won't say you will, because
I don't know everybody's heart. I know this. When I say things
like that, people come crawling out of the woodwork. You know,
I'll preach in other churches. Now I preach something like that,
and people come out of the woodwork and say, I know what you're talking
about. Most people are afraid to express
that. Because they think, oh, they'll
just think I'm whining. They'll think poorly of me. They'll
think I have no faith. Even we who believe in the sovereign
grace of God know how to put on that religious outward appearance,
everything's good. Something bad happens to us,
and it may be killing us, but we'll say, well, you know, the
Lord's in sovereign control. Have you ever noticed that's
not the way the people in the Bible spoke? They may say that,
but they said it with tears in their eyes. Job, he never spoke foolishly
against God. But he said, you know, I want
this written on my tombstone. Even though the time will come
when concerning my body worms shall eat this flesh, yet I know that my Redeemer lives. In the latter day He shall stand
upon the earth, and I shall see Him. And I'll not see him with
another person's eyes. It's not just I'm listening to
a good preacher and I can imagine things, that I'm going to see
him with my own eyes. But his heart was melting within
him. He was covered in boils, painful boils. He sat in, as
was the characteristic of that time, in sackcloth and ashes
and just threw dust over his head and said, though he slay me,
yet will I trust him. But he also said, I curse the
day of my birth. Don't ever think. that real and
honest pain, grief, and weeping is contrary to faith. It's not. Life hurts. This life hurts. The natural things of this life
hurt. I don't know that they used to
have to say this so much, but I think beginning with my generation,
the baby boomer generation, our parents came back from World
War II. They were the victors. They were full of optimism, you
know, and the economy started to take off. They'd just come
out of the Depression, and now you could find jobs. The people
that previously could not afford to own homes were able to buy
homes. Do you remember that TV show,
The Wonder Years? And it was about actually the
main character. I figured out he would have been
a year younger than me because he graduated in 74. But I mean,
that was right in the middle of the baby boomer generation.
And I'll tell you, it was a good time to be alive. We were the
first generation that I'm aware of that most of us could grow
up in the United States without a fear of where our next meal's
coming from, without concern for that. We grew up, and yes,
there were times that we got sick, but medicine advanced enough
that nearly everything you'd get, they could do something
about. And I'll tell you since then, you know, and I can remember
in the 60s, the diseases that would take people out and now
you go to the doctor and they give you a shot or a pill or
maybe you spend overnight in the hospital and do some surgery
on you and you're good to go. And we grew up with the idea
that things are supposed to be good. That good is normal. And then you have these occasional
periods of trouble. That's not how history has been.
It has, for the most part, been trouble with short periods of
enjoyment. So if you've never been brought
to the place that Baruch was, and this is especially if you're
a believer, you probably will be. The Lord does these things
to His people for a reason. So that's mean. No, it's not.
It's not. God never has done anything mean
to any of His elect. Rather, he has ordered every
aspect of history, every particle of creation, is controlled by
him to bring about the everlasting salvation of his elect. But that
doesn't mean that everything he has ordained and brings to
pass is pleasant. We were singing that song, This
is My Father's World. And every time we do, this story
comes to mind. You remember Brother Henry Mahan
and that his oldest son was killed in Vietnam. And they were on vacation when
they received the news. So they went back to Ashland.
And as is so common, and it's got to be a very painful thing,
The news of a soldier's death is much faster than the letters
the soldier himself may have sent. So after you hear that
your loved one is gone, you may get one or more letters from
them that were in transit. And they got a letter from him.
And in that letter, he was talking about that the previous Sunday
he'd gathered, you know, they would have church services. And
they sang, this is my father's world. And how much comfort he
got out of that, knowing. Of course, he was raised, and
understand what that meant. This is God's world. And though the wrong seems all
so strong, and you can imagine what that looks like in the middle
of Vietnam. Though the wrong seems all so strong, God is the
ruler yet. He's hearing those things. His
heart's rejoicing in them. And a few days later, he was
gone. And a day or two after that, his family is put in unbearable
grief. And all this by the will of God,
who loved them and gave himself for them. So what does God say to Baruch
in the midst of all of this? Verse 4, he says to him, this
is what the Lord says, I will overthrow what I've built. Baruch,
doesn't matter how bad you feel about this, doesn't matter how
much it pains you, doesn't matter how much it sorrows you, this
is going to be done. I'm going to destroy the temple.
I'm going to tear down Jerusalem. This people will essentially
cease to exist except for a remnant of them. And this is going to happen throughout
the land. None of it shall escape. There
is no place within the boundaries of this land that I promised
to your forefathers where this will not happen. There's no place
you can run and hide and not see this. and experience this. You can't get away from it. In going through the book of,
I believe it was Philippians, and I was looking at Brother
Tim James' commentary on it, and Paul was talking about trials.
Tim made this comment, and I don't know if he read it or it's just
one of those Tim James insights. He says, trials are not meant
to be fixed. They are sent to fix something. Trials come and we ask God to
remove them. He sent the trial to remove something
else, and it's not going to be gone. until whatever purpose
he designed in it is accomplished. Trials are unpleasant. They're
not bad for the believer. They're not bad, but they are
unpleasant. Otherwise, we wouldn't call them trials. He says, all of this is going
to happen and not all your prayers, not all your woe is me, is going
to change that. Then he goes on in verse 5, should you then seek great things
for yourself? Seek them not. He says, Baruch, are you looking
that despite all this happening, you're going to come out of this
still living in the land, and maybe as one of the few left,
you're going to be a big shot in the land. No, don't think that. Don't seek great things for yourself.
Don't seek the riches that I'm going to destroy. Don't set your
heart on them. Don't think, well, the Lord's
going to destroy the wicked, so I'm going to go over here.
I'm going to build me a house right here because, you know, he's going
to tear down Jerusalem, but I'll be safe over here. No, if you
build a house, I'm tearing it down. Do you seek great things for
yourself? Do you seek a great name for yourself? You have worked
for a long time under the shadow of Jeremiah, who is well-known. Do you have a desire to be known
like him? To be famous? To be somebody
within the faithful religious community? Do you want it to be that when
people are discussing religious issues and they can't come to
agreement, do you want to be that they say, let's go ask Baruch
what he thinks? See, that's what Paul wanted,
and he was getting it. When he was Saul of Tarsus, that
Pharisee, Oh, he was going to be the best Pharisee that ever
was. And he probably was. He said, I was beyond. I had
advanced farther than those my own age. I wanted to be somebody. Baruch, are you hoping that someday
you won't be a prophet's secretary, a prophet's valet, but you'll actually
be a prophet? Don't seek that. Why? Because I'm going to destroy
everything. And if you sought it and got it, you'd lose it. How does that apply to us? After
all, there are no prophets in our day, so there's no secretaries
and valets to prophets in our day. Well, the church of the
Lord Jesus is like the nation of Israel. We who believe and we worship God according to truth,
we are, and Paul said this, we are the children of Abraham.
It doesn't matter what our physical ancestry is. In Christ, there's
neither Jew nor Gentile. But what God did with that nation,
that carnal, natural, fleshly nation for about 1,500 years,
that serves to illustrate for us what God's spiritual kingdom
is like. And those in this kingdom suffer. And they suffer because there
are many who claim to be part of this kingdom and really are
not, but they associate among the faithful. And yet they themselves
follow after false versions of God. They don't follow God according
to truth. And eventually God's patience
wears out. And so in order to eliminate
those who blaspheme His name through their false worship. He brings destruction upon them.
And when He does that, even those within the church feel the pain
of it. Why? And I'm sure that this bothers
you. You feel the pain of the name of your Lord Jesus Christ
being blasphemed because of the way these wolves in sheep's clothing
act. Doesn't it bother you? And I'm
not talking about the world. It's bad enough they use our
Lord's name as a curse word all the time. That's bad enough. But these people that get in
pulpits and take the name of our blessed Lord Jesus on their
mouths and then use it to promote things which disgrace our Lord
Jesus and bring shame upon the name of our God. That's distressing. That's what it meant when it
says that Job was vexed by the conduct of the people in Sodom.
It was not just that they were perverts. That was bad enough.
It's that their perversion was a shaking of their fist into
the face of the God that Lot worshipped. I don't know why
he stayed there. I think I'd have gone back to
Uncle Abraham and said, look, let's just join our sheep and
shepherds, and we'll make an Abraham and Nephew sheep farm
or something. I want to hang around people
that believe God. We're in pain because of that.
We're in pain because when God brings these judgments in the
purification of his church, it sometimes takes out people we
love and those whom we once considered faithful. And it hurts to have that fellowship
broken. I don't know what Baruch's family
was like. What if he was the only one in his family who was
actually a believer and everybody else was just going through the
motions and he hadn't realized it, but they got swept away in the
wrath of God. That'd be tough. Do you look for great things? I know as a young fellow, when
I felt called to the ministry, I was looking for great things.
I had visions in my mind. Of course, I was in a branch
of Christianity where churches always aspired to be big. You
know, I just got trained in me. In fact, I remember one of the
granddaddies of that conservative fundamentalism during that period,
a man named John R. Rice. He came to our college
and he was speaking during chapel and he said something about small
churches and he goes, do you think I don't like small churches?
I like small churches for about three weeks. Because being a freewheeler,
he thought that really you could go out there and by your preaching,
if you did it right and you did enough praying and all this,
people would believe and the church would be big soon. And
so that's how I was raised. And quite full of myself, I thought,
Once I get my training done, I'm going to go out, you know.
And I remember my best friend, he and I both could get ourselves
whipped up into what great things we were going to do for God,
you know. And he'd say things like, you know, we're charging
hell with a squirt gun. We need to be, you know, do more.
And we were going to do more and all that. Nothing happened.
Not a thing. And here I am 40 years later,
actually more than 40, 45 years after I graduated college. And
I'm preaching to roughly 25 people that are present up in the corner
of Iowa, past the age when most people
retire. Am I going to become great? 200
years from now, someone will be saying, you need to get a
set of tarot. Now, I mean, he never wrote anything
because he wasn't disciplined enough to get it done. But his
sermons are, you need to do that. You need to get a whole set for
your library. No, nobody's going to say that. Do you desire great things for
yourself? Do you seek that even within the church? Don't. There's
only one thing worth seeking, period, the Lord Jesus. It's the only thing. Because everything else you seek
will be destroyed. Now, that does not mean you should
not seek to be faithful. That's good. That does not mean
you should not seek the opportunity to make Christ known to others.
That's good. But that's not seeking great
things for yourself. That's seeking great things for
others and for Christ. Elevate him in the eyes of the
people. That's all good It doesn't mean
that in your day-to-day life You don't do what you can to
improve your temporal circumstances But don't seek those things as
though that's what your life is made of because if you are
in Christ That's not what your life is made of your life is
hid with Christ in God. That's your life everything else
is just an overnight stay in a motel while you're on a trip
to somewhere else. When Bonnie and I go traveling,
now when we had kids and we went traveling, of course we'd usually
start in the afternoon I'd drive late into the night because you
can make a whole lot more miles once the kids fall asleep. But
eventually, you got to stop. And often, we were heading back
to where I was raised. And about the halfway point,
it was almost halfway, was when we got halfway across Missouri. And there's a city called Columbia.
And in Columbia was this budget host motel. Now, it wasn't the nicest one.
But you could get two adults and three kids in a room with
two double beds, and I think it was like 30 bucks. Maybe even
less. I remember one, Bonnie, it said
15 or something. In other words, we weren't looking
for the Holiday Inn. We weren't looking for a Ramada,
primarily because we didn't have the money for it. But even if
we had, that was not what our minds were set on. Why? Because
the next morning, we're getting up and leaving. We needed a place,
we wanted a place that was clean, that you didn't walk in and go,
ooh, I don't know if I want to lay on it. But once it was clean
and had beds in it, cheap was after that. Because that's not home. It's
a mere stop on the way home. And you and I are on our way
home. Now, if you have the ability for a
holiday inn or a ramada or whatever is the nicer stuff now, feel
free. If you don't, don't worry about
it. And I mean that both really and metaphorically. You are members in this little
congregation. Of course, there's nothing to
aspire here, aspire to here, you know. The church itself is
insignificant in the great scheme of things, so far as the world's
concerned. But imagine you were in a church now of about 500
people, and you had it in your heart that you wanted to be somebody
in that church. Churches I was raised in, they
had all kinds of offices to occupy. Pastor, assistant pastor, minister
of music, youth pastor. You had Sunday school superintendent.
You had superintendent of each department. You know, everybody's
got titles. Do you seek great things? Don't seek them. Whatever has the name of man
on it, God's gonna destroy. And the only thing that will
be left is what has the name of Christ
on it. Do you know how few preachers,
faithful men of the past, when they died were of any consequence
in the world whatever? Even those who for a time were
highly esteemed as their ministries went on. They began to get smaller. And by the time they left this
world, they weren't much sought after. Why? There's only one name worth
mentioning, and that's the name of Christ. Don't try to make
your name worth mentioning. Do you seek great things for
yourself? Don't bother yourself. The Lord's going to destroy this
world, and you know what that includes? This church. And I
don't mean just this building. There will come a time when maybe even people are meeting
here, but it won't be the gospel that's
being preached. There are very few churches that
actually last faithful past two generations. Why? The Lord is not going to make
any lasting memorial to anything but His name. Brother Spurgeon, when he passed
away, Now, when he passed away, he was still, aside from his
health problems, the church was still going strong. And it had
a history of some, what we might call the greater lights. John
Gill had been pastor there, John Rapone, Benjamin Teach. Maybe
you don't know those names, but if you've got commentaries and
things like that, you know, that you study from, you recognize
those names. It had a good heritage. Ten years after his death, somebody
who had been a member of that church wrote an open letter to
Metropolitan Tabernacle, and he began to say things. of what had become of that church
in just a few years since Spurgeon had left. And they had fallen
to the revivalism, and they were having those exciting revivalistic
meetings where they'd have them bow their head and close their
eyes, raise their hands, and manipulate people into making
professions of faith. And since that time, there have
been preachers in that church that didn't come within 10 miles
of preaching the gospel. The man right now, who's in that
church claims to. I've never listened to a message
from him. I don't know. He's kind of well-known. But what I'm saying is, Metropolitan
Tabernacle. The buildings, actually it got
bombed in World War II and they rebuilt it. But God let it go dry. And if
the man who's there now is preaching faithfully, then he has revived
that work. But all I'm saying is the things
in this world, no matter how good they may appear at any given
moment, the time will come when God will take them down. He may
later rebuild them as he did Jerusalem. But don't seek greatness here. Don't seek your fulfillment in
this world or in this church or in your spiritual experiences
in this life. Don't seek great things. Seek
the Great One. And there was a promise. The
Lord says, for I will bring disaster on all people. And he meant all
people within Israel, declares the Lord. He said, I'm going
to do that. But wherever you go, I will let you escape with your
life. Actually, I like the way it's
worded, the King James kind of does a good job of it. But it
says, wherever you go, your life will be a plunder. Now that sounds
bad, but here's what he means by that. You will be part of
what's left over. And as a plunder, I will give
you your life. And friends, God's gonna destroy
this world. He is, I don't know when. We can say this, he destroys
the human race about every 80 years, doesn't he? About every 80 years, there's
a few that go longer than that, but about every 80 years, the
population of the earth is totally different than it was 80 years
before. So he destroys the world, the human world, about every
80 years. And everything that those people
gathered is gone, at least so far as they're concerned. The child of God, think of this.
He will, wherever you go, whatever you become in this world, whatever advancements you make
or don't make, wherever you go, When I come through, your life
will be spared, and I'll hand it back to you as the spoils
of war. And brethren, if you have your
life, what else is there? If when this life is over, you're
still alive, is that not enough? If when this world, this universe
is brought to an explosive end, will it not be enough that you
survive it and are in the presence of the Lord who loved you and
gave himself for you? Seek no greatness here. It's going to be destroyed. Seek
Christ with all your heart, and not one ounce of energy and time
that you send seeking Him will be lost. Everything else will be. That
make sense? Everybody's just looking at me.
I hope I made sense. We need to do Brother Myles McKee
thing. Just once in a while, I'll do that. I see these staring
faces, and I'm thinking, are they just zoned out? But anyway,
well, may the Lord add his blessing to his word.