if you'll return in your Bibles
to Jeremiah chapter 30. The clock on the back wall ran
out of battery. I'll try to consult my phone
once in a while what time it is so that we don't dismiss at
one o'clock. Jeremiah was a prophet in the land of
Israel. the land of Judah, and he was
there when God sent Nebuchadnezzar into Jerusalem to lay siege and
eventually breach the city, destroy the temple, pretty much
destroy the city, and take the best of the people to the land
of Babylon. It's written that he left the
poor of the land behind to till it, take care of it. I've been reading the book of
Jeremiah and every place I read this past
week, I thought I need to preach from there and then I'd read
somewhere else. I need to preach from there. This is kind of the
last place I was looking at. So we'll preach from there. There
are so many wonderful figures, illustrations of our Lord Jesus. When we read the prophets of
Israel, we remember it, as Paul said, these things were not written
for their sake alone, but for us. For us, who have believed
with the same faith that the Old Testament believers had. Do you realize that you and I
have the same faith that Abel had? Now, we understand more
than Abel did, but we believe the same God and we believe Him
according to the same promise. And we come to Him the same way
Abel did. Remember, Abel brought a lamb.
He understood without the shedding of blood, there's no remission
of sin. And I'm sure he understood that
it really wasn't the blood of that lamb. That little lamb he
had, that really wouldn't put away sin. He understood it was
a symbol. Cain had no faith. So Cain brought from the works
of his own hands and offered to the Lord that which was devoid
of blood, therefore it could not take away sin. Cain, of course, is a good example
of worldly religion because that's what worldly religion does. It
offers bloodless things to God. but we come to our God by the
blood of Jesus Christ. So we have the same faith as
the believing Israelites. Now when I say believing Israelites,
we've got to understand that most of those who were the natural
descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not believe God.
Do you remember that God made them a nation, he brought them
out of Egypt, And there at Mount Sinai, he entered into covenant
with them. And that's when they became a
nation. Before they'd just been a group of tribes of families
descended from one man. Now God brings them together
at Mount Sinai into a nation. And yet not one of those from
20 years on up who left Egypt who were there when God spoke
to them from Mount Sinai, not one of them, when they got to
the land of promise, had faith to go in. And so for the next
roughly 40 years, one by one, they dropped dead in the desert.
As the Lord said, he swore an oath that they would by no means
enter his rest. So the Israel of the Old Testament
is much like what I sometimes refer to as broad Christianity. By that I mean all those who
profess to be Christians. We know that not all of them
can truly be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ because they
believe things that, you know, the various denominations believe
things that are mutually exclusive. Some believe that you actually
receive some kind of saving benefit from being sprinkled when you're
an infant and every time you take the Lord's table, which
they call something else. But they believe that each time
you do that, you gain a little more grace. And when you do a
good and kind charitable work, a little more grace. And if you
do enough of these works, enough of these things, excuse me, enough
of these things that earn you grace, Talk about an oxymoron. Earn you grace. When you die, you won't have
to spend too long in purgatory because all your good deeds will
have kind of outweighed your bad deeds. And once you spend
enough time in purgatory, then you are, as they say, beatified.
You are taken up to heaven. and you've become a saint. And
while we may look at that and count it to be great superstition,
yet every other thing that men do in order to obtain the grace
of God is just as superstitious. And so the greater part, I believe,
of what comes under the general description of Christianity is
not the faith of Christ. It isn't. I don't say that by
way of self-righteous judgment, because this I know. Apart from
the grace upon which we rely, we would be right where they
are. We are in nature no different than the most wicked person that
ever lived, the most self-righteous false religionist that ever lived. And all that would be required
for us to return to that is for the Lord God to let go of us,
because it's still in us. We're still like that fellow
that came to our Lord and said, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.
We are a mixture of those two things. And all that the Lord would have
to do is give us more leash, and we would get farther away.
So we make no boast in saying that While we believe that we
understand the gospel of God in truth, we say that those that
disagree don't have the truth. So with these words that Jeremiah
utters to Israel, he is not just speaking to those natural descendants
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God is using some things that
happened to that nation, approximately in the 600s BC, and using that
to illustrate the spiritual Israel, or as Paul calls them, the Israel
of God. And it is our delight when we
can find in what these prophets say. when we can find Christ
and we can find His church, because it's there. Our Lord said to
the Pharisees, you search the scriptures for in them you think
you have eternal life. These are the scriptures that
testify of me, but you won't come to me that you might have
life. Now, they couldn't see Christ in the Scriptures because
they did not have spiritual eyes. They had not been born again
by the Spirit of God that they might perceive the kingdom of
God, that they might enter the kingdom of God. They read the
Bible just like most people do. They find little bits of, you
know, commandments to live by and some wise sayings to to rule
their lives, and they find some things to sustain them when they're
having some troubles in this life. And it never occurs to
them, the whole book from Genesis 1-1 to Revelation, wherever it
ends. The whole book is designed to
point us to Christ and to cast our soul entirely upon Him and
upon what He did, not what we do, upon what He did, what He
has accomplished, to look to Him where He is now, at the right
hand of the Father, making intercession for us. All of it is designed
for that. Paul says the law is good if
a man uses it lawfully. Well, what's the lawful use of
the law? to reveal Christ. When men take the law as it was
delivered at Sinai, and use it as a whip to crack over the heads
of God's people, and to try to force them and bind them into
certain conduct with it, and to terrify them and hold them
in bondage through the fear of death, when they do that with
the law, they are not using the law lawfully. Now when Paul's
talking about the law, he's talking about certainly the entirety
of the first five books, the books of Moses, but it can be
included the entire Old Testament, which was sometimes referred
to as the law. But Paul's point is that these scriptures, even
that covenant by which God entered into covenant with Israel, even
that was designed to reveal Christ. And so when we open it up, no
matter where we open up the scriptures, we're looking for Christ. He's
in there. And we haven't understood a scripture
until we find out what it has to say about Christ. Until we
find out what it has to say about Christ and the gospel that came
by him and the results of all that. He's in there somewhere. He is the treasure that we look
for. And we're not satisfied till
we find that treasure in this treasure chest. So beginning in verse 21 of Jeremiah
30, Jeremiah is making prophecies about the restoration of Israel
after the captivity. And he says, their leader will
be one of their own. Their ruler will arise from among
them. 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." Now, we didn't have
to look far to find Christ in this passage of Scripture. This
is pretty obviously a reference to Him. Their leader will be
one of their own. Here is the marvelous and completely
mysterious truth upon which the whole of Christianity hangs,
that Jesus of Nazareth is no more and no less than the living
God. You say, how can that be? How
can the living God be a man? I don't know. And I don't even
know how he could explain it to us. But it is so. He said to the Pharisees, unless
you believe that I am, you will die in your sins. He said before
Abraham was, I am. They understood what he meant.
He was declaring himself to be that very same one who spoke
to Moses from the burning bush. And Moses said to him, well,
you want me to go and tell the people of Israel? You want me
to talk to Pharaoh? Whom shall I say sent me? And
he said, I am that I am. You tell them I am sent you. And then I am showed up 1,500
years later. He showed up as a single cell
within the womb of his mother and went through all the stages
of human life. Came forth as a babe, grew up
as a child, subject to his, imagine that, the living God, subject
to anybody. He was. He'd be one of their
own. He grew into adulthood, learned
to trade from his father, Practice that trade until it was time
for him to be revealed for who he was. And he laid aside his
carpentry tools and he began teaching. He began collecting
disciples. He was baptized. And he went on teaching. He endured
all their foolishness of heart and hardness of heart. Oh, what
a patient one was he. But he rose right from among
them, right from among the Jews. But the marvelous thing is he
was a human. He became one of us. He arose
from among us. And God says, I will bring him
near and he will come close to me. How did God bring our leader,
the Lord Jesus, near? Well, of course, he's very near
to God because he is God. But of course, we understand
that bringing him near even in his humanity. Now, our Lord came
into this world. He was the Word of God. The one
who is with God, who was God from the very beginning, he's
the one who spoke the worlds into existence. We know that.
And yet he who is the word came into the world unable to speak.
He had to learn how to speak. He studied the scriptures. And
of course, in as much as he had the Holy Spirit of God, In limitless
supply, he understood the scripture so that even at 12, he spoke
with such wisdom and understanding concerning the things of God
that it surprised the doctors. So God brought him near in truth
and instruction in an intimate communion with God. I read about
our Lord praying all night. You ever think about that, praying
all night? How do you do that? I know this, I can stay up all
night talking to a friend. But if I can put five minutes
of prayer together, that our Lord was in such communion with
his God and Father, he could pray all night and feel stronger
for having done it. I stay up all night and talk
to one of my friends and the next day I'm more worthless than usual. Our Lord God, He said, it is
my food to do the will of him who sent me. And when he communed
with his father, he received strength. He brought him near in favor. Now we speak of earned grace
as a silly thing, and it is when it's applied to us. But the Bible
says our Lord grew in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor,
and that word is normally translated grace, with God and man. Grace
can be earned. The word that's, you know, the
Greek word they use there, generally speaking, as it was commonly
used, it was earned. Somebody did something that you
liked, that you approved of, and therefore your grace was
upon them. This was often the case with military, you know,
the behind-the-desk type leaders. But someone would go out, a young
man would go out and behave valiantly in battle and maybe pull victory
out of the jaws of defeat. And the leader was so pleased
with what he did that his grace was upon that young man. And our Lord Jesus Christ did
everything God wanted him to do. And God's grace was upon
him. You know, it said he is full
of grace. And from his abundance, the abundance
of the grace that he has, the overflow of his grace, we all
receive one grace after another. Now, we didn't earn the grace
we received, but Christ did. So much grace did he obtain from
the Father that it was more than, shall we say, a human could hold,
and the grace flowed out from him to all his people. That's
the source of our grace. He brought him near in favor.
But here again, God does something that no other God does. You look
at all the gods invented by men, none of them did this. God brought
him near in judgment. You know, someday everybody's
gonna be brought near God in judgment. It's appointed unto
man once to die, and after that, the judgment. So you will be
brought near God in judgment. But we wouldn't think that our
Lord Jesus Christ had to be brought near God in judgment. After all,
what was there to judge him for? He did nothing wrong. I mean,
you could imagine our Lord coming before him that God might pronounce
him righteous. But God brought him near in judgment
to condemn him. How can a just God condemn an
innocent man? Well, he wasn't innocent when
he was on the cross. For the scriptures teach us The
Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was in himself,
in his nature, in everything that he'd ever done. In all of
that, he was without sin. And yet God, actually the way
the Hebrew puts it, caused our sin to gather upon him. I tend to think visually. And
I see sin coming from all over the world, across all the ages
of time, to that one place, at that one moment in time, as our
Lord hung there upon Calvary, and every last sin of the chosen
people of God was charged to Him, and He bore that sin in
the presence of God, as though He Himself had been the one who
did it. So much so, that through the
prophet Jeremiah in the book of Lamentation, He owns them
as his own sins. He says he has wrapped his cords
around my neck. He said, well, wrap my sins about
my neck as a cord. Do you hear that? He's wrapped
my sins. Our Lord owned our sins as his
sins. You could take great pride if
you went down to the bank Plenty of pomp and circumstance and
celebration and attention. You said, well, I'm here to pay
so-and-so's debt. And you write a big old check
and pay off their debt, and everybody pats you on the back for being
a fine fellow that you are. That's not what our Lord did.
He didn't say it was our debt. He said it was His. And He paid it to the full. Would
I describe what our Lord endured? I wish I could. I don't know
what he endured and I never will. And I never will know it because
he endured it. What is it to come under the
wrath of a holy God? A God who says, I will by no
means clear the guilty. The God of whom it is written
that he's of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Why he condemned the entire,
listen to this, if you wanna understand the strictness and
holiness of God, Imagine this, he condemned the entire human
race because one man ate fruit from the wrong tree. And you
say, well, you know, I've done the best I can. Well, I think
Adam did too. He did the best he could. Now,
if you went over and stole somebody's apple, do you think it'd be right if you got put in jail for a
year? Adam stole a piece of God's fruit
and God condemned him and everyone that would come from him. That's
you and me. And people think they're going
to stand before that God. They're going to stand before him and
somehow get a favorable judgment from him. Well, I never killed
anybody. Well, did you ever pick fruit
from the wrong tree? Did you ever have, as our Lord
himself said, did you ever have a hateful, malicious thought
towards someone without just cause? But our Lord, he came before
God, the judge of all, bearing our sin, calling it his sin,
and he submitted to death, even the death of the cross. He suffered whatever hell is.
That's what he suffered. But such was the greatness of
his person that when he had suffered about three hours of that, he
said, it is finished. I was doing a little studying
from a fellow that listens to us online sometimes. I'd been
talking with him and told him about, you know, we use a new
international version, but they changed it back in 2011. We have
a hard time finding the older versions that we're accustomed
to. He's been buying a bunch of them and sending them to me.
So if you all need one, let me know. I've got a few extra ones
around, the ones copyrighted from 1984. At any rate, he sent
me one that's the new international version with an interlinear Greek. And what interlinear Greek means
is it's got the Greek and then the English words under it. And
I was reading some about that. speaks of that word that's translated,
and it's only one word that's translated with the whole phrase,
it is finished, and said more strictly, it could be translated,
it has been finished. Now the meaning is kind of the
same, but the point is, we have in, even in the English language,
we have what is called the present perfect tense. The word perfect
means complete. And the present perfect tense
means At the present time, right now, it has already been completed. And that's what our Lord was
saying. Right now, it has been completed. And whatever it is
he was doing, there's nothing more to add to it. He made full atonement. He paid entire redemption for
the people that he represented. Through the prophet Isaiah, the
Lord God said, for the transgression of my people was he stricken. God has a people, a people he
chose for no other reason than the fact he wanted to choose
them. He didn't choose them because they were good, because they
weren't good. He didn't choose them because
he found something redeemable in them. There wasn't anything
redeemable in them. There wasn't a little bit of good that he
could maybe do like I learned in Boy Scouts. You know, if you
got just a little bit of a coal of a fire, you put some wood
on, you start blowing on it and eventually it'll blaze up. Well,
there wasn't any of that in us. He couldn't get anything started
from what was already in us. He chose us according to his
free and sovereign will. He put us in Christ. He blessed
us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places. And Jesus
Christ, in order to justify God in doing all of that, came and
paid their penalty to the full. There's nothing more to be done. Nothing more to be done to satisfy
God, the judge of all in their behalf. That's why Augustus' top lady
wrote in his famous hymn, Rock of Ages, nothing in my hand I
bring, simply to thy cross I cling. Naked, come to thee for dress. Wretched, come to you for grace. Foul, I to the fountain fly. Wash me, Savior, or I die. What can I bring to God to enhance
my relationship with Him? What can I bring to God to get
the rightly offended judge to look on me with favor? Nothing,
absolutely nothing. Jesus Christ brought to God everything
necessary. everything necessary to put away
the wrath of God intended for me, intended for all his people,
brought him near in judgment, brought him near in acceptance. Now, some people think that Jesus
Christ died and spent three days in the realm of the dead. They even think he went down
there They misunderstand Peter and they think he went down there
and he preached the Gospel to people already in Hell. It doesn't
make any sense. Now, what did he say to that
thief? Today you will be with me in glory. The Hell our Lord
suffered was right there on the cross. I guess Hell is a place
but you don't have to be there to experience Hell. Because hell
is being in your sins in the presence of a holy, righteous
God, bent on vengeance. That's hell. And he was done
with that, such that when he died, just before he died, he
said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. And he didn't
say that believing that he was going to spend the next three
days suffering torment. He said that knowing full well
he had finished the work his father gave him to do. And he
was put in the tomb, his body was, but he was in paradise with
the thief and Moses and Elijah and all the rest of them that
had believed to that point. But then God brought him out
of the tomb. He is the first of the new creation. Yes, it's the same person and
same body, yet it's not the same body. The body from which he
came forth from the tomb was not a body subject to death.
You couldn't kill, you can't kill the Lord Jesus Christ now.
He's immortal even in his flesh. He came forth glorified, though
he still kept much of that glory hidden, for men wouldn't have
been able to bear it if they saw it. And then some 40 days later,
in the presence of his disciples, God brought him near in glory,
honor, and power. And Jesus Christ ascended up
in a cloud, and to put it in the words of the psalmist, he
approached glory, he approached the Father's house, he approached
heaven, and he said, lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be
lifted up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come
in. Who is the King of glory? Jehovah God Almighty. And who
is that? That's our Lord Jesus. How many had thought themselves
to be the Messiah? He wasn't the only one claiming
to be Messiah in his day. They died, and if they ever approached
those gates and said, lift up your heads, O ye gates, and so
forth, they'd have stayed shut. They'd have said, you're not
Him. You're not Him. We know Him. This ain't you. Stay shut. Stay shut. He comes,
and the doors, and that's the way those old gates, they weren't
swing out gates. They just went straight up. And
they lifted up that the King of glory came in. And the father
said, son, sit here at my right hand till I make all your enemies
a footstool for your feet. He, God drew him near, brought
him near in glory, honor, and power. Our Lord Jesus said, all
authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. All of it. You know, the devil
tried to give it to him. but the most he could do is offer
him authority on earth. In his temptation, he showed
him all the kings on the earth. He said, you worship me, I'll
give you all that. The father said, worship me,
I'll give you that, and the rest of the universe as a bonus. All authority in heaven. What
did he mean by that? Not only the authorities of these
earthly kingdoms, but there's a spiritual world going on all
around us and throughout the heavens. I don't understand that
all the scriptures don't teach us about it. And we don't need
to know much about it, but we know it's there. He's got all authority over that.
He tells the angels where to go, what to say, what to do. He always did as God, now he
does so even as a man. Who is he who will devote himself
to be close to me? Well, you know, not a one of
us ever did, did we? Anybody here devoted himself
to God enough that God could say to him, sit here at my right
hand till I make your enemies a footstool for your feet? But our Lord said in John 17,
he's praying to the Father, he says, for their sakes, I sanctify
myself. Now, one of the, meanings of
sanctify is to devote. To sanctify something, to make
it holy, means to set it apart for a particular use. And he
said, I have set myself apart for a particular work that was
given to me to do by my father. I do it for their sake. He's
the one who would devote himself so that the father would say,
come up here, be close to me. And every one of his people shall
someday experience that same thing. Paul says, we died with
him, we raised with him, we ascended with him. And all that we're
doing through life is catching up to what's already been done
in heaven. We are seated in him. in the heavenly places. We are
seated at the right hand of God, the place of favor, honor, privilege,
acceptance, right there with Him. In other words, you and
I, foul and wicked though we are, weak, frail, stumbling,
face-planting us, We are given the same place as the Lord Jesus
Christ has. That's what grace is about. It's
not just about missing hell. That's a good part of it. I'll
admit, you know, I'm glad to miss that. But that's not all
of it. It's to be in Christ, like Christ,
with Christ in the presence of the Father. That's heaven. Their leader will be one of their
own. Their ruler will rise from among
them. Well, I just want to skip down
to one other thing to look at here. Verse two will take just
a couple minutes. This is what the Lord says. The
people who survive the sword will find favor in the desert. Now here we are. We are by nature
children of wrath, says Paul. We have the same nature that
the children of wrath have. But we survive the sword of wrath,
and we survive it for only one reason. That sword fell upon
the Lord Jesus Christ. Jehovah bid his sword awake,
O Christ, it woke against thee. Thy blood, thy blood, its fiery
wrath must slake, its ward thy bosom be." Jesus Christ took
that sword, that's why we survive it. It never got to us. will find favor in the desert."
Now, what's he talking about here? Well, there were people,
faithful people, believing people, among the Jews of that day, that
group that Paul refers to as the remnant, according to the
election of grace, those who really did believe. You know,
when God sent Nebuchadnezzar in, or Nebuchadnezzar's army,
they tore down the temple, they were there, they saw that. Some
of them may have been killed by the sword, but I don't know. They suffered the siege against
Jerusalem, and they suffered that walk all the way up to Babylon. That was tough. That wasn't easy. But look here. The people who
survived the sword, those who by virtue of being in Christ
when He died, survived the sword of wrath, They find favor, they
find grace in the desert. You and I live in a desert. You and I who believe the Lord,
this world is a desert to us. It is not an oasis. We might call the church an oasis.
This is kind of nice together like this. This is when we find
a little spot where the living water flows and where the manna
from heaven falls. But the world itself is a desert. It's a wilderness for believers. Thank God we've escaped the sword
and we find grace right here in this wilderness. All right,
no matter what's going on out there, we got grace. We've got
the Lord's favor. No matter what's happening to
you, believer, no matter what's happening to you right now, it's
the hand of God's grace upon you in the wilderness. I know,
you know, we have in our heart desires to be with Christ. We
have desires to lay hold of all those things for which God laid
hold of us, but it's not time for that yet. And we should not
get discouraged that in this world we face a lot of trouble.
In fact, we should be encouraged by that. We should be more concerned
if we find satisfaction here. There's a difference between
satisfaction and contentment. We can be content to live like
this for the time being, waiting for our departure or the Lord's
return. We can be content, but a believer
can never be satisfied in this world. Never. Because the things he's looking
for are in the world to come. C.S. Lewis once said, the very
fact, does not the very fact that I cannot be satisfied with
this world, doesn't that prove I was made for another world? The old spiritual said, this
world is not my home. I'm just passing through. And
I'll be content with the rations of someone passing through, living
my life in motels, figurative motels, or under the stars until
such time as the Lord shall say, come near, come home. Or until
the sky shall open. And our Savior, who about 2,000
years ago went up into glory, he's gonna come back. And with
a shout, he'll say to his people, come. Come. Come away with me, my love. Come. Oh, what a leader. And what a
blessed people we are. May God be blessed. Praised for
this blessing.