Trinity 5

Jesse Jacobsen

Typeset
Time-stamp: "Sat Jun 25 21:27:46 2005"

Jeremiah 16:14–21



“Therefore behold, the days are coming,” says the LORD, “that it shall no more be said, `The LORD lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,' but, `The LORD lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where He had driven them.' For I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their fathers.

“Behold, I will send for many fishermen,” says the LORD, “and they shall fish them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks. For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes. And first I will repay double for their iniquity and their sin, because they have defiled My land; they have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols.”

O LORD, my strength and my fortress,
My refuge in the day of affliction,
The Gentiles shall come to You
From the ends of the earth and say,
“Surely our fathers have inherited lies,
Worthlessness and unprofitable things.”
Will a man make gods for himself,
Which are not gods?

“Therefore behold, I will this once cause them to know,
I will cause them to know My hand and My might;
And they shall know that My name is the LORD.

The LORD can see His children

God sees everything. But strangely enough, there are two times in the Old Testament when He says there is something He doesn't see. One is in Isaiah 65, where God says that the former troubles are hidden from His eyes. In Hosea 13:14, He is speaking to death and the grave, promising to destroy it. We know He will keep His promise, because He said, “Pity is hidden from My eyes.” It may be surprising to hear that something is hidden from God's eyes, but in both cases, it's good news for us. God has forgotten our former troubles, and He will destroy death without pity.

Those things are good news, but don't forget what God does see. He spoke of His people in our text, saying, “For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes.” God's children must accept that He can see their iniquity. He knows our secret fear: that we must account for the sin that still has some power over our lives. Mine is different from yours. But God can see them all.

So today we consider the theme, “The LORD can see His children.” But it's not all bad news, because of what He does with the iniquity that He detects within us. He finds us when we have strayed. He delivers us from our offenses. He brings us where we belong.

He finds us when we have strayed

God saw the iniquity of Israel, so that even when Jeremiah wrote these words, their doom was to spend about 70 years in captivity far away in Babylon. God's people had strayed from His ways by worshipping false gods. They had been taught this by the heathen who lived nearby. There was a special way of life that God had given to His people, centered upon His promises to them. But they had abandoned that way of life and began to live like their heathen neighbors. God's prophets appealed to them again and again to repent and return to the ways of righteousness. But the people preferred the message of false prophets: that there will be no judgment; they can do anything they like.

So what's a god to do? His judgment fell upon them, and Jeremiah was writing about it. God was going to scatter the people of Judah. Even the Temple was destroyed. The only ones left behind in the land were the heathen and the people who had left Israel long since.

But Jeremiah's message was not only doom and gloom. In fact, the whole thing helped Israel see their chastisement properly, and that it was justly deserved. Only then, when Israel was weeping upon the banks of the river we call Euphrates, far away from their own city and temple — only then were they ready to believe Jeremiah's words in our text today.

Why should we bother to learn these things? Because we are God's people today. He has called to every one of us and brought us here this morning. But some are missing here this morning for the same reason that many in Judah used to ignore the Temple. And some who are here this morning would like to mix their God-given Christian life with the poison of worldly philosophies and religions. In fact, we all face that temptation. Some here struggle at home with maintaining a truly devotional life in prayer and the Word of God, when those should be the most precious moments of each day. In short, we're not so different from the weak and drifting people of Judah to whom Jeremiah wrote.

But God's message of comfort to them is the same He gives to us. We cannot save ourselves, and will only fail if we try. But He knows us. He tracks us down, and He finds us. “Behold, I will send for many fishermen,” says the LORD, “and they shall fish them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.” Our first main point is this: He finds us when we have strayed.

He delivers us from our offenses

Usually when someone has done you wrong, you want to receive some kind of justice, and that usually means that the offender must know what it's like to be you. You want the offender to understand how he made you suffer. But that's not why God sent his people to captivity in Babylon. It's not why He allows us to experience suffering, either.

If God truly wanted to punish Jerusalem for her sins against Him, He could have done so. They would have been banished not to Babylon, but to hell. They would have languished not by the Euphrates, but in the lake of fire which burns day and night, forever and ever. I realize that these are ghastly thoughts, but we must know that this is the true punishment for all sin. Our sufferings on Earth, no matter how terrible we think they are, can hardly compare to the punishment that God has prepared for those who reject His mercy.

God did not send His people to Hell, but to Babylon. And so also with us. We live in a Babylon, separated from our homeland. This is not God's punishment, but a chastisement meant for peace. Our Babylon teaches us that we are mortal because of our wickedness at heart. We do deserve Hell, but instead God has given us promises like the one in our text.

Jeremiah wrote these words of God: “For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes. And first I will repay double for their iniquity and their sin, because they have defiled My land; they have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols.”

You can see that He is not blind to our sins. But His solution is to pay our debt for us. “I will repay double for their iniquity and their sin.” The word “double” could mean several things, but a good possibility is that God will pay for the guilt we inherit by simply being sinful people, and also for the guilt we earn through our personal disobedience. Both are covered by His payment.

You probably know exactly what that payment was, but we must never, ever forget it. God gave the life of His only-begotten Son as the guilt-payment for you, for me, for Israel, and for everyone else. Jesus suffered and died — His divinity even participating in that horrible experience. He was forsaken by the Father in heaven, and endured the ultimate suffering of hell. He shed perfect human blood, but it was more than perfect: that blood was divine. The debt is paid, and the payment is so precious that if our sins were double, they would still be covered. Our second main point is this: He delivers us from our offenses.

He brings us where we belong

The people of Israel always remembered a certain defining moment in their history. It's even mentioned in the New Testament book of Acts. Through the hand of Moses, God brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt. He fed them with manna in the desert for forty years, having given them the written Law and the Tabernacle as faithful guides to the salvation He promised. That dramatic deliverance from Egypt, then, is a defining moment for Israel. But Jeremiah's prophecy predicted something else, just as important.

“It shall no more be said, `The LORD lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,' but, `The LORD lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where He had driven them.' For I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their fathers.”

Even though God's chastisement was severe, and there seemed no recovery for the people of Israel, God was promising to restore them at the proper time. That restoration truly happened, about 70 years after they were taken into captivity. The magnificent Temple built by Solomon had been destroyed, but a new one was built and the sacrifices were observed again according the God's Law. The walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt, and the people began to dwell in safety again, in their own land. At the right time, God brought the Babylonian captivity of Israel to an end.

But Jeremiah's prophecy was even greater than the restoration of the Jews. The prayer of the prophet toward the end of our text shows that even the Gentiles would be brought to the true god: “The Gentiles shall come to You From the ends of the earth and say, `Surely our fathers have inherited lies, Worthlessness and unprofitable things.' ” Do you know who those Gentiles are? We are among them. God has promised the end of our own Babylonian captivity, and the fulfillment has already begun.

Through holy Baptism, He places us into Zion, the invisible Jerusalem on earth that we call the Church. He joins us to the Temple that is Jesus Christ, and bids us partake of His sacrifice for our sins by receiving the forgiveness of our sins — our manna in the wilderness, and the bread of life. You are washed and absolved of all guilt, because Jesus paid your debt. What's more, Jesus even gives the very flesh and blood He sacrificed, for Christians to eat and drink. He is truly our Passover Lamb, and those believers who eat His body and drink His blood are made immune to the plague of death.

This Zion, this Jerusalem, is where we belong on earth. Yet the final fulfillment of the promise is yet to come, when we will join Jeremiah and the rest in the true Jerusalem that awaits us, where the marriage feast we sometimes taste in the present will continue forever.

Remember: the LORD can see His children. He finds us when we have strayed. He delivers us from our offenses. He brings us where we belong. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!

Listen online at www.grace-els.org

This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.