Text:
Jeremiah 23:16-29 (Luke Wheat and Straw In the name of him who came to cast
fire rather than peace on the earth, dear friend in Christ: much to the delight
of parents and the mixed apprehensions of children, school begins this week –
and with it what many people are anticipating even more: the fall sports season which features
America’s favorite game, football. It’s
strange: almost everywhere else in the
world people get most excited about the game of soccer. Why, I’m not sure; because as a spectator
sport it rates right up there with watching grass grow for its levels of
excitement and drama. But here in Oddly enough, the same is true when
we go to war. Our armed forces are
probably the best and the most well equipped the world has ever seen. And in head to head, all-out conflict with
the armed forces of any other nation we’d come out on top. We don’t do quite so well, however, as we
proved in Viet Nam and are now learning again in Iraq, when the lines are not
so clear: when it’s harder to tell who’s
friendly and who’s not, when the enemy employs guerilla and terror tactics
instead of facing us head on, and when it’s difficult to evaluate progress in
any measurable way. We don’t like that
at all. We want everything to be clearer
and more distinct. And I think the same is true of the
way we approach our religious faith. We
want things simple, straightforward, and clearly delineated. We want to say this over here is Christian
and right and true and good, and that over there is not. And so we can really get into a story like
the one of the prophet Elijah and his showdown with the prophets of Baal at But today’s Old Testament lesson
comes to us from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. And I’m willing to bet that very few of us
can remember even a single story about him, much less one that defines his life
and ministry in any meaningful way. And
what’s really strange about that is Elijah never wrote a thing that we know of,
and everything we do know about him happened in a period of just three short
years. On the other hand, we have pretty
much Jeremiah’s whole story, from his call to be a prophet of God when he was
little more than a child, on through his sixty or more years of service to the
Lord – during which time he wrote one of the longest books in the Bible (in
addition to one of the shortest). So we
have available to us far more information about him—and yet, compared to
Elijah, we know almost nothing about him. Why is that? Well my best guess is that it’s because his
story isn’t quite so crisp, clean, and straightforward
as Elijah’s. You see, the bad guys in
Jeremiah’s life were not the idol-worshipping prophets of Baal. They weren’t nearly as obvious as that. They were instead the men serving along side
Jeremiah as priests and prophets in the But the reason they were so popular
was that they told people what they wanted to hear instead of what the Lord God
said. And they were good at it. I mean they weren’t so obvious as to say
black has now become white or vice versa, or that God’s “no” had suddenly
become “yes”; nothing as clear and distinct as that. Instead, they operated in shades of gray and
subtle academic distinctions by which “no” became “sometimes”, “maybe”, and
“yes, under these special circumstances”.
And they could make it all sound so very scholarly while they dissembled
and obfuscated and beat around bushes that by the time they were done, it sounded
like it must be right. Even more, they
made it sound so loving and caring because they were the ones teaching
inclusion and acceptance and “Hey, let’s not be judging anyone. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Can’t we all just get along? And can’t we accept that the Lord God is big enough
to be approached in any number of ways – and by people who call him any number
of names? There’s room for everyone and
every opinion and every lifestyle in the house of God.” Well, Jeremiah didn’t think so. And among the prophets who claimed to be
speaking for the Lord he pretty much stood alone in his position. And for the stand he took on God’s Word of truth
he was called a hateful, judgmental doomsayer, and a backward, ignorant
liar. At one point his divinely inspired
writings were burned by order of the king.
Other times he was imprisoned for speaking the messages God sent him to
deliver. Once it got so bad for him that
Jeremiah tried not to speak the Word God gave him because he knew that angry
people would make him suffer for it; but then he found the Word of God burned
like fire in his soul until he had to speak up and let it go. Jeremiah had the unhappy task of
delivering the unpopular message of God’s judgment against sin to people who
didn’t want to hear it, and who were quite content to listen to other prophets
who told them what they wanted to hear.
The difference was, of course, Jeremiah was speaking God’s truth and the
others weren’t. And unfortunately,
throughout his many years of ministry by which the Lord tried time and time
again to call his people to repentance, almost no one listened. That’s what the long book of Jeremiah is
mostly about. His other book, the short
one, is called Lamentations. It
describes the prophet’s reactions as he walks through the smoldering ruins of
Jerusalem weeping over the mass carnage there – all the city’s inhabitants who
had been slain because they failed to heed the prophet’s warnings and the
Lord’s call to repentance through him.
They preferred the comfortable lies of the false prophets to the
uncomfortable truths of God. And so,
when God’s judgment finally fell, they paid with their lives; every last one of
them. They didn’t listen to Jeremiah. The question is: will we?
Will we learn the lesson the
Lord God spoke through him? The message we heard this morning
from Jeremiah is part of a larger section in which he is warning people about
the many false prophets who were distorting God’s Word and filling people with
vain hopes. And again, it needs to be
said that these guys didn’t walk around wearing signs that clearly identified
them as false prophets. No. It wasn’t that obvious. They looked good. They were educated, well-spoken, and seemed
to be very spiritual men. People liked
and admired them. Nor in most cases were
they simply hucksters and conmen who were consciously trying to deceive
people. Instead they were very sincere
about the things they taught. The
problem is that they were sincerely wrong, and their false teachings were
leading people away from the truth of God to judgment and ruin. And so, in the process of warning people
about them, Jeremiah says several things that will help his hearers learn how
to recognize a false prophet. And
inasmuch as there are many false prophets around today – probably a lot more
than Jeremiah ever had to contend with – we will do well to pay attention to
what he has to say. First, it’s worth noting that twice
in this section Jeremiah indicates that the false prophets were not standing in
the council of the Lord. That is to say,
they weren’t listening to and receiving their words from God. Now you might ask, “How can that be? They were the Bible scholars of the day. If they were constantly reading God’s Word
how could they not be in the Lord’s council?”
The answer lies in how the Word of God is approached. Does the preacher place himself under the
authority of the Word recognizing it as the true, infallible, unchanging
revelation of the Lord Most High – and so actually receive his teaching from it? Or does he place himself above it to begin
with, seeing it as an ancient document that reflects a snapshot of what well
intentioned but superstitious people once believed; but now that we’ve come so
far in our evolving understanding of God’s plan and purpose we have to filter
and correct so that it better reflects the “truth” as we understand it today. False prophets do the latter. And so while they make use God’s Word, they
only use it to the extent that it supports their own preconceived ideas. What you hear from them is not what God said,
but what they think peppered with Bible passages that appear to reinforce their
teachings. A second red flag that marks a false
prophet is his use of an extra-biblical source of authority or revelation. You see, it’s one thing for a false prophet to
use his supposedly enlightened judgment to delete parts of God’s Word that are
contrary to his point of view; but to lend credibility to things he wants to add
to his message that aren’t in God’s Word he has to present to his hearers a
reason to believe him – a reason to accept that what he says either comes from
God or another source just as reliable.
In Jeremiah’s day it seems the favorite method was to claim to have inspired
dreams by which the Lord communicated new additions his word. And the wonderful thing about dreams is that
they are completely unverifiable. Who’s
to say for sure what another person dreamed or where that dream came from? But if you already held a teacher in high
regard and considered him to be a godly person, you might be very willing to
accept that his dreams were true revelations from God. And it wasn’t only true back then. Even today the aberrant teachings whole church
bodies are based on the dreams of supposed latter day prophets. There are televangelists you could tune in
right now who are claiming to have dreams and visions on almost a daily
basis. But these days I think most of us
would be justifiably suspect of such claims.
Instead, modern, thinking Christians like ourselves
are more susceptible to being taken in by appeals to human reason, superior
education, and stories of personal experience.
The Bible teacher who is perceived as having all the right credentials –
maybe he’s a doctor of theology or a bishop of the church, the guy who says
“Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you that God would do it this way?”, the fellow
who’s got all kinds of sociological studies or scientific research or marketing
data to back his claims, and the preacher who can tell an entertaining story
about something that happened to him and how God worked in his life – these are
the kinds of methods false prophets use to add all sorts of things to God’s
Word and make them appear to be just as true and reliable. And a lot a people fall for it. And one more: another common feature of false prophets is
that they tend to play fast and loose with the Law of God. In most cases this translates directly into
teaching lax moral standards. This was
certainly the case in Jeremiah’s day.
The false teachers he was denouncing made themselves popular by
proclaiming a God who chuckled to himself over the weaknesses of his fallen
creatures and who winked at the sinful foibles and lusts of the people he
called to be his own. These prophets
assured the people of the Jewish nation that God loved and accepted them just
they way they were—regardless of how they behaved and treated one another. It’s a message people still love to hear
today. But it is a siren song that leads
people to their destruction. For a
people without sin do not need to repent.
And a people who do not stand in fear trembling before the righteous
judgments of a holy God who is angry over sin do not need a Savior. And a God who loves sinners just the way they
are does not need to send his only begotten Son to die in their place. So by watering down or softening the holy Law
of God, the false prophets end up throwing out the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. And the thing to understand that
it’s all done very subtly. To use the
earlier illustration, it’s usually the slow moving and painfully dull to watch
game of soccer, not the clear cut action of football. But Satan, our adversary, who works his
mischief through false prophets, is a patient guy. He doesn’t care how long it takes to erode
away God’s truth if in the end he can rob people of the confidence they have in
Jesus. And this is why we need to be on
guard always. And I know that we don’t
like doing it. At times it seems
nitpicky and unloving and like we’re splitting hairs to say, “No. What you’re saying is wrong. What God says is this”; but that’s exactly
what we’re called to do. And we will be
accused of all those terrible things—just like Jeremiah was. But we have an obligation to know the
difference between the wholesome and nutritious wheat of God’s Word and the
soiled straw of the false prophets, and to keep them separate. And it really isn’t’ that difficult. Regarding the false prophets, this is what
the Lord of hosts says: “Don’t listen to
them”. It’s not our job not to censor or
silence them as they chip away at God’s Word a piece at a time. The Lord will deal with them as he sees
fit. But it is our task to keep the Word
of God whole, unadulterated and undefiled so that it can be the hammer that
chips away at our hard sinful hearts and brings us into a deeper trust and more
faithful walk with our Lord Jesus Christ.
In his holy name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |