AUSTRALIAN BIBLE CHURCH

A CONTINUATION OF THE ORIGINAL THRUST AND BASE OF
THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF AUSTRALIA, ON CHANGELESS BIBLICAL LINES

PART I – The Negative Side To Open

Jeremiah 37:17 with Jeremiah 23:33ff., 34:8ff.
Isaiah 37:1ff., 38:14ff., II Kings 22:12ff., James 2

Surrounded by enemies, shrinking into famine, a very sieve for sin, as if collecting acid rain, King Zedekiah was not lacking in boldness. He followed the practices of his brother, King Jehoiakim despite his dire end, and added his own reckless renegacy. Thus he both failed to hear Jeremiah after his 21 year old institution as King, and feared nothing about Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, who had already taken King Jehoiakin to Babylon, where he would have a 37 year captivity before things ameliorated a little.

One might have thought that he would think twice before breaking the law of God, the lore of wisdom in rebelling as a weak kingdom while holding the Lord well apart, against a powerful one. After all, it was in terms of that invasive king, Nebuchadnezzar that he had been placed on the throne, and by the word of the prophet, Jeremiah he might have kept it and glorified God, being guided to be more like his princely father, Josiah, who needed no title to show regality, and having all power to do the will of God, had effectively USED it.

However King Zedekiah did nothing of the sort, rebelling against 1) God's law, 2) Jeremiah's counsel and 3) the King of the captivity. You might have thought, then, that these things being so, with three rebellions, one against the source of power and victory, one against the counsel of kindness and a third against the earthly tyrant, that the clashing roar of these stormy waves might have awakened him, if not sharply, then perhaps just a little.

It is so with many. They ask why they have neurosis, incapacity, no sense of power, of peace, of program, of progress, or even of meaning; they attack others being jealous, the State being exasperated with life and unwilling to recognise the good things provided or even themselves, their duties, as if maddened by their displacement. Here they become spiritually displaced persons, in whom the fire of fury and frustration works; and what they will do next, who can tell, but the Lord! They leave the wife, ignore the beauty of the co-operation that was, for the interests of the lust or temper of the moment, and sail off after decades of wifely service, in a selfishness so profound, that it is like a lobotomy, a cutting of part of the brain, in brainless ingratitude and ceaseless preoccupation with self-centred desires.

It is therefore both amazing, in terms of principle, and yet not at all surprising in terms of statistics, that when the Lord gave an MORAL order, through the prophet Jeremiah in the very midst of the wars coming more and more freely to engulf little Judah, once a great nation but now increasingly depraved, especially since King Manasseh, that masterpiece of corruptive wickedness – though he DID repent, that Zedekiah took one more step. Which was this ?

The prophet Jeremiah, in the name of the Lord, indicated that the people were misusing slaves. They were treating them inhumanly and not according to the law.

A massive slave release was accordingly mandated. Having violated the conditions given, they were now to dismiss from slavery all the male and female slaves. Since they had not honoured the code for liberation in its time, therefore now they were to free all AT ONCE. In the fear of their unprepossessing situation, they acted speedily, setting them free.

A wave of realism, if not repentance, surged across the land. Was it possible that now, as in the day of righteous Reformer, King Josiah, they would return to the Lord and find both strength and solace, meaning and might ? It was. Yet it did not happen. Seeing their unjust profits diminish, their power reduced, their pride and importance deleted, their ease eroded, why they turned back and put the released slaves back into servitude again!

Such is the topsy-turvy recklessness of those borne along in the winds of fury, both lifted up and cast down, simultaneously, or if you prefer, in movements so near to each other that they were almost like a super-quick dance. Ambiguity, changeableness, self-centred skating was IN!

To be weak is bad; to be of impure heart is worse; to vacillate and respond now to self-interest and now to decency, obeying God and winking at it anon, this is like crossing a road of violent traffic while reading a book, and giving sensitive attention to the mobile phone, while at the same time, regarding with pleasure the flight of birds to distant trees.

The penalty did not delay, for this vacillatory demise of virtue. The Lord said this (34:17):

'You have not obeyed Me in proclaiming liberty,
every one to his brother and every one to his neighbour.

'Behold, I proclaim liberty to you,' says the LORD -
'to the sword, to pestilence , and to famine!
And I will deliver you to trouble among all the kingdoms of the earth.' "

Thus the concept of deliverance the people had treated meanly, calculatingly, half-heartedly, and then revoking it, they forced slaves back once more to their illicit and heartless treatment of them. Deliverance ? Why for them, it was to restore a means of wealth, irrespective of human suffering, and against the law of God.

Deliverance ? since they thought so much of it, then, as to deliver the slaves, if only temporarily, and so little as to bring them back into anti-social suppression, twisting the terms and mocking their meaning, then they could systematically endure what they gave, and acquire for themselves what they had bestowed on the slaves. If that was their mercy, they could experience it!

THEY, yes they too could have 'deliverance' a dancing, glancing term, and themselves enjoy the wonder of a short deliverance (until the enemy destroyed their nation, at least temporarily – exiling them for 70 years, as foretold in Jeremiah 25). Then many could experience even more deliverance, the kind that does not count, and find the meaning of a new subjection as the enemy forces swept them aside, as if they were scarcely human, and used them for their own profit and power, pride and love of subjugating other people.

Both Moslem armies and Romanist-directed ones have performed such SUBMISSION-and- control scenarios over hundreds of years, in seized lands and nations; but then they have found something of the other side of submission. Such was the case :

These are but illustrations, from far and nearer. God simply does not like oppression, is not favourable towards man strangling man heartlessly; and while He reserves the right of judgment of sustained and chronic evil (to let its corruption go on, can be more unkind that to abort the whole thing), yet He may choose to teach slave-loving oppression, what the American Civil War so poignantly taught about the dynamite of sensitive sorrow and suffering hidden in oppression. Whatever started it, this was a dynamic within it!

Back to Israel: In the very midst of the slavery episode, indeed a little later, you find this same King, who reigned at that time, asking the prophet this little question, to which we now come.

In Jeremiah 37:3, the King requests prayer. Many request prayer. Do they consider changing their ways, or do they ask for woe while continuing as if obsession had removed the eye of the soul, and their codes and conduct were invisible even to themselves, blinded not only to what happened outside, but to what is occurring within, in their own hearts, as well! If you want prayer, it is time to want holiness, the pardon of repentance, to seek godliness and His glory, the payment to your account of the righteousness the Lord who to faith gives freely, having paid the ransom price in Christ Jesus. What is the use of putting on mosquito protection fluids, if you insist on sitting in the middle of a jungle swarming with the things!

Still, Zedekiah approached the prophet. The reply ? At about that time, the Egyptian army came to assault Jerusalem, but having other problems, suddenly left. Don't think this is deliverance, said Jeremiah, for the Chaldeans, the Babylonians "shall come back and fight against this city, and take it and burn it with fire. We saw last time that even if the whole Babylonian army, each one, lay wounded, so vile was the flavour of the dis-faith of Jerusalem, that this sick army would even at that, rise up and conquer it! (Jeremiah 37:10). The King had his answer.

Things developed. We also noted recently that Jeremiah went to claim land outside the city, was deemed to be about to side with the enemy, or defect to it, was put in prison, and there languished. The King, who had not been sparing the prophet thus far, though not in entire control (even when one is NOT in entire control of events, one can use what measure of control ONE DOES HAVE, and so show sincerity; and indeed, often people seeing courage in someone, will take heart and arise en masse to seek the good thing hitherto avoided!) now sought a favour. Now he secretly called and interviewed Jeremiah, in his own house!

The effrontery of sitting in the vomit of vice and asking if there was any hygiene!

He asked for the reason of his own imprisonment. But he did not ignore the plight of the King. How often does God PLEAD with people to abandon evil, seek mercy, show kindness, be merciful to the poor, to act in faith and follow Him!

Yet the words in the midst of the trouble often seem like distant cannon fire to the tormented souls that equivocate and seek to make of God an accomplice, a participant after the fact, in their evils and sins. They do not heed: they want only what they prescribe, and act as if God were a petrol station, to be blamed if not providing the energy of cars, to the waiting vehicles, at a minimum price. As to driving ? of course, THAT is their affair. For them, God is merely a serviceable supply source.

Later, having been treated a little better, though still kept in imprisonment, and having given further warning to those who insisted on not surrendering but staying in the doomed city, Jeremiah was brought into a horrible pit, without prospect of food or drink. See him now: From this, taken by the mercy of the eunuch, Ebed-Melek, he is once more brought to the King. Mercifully, he tells the King of the deliverance if they would surrender to the invading forces. The King would not do so; but notice the language of the prophet.

"Please," he cries, "obey the voice of the LORD which I speak to you. So it shall l be well with you, and your soul shall live."

Yet the King would not. IMPLORED in the torrent of mercy, sought in the spirit of love and lovingkindness, YET THE KING WOULD NOT LISTEN. Again, despite this condition of his heart, he still once more took the step of ASKING Jeremiah, seeking some spiritual good. Thus the prophet PLED with the King: PLEASE, he said, in tender concern which vice did not eliminate, from the heart, please do as I tell you from God.

In Isaiah 48:18ff., you likewise see the exclamations of mercy sent away, the tenderness of the pleas of God.

These were no mere words, but each one of His supplications to errant and erratic man is like a nail in His own flesh, which He certainly felt. What He suffered there, is the physical and inwardly personal in its outward expression; on the Cross its pain was visible. Here it is the laboratory exhibit of the pleas of His heart.

What then ? SEPARATE from the sovereignty of sin, and do not remain in that city. HEED the word of God and do not remain where it is not heeded, in any Church, and does not rule. HALLOW the name of God and be in the fear of His name, for the fear of the Lord is clean. Be innovative in many things, but never with the word of God, to exchange it for asininity, to befoul it with unbelief, to be inoperative while it operates, like a paralysed army. Consider the merciful pity and the wonder of wisdom in the Lord, and follow Him.

You can say as much about divine sovereignty as you please, but nothing takes the emotional force from the love which wishes that all might repent and come to the knowledge of the truth. His effecting of salvation is no testimony to His rejection of others unsaved, but of His refusal to force on any whose heart is not moved, the implementation of salvation where it IS found. Then His relief and rest, it is not taken and so the tension with truth is not resolved: grace is wasted.

If anyone reading these words is not yet taken into the heart of the Lord, is mistaken in shiftless unspirituality, then repent now, receive the love of the Saviour, and being His, soar into His kingdom, sitting in heavenly places with Him whose presence is then the ULTIMATE ENVIRONMENT (Ephesians 2:6-8) for the human heart.

Next week, Lord willing, we shall complete this sermon, which proves too long for one presentation.

	a) when Hitler carried off much of Europe like a despised bride, to misuse her, and then Stalin extended the time for many, as also
	b) when Islamic power was broken in World War II, after threatening Europe with its force, or as
	c) when the Vatican, after centuries of allowing the depraved horror of the Romanist Inquisition, was a little rump left to the power of the papacy, after a national movement in Italy.