Yesterday we ended our devotion thinking about the wound that our sin is to God. We often fail to consider what our sin does to God; we continue that thought this morning.
Look at 9:7-11
The people might try arguing with God, but He says; What else can I do? Seriously, what would you do? Shall the judge of the world not do right? Shall He not act in righteousness? But what we are hearing in all of this is…dare I say…God struggling?
When Moses wanted to know the name of God, who are you, what is your name, Moses asks, in Exodus 34, God told Moses that his name is: The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love…” That is who God is. Yes, it goes on to say, “…yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.” But do not neglect the first part of His name to run to the second…it is not either or.
Yes, verse 11 says what is going to happen…what God is going to do…He will exact vengeance. But…verse 10 speaks to the emotional cost…not the emotional cost to the people, but the emotional cost to God Himself.
If we are being candid, here is what the text says: It is God who is crying out loud…it is God who will weep and wail. Brothers and sisters, this is God in tears. “This is God hugging the very creation that is desolate. This is God bereaved not only of his human loved ones, but of creation itself. What we have is yet another picture of de-creation…Human sin affecting all of it. Creation suffers in silence and the only sound is the sobbing of the Creator. (Christopher Wright, pg. 130)
I wonder how many of us have had a season or seasons of life, where we wandered from the Lord? We did not listen to the Spirit’s promptings and then his shouting? No…we decided, again, for a time, to go our own way. Perhaps you, like those in our text, tried to fool yourself that you were not rejecting the Lord, but now looking back, you know with full clarity that that is exactly what you were doing! And the Lord had no choice, but to allow you to have what you so desperately wanted…He gave you over and you soon learned that your sin was not the kind master it claimed to be…but hell itself in disguise.
Yes, the Lord let you go there…He had too, for crying out loud, you demanded it. I am sure many of us know exactly of what I speak? What does it do to you now, to think, that while God had to let you go…He…God…the one without beginning or end…wept? He felt the pain of a Father, rejected by his own daughter…his own son.
And if one of the hosts of heaven, knowing your cold and hard heart, saw the tears of God and said, “Why do you weep, he is willingly embracing his sin…she is walking away, knowing full well what she is doing…” God would have said, “Yes…I know…but he is my son…she is my daughter.”
I am almost 65 years old. I became a pastor in 1990. I estimate that I have preached and or taught on average 4-5 times a week for those 35 plus years, sometimes more. I guess folks couldn’t be blamed for thinking that with all of that study, I should know some things by now. Well, if by that someone means that I should have a great degree of certainty about many things, I sadly am a disappointment. I don’t know what to do theologically with a God who is deeply wounded and emotionally distraught over my sin. This God who I know is unchanging, who is outside of time, who knows all things before they come into existence, before they happen…A God who has all outcomes already known and, is surprised by nothing, shocked by no action of man. That is all true.
But my dear friends…This is no less Who this great and wonderful One is. It is entirely possible, in fact, it is likely, that you, like me, have at times, broken the heart of God. Don’t theologize this…just let it sink in. You have broken the heart of God, caused Him sorrow to the point of tears and yet He loves you.
So, what are we to do? READ 9:17-22
God will not weep alone. When sin seems to win the day, when rebellion is the normal cast for God’s people, the Lord calls for an army of weepers. In that day, and it is true still among near-eastern people, there are grief processionals…women who are skillful in providing appropriate songs of lament.
In our text, God speaks to these women and tells them, go get your daughters, let them weep with you. The grief of sin stretches into the next generation. Jeremiah is not soft-selling the consequences of sin and rebellion…whether it be to God or to us. The tentacles of the evil in our hearts reach out to poison everyone and everything it touches. Only God’s grace and mercy can stop it and change the direction of life’s trajectory.
Sadly, there is more. The final insult to the Lord. It was not enough that Israel had a false security but even the covenant sign, circumcision, was said to mean absolutely nothing.
READ 9:25-26
Jeremiah is saying to the people of God: Look, there is no difference between you and the nations around you. Oh, there should be, a difference that is as profound as night and day…but alas…you are the same. You wanted to be like them, you envied them, and now you are just like them…and they own you.
Our text ends in chapter 10 with the final cost of idolatry and the Lord making comparisons to Himself. It simply sounds ridiculous that they chose:
Impotence over power.
Manufactured objects over the eternal king
Those that are doomed to perish over the One who created all things.
Those that are worthless and fraudulent, never delivering what they promise, over against one who has never once failed to keep His word. And all Jeremiah can do, all we can do is to call out to the Lord for mercy.
READ 10:23-25
We have seen God’s heart, now a word that we trust, will ring in God’s ears.
These words were prophesied in Psalm 79:6-7, now becoming the prayer of God’s servant. The prayer acknowledges man’s limits, in verse 23, and then pleads God’s mercy in verse 24, ending with confidence that God will do what is just and right according to who He is, in verse 25.
In the midst of the mess of sin, even the sin that we have made ourselves…we can follow the pattern: We have limits, we can’t change things, and so we plead God’s mercy and we find confidence in who He is…He will do what is right. Here is the irony of the prayer. Would it not be true that Israel, being just like the nations, are now among those who do not know the Lord and do not call upon him in truth? So, are they not to be judged as the nation’s themselves will be judged? But, if that is the case, and if there is hope for Israel’s future, which we know there is, Hope in mercy, then is there not hope for the nations?
What will God do? Well…we know what He is going to do. He is going to come. He is going to bring Himself right into the mess that we have made. And is going to come with a message to the Jewish people and to the world. Mercy will win the day, grace will conquer sin, but it will come at a cost and once again, the cost, the pain will be to God.
Through the suffering of God the Son, comes joy to mankind, to you and me, and even to God Himself. Joy to Father, Son and Spirit as they rejoice at the victory at the glory of the plan they made and executed flawlessly. So, we enter into the reality of emotion and theological tension. Serious Joy, for in the midst of all our sin, there is hope, there is victory. The Messiah of God will conquer sin, death and hell. He will strip sin of all its power and where death reigned, now there is only life.
Prayer: Father, the consideration of who You are is deeper than the ocean, I can scarcely comprehend your majesty and then to fathom the wound that sin is to You. Father forgive me. I sin so easily and thoughtlessly, but to consider what my sin has cost You, what had to be done that I might belong to Your family, this is sobering. Give me a holy hatred of all that displeases You and a consciousness to see clearly, that I might bring You joy and not wound, through Jesus Christ my Lord, Amen.
Hymn: Benedictus