Dennis Tuuri

Sermon scripture is Jeremiah 16. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. The subject is God makes the call. The word of the Lord came also unto me, saying, “Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus saith the Lord, concerning the sons, and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bear them, and concerning their fathers that beget them in this land.

They shall die of grievous deaths, they shall not be lamented, neither shall they be buried, that they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth, and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine, and their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth. For thus saith the Lord, “Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament, nor bemoan them, for I have taken away my peace from this people, saith the Lord, even loving kindness and mercies.

Both the great and the small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried. Neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them. Neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning to comfort them for the dead. Neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother. Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting to sit with them to eat and to drink.

For thus saith the Lord, Lord of hosts, the God of Israel. Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes and in your days, the voice of mirth, the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride. And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt show this people all these words, when they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us?

Or what is our iniquity? Or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God? Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the Lord, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshiped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law, whom ye have done worse than your fathers. For behold, ye walk everyone after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto me.

Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that you know not, neither ye nor your fathers, and there shall ye serve other gods day and night. where I will not show you favor. Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, the Lord liveth that brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. But the Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them, and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.

Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them, and after will I seek for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks. For mine eyes are upon all their ways. They are not hid from my face, neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes. First I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double because they have defiled my land.

They have filled mine inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable things. Oh Lord, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in the day of affliction. The Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit. Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods. Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know.

I will cause them to know mine hand and my might, and they shall know that my name is the Lord. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this passage. We thank you, Lord God, for the gift of the Holy Spirit who takes this word and writes it upon our hearts. Give us open ears to hear this word this day. May we repent of our sinfulness and call forth repentance in this land as well on the basis of this text.

Minister it to us Lord God. We ask it in Jesus’ name and for the sake of his kingdom. Amen.

Somewhat a week away from Super Bowl Sunday, so-called. I have a baseball analogy to start with this morning. Although I guess it works in football, too. Three strikes and you’re out. In the state of Washington. Now, I guess it’s going to work in terms of felonies. Three felony convictions in your life, life in prison, if they pass the initiative.

You know, you got strike one in baseball, another strike, ball goes by, you third strike and you’re out of the game. Football, I guess, isn’t all that different. Four downs, but really you have three plays to get the ball ten yards. And if you don’t do it, then normally what you do is give up the football to the other team, you yield possession of it. Well, I thought of this three strike analogy this last week.

We’ve had three strikes, in my estimation, on the part of juries. We had the first strike of the Rodney King attackers found not guilty of attempted murder. Strike one. Then we had the hung jury, rather, with the younger brother who very clearly was part of the killing of his parents. From what I understand, he actually—his mother was running down the hall, he reloaded, blew her head off—but the jury couldn’t find it in them to bring a conviction.

Hung jury strike two. And then this last week, Mrs. Bobbitt, clearly guilty, acquitted on the basis of supposed insanity. Strike three. The American system of jurisprudence is bankrupt. Juries cannot make the call. So I’ve gone now from them being batters striking out to them being umpires who refuse to call the ball, the pitch a strike when it is a strike or saying we can’t decide. Well, this I think is indicative of the state in which we find ourselves today.

God can and does make the call. He doesn’t miss when he swings. No strikes get by God. He makes the call. He hits the ball. He does what is plainly consistent with his character. In the book of Jeremiah, he makes a call against a people on the basis of their sin. The church of Jesus Christ is required in response to God’s calls to make calls as well. That’s what Matthew 18, the keys of the kingdom are all about.

Whatever the church decides judicially shall have been decided in heaven. It’s a response making a call to a situation. But we live in a land where the criminal justice system apparently is nearly out of the game if these trials are any indication and I think they are of what the future holds for us. Now we’re going to talk today about abortion. This is, I don’t know, how many years we’ve been doing this—probably ten or so, I suppose—we take the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

This being the twenty-first anniversary—twenty-first birthday, so to speak, a coming to age of maturation of this great evil in our land—and we take that Sunday at this church and engage in a liturgy of malediction. You know, the benediction at the end of the service. “Bene” means good. “Mal” means evil. It’s an evil word that’s spoken against those who participate in or commit the murder of unborn infants. It’s not a benediction that rests upon them.

It’s a malediction. So this is a liturgy of malediction which we will perform after the offering in which we ask God to bring his special judgments. We declare to this congregation and to the culture around us that God makes the call against people that do this kind of sinful wickedness. And God says that they’re accursed unless they repent and his judgments come upon them. We pray for that to happen.

It’s interesting. Just yesterday I got in the mail a letter from a man who got the videotape of Reverend Jordan leading us in songs at family camp. He’s ordered some other tapes as well of Mr. Jordan’s presentation to us and the transfer on the different cycles of history. And he wrote me a letter with a proposal for what he called—he wants to call—”Keys Day,” and really it’s geared at the same thing we’re doing now. It’s not just us. The Christian Action Council has for a number of years what they call this day “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Now I don’t know if this year they actually did it last week on the sixteenth. There was some sort of conflict with another group, and this Sunday I don’t know what it was. But this would normally be the day, and so we decided to stay with this day and we have tradition we use in this church the closest one to the University of Roe v. Wade, which was just a couple of days ago.

So this man suggests that we call this day “Keys Day,” and he talks in his letter—and it’s a real interesting letter—he talks about how, you know, the church took Saturnalia, the pagan festival at the end of the year, and turned it into Christmas. The church took a pagan festival in the spring and redeemed it with the use of the remembrance of Easter and the resurrection of Christ, the birth of Christ, resurrection of Christ, and how they took Halloween.

Now, the church is—and we’re part of that movement, I think—the church is taking Halloween and remembering instead we should use that day to celebrate the Reformation because Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg on that same day in fifteen seventeen. And so, the church has this tradition, and whether or not we think that these—Christmas was celebrated prior to Saturnalia doesn’t really make any difference for the sake of this analogy.

We have this tradition that we engage in today as well of taking things that have been initiated perhaps for evil or bad purposes and yet taking those very things and using them for the sake of the kingdom. And he talks in this letter about that he wrote to me that this is kind of like the “second son principle” in scripture. And of course the big model for that is Adam and then Jesus. And the first son fails. The oldest son in scripture repeatedly, very frequently fails, sins, falls, and the youngest son or the younger son then rises up.

And it’s a picture of, as I said, Adam and Christ—the resurrection of the second son who redeems all of mankind. So the second son principle is to be seen as well in this observance of these days and our observance of this day and turning it into a positive statement. Now, you know, we called it anti-abortion Sunday, and it is certainly important to realize that is good terminology. We are against the killing of unborn infants known as abortion.

We’re against that. It’s not just that we’re pro-life. I think that’s one of the spirit of our age. Everything’s got to be positively motivated. We don’t want to say we’re against anything. No, we are against something. We’re against whatever is sin in the scriptures. But he makes a good point here that perhaps the name “Keys Day” or, uh, “Make the Call Day,” whatever you want to call it, is appropriate as well to remind ourselves that this is a proper use, the exercise of the keys, the church. It’s a response as a good second son response to the father. The first son didn’t—saying back to the father in our own words what he has told us is true from his scriptures.

And in this case, we’re telling him we’re agreeing with him that those who commit abortion, those who murder pre-born infants, are to suffer his special judgments as he tells us clearly in the scriptures that they are. So this letter was very timely and I thought he brought up some very good points. He also talked about the “amen principle” in scripture. We have responsive readings. We just did one, and you know that we do them differently than many churches you may have attended in the past.

And the reason for that is that we think that much of the scriptures—certainly much of the Psalms—are written in a responsorial setting where each verse, the first half of it laid out in your particular Bible usually, the first half is a statement of a truth. The second half is the same truth in different words. And that teaches us that we repeat back to God. Our lives are lived in response to his truth and in obedience to his truth.

Different words are used for the second half of the response normally because God says that we’re not simply to parrot back to him things, but rather we rephrase things. We understand them fully if we take God’s word and put it into our lives and our lives are lived in response. And so the amen principle he brings up in his letter is an important part of Keys Day or anti-abortion Sunday or Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, whatever you want to call it.

And so that’s what we do today: a liturgy of malediction. We ask for God’s special curses. And this is a proper amen response because we’re not asking for something that God hasn’t told us is to be asked for in terms of his word. His scriptures are quite clear. Psalm 10, that we read earlier, other Psalms as well. You’ll see in the so-called imprecatory Psalms—those are psalms of prayers of imprecation, asking for God’s judgment against the ungodly—that these special curses are appointed for several classes of people.

In general, of course, those who oppose the kingdom of God. Psalm 2 follows Psalm 1: the two paths. And what is the path of the unrighteous? It’s to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. It’s to shake their fist at God and cast off his sovereignty or attempt to. And God has them in derision. Well, that is usually seen in the Psalms as being the special recipients of God’s curse. When they do that, by means of attacking two things, one is the church and the other are those elements of the society—the community, really—it’s written to, but society in general—who are, to a degree, helpless and special protection of God. And those are three groups usually that are singled out: widows, the fatherless, and the stranger in the land.

And so wicked men who oppress either the church or the widows, fatherless, and strangers in the land—they are the special recipients of God’s imprecation. And so Psalm 10 is the same thing. Says that God is indeed the father of the widow and he’s the father of the fatherless. He will indeed judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress.

And using the words from Psalm 10: Psalm 10 says, “Why do these people do these things? They do them because they don’t think God’s judgment is upon them.” Well, the church is here to remind them that while God’s judgment may or may not have been meted out in full yet, yet it shall be in time. That God sees every last act of abortion. Every murder that is committed, God sees, God records, and God judges.

And in fact, the very existence of abortion in our land is, I think, can be said to be a judgment from God as well. And I’ll get to that in a little bit. One final thing that this man recommends—in terms of a future orientation—the liturgy of malediction has a future orientation to it. It praises these things that in the future this might be the course of this particular culture in which we live, that God’s special judgments be meted out, bringing people to either one of two conclusions.

Either that they repent and then are established as righteous in the land, or that they are removed from the face of the earth. That’s our prayer: is for those in authority, for those who practice abortion, for the mothers who turn their children over to the abortionists. Our prayer is that God may bring his special judgments and curses upon them. Not to punish them ultimately because we want to see them punished for our own sake.

No, to bring them either to repentance or to remove them off the face of the earth and thereby to warn people who would do the same thing that this is a sin judged by God. The concept that punishment prevents people from doing evil is sound and biblical, no matter what else you might have heard. Deterrence is a godly concept. In Deuteronomy 17, the man who sins presumptuously against God is put to death so that people may see and therefore no more sin presumptuously.

So the idea that capital punishment or other punishments from God is deterrence is biblically based. I heard a Washington court—Washington County District Court judge—on the radio this last week and he said, you know, these people who say that there is no such thing as deterrence, that capital punishment is not a deterrent. So why would a guy go in and rob—going to rob the store and threaten to kill the owner if he doesn’t turn over the money?

So he’s threatening him with capital punishment, death, unless he does this act to deter him from calling the police or something. Well, in any event, this is what we pray for. We pray for God’s special judgment. So, let’s look at Jeremiah 16, understand some relevancies of this text to this particular day then. And as I said in Jeremiah 16, we have an instance of God making the call—not striking out.

You’ll see in the outline I’ve got seven. This text divided up into seven parts.

First part is essentially an introductory text, verses 1 through 3. The word of the Lord came unto me saying, “Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus saith the Lord, concerning the sons, concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bear them, and concerning their fathers that beget them in the land. This is what God is speaking of.

He tells us in these first three verses, this is the text of what we’ll be reading is based upon this. This is the word of the Lord, a sure word from God to Jeremiah. And he tells Jeremiah not to take a wife, neither to have sons or daughters in this place. Now, there’s some discussion as to whether or not he was really even single. He might have already been married. We don’t know. Calvin said, “We don’t know.” That’s good enough for me.

But the point that God makes here is this, and I’m going to read from Calvin’s commentary on Jeremiah 16. He says that marriage is the preservation of the human race. But he said, God tells them to take not a wife and have no children. We hint see that in the person of Jeremiah, God intended to show the Jews that they deserve to be exterminated from the earth. This is the import of this prophecy. The prophecy is that they need—they deserve—to be exterminated off the face of the earth.

And so the normal means of the propagation of the human race, God tells Jeremiah by way of symbol of what he’s going to tell them. Now the picture is: don’t have a wife and don’t have children because you really deserve to be exterminated from off the face of the earth. Then God tells them in verse 3, and now let me just make a caveat here. I’ve decided to focus these verses in this way. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, whether the next divisions that you have in your outline are really the best way to divide the text or not.

I get where verses 4 or 5 the judgment of God concerning the ones that are born, the children, and then verses 6–9 concerning the parents. Now, I do that because in verse 3, we seem to have these two groups: the ones that are born, sons and daughters, and God says this is the word concerning the children essentially, sons and daughters, and also concerning the parents, fathers and mothers. So, I’ve taken and broken these texts up.

Now, it could very well be that all those verses relate to both groups of people. But I’ve taken the division where God tells Jeremiah in verse 6 and 9 that the judgment will be upon the great and the small to indicate the division of the text. So at least by way of application these texts may well apply to both children and parents. So it is legitimate to consider the first couple of verses specifically thinking of their application to children and the next three verses about parents.

And that’s what I’m going to do now. So we have this introductory text introducing the subject and then going on to speak of the judgments. In verse section two—rather, verses 4 and 5—we read of the judgments, and I’m going to apply this specifically to the ones that are born, to children. “They shall die of grievous deaths.” The Septuagint—it’s a deathly death. I mean, it’s a wasting away thing is spoken of here—and disease without reprieve, not a quick death but grievous in the sense of long suffering. Other texts have it differently, but that is what the Septuagint text, based upon ancient Hebrew texts, tells us this verse means: grievous death.

“They shall not be lamented, neither shall they be buried. They should be as dung upon the face of the earth.” And we have a situation in this country now in terms of America that this is the state. This is what meets those pre-born infants who are regularly murdered every day in this country. They are not mourned. They are not lamented—not mourned, not lamented. They die grievous deaths and they are as dung upon the face of the earth.

They are thrown into refuse heaps in some places. Of course, there are probably no sanitation rules and regulations against that, but essentially they are regarded as unimportant, as dung on the face of the earth. “They’ll be consumed by the sword and by famine.” And we know, of course, of pre-born infants that are regularly—now, of course, here the immediate application is the judgment come upon Jerusalem and Judah at the hands of invading armies who will take the sword to them.

But we can, I think, legitimately apply it to what happens in the womb of the mothers who commit their children over to the hands of people who would actually literally butcher them and use little tiny scalpels—swords—against those who are in the womb in the safety, the most biggest picture of safety that God has given to us, the mother’s womb. Yet that womb is invaded with the sword, and they will die by famine, and their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven and for the beasts of the earth.

“For thus saith the Lord, enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament, nor bemoan them. For I have taken away, what does he say he takes away in this particular section? His peace, which is to say, his loving kindness and his mercies. And I think that there is a judgment that is pictured in this for us. The fact that these people do not lament and do not mourn the death of their little ones is, I think, an indication of God’s judgment already at work in the land.

He removes his peace, his well-being, his order based upon his word from the land that sins against him. And he removes his loving kindness and mercies. Loving kindness and mercy are attributes of God that are applicable to a culture only so far as it obeys him and is in right relationship to him. And as a culture moves away from the Lord Jesus Christ and belief in it, loving kindness and mercy goes out the door.

We don’t understand that very well. We live in a country that has deep roots in the scriptures and as a result loving kindness and mercies remain in the providence and grace of God to this day operative in the context of the culture even though it has rejected God. But God says that is not forever. There comes a time at which he removes even loving kindness and mercy from the land.

And how does he do it? Through the demonstration of loving kindness and mercy through his people. Even the people that are supposed to have, in a natural sense so to speak, loving kindness and mercy for their own children—no longer have it. Those children are turned over in the womb to the abortionist scalpel. And so we see some relevance here to our day and age.

Secondly, concerning their parents in verses 6–9: “Both the great and the small shall die in the land. They shall not be buried, neither shall they be lamented for, nor cut themselves and write themselves bald for them. These are signs of lamentation in Israel. Neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning to comfort them for the dead. Neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother. Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting to sit with them to eat and to drink.

“For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes and in your days the voice of mirth, the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride.” Well, here we could see references to the growing practice of euthanasia where people no longer mourn the death of their parents and in fact order that death while they’re unable to make those decisions for themselves.

We are closely approaching the time, and in fact are already here with Dr. Kevorkian, where older people are turned over to execution, and if the state pays for these things then surely the state will begin to exercise some control over that decisionmaking as well. It’s interesting to me that God says here, in the last section, that he removes his loving kindness, his mercies, his peace and now he says he removes the voice of mirth, the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom from the voice of the bride.

And you know, this is a land that has seen the removal of mercy and loving kindness exercised by parents toward their children. But it’s also a land that has seen the removal of joy increasingly in our culture. Our culture increasingly becomes nasty and mean-spirited, polarized, and certainly no joy being evident in many, many places today. And certainly the removal of the joy of marriage. Marriage has been forsaken as an institution and what joy is there to the bride and the bridegroom?

Analogous to the bride and the bridegroom, when people decide just to cohabitate for a while and see how it works out. No commitment, no covenant, no lifelong joining together and yoking of two people into one in God’s sight. That joy of marriage is removed from the land as well, the land that is in disobedience to God. And that’s our land. The implications of this are that, as we said before with homosexuality, homosexuality is a judgment by God upon people who fail to give him thanks.

And the nation that fails to thank God and acknowledge him is turned over then to sodomites running in the streets. It’s also turned over to the abortionists. It’s also turned over to the lack of joy in marriage. And it’s also turned over to the death of older people through euthanasia and through what I think will be coming increasingly common—involuntary euthanasia. Now the people in such a land ask why this is going on.

They hear these pronouncements. They may recognize the implications of their land and certainly the coming judgment of the armies that come upon them. And they say, verse 10—it says that when this comes to pass, when you show the people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, “Why has God?—Wherefore hath the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? What’s our iniquity? What’s our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?”

They say, “What have we done wrong? We don’t understand what we’ve done wrong.” And so it is in America today. “Why do these judgments happen upon the country if God says, and you people in the church—the prophetic ministry of God—says that God’s curse is going to upon us? Why should it? What have [we] done?”

That’s so wrong. Calvin in his commentary says here that it was a great blindness, nay, even madness, not to examine themselves when they were smitten by the hand of God. For conscience ought to have been to them like a thousand witnesses immediately condemning them. But hardly anyone was found who examined his own life. Remember, we talked last week about the importance of watchfulness, self-examination. And then though God proved them guilty, hardly one in a hundred willingly and humbly submitted to his judgment. With the greater part in murmured and made a clamor whenever they felt the scourges of God.

I thought of that this last week as I was watching, I think it was Friday, and they were talking about the earthquake in Southern California. Certainly another indication of the judgment of God. Another warning from God. His loving kindness is so prolonged. However, his patience towards sinners is so great, so long. He continues to give these warnings—nothing like what will happen in the future—men fail to repent. But in any event, here in this judgment, this earthquake of God in Southern California, you don’t see a humbling of people.

You know, they showed people in these lines for federal assistance complaining because it took them two days to set up an appointment or two days to get somebody to talk to them and to maybe begin to get some money from the government to help them with their condition. People aren’t humbled by these judgments apparently, but increasingly they murmur about them. They murmur against God and they murmur against their own god, the civil state.

I pray to God that this congregation, that we do what is necessary in our own understanding of God and his word and our own understanding of the requirements of Christian community, our own understanding of God’s providence and sovereignty over all things. I pray to God that when disaster strikes the greater Portland area, none of us are found in some welfare line complaining because the mass state hasn’t acted fast enough for us to give us aid and relief. People have become incredibly prideful and arrogant and failing to humble themselves under the hand of God when judgments exist.

This is a fascinating thing that people say, “What did I ever do wrong to receive this judgment?” And all of us are that way in many ways. We think of ourselves as essentially good people. We don’t deserve these things that come upon us. In our own state, in the fallen state of sinners that we are—that alone, the imputed sin of Adam to our account and our actual transgressions as well—God’s wrath abides upon those of us who are unrepentant perpetually.

We have no right to blessings from God. Blessings from God upon us are strictly the grace of God on the basis not of our good works, but of the works of Jesus Christ. So we never deserve what we get in this life. You don’t want to get what you deserve on the basis of your actions because if you did, it would be eternal damnation. Plain and simple. That’s all you deserve. So don’t complain against God when judgments come into your life. Humble yourselves under his mighty hand.

And I say the same thing to myself. I get so impatient sometimes as God doesn’t cause things to shake out the way I want them to, or this or that breaks down, thinking somehow that I deserve better. I deserve no better. I deserve far worse. I deserve the judgment of God upon my sin. He graciously puts that judgment upon his son Jesus Christ. And then he governs all things to my well-being.

But people say, “Well, what do we do?” Well, God tells them what they did in the next verse. God’s answer to their cry of what did we do to deserve this is that you’ve engaged in transgenerational idolatry and sin. I don’t know if “transgenerational” was the right word or not, but the idea is that there is idolatry and sin at work here and it has happened over a course of generations. Your fathers were like this and you’re even worse than your fathers is what God tells them in verses 11 and 12.

“You shall say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, they’ve walked after other gods. They’ve served other gods. They have worshiped them. They forsook me and they kept not my law.” In verse 12, “And you have done worse than your fathers, for behold, behold, you walk everyone after the imagination of his evil heart that they may not hearken unto me.”

So God says several things here very importantly. It’s such a simple answer, isn’t it? You expect with this kind of judgment being portrayed, the extermination of the nation of Israel from off the face of this particular land. You they say, “What? We know we’re sinners, but what did we do so bad?” And God tells them real clearly, “Well, what you did is you sinned. You forsook me. You left me.”

Now that’s an important word—that you forsook me. You see, there is a sense in which the Gentiles, the heathen nations that have never converted, have not forsook God in this same way. Now they have, because God created them and they failed to give thanks. But there’s a special curse to come upon people that have relationship with God, that know his word, and then walk away from him. And that’s what Israel had done. They had forsaken him. They left God first.

Then they walked, having left God and turned their back on him. They walk after other gods. Hmm, that’s interesting. Then they end up serving those gods and worshiping them, bowing down to them. And he says that going back to the beginning, you have forsaken me—twice repeated for emphasis. And how? You haven’t kept my law. The origins of their punishment is their sin of not keeping God’s law. Plain and simple. Why did these terrible things come upon us? Why are they coming? You didn’t keep my law.

And because you didn’t keep my law, you had forsake—you forsook me. Then and then you engaged in idolatry. That’s what your fathers did. But they’re not punished for the sins of their fathers. That’s not what’s being said here. He goes on to say, “Ye have done worse than our fathers. For behold, ye walk everyone after the imagination of his evil heart.” Maybe I don’t know.

Then he goes on to say that they may not hearken unto me. Some commentaries think that they’ve done worse because they won’t hearken to God. Now having forsaken God, idolatry, sin, the prophet comes to speak to them, but they don’t hearken to the prophets, and that’s why they’re worse than their fathers, maybe. Or it could be that the transition here is that the fathers engaged in idolatry, going after other gods, where the children are engaged in the imagination of their own evil heart.

Not even another god outside of themselves. Now their god becomes totally their own imaginations, their own wicked heart. And we can certainly see that in our culture. We can see the transition over the last couple of generations with a departure from God’s law, of following after other gods, and then finally getting down to the generation today that seeks only its own particular direction in life, whatever way they want to go.

This answer, though, as I said, is—it’s almost as I read the text several times, it seemed to me almost a little anticlimactic. I’m almost a little bit like, “Well, is that it? Is that all they did was sin? Broke God’s law? Well, gee, you know, I was expecting something more like they were homosexuals or they were this or that.” No, God says that the result, the way he makes the call is it’s outside the strike zone. You have a lifestyle that is repetitively, transgenerationally, over several generations, outside of the strike zone. You’re way off on the ozone someplace.

You’re no longer obeying my law. It’s sin. Now, I can imagine what these people’s response to Jeremiah was like. No doubt many excuses were allowed, were given by them for their actions. Many things. “Well, you don’t know how hard it’s been to keep your law with the wife you’ve given me. Or you don’t know how tough it is given the husband you’ve given me or given these terrible children or given this culture. Do you see what’s—what kind of lifestyle I have to live? I’m not well off. I’m poor.

So, you don’t know how tough it’s been to try to keep your laws of offerings, et cetera. You don’t know how tough it is to try to do justice in the context of a land that is terrible and where justice is broken.” I can just hear the excuses rattled off. It’s interesting that in Jeremiah chapter 42, my wife was reading this to me the other day and into chapters 43 and following, there’s a situation described there that is so—it runs so true in my experience both with myself and with others. This idea of making excuses for our sin.

In those chapters, what happens is many people have been taken off. There’s a remnant left in Judah and in Jerusalem and one of the men—these men come to Jeremiah and they say, “Tell us what God would have us to do now. We want to hear the word of the Lord to us.” And God, and God through Jeremiah tells them, “Don’t go to Egypt. See, the king of Babylon is coming after them and they want to go off to Egypt for peace there and get out of the land and go willingly by their own choice into captivity, so to. Although they didn’t think of it that way, going to Egypt for protection. And so Jeremiah tells them, “Don’t go to Egypt.” They say, “Well, what would God have us to do?”

He says, “Well, whatever you do, don’t go to Egypt. It’s against the will of the Lord right now. Don’t fear the king of Babylon. He says, ‘Oh, God will deal with him. You stay right here where you are.’ That’s what God wants you to do.” And then immediately the people say, “Well, you’re not speaking for the Lord to us. You must be speaking for that—this other fella. You must be in conspiracy with him against us. We’re going to go to Egypt,” they say. And God tells them what’s going to happen in Egypt.

And the great judgment that’ll come upon them. And I’ve seen this. And I said, I’ve seen this in myself. And I’ve seen it with people that I work with. We want to hear the word of the Lord. We want to go to the man who can reveal what God wants us to do. And when the simple answer is “obey him and don’t do this and do this and trust God in the meantime as you’re doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing,” people reject it.

And they can say as people probably did then, “Well, you know, this army’s coming down. That’s not a good enough answer. Just telling us to stay put. What’s God going to do for us? We need to find peace. We need to find shelter.” Well, they can give excuses to God as they did later on in the in the chapter, and that’s what abortionists do, of course. The women that commit their children to abortion. You know, God says, “Don’t kill people. Don’t kill the primary image bearer of God, man. Don’t kill babies in the womb.”

But people are willing to give up—all these excuses. You know, “Well, you don’t know how tough it’s been? That guy raped me, that’s why I’m pregnant. Or there’s incestuous relationships going on. My father forced himself upon me and that’s why I’m pregnant. You don’t know how hard it is to obey that commandment.” But God says, “Hey, that’s the commandment.”

He may empathize with this, that, or the other situation which we find ourselves—our poverty, the lack of justice, crime raging in our streets—but it never justifies sin. When people think it justifies sin, they go to God. He makes the call and he announces his judgment against them. If they don’t repent, the call is carried out. The punishments of God come upon the land.

And we can see that people make these justifications, but they also do it in the context of the church of Jesus Christ. I know how Jeremiah in chapter 42 felt. I think I know. I’ve been involved in situations and counseling situations that seem pretty simple and straightforward. Yes, terrible things have happened, but yes, the word of God clearly tells us a path to go. But people don’t want to hear that path. They don’t want to take that counsel. They want to go off in another other direction.

That’s you and me. We have that tendency. That’s what the sinful nature in us is. We we don’t want to hear that sure and relevant word. We want for somebody to feel our pain. Now, God is empathetic. And as you counsel people, you should understand that you need to tell them. You need to tell people within your household that you understand the difficulties, the temptations that come into their lives on the basis of the external circumstances.

But you must point them to God’s word as the solution to their problems. And so if you know somebody who is a Christian, professing Christian, who pursues abortion, yeah, you could sympathize with their state, whether it was rape, incest, poverty, whatever it is, but it never justifies sin. And you always must bring them back to that clear word of God saying, “Don’t do this thing. It’s not the right way out.”

When you’re in the midst of a difficult situation, cleave to God’s word. But all too often when people get to that place, they don’t want to do that anymore. Well, as I said, God has no trouble making the call when sin is involved. And usually we shouldn’t have much trouble either. We know what’s right. We, you know, the law of God is not some complicated thing. I think my wife was asked by somebody recently, “Well, what do you know? What do you? What makes your life different because you’re a theonomist or believe in God’s law?”

And she says, “Well, if you’re a moral person, it doesn’t really change your life a whole lot. That the Lord’s day is one that none of us have been raised to, most of us have not been raised up to sanctify. That is different. But much of the law is is common to our culture and it’s certainly true to our conscience as we read the word of God, and so it isn’t complicated. The matter of dealing with sin isn’t a complicated thing.

God’s diagnosis isn’t complicated. If we know it, we do wrong. The problem is that we just don’t want to exercise faith in God. Now, we have an even clearer word, and we look at the people who came to Jeremiah and said, “Well, you telling us not to go to Egypt. We need to go to Egypt.” And we can say, “Well, gee, they had the man of God himself there speaking to them words from God and they still wouldn’t obey. How terrible those people are.”

But you know, we even have a clearer word, don’t we? God doesn’t call you to exercise faith in me as the oracle of God. And that’s what God called those people to do, to exercise faith in Jeremiah as the oracle of God in their particular situation. But God says that, you know, you don’t have to put your reliance upon an individual like they had to. You got it easier because this is what you put your reliance upon.

And understanding of this—and this is pretty clear stuff when it comes to personal sin—it’s even easier for us to make the call. But we find it increasingly difficult to do it in our own lives, and our culture certainly cannot make the call at all. And in the case of these three strikes that I’ve mentioned, it’s an indication where the culture refuses to make the call in those three trials that I mentioned recently.

It certainly can be said that for twenty-one years and longer, but at least twenty-one years officially, this country cannot make the call on abortion. You know, they cannot call it on the basis of what God’s word clearly says it is: murder. And unfortunately, many churches can’t make that call as well. The evil is now adult age in our culture. It is going transgenerational, and unless the country repents, it will go worse and worse and this nation will be obliterated, crushed by God, judged and thrown as dung upon the face of the earth itself.

That’s what’s going to happen as this evil matures and goes transgenerational. You know, as we—as I was speaking to a friend of mine about these three trials and how that the culture cannot make calls anymore, telling somebody, “No, that’s wrong to do that in whatever situation. I don’t care what happened. It’s wrong to do these things: to bash somebody’s head with a brick, to blow your mother’s head off, or to attack the very at the very core of what a man is according to the scriptures as well.”

You know, that’s a capital offense to do what she did. I think it is anyway. But in any event, as the culture cannot make these clear calls, my friend, we were talking about this and this friend of mine said, “Well, what do you—that’s a result of the public school system because the public school system has for many years now—it’s grown mature as well.” And it tells people there’s no responsibility for anything.

You always got to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes. You always got to think about all the extenuating circumstances. And as a result, you can’t ever make the call anymore. Well, that’s true enough. The public schools have culpability. But let’s take it a little closer to home. This last year—this last year—a person who had been under the preaching of strong biblical teaching relative to an application of God’s word, that God’s law is the means by which he graciously loves us and tells us the direction for our lives.

This person and others have said this as well. I don’t need to relate it to this person. Others have said this as well. They would rather be in a church that errs on the side of grace instead of erring on the side of law. Well, you know, it sounds good off the top of the head, but you know, if you think about that, to pit grace and law against one another is in some ways at the very core of the inability of the culture and the inability to make the call in those trials and the inability of the churches today to make the call relative to abortion, asking for God’s judgment upon murderers.

Because to pit grace versus law is to pit things that are the opposite sides of the same coin. God, the Psalmist says, “Grant me your law graciously.” The law is a gracious act of God to tell us what we should do in this circumstance or this circumstance or should we do this and should we not do that? And when you obliterate the law for the sake of grace, supposed grace, really no grace, abstracted from the law, there is no grace. There’s the there’s the whims of men’s minds and hearts as they feel sympathy or extenuating circumstances or feel the pain of somebody else.

But the end result of that, the obliteration of God’s law, is a failure to make the call. You no longer have a standard. You no longer have a strike zone. And you no longer have the ability to tell people that was sin. And is that administration of grace to people—to not tell them this is sin and this is righteousness clearly based upon God’s word?

Well, clearly that’s what’s happened. I don’t think it’s primarily public schools that’s resulted in these trials. I think primarily it’s the church of Jesus Christ that has failed to proclaim the standard of God’s law. And God’s law includes with it blessings and cursings—God’s actions to people on the basis of their acceptance of and willing submission to—certainly never perfect—pleading the grace of Jesus Christ, but still a submission to that standard at least.

And when the church departed from that, the culture over a series of generations has departed from any kind of standard as well. Judge Bork spoke years ago that the rubber constitution we ended up with was preceded by a rubber Bible, a Bible that was no longer a fixed standard. And so if our culture cannot make the call anymore, it’s because the church cannot make a call.

And if we’re going to turn it around, this is where it begins in the household of God. Last year on anti-abortion Sunday, we talked about cities of refuge and the application of that. Cities of refuge are a picture of grace, aren’t they? People can get there to get away from the blood avenger. But they’re also a picture of justice because if the person has sinned, he is not kept in the city of refuge. He’s not kept in the church. He’s thrown out the doors and he is executed.

Joab’s clinging to the horns of the altar did him no good. Solomon ordered that he be pulled off of it because he was guilty of murder. And the church that thinks somehow that grace is to be stressed instead of law has given up the standard and is the result, and has produced the very root of the problem that we have in our culture today where the standard of God’s law is no longer the standard.

And God will not tolerate some sort of nation based upon a constitution once it has rejected his word. He judges it. Well, okay, so God makes the call in that section, and then his call is a most severe judgment in verses 13–18. He says, “Therefore, I’ll cast you out of the land into a land you know not, neither you and your fathers, and you will serve other gods.” Isn’t that what’s happened in this country?

Well, he’s not going to cast us physically out of this land perhaps, but he has cast us out of the good land, out of the heavenly land of blessing in America, and he has caused this nation to serve other gods—the God of the civil state. Who do men serve as their gods? Well, look where their tithe goes. And a tithe of four to five times what God requires goes opposed to the civil state and its various administrations in this country today.

You see, God’s judgment to those who would serve other gods is to have them serve other gods day and night. Is what he says here, in verse 6.