Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Jeremiah 29
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

And thank his holy name. Praise God. May we do that today. The sermon text is found in Jeremiah 29. And on the handouts I provided, the entire text of chapter 29 is there. I’ll be referring to more than just the first few verses, but I’ll be primarily focused on verses 1 to 7. So please stand for reading God’s word. I’ll read Jeremiah 29:1-7. And if you want, you can follow along in the handout from the outline as well.

These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the eunuchs, the officials of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen, and all the metal workers had departed from Jerusalem.

The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah, the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah, the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah, king of Judah, sent to Babylon, to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. It said, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf. For in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for today. We thank you, Father, and give you blessing. We bless your holy name. We give you thanks, Father. Help us this day, this entire day, to focus upon your goodness to us. And may we, Lord God, be found today in the context of your spirit that comes on us in this particular day to set it apart from all others. Bless us, Lord God, now as we consider your great word to us with its gospel message in the midst of dark times. May we learn from it in Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, where are we at in America today? On the outline, I’ve got the question: Are we Israel? Are we Israel in a time of declension and apostasy? Are we the people in the land of Canaan whose rulers had turned wicked and immoral, etc., and who had no longer been faithful to Yahweh? Are we Egypt? Throughout the Bible, we have this Egypt motif. Israel can become Egypt after it gets so bad. And when Jesus is born, he’s taken to Egypt. And he’s taken to Egypt for rescue from the Pharaoh sort of guy that wants to kill God’s people in Israel.

So Israel can become Egypt. Is that where we’re at in terms of the biblical models of who we as a culture and as a nation are?

Are we Babylon? And that’s the text today—a letter written to the exiles in Babylon. They were carried away, the people of Judah into exile for 70 years. So are we there perhaps?

Are we Rome? Paul, in the New Testament, finds himself in the context of the Roman Empire. And so what he says has to be taken into consideration. And maybe we’re like Rome. After all, our political structures are built to a great degree on Roman, which is Greek philosophy and political structures and culture.

Even I’m going to talk today from the perspective and for several sermons that we are—one perspective we can look at is that we’re like the exile in Babylon. Each of these perspectives are truths from the Bible that can inform our situation in any context. None of these—I’m not trying to draw big thick lines here and say that I think that the Babylonian exile is the model for us. I do think, however, that model is a very useful one to us and is becoming, it seems, you know, more and more where we’re at.

Now, we haven’t been taken away to another land, but it seems like the culture in which we find ourselves now is more like Babylon than it is Israel or a Christian nation that’s apostate. We don’t anymore. You know, as I said several weeks ago, I was at a meeting with a judge and the judge says that we can’t legislate morality from the bench. And specifically, it’s said in terms of homosexuality, transsexuality, etc. And it’s also said in terms of whether or not custody over children can have as a significant factor their religious upbringing by one of the two parents. The court will not make these kind of religious decisions anymore. They are not going to preference Christian religion over Islamic religion, over atheism, secularism, no matter what it is.

So I think you can make a pretty good case that we are officially secularist and maybe polytheistic now in America. We’ve had various ecumenical worship services sponsored by the federal government or at least in the context of President Bush’s administration where different faiths are represented. So you know, Babylon was a culture that was secularist but it was also very religious—but multi-religious, was polytheistic with thousands of gods and deities, more religious than our secularism today in America.

But it seems like, you know, we have definitely turned a corner in my lifetime from not being a Christian nation anymore in its official declarations, in its official pronouncements from the judges who determine these things, by the sort of argumentation that goes on in Congress and laws that are enacted. The Christian faith is one of several streams of belief that people may consider, but certainly it’s not seen as a Christian country practically anymore.

So I think, you know, in the times of Israel and even its declension, it was hypocritical. It was sacrilegious. It was filled with immorality and corrupt government officials like we have today. But it was still explicitly Yahwistic, right? It was still officially worshiping Yahweh. Way. Now, they used some syncretized forms to do that, but you know, the temple was still a big deal. And in fact, that’s the problem—is they put their reliance upon the temple, upon Yahweh worship to justify everything else they were doing.

That doesn’t seem to fit our context very well.

Now, if you don’t agree with me, that’s okay. It’s a text of scripture we’re looking at here that I think tells us some things about situations where we are in a cultural minority. So hypocrisy and apostasy are two different things and it seems like as a country we’ve apostatized, we’ve left the Christian faith and we become pluralistic or secularistic in our perspective. That’s the new religion that is the thing now. That will be determined by laws. We’ll look and say, well, we’re officially pluralistic now, we’re officially multi-theistic, and so we’re going to make decisions about custody of children or whatever it is based on being informed with everybody getting equal rights here. We’re officially polytheistic I suppose we could say, and secularist. And so we are in this kind of place of being what I mention here is a cognitive minority.

This is a term used by a sociologist named Peter Berger, a religious sociologist, and I want to talk about that just a little bit. The idea here is we are in a definite minority status, particularly as we look at our particular view of how the scripture should be interpreted. We’re definitely not any longer the main view in America, and this has changed within our lifetime.

One of the things I’m going to talk about at the end of the sermon is the Lord’s day, the Christian Sabbath. And in the context of my lifetime, this country has gone, and the Christian church has gone, to recognizing the importance of the Lord’s day and setting it apart, not doing commerce, etc., to now it being just like any other day. That’s the shift. And so we are this so-called cognitive minority.

Berger says this: “This is a people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their culture.”

So we have in Babylon the letter that these, this letter is addressed to people in Babylon. I’ve given you a timeline at the bottom half of the first page of the outline. Not going to go over the whole thing, but there are three major events that happen in the context of that timeline. Israel dies, is taken into captivity by Assyria. Judah, the southern tribes die and are taken into captivity and in exile. And then Judah, which now becomes all of Israel—the name Israel now encompasses both Judah and Israel. The northern tribes aren’t really reborn, but the southern tribe of Judah is. And so God’s people are brought back into the land in the context of Judah. And so that’s rebirth.

So the image, the basic message of the prophets is not one of social reformation. They’re not trying to change the culture so much. They have some of that going on. But what they’re doing is announcing—all the prophetic books announce the death of God’s people and their subsequent resurrection. Ultimately, the prophetic books picture the coming of Jesus Christ who on behalf of his people, in behalf of true Israel, the true Jews, the true people of God, will die on our behalf and then be raised up to life and bring us to resurrection.

So that’s what the books are talking about. And what’s happened here in the context of Jeremiah is one of these deportations of people to Babylon. It’s, you know, Jerusalem is not fallen yet in the context of this letter. There’s still people there, but the deportation, the Babylonian exile has already begun. And specifically, I think that we can read traces in Jeremiah 29 that seem to indicate that this might be in the context of the rebellion by Israel against Nebuchadnezzar.

Babylon is a power—is the dominant power by this time. Babylon has become powerful and it now exercises control over a large group of countries. But there’s some kind of problem with Nebuchadnezzar that draws his attention away from those matters. There’s an internal revolt. There’s internal problems he’s got. And for a couple of years, a year or two, he’s distracted. During that time, the people that are left in Israel revolt against Nebuchadnezzar. And as a result of that, massive amounts of them are taken into captivity into Babylon. The revolt is unsuccessful.

And one of the great things that’s going on in the prophetic books is God is telling his people in Judah specifically, “Nebuchadnezzar is the guy. He’s my man. Don’t rebel against him. If you rebel against him, you’re rebelling against me,” God says. Now, this is unusual because he’s a pagan king, at least at the beginning of the process. But that’s what’s happening.

So, you know, we can sort of look at this and you got these exiles who are cooperating with Nebuchadnezzar, guys like Daniel, and you got true patriots in Israel who are trying to throw off Nebuchadnezzar. And our emotional instincts might be with the rebels in Jerusalem. But that’s what they are—the rebels. And God says over and over again, that’s not where our emotional instincts should be. That our informed biblical instincts should be to say that no, God has told them explicitly that they’re to serve Nebuchadnezzar.

So that’s kind of what’s going on. And so in the context of this, they’re sitting there in Babylon. They’re by the river Chebar. That’s why the front order of worship has people, you know, sitting by a river. They’ve been settled in a particular district of Babylon that by the way needs agricultural work and settlement. Okay, that’s important for the text today. But they’re in the midst of Babylon and they’re in the midst of this city and this city has huge ziggurats around it, right? They have huge representations of the false gods. In particular, now in this particular context they develop—any other culture—Marduk is the great god at this point in time. So big representations of him. Their status to the core as we know from the book of Daniel—image of Nebuchadnezzar is set up.

So they have this idea that the king is God and that there’s no creator-creature distinction and that Nebuchadnezzar has been taken by the right hand of Marduk and he has power and authority. So the ruling establishment is seen as the voice of God on earth, which is similar to what some people think today, even though it’s not in a religious context.

They’re in the middle, in other words, of gross idolatry and statism. Forget taxation. There’s outright theft of all kinds of property around them. They bring everything to Babylon. They’re Israel and all these other countries are conquered nations. So they’re taxed at 100%, we could say. Okay. So incredible levels of taxation, statism, false religion, polytheistic. At the same time, almost secular from other perspectives, in terms of they have a great economic position and wealth at this point in time.

These relatively small number of true believers of Yahweh are taken and planted there. And so I think there’s a connection between us. There’s a relatively small number of Orthodox believers, you know, in Jesus Christ in the midst of what is an increasingly secularist, polytheistic, statist environment and a very healthy environment for the most part. So I think there’s connections we can make between that time and our time and specifically in the context of this idea of a cognitive minority.

We, you know, what do you do? You’re placed there and you’re going to be there 70 years. You’re going to be there a long time and what are you going to do? You know, well the natural tendencies are to sort of become like the culture. Sociological studies have shown it’s very difficult to resist. What some might refer to as there’s always a siren song singing you to shipwreck. Well, the culture around us, the culture around them in Babylon, represented various siren songs singing true believers to shipwreck of their faith, encouraging them.

Your view of reality, right? Kids raised in this church, reality is X. But the whole culture says reality is Y. And an awful lot of Christians even believe that reality is Y or Z or whatever it is. How do you resist the temptation to have your view of reality redefined by the context of the group you’re in the middle of? That’s a very real problem. And what you can do is you can sort of just give up on it and you become more and more like the culture.

That’s what the American church has done. The change, for instance, in the observation of the Lord’s Day or Sabbath wasn’t because, and I pointed this out before in other sermons, it’s not because there was some theological significance that changed. It wasn’t some interpretation of the text that changed. It was accommodation to the culture round about us. It didn’t seem like that was worth fighting for. Not that big a deal. Now, it was a huge deal in the Old Testament. I think in the New Testament. So, so it’s an example where this siren song singing to shipwreck is the song that you hear today. You’ll hear it today in various ways. I’ll talk about that more at the end of the sermon, Lord willing.

So, you can accommodate. You can be, you can just say, “Well, yeah, they’re right. Our church is kind of goofed up. I still sort of like the Christian thing, but you know, reality really is more defined by the culture.” And you can sort of drift off that way.

Young people, this is what you’re going to be tempted to do. It’s very difficult, almost impossible to avoid that. And sociologists have found that it is impossible to avoid that on your own. Apart from an established community with particular practices involving the calendar, involving sacred space, etc., it’s almost impossible to avoid that happening.

Now, there’s another reaction that cognitive minorities take, and that’s the reaction of complete retreat into like a Christian ghetto. “We got our own community. We don’t care what’s happening around us. We don’t want to interact with the culture around us only to the minimum amount we have to. And we just want, you know, personal peace and influence right here where we’re at. And we’re not going to change our view of reality, but we’re not going to change anybody else’s view either.”

Now, Israel or Judah had been placed in Babylon to change the cultures view. One of the big reasons for God’s judgment on Israel and Judah was that they weren’t being a place of prayer for the Gentiles. They weren’t accomplishing ministering and bringing the Gentile nations into the context of the true religion of Yahweh. That’s what they’re supposed to do. So, you know, it’s kind of like forced evangelism. Now, he dumps them in the middle of a bunch of pagans and if they’re going to be faithful to God, they’re going to shine as lights there. They’re not going to retreat from the culture. People will be able to see them and interact with them, but they’re going to be faithful.

So, you know, the two ditches are accommodation to the culture. And the second ditch over here is complete retreat from the culture, cloistered off. In the middle, the other thing you can do is what Berger calls entering into a bargaining process. Kind of a bad terminology, I suppose, but you know, there are certain things in the culture that are not necessarily antithetical to Christianity and we can do those things. And then there are certain truths—what we have to find, you know, what are, what is our core set of reality here?—and we actually influence the culture round about us that those things are true. So there’s this process where you don’t reject everything that’s out there and you do input into the broader culture knowing that the power of God is there and intends for you to bring the nations to salvation.

So that’s kind of, you know, the big picture of this idea of a cognitive minority and what you do in relationship to that.

Now, at the head of your outline, I also have a reference to 1 Timothy 2:1-4. And now this is, you know, the Christians in the context of Rome. And I think Paul hearkens back to the text we just read when he says this. And he’s giving instructions for the church, right? He’s writing to a pastor—pastorally epistle—how to conduct yourself in the household of God. This is his first application to worship but then generally life.

He says: “I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings, for Nebuchadnezzar, for Caesar, right? All who are in authority that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.”

Wow. That’s what he just told us in Jeremiah. “Seek the peace of the city because in their peace you’ll have peace. You’ll have a quiet and peaceable life if you seek their peace, if you pray for Nebuchadnezzar.”

So I think Paul’s picking that very thing up. “That we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. See, so it’s not just a quiet and peaceable life. It’s a quiet and peaceable life in godliness and reverence. It’s not retreating from the culture or accommodating the culture. It’s peace defined in reference to reverence and godliness. Okay, that is exceedingly critical and crucial for the exiles here to read and understand as we’ll see in a in a few minutes.

For and why, what’s more stuff he tells us about this? “This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our savior.” So, first of all, it tells us that’s what our goal is. We’re supposed to be pleasing God. He saved us. We should praise him. He saved us for his purposes. What’s pleasing him is doing this thing. And this same God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

So you see, he brings in really all the themes of the Babylonian captivity as described for us in Jeremiah 29 and he brings it into a New Testament context in a context where they’re not been moved into another country, but they’re still in kind of an exilic situation.

Now, I think this gives further weight to the idea that’s how we find ourselves today, where New Testament Christians—we generally find ourselves will find ourselves in the context of a culture where we’re a cognitive minority and where God wants us to change the culture.

So we have this connection. All right. Now let’s then, after that, you know, long introduction, talk a little bit about specific lessons from Jeremiah 29.

**The first lesson is that exile is from God.** It’s very important that we understand this, right? And God really highlights this in this letter. All right. You see on the handout I’ve given to you, in verse one, I’ve bolded certain things and then italicized certain other things.

So this letter is given to people that Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile. But then down in verse 4, “the God of hosts”—now hosts is armies. So right away he’s telling the ones in captivity, “An army has come and gotten you, but it’s my army. Now I know they look bad. I know they didn’t believe in me, but I’m using those Babylonians for my purposes.” And if the inference isn’t enough, he tells us explicitly: “the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.”

God is sovereign. That’s what’s being said here first and foremost. This is one of the core views of reality that the Christian faith from the beginning of the Bible to the end exerts. And so, we have a real problem today because we have churches that don’t really ultimately believe in the sovereignty of God.

The first thing we’re told if we identify with these exiles in Babylon is that God is sovereign and he’s sovereign in the worst circumstances in which we could find ourselves.

It wasn’t a pleasant thing. They had to walk from Israel—or from Judah rather—to Babylon. Walk days and days and days. No doubt some died on that track. It was terrible. And before they got to doing that, they saw their city being torn apart. They saw probably bad sort of things that happen in the context of wartime when you’re dealing with people that are not moral people, you know, rape, pillage, murder, destruction. They saw their temple being occupied and controlled by foreign people. Can you imagine what they thought was at the center of their reality? And that’s not right. Geography isn’t, but at the center of their reality, it was taken away.

So, these people had gone through things that we can only imagine, the horrors of. That we can only imagine the horrors of. You have to understand that part first to understand the impact that this first part of the letter brings when God says, “I sent you into exile. I was sovereignly using all of those things for my purposes.”

And he tells him “into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” Now, that’s important language, too, because what God is saying here is there’s a transfer of the central way it is going to work now from Jerusalem to Babylon. Babylon has replaced Jerusalem for 70 years or whatever it is, however long they’re there. Babylon has replaced Jerusalem. And Nebuchadnezzar by implication has replaced the Davidic kings in Judah. This is what he’s telling them.

And I think that, you know, I can’t make a direct one-to-one connection to our position in America, but I can certainly say that to the extent that we become exilic in our existence here, the Lord God sovereignly has sent us into that. He’s accomplishing for his own purposes. Okay?

So number one: living in exile means living with a sure knowledge that the sovereignty of God. Now that’s at the beginning—coming to grips with that in terms of the difficulties we face. The Lord God moves the Supreme Court. The heart of the king and the president is in his hands, no matter who it is—Clinton, Bush, Obama, McCain. God is sovereignly doing what he wants to do. He’s going to give us the president he wants us to have for his purposes. So, we got to come to grips with at the front end.

And the beauty of that is that at the back end, we know what his purposes are. We know that his purposes are good toward us, and we’ll see that in a couple of minutes. But all that knowledge of the blessings of God to us in exile are contingent upon an understanding that the Lord God is sovereign in the exile.

**Secondly, ordinary life is what exile is all about.** What do we do? What great things can we do for the kingdom here?

Well, he says, “Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to send you into Babylon. I’m going to, you know, work away at that group. I’m going to do great things, change the world. You’re going to witness to the nations. And here’s the great”—You got to set up a seminary. You got to set up a preaching circuit. You got to do this kind of stuff. You got to or maybe you got to take up guns. Whatever it is—what’s the tactic that God uses and will use in America to bring us out of, by way of analogy, the exile we are in now?

Wow. It’s pretty amazing stuff. It’s verse 5. He says, “I sent you into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon for a particular reason.” Here it is:

“Build houses. Live in them. Plant gardens. Eat their produce. Take wives as sons and daughters. Take wives for sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, don’t decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf. For in their welfare you will find your welfare or peace.”

So what he says is first and foremost is ordinary life. All they got to do is be faithful to Yahweh in the midst of this difficult situation. Live lives, build houses, you know, go to the store, build your vegetable garden or plant vegetables, whatever it is, have kids, marry those kids off, marry in the context of the faith, of course. Ordinary life.

Now, this is gospel, folks. This is tremendous gospel to us. It means that at the end of the day, most of what you do to move us away from exile into a position of blessing again, the conversion of the nation we’re in the midst of—to use Paul’s language, conversion of the kings and authorities—the big thing you on the top, you know, the big E at the top of the eye chart is live faithful and ordinary lives. You don’t got to do some great thing. Or maybe a better way to say it is you’re doing a great thing by living ordinary lives. That’s good news, isn’t it? It’s good news for me, you know, in an age when we think that, you know, we, what we got to do is political action. What we got to do is evangelism, what we got to do is apologetics. What we got to do is act. What we got to do is think about everything thing. And no, God says the big thing you got to do is just live simple lives of obedience.

Now, that’s in the midst of Babylon—ziggurats, huge towers, a go, a king who thinks he’s God explicitly. He doesn’t joke around with it. He’s going to build a big huge statue of himself and make people worship him. What are we complaining about? I think Billy Graham is right. We have sort of become a nation of whiners and I probably contributed to a lot of whining about this. I mean, things are bad. That was awful what Nebuchadnezzar was doing. But if God can change all of that by people just living their lives normally, you know, this is really important for us to hear and should be tremendously freeing to us as Christians.

Now, there’s a little bit of detail we can talk about. The first thing he talks about is obeying in the simple things. First, building and planting. It’s interesting that this building and planting is language that’s picked up from Jeremiah’s actual call in Jeremiah 1:10. God tells Jeremiah, “See, I have this day sent you over the nations and over the kingdoms to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant.” So Jeremiah’s commission was to build and plant. And God now is telling his people that they’re going to build and plant, right? That’s the first two things they’re going to do: build houses and plant vineyards or garden vegetables.

And so Jeremiah’s life is sort of like the people. The people are sort of like Jeremiah. So there is big stuff being accomplished. Jeremiah’s call, you know, does mean that cultures will be torn down and cultures will be built and planted that please God. Okay? There’s a big issue at play here in terms of Jeremiah’s call, but it’s worked out in simple instructions to faithful people to live their lives in faithful obedience in the simple things.

Another thing that’s interesting about this is it’s sort of an Ai thing. You know, when they go into the conquer the land, Jericho is kind of the sovereignty of God is demonstrated to them giving them victory easily. Ai, they got to use strategy, the next city. Well, it’s the same thing here. But they went into the promised land. They went into places where all these things were explicitly said to be in place. There’ll be cities there. There’ll be vegetable gardens. There’ll be trees, fruit trees. It’s all done for you, God says. But here, it’s not going to be that way. Here, we’re in Ai time. It’s not going to be, and you shouldn’t expect God to act miraculously most of the time and doing this stuff for you. Now, we’re in mature life as God’s people, and we have to take the kind of effort that it takes to do these things.

Now, if you can imagine, you know, what this means, and you can because you live in America, how do you build a house and live in it? How do you have money enough or how do you, the means proper to make vegetable gardens or to develop food sources for yourself and eat them and actually have pleasurable food as well? You’re in the midst of Babylon and God is going to have you served. He says at the end of it, “Seek the welfare of the city.” The idea here is not that you’re in a cloistered environment. You’re going to have to get building materials from somebody, right? You have to have wiring. And in Nebuchadnezzar’s world, you probably got to have inspections aplenty. Maybe not the same sort of thing that we have, but remember, this is a guy who thinks he’s God and who’s going to control every aspect of life. And this is what he does.

What I’m suggesting here is that this simple statement—that the exiles in Babylon were to do normal life and engage in normal processes of building homes and developing food sources—is an example to us to avoid particular sins. And specifically on the outline, the first one is the sin of perfectionism, which is related to legalism.

In 2 Kings 5:18, Naaman—the Syrian becomes a Syrian. Naaman the Syrian becomes converted. And so he’s talking to the prophet and he says this: He says, “In this thing, may the Lord pardon your servant. When my master goes into the temple of Rimmon to worship there, and he leans on my hand, my hand, and I bow down in the temple of Rimmon. When I bow down in the temple of Rimmon”—twice for emphasis—”may the Lord please pardon your servant in this thing.”

Well, see, he’s going to go back. He’s a high official in the government of Rimmon. And Rimmon’s an idol. And he goes into a pagan temple and he bows down to worship. And says, “I got to go in there and I’m bowing down with my master in front of this representation of an idol.” And he says, “Boy, you know, I got a problem here. How, you know, I need the pardon of God if I when I do this thing.”

And the answer from the prophet is the prophet says, “Go in peace. Don’t sweat it. It’s all right.” He says, “To help your master bow down and as a result for you to bow down in the front of an idol. What he says it’s okay to bow down in front of an idol to name it. Yeah, he does.

R.J. Rushdoony years ago and I’ve remembered it for years and years and years had a newsletter article, you know, warning people about perfectionism and he cited this verse. God is not into perfectionism the way we define the term. He’s into holiness. He wants us consecrated to him in whatever we do. But that doesn’t mean, you know, that things that might be related to sin are necessarily sin.

I have an extended quote here that I want to read. Well, first of all, from Rushdoony, he says: “Naaman was not summoned to a life of perfection but of holiness. And there is a difference. Naaman was not compromising his faith but performing a minor duty in a major career. So no compromise was going on. God doesn’t let people sin but it was no sin is the point of which you’d need pardon from God to bow down in this temple.”

Roger sent me a quote from Doug Wilson. I think this is so appropriate to living in exile and to this issue of Naaman, for instance, or to the issue of what we do in our culture that’s completely dominated by a civil structure that is becoming more and more sovereign in the context of our world, not as sovereign as Nebuchadnezzar was but like that.

Doug Wilson writes this: “Talk about the legalistic mind. In that mindset, if something has negative moral implications, then we must have an authority to make a moral judgment or anyone participating in that thing at any level. But the Bible doesn’t address broad moral situations in this fashion at all. The biblical commandments, the commandments of God in the Bible tell us what the sins are. The biblical worldview tells us what the moral ramifications of our actions are. But we are not allowed—important here—we are not allowed to generate new commandments from those implications or ramifications even as we labor and pray for those ramifications.

“Naaman didn’t want to have the idol there even long term. He’s looking at a ramification of their pagan culture. He wants it changed. But in the meantime, he doesn’t draw a new law. He doesn’t add another commandment to the laws of God in terms of, you know, not being able to bow down, helping his master, the king, bow down in this temple.

“Wilson goes on to say that eating meat offered to idols provided one example. Christians remaining in the Roman army would be another. Christians serving as tax collectors for a pagan system would be another. Daniel serving as the chancellor of the University of Babylon is another. Scripture is full of believers participating in subpar systems as weighed in the balance of a biblical worldview. And it does not follow from this that such participation is sinful. Since we are allowed to look of these instances as exemplars, the opposite follows. To participate enthusiastically in the midst of a sinful setup like the world is not the same thing as sinning. To make such an illegitimate jump is to create the basis for suffocating legalism.”

See, if they had made that jump in Babylon, they couldn’t do the very thing they were supposed to do, which is to live ordinary lives. They would have been subject to suffocating legalism. Well, no wait a minute. This is all connected back to Nebuchadnezzar’s worldview and his system. It’s all bad. In principle, Wilson writes: “All Christians would be immediately paralyzed were they consistent because virtually every transaction in the sinful world has the ramification at some level of keeping some unbeliever or unbelieving system going. To buy gas at a convenience store that sells pornography keeps the pornography industry going. To buy groceries from a grocery store owned by Mormons keeps their false doctrine going. To ride in a car built by non-Christians to go to the gas station or grocery store is to add a second layer to your perfidious conduct and be even worse, I suppose if we say you go, try it, to get your”—you see, it’s all connected up. And once you start adding these layers of legalism, you’ve produced a paralyzed Christian community that will not be able to do the simple things with a good conscience that these men were allowed to do in Babylon.

As Wilson says, “there’s about a thousand layers to go. This is just like the house that Jack built.”

So, this call to engage in ordinary lives in a system completely controlled by non-Christians is a call to avoid legalism and sinless perfectionism. To not have an overscrupulous conscience that takes the laws of God, extrapolates out, makes analogies to something over here, ramifications, and all of a sudden makes this law—that’s what he’s talking about. That’s wrong. And it’s going to paralyze you. And you won’t be able to do what the basic thing you’re supposed to do in exile and in America is to do, which is to live ordinary lives.

The second thing it helps us to avoid is titanism. Another article by Rushdoony years ago in which he talked about people saying they wanted to pray somebody into the kingdom and they thought if they just prayed hard enough this person would become a Christian. He said it’s awful. Sounds pious but he said it’s horrible because it assumes titanism—we’re the gods. We can do through our power. Now that we’re Christians, we can just decide things and make them happen by the sheer exertion of our will and enough piety and enough devotion. “And this guy, I’m going to claim him for Jesus Christ.” Uh-uh. God is sovereign, not you.

Titanism is what those rebels back in Jerusalem were trying to accomplish. “We’re the great ones here. We’re powerful. We’re going to throw off Nebuchadnezzar. We don’t care how big he is. We’re going to have our way.” No, not God’s way. So, it helps us to avoid those sort of—says, “Just do your simple thing of life and I’ll take care of it. I will work out Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion.”

Now, there are non-simple things. We’ll talk about those next week with Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, but for the most part, it’s the simple life that they’re exhorted to do.

Now, in the midst of this simple life, we’re to believe blessings are present in exile. We’re to believe that blessings are present in this exile. And he says specifically here, not just to build and plant. He says, “Have kids. Have lots of kids. Increase, don’t decrease. More than replace yourself populationwise.”

What he’s doing here is significant. First of all, in terms of helping us to remember that ordinary life according to the Bible is having a bunch of kids. That’s ordinary life. And our culture says no, no, no, no. Kids are a problem. Kids are difficult. I guess there’s a commercial that shows a child misbehaving and the guy, you know, obviously realizes he never should have had that child. That’s the kind of anti-child bias this culture has. That’s one of those siren songs singing you Christian to shipwreck.

God says that ordinary life is having a bunch of kids. And I’m not saying have as many as you can, but I’m saying have a bunch of kids. You can’t take away the clear implication. We’re supposed to be increasing. Particularly when you recognize that what he’s doing here is he’s bringing back the blessings of creation itself from Genesis 1:28. And God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, the earth and subdue it, exercise dominion.” It’s the blessing of God that’s being described. They’ll be able to have the blessing, the original creation blessing of having a bunch of kids where they’re at. And we have that same blessing today, but we don’t partake of it typically.

Exodus 1:7: “The children of Israel in exile in Egypt”—now, many, many years before—”the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty, and the land was filled with them.” That’s the kind of thing we’re supposed to be doing: having a bunch of kids. And this is blessing.

Jeremiah 30:19: “Then out of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of those who make merry. I will multiply them. They shall not diminish. I will also glorify them and they shall not be small.” We should want to have a bunch of kids. And that’s and to do that is a recognition that God doesn’t mean we’re now at a time of curse. In Babylon, they were in a time of blessing. That’s the purpose here—ordinary life but ordinary life that is blessed by God.

So we shouldn’t, you know, be drooping and hanging our heads all the time. We should recognize that God’s blessings are immediately available in the context of exile and now. And I’m not saying just in terms of children but that’s an exemplar again—that’s a model of the blessings of God that come to a particular people. They were to place their hope in the future in God. And they were to look long-term. They were not to think short term. Have kids—several generations out, things will change. So, and they were to believe the blessings of God in the context of that sort of long-term thinking.

As one commentator put it: “The uprooted and orphaned exiles are invited to invest their lives in the new realm of divine blessing.”

So, you know, think about America as blessing. It’s a place of—it’s a place of divine blessing. This is what the realm is now. Exile doesn’t mean things are horrible. It means that you can exercise your common obligations. Now, among those, we don’t stop there in the text. It goes on to say that you’re supposed to serve the city. And they were in this city by the river Chebar. And as I said earlier, this was an area that Nebuchadnezzar wanted worked. He wanted farms built. He wanted houses. He wanted civilization there. It was kind of this big plain. And he wanted it developed. Well, that’s what we’re good at, right? I mean the Lord God wants us to exercise dominion over a particular place of earth and that’s what they were supposed to do.

So they were developing this land. They were fulfilling the wishes of a king who thought he was God. Nebuchadnezzar said, “I want you to do this.” And now it’s like the bridge on the river Kwai, right? So no, we’re not going to build that for the Japanese. No, we’re not going to do that. No, we’re not going to build this for Nebuchadnezzar. He’s just going to use it to have more ziggurats and more people worshiping false gods and doing unrighteous and abominable things. We’re not going to do that. God says, “Yeah, do it. Serve the king.” And we’ll see in the life of Daniel, of course, that service to the king is part of the process whereby these prayers for the kings are made effectual.

So, they’re supposed to serve the king. They’re supposed to serve Babylon. How? They’re to work for the city’s peace. Okay? So, they’re supposed to work for the city’s peace. The text immediately tells us that it says: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Seek its welfare. Work for that city. Engage yourself in service for that city by actually doing things.”

And now here’s where political action, service projects, city fest, whatever it is—this is where all this stuff can come in. Now, the extraordinary things, you know, the basic idea is common life, but there are elements in which common life becomes areas of specific service. And so, political action is an element of serving the city by working for the correct order. Order. Welfare is peace, God’s order.

So they’re to work for the city’s peace, avoiding the siren song of retreatism in the Christian ghetto. That’s also a siren song singing at a shipwreck: “No, no, we won’t want to serve the city. We don’t want to serve Nebuchadnezzar. We don’t want to do what he wants us to do.”

And secondly, in addition to working for the peace, they’re to pray for the peace. And as I said, Paul picks this up. Now, this is important because this helps us to avoid the siren song singing into the shipwreck of syncretism and the problem of glamour. What do I mean? Things that look cool. Our culture is into glamour, you know, bling. And so there’s no substance to it. But that’s what we’re tempted to do.

In other words, if all we did was to work for the peace of the city and not praying for the city, our working becomes less distinctively Christian. Prayer means that it’s the undergirding force—number one, that involves God in the process, of course, but in terms of the sociology of the thing, it keeps us committed to God as we work. If we’re praying for the conversion of the city, we’re not going to give up our sense of reality as we go about the work. But if we don’t pray and don’t focus on devotion and piety to God, then our work could indeed become compromised and syncretism. And the siren song of being like the rest of us here in this land will lure us to that particular form of shipwreck.

So they’re to work and they’re to pray for the peace of the city, and there had to have a goal of the conversion of the city. And I mentioned this before. I won’t belabor the point. I may return to this, but the obvious thing here is that God has them there to witness to the city and to seek their conversion. But I do want to—and I mentioned here—there’s no year of exclusion in this kind of warfare. God is conquering Babylon through guys getting married and having families, you know, and Deuteronomy, when you have a wife, you’re not supposed to go off to war. But in this kind of war, more general warfare, everybody gets involved, including people that just had a wife, because having the wife, raising the children faithfully is engagement in the warfare that God is using to bring the surrounding culture to conversion.

I do want, however, to get to the conclusion. But to get there, we’ve got to go through three:

**Ordinary life means putting God first, seeking and listening attentively to him.** And I’ve got various scriptures there. But, you know, in the way Jeremiah 29 is actually sketched out, there are several judgment verses against other people and then accusations against them. So, for instance, in verse 18, he says he’s going to be a curse, a terror, and a hissing and a reproach among all their people are that he’s going to judge. The bad people that God is judging will be a reproach among the nations.

So, he’s going to judge them. And now, here’s why. Verse 19: “Because they did not pay attention to my words, declares the Lord, that I persistently sent to you by my servants, the prophets, but you would not listen, declares the Lord.”

So, the reason why the people in Jerusalem were going to be judged so harshly is because they wouldn’t listen. Listen—attentive to God. And then he says in verse 22 that he’s going to burn some people in the fire. He’s going to tend people into the hands of the king of Babylon who will roast them in the fire. Why? “Because they have done an outrageous thing in Israel. They have committed adultery with their neighbors’ wives. They have spoken in my name lying words that I did not command them. I am the one who knows and I am witness.”

So in other words, while we’re talking about ordinary life, ordinary life must be with a high sense of devotion and consecration to Yahweh. The prayer is what undergirds the service. The being attentive to Yahweh and to how he tells us to live undergirds what we do in the context, the broader context of the city. And what God tells us is he’s first. We’re not. He saved us for the purposes of honoring and glorifying him. He’s got to be number one priority, right? Clearly, this is the Christian message. Clearly, this is who we are. God must be the number one priority in your life. And when he’s not, that’s when judgments from him start to come.

We are supposed to declare his people. Isaiah 43:21 declares praises rather: “This people I have formed for myself. They shall declare my praise.” You have been formed by God for his purposes, not for your purposes. We’re not humanists. We’re theists. We believe that the praises of God is what is to inhabit the people of God.

I’m not just telling you how to have a nice life in the context of Babylon with no reference to God. What I’m saying is at the heart of this is the acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty that’s going to bring us into blessing, but will surely also be against us if we put ourselves and our interests above the interests of Yahweh.

Ordinary life starts here and now on this Lord’s day today. Today’s the first day of the rest of your life. Well, the Lord’s day is the first day of the rest of your week and the rest of your life. It is the Lord’s day. This is not a day that belongs to you. This is a day that belongs to the Lord in a specific set-apart way. Now there are other things to do too. He’s not—he can’t be contained in temples nor in one day. But he wants you to take one day, acknowledge him in it, very self-consciously putting him first, right? This is the Lord’s day.

What’s the siren songs of our culture? There’s a siren song of Mother’s Day. You know, I know some of you are going to get mad now, and I know I’m going to catch some grief here. That’s okay. I believe what I’m saying is the word of God. Mother’s Day is a siren song from Hallmark and from the broader culture to supplant the Lord’s Day. That’s the way the opposition to God would have you think of this day—one day out of the year as Mother’s Day. This is never Mother’s Day. This is always the Lord’s Day.

Now, can we think of our mothers on that day? Yeah. Can we preach on Mother’s Day? Sure, because mom is such an important part of the biblical family. But never get it wrong. Don’t start thinking about the Lord’s Day as Mother’s Day. And if you’re going to have a Mother’s Day celebration on Sunday, which we don’t, you know, we the siren song—we just say no.

Now, I’m not saying you have to say no. But if you are going to say yes to doing Mother’s Day celebration in the afternoon, this is the Lord’s day, not the Lord’s two hours. This is the Lord’s day. And whatever you do in terms of mother’s day or father’s day must be seen explicitly in the context of the Lord’s day, right? It’s a siren song.

Birthdays—somebody’s birthday celebrations about birthdays. We do that here. We celebrate birthdays downstairs. But you know what I’ve noticed? I think I could be wrong here, but I think that we used to be more self-conscious when we would say things about people’s birthday to acknowledge the Lord’s day and to thank God for the growth and development in this person’s life or thank God for this great friend that this person’s been to me.

You see, this is how we’re successful as a cognitive minority. Part of our reality is the priority of God in our lives and the priority of God in our lives is reinforced for us in sacred time, sacred space together. And then the whole day is consecrated to the purposes of the Lord. It’s the Lord’s day. It was called that by the way in the Old Testament—the day of the Lord—as well as New Testament: day of the Lord, Lord’s day.

So what I’m saying is we resist the siren song if we’re careful on this whole day. What are some other siren songs? Birthday celebrations. You’ve got soccer games today. I heard in the news there’s some sort of, you know, super big, little league game—World Series, something. I don’t know what’s going on, but, you know, baseball tournaments and stuff culminate on Sunday. Usually golf, all kinds of recreational events. You got your kids in little league, you got your kids in the soccer league. You’re going to probably increasingly over time—the siren song will come. “Well, we I’m here Sunday afternoon. Well, it’s Sunday afternoon. What’s the big deal? We went to church in the morning.”

Whoa. It’s the Lord’s day. Not the Lord’s morning. It’s the Lord’s day.

Siren song singing us to shipwreck.

Concert events. You know, concerts become more and more planned on Sunday or there just Sundays like any other day of the week. And that’s the siren song. If we lose our sense of the Lord’s day and Sabbath, we lose an essential part of the way God will make us an effectual witness to the nations by placing him and his life, his realities in the context of our life.

What does Isaiah 58:13 say? Well, you know, it says that we’re supposed to call the Sabbath a delight. That’s why I’ve got this picture, a coloring picture the kids have been working on probably because this is what they’re supposed to be like on the Lord’s day. They’re supposed to be thinking pious. They’re supposed to be thinking God’s thoughts. They’re supposed to be thinking about the scriptures. They’re not supposed to be doing normal stuff on the Lord’s day.

Normal stuff isn’t bad. Normal stuff’s great. Work’s not a bad thing. Work’s a great thing. It’s not supposed to do it on Sunday. Commerce isn’t a bad thing. It’s a great thing. It’s a wonderful way God brings blessing. Not supposed to do it on the Lord’s day. Why? He wants it set apart in a particular way so that we refocus every week on the priority of God. We can’t have ordinary life that changes the culture without having in the context of that ordinary life attentiveness to the Lord Jesus Christ and attentiveness to the Lord Jesus Christ begins on the Lord’s day. Jesus says, “This is my day. Be attentive. Hear what he’s saying.”

I went back to a sermon I preached many years ago on the sanctification of the Sabbath. And I have a note here. Someone says told us in terms of the Lord’s day: “Praise God, I get to see my friends at church and I don’t have to do the dishes.” It was a day of delight. That’s what Isaiah 58 says, you know. It’s called a delight. It was a day of delight. That’s what it’s supposed to be.

We used to regularly encourage children to memorize Isaac Watts’ poem. This is the day when Christ arose so early from the dead. Why should I keep my eyes closed and waste my hours in bed?

I cannot believe—I cannot believe that there are people in the context of the hearing of these sermons that I’ve delivered that I think are faithful. And if they’re not, you come and tell me. I cannot believe that there are people who continue to keep their eyes closed in bed on the Lord’s day when the call to worship is given because of some lack of preparation Saturday night, some party, whatever it is. I cannot believe it. How could somebody be so foolish and so inattentive to the word of God to think that worship itself, just that part of the day is optional? It is not optional. We have tried. We placed this in our confessional statement and our covenant statement. We said it over and over and over. And I have people who have been in this church for years saying, “Well, I never do that.”

What? You weren’t being attentive to the word of God then. Now, if I’m wrong, show me I’m wrong. I don’t think I am. You know, all those—we’ll deal later with verses from people think I’m wrong. But the, you know, the point is this—very start of Watts’s poem. We fail at that level. If our children are raised up to think that somehow the Lord’s day doesn’t have to be set apart, Nehemiah said it’s of the essence of Christian reconstruction to observe the Lord’s day by abstaining from commerce.

Everybody I know—Jim Jordan, Doug Wilson, Rushdoony—they all say that the end goal is to have a Lord’s day completely set apart from commerce. That’s what they all say. Is that your end goal? If it is, how are you trying to accomplish it? Are you prioritizing that? Are you setting that out as the end goal that we demonstrate to the culture that watches around us?

Watts poem goes on: “Waste hours in bed. This is the day when Jesus broke the power.” And the point of Watts’s poem is the only reason you’re going to stay in bed is if you’re not thinking about what Jesus Christ did for you, rescuing you from the fires of eternal hell. Jesus has rescued you from the fires of eternal hell. Can you honor him a little bit? Roll out of bed on time, get here on time, be rested Saturday night. Can you do that much for the Savior who has suffered the eternal agonies of death for your soul?

It is astonishing to me that we cannot honor the Lord on a regular basis by coming to worship him. “Oh, I’m there most of the time, pastor. I’m mostly faithful to my wife. I only had two affairs last year.”

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You’re faithful to your wife, but are you faithful to your savior’s call to prioritize him and to come and worship him on the Lord’s day? A little bit of slipping on that is bad. It’s not something to be, you know, proud of—that I normally make it. No.

“Shall I still wear Satan’s yoke? Love my sins. So, well, we’re supposed to turn away from sin. Today with pleasure Christians meet to pray and hear thy word and I would go with cheerful feet to learn thy will oh Lord I’ll leave my sport to read and pray and so prepare for heaven. Oh may I love this blessed day, the blessed of all the seven.”

We think that some degree of recreation is okay. We don’t leave all sports, but if those sports become somehow a way to divert you from the primacy of the Lord today, that’s bad. When we started this church up we had games for the kids to play, you know, in the different rooms. They were Bible games—Bible trivia, Bible memorization. Now we got kids playing poker. What’s going on? I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think it’s good. And I don’t think it’s going to make us effectual for transforming the culture in which we live.

You know, there nothing wrong with poker, nothing wrong with recreational events, but God says, Jesus says, “This is my day. Sanctify it. Call it a delight. Don’t do your own way.” I think it refers to vocation. Isaiah 58:13: don’t say your own words. Your words are good. Words are good things, but today when you speak, think more carefully about what you do. Encourage people.

I like to leave on my Sunday clothes all day to remind myself it’s a whole day event. And if I slip into casual, and I’m not, you know, I’m not trying to lay—I’m not trying to do that legalism thing. I’m not saying you’ve got to do that. It’s a way that I use. It’s a way that I use to keep myself and my head and my heart focused on the Lord’s day. It’s a reminder to me, a little warm—well, but remember, we’re doing this to help us remember that today is the Lord’s day. We’re going to honor him in what we do and say.

Our little children—the long-term generation—you have kids, have several generations—that means that the faithfulness to prioritize God and his word and pay attention to that must go on inter-generationally, cross generations. What are your children learning about today? Are they really focused on Jesus this morning, or is there something else going on that could be drawing their attention that you’ve set up for them?

We want our children to learn in this church setting apart the entire Lord’s day. If we lose that, I think we’ve lost ordinary life faithfully to the Lord Jesus Christ.

I’ll come back to this subject next week, but I just—I just want us to think very carefully. I want us to attend with great carefulness to God’s word that says that ordinary life is so wonderful a thing. But it has to be ordinary life that focuses on the primacy of the Lord Jesus Christ and his lordship over us and our loving response to the great gospel. It’s gospel—this passage of scripture. God’s going to convert the nation through ordinary life, but ordinary life lived with submission to the lordship of Jesus Christ. If we lose that, then we’ve lost the whole idea of what ordinary life is.

There are the siren songs singing us to shipwreck. Think about them. What’s calling you off on the Lord’s day? What’s calling you off at work? What are the siren songs urging you to become like the Babylonians that you may be giving into? Are you effective in prioritizing the lordship of Jesus Christ in your life? It’s a simple thing we got to do.

Our offering song is simple—talking about little kids—can do what we’ve been talking about today. And may the Lord God grant our children today to see today as the Lord’s day in its entirety.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the wonderful gospel, the simple message of this important truth of life in exile. And help us, Lord God, to honor you today. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

We’re going to have Roseanne play through this song.