You
shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord:
When men fall, do they not rise again? If one turns away, does he not return?
Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They hold fast
to deceit; they refuse to return. I have paid attention and listened, but they
have not spoken rightly; no man relents of his evil, saying, ‘What have I
done?’ Everyone turns to his own course, like a horse plunging headlong into
battle. Even the stork in the heavens knows her times, and the turtledove, swallow,
and crane keep the time of their coming, but my people know not the judgment of
the Lord. How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the
law of the Lord is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of
the scribes has made it into a lie. The wise men shall be put to shame; they
shall be dismayed and taken; behold, they have rejected the word of the Lord, so what wisdom is in them? Therefore I will give their
wives to others and their fields to conquerors, because from the least to the greatest
everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest, everyone deals
falsely. They have healed the wound of
my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. Were they
ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they
did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among the fallen; when I
punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord.”
The
prophet Jeremiah records God’s frustration with his people. It’s a frustration with sin, and of course with
the unbelief that’s at the root of sin. Sin
is unlike anything else. The natural
inclination in our sinful hearts is not simply an unfortunate tendency to make
the wrong choice here and there. It is,
in fact, rebellion against God. He
created earth and all that fills it to be good.
The sin that spoils what God made good begins in our own hearts. By nature we are enemies of God. By nature, we deserve his wrath.
By
nature. But how natural really is sin? Isn’t it rather a corruption of nature?
When we talk theologically about human nature
or our natural desires and so forth, we are really making reference to a
corruption that in itself is very foreign to nature. But it is so much a part of us that we cannot
by our own fallen powers distinguish it from
our nature. And so human nature has become a sort of short hand for corrupted human nature. Sin is a spiritual perversion that the devil
has brought about by tempting our first parents away from believing God’s
spoken word. God created us to hang on
to every word he speaks so that we might have perfect communion with him. This was the most beautiful feature of his perfect
creation. And so the most hideous
feature of our fallen nature is that we do not listen to what God says.
All
creation is cursed for our sake. There
is death and disease and pain. But God
still orders his creation according to his almighty power. The seasons come and go according to his
command. There is a natural order of
things in which we can still trace the wisdom and kindness of God our Maker as
his handiwork does what he tells it to do.
But man does not. Sin is truly
twisted.
To
demonstrate how unnatural sin really is, the Lord God expresses to Jeremiah his
frustration. If a man falls down, won’t
he get up? Yeah; naturally. That’s what you do when something causes you
to stumble. If a man walks the wrong way
and realizes his mistake, won’t he naturally come right back and correct
himself? Yeah; that’s nature. But we can’t deal with our sin simply by
taking note of our error and correcting it.
It’s not like driving with a GPS, where you really want to get from A to
B, but, because of some unavoidable malfunction, you get lost here and there
and have to get back on track. No, sin
is not simply a weakness or cloudiness of judgment; it is a wayward will. Natural
man does not even have the desire to get from A to B, so to speak. He has the will to get lost — the will to do
wrong, to do what pleases our flesh instead of serving our neighbor — the will
to ignore what God says because you already know what you really want to do – like a warhorse determined
to plunge into battle — that’s sin. And
our natural powers are no match against it.
It’s
frustrating. As God laments to Jeremiah,
“Even
the stork in the heavens knows her times, and the turtledove,
swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, but my people know
not the judgment of the Lord.” Yeah, it’s frustrating. The animals do what nature would
determine. God made them that way. But what do we do? Not what God created us to do. Our nature is corrupt, and so we can’t rely
on what our hearts or our instinct might tell us. We have to rely on God’s word. We have to learn to hang on God’s word
despite what comes naturally for us to do.
God
speaks to us. We don’t naturally listen. Frustrating.
But God continues to speak.
Throughout the generations God spoke only to see the children of man
turn from his voice just like their father Adam did in the garden. By grace, he chose Abraham and his
descendants to know and believe in Christ as they waited for the promised Seed
who would redeem the world from sin. He
did not choose them because they were holier than anyone else. He chose them out of pure mercy. But they lost sight of this mercy. They again and again imagined that God had
chosen them because he liked what he saw in them. Frustrating.
Again and again they rejected the spiritual food handed to them in the
Gospel in favor of their own vain thoughts and works.
It
is not our thoughts and works that make us God’s special people. It is God’s word. We can’t rely on our natural powers, so God
gives to us what natural man cannot receive.
It is supernatural. He sends His
Holy Spirit to teach us the truth. He
teaches us what costly price the Father spent in order to free us from sin and
death: the very lifeblood of his Son whom He loved. He teaches us his judgment by laying all
judgment on his Son in our place. He
joins us to Christ who died and rose to give us a new life unmarred by sin and
unwillingness. He washes us clean in
Holy Baptism and there gives us ears to hear his word as holy children of
God. And his word forgives us. He makes us his people not by giving us rules
to follow, but by giving us free and willing hearts that delight in what he
says. He creates us anew by creating
living faith.
But
just as God constantly called his children of old to repentance for their many
sins, so he must call us to repentance as well.
Because we still sin. We still
engage in war against God. Our unnatural
nature remains a force that we as new men and women must continually fight,
because when we fight against urges and pride and whatever else defiles our
lives and strains our relationships with others, we are always at the same time
fighting against unbelief that strains our relationship with God by ignoring
his judgments. We fight this fight by
hanging onto the word of grace that forgives us and unites us to our gracious
God.
In
our Old Testament lesson, God expresses frustration with his people, because this
is exactly what he was offering. And
this is exactly what they were refusing.
But isn’t frustration a uniquely human emotion. Doesn’t frustration come from a certain
inability to get done what you want done?
But God doesn’t fumble. He
doesn’t try and fail. He speaks. He accomplishes. So then what could God possibly be frustrated
with when he is omnipotent?
But
by expressing such an emotion, God exhibits not his weakness, but his desire to
save us. Because he saves us not by
decreeing what we must do the way he decrees that geese will flock north and
south. He doesn’t ingrain in us some
dumb instinct that mimics the holy life he is pleased with. Rather he gives us a holy life to live by giving
us faith in what he has spoken. He
clothes us in the holy life that Jesus lived in our place. He teaches us to hang on to his word. He does not reprogram our hearts to mechanically
do what we should. Rather he melts our
hearts by exposing our sin, and persuades our hearts by forgiving our sins for
Jesus’ sake. He does not force
faith. He creates faith by tenderly
speaking the absolution, by feeding us with the body and blood that purchased
our salvation, and by identifying us as his beloved children with whom he is
well pleased.
Although
man has no power on his own to accept this (Faith must worked in our hearts by
the Holy Spirit), man does have the natural power to reject it. And this is what frustrates God. It is not God’s fault when one does not
believe. God’s mercy is genuine and is
sincerely offered to all. That is why he
took on the flesh and blood that is common to all. He became true Man. He joined his creation. He assumed our human nature without assuming
our sin. He made the distinction that we
are unable to make. He obeyed his
Father’s every command. And as the only
innocent Man with a perfect human nature, he bore the judgment against our sin in
order to make peace between God and his rebellious creation.
The
frustration that God expressed to Jeremiah is the same frustration that God
expressed when he wept over Jerusalem:
When
[Jesus] drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, “Would that you,
even you had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are
hidden from your eyes … because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
When
God’s people ignore God’s judgment, they ignore what makes for peace with
God. They cease to be His people. When we close our eyes to what frustrates
God, we close our eyes to Jesus who has come to make peace. Look at Jesus’ frustration. He weeps for Jerusalem and the Temple, which
He chose as His dwelling place. He weeps
because it will be destroyed by God’s wrath.
Jesus’ description is stirring.
The whole city will be surrounded – “you and your children,” Jesus
says. The Temple will be demolished – “not
one stone upon another,” Jesus says.
His frustration is with unbelief.
“Don’t you know what your sin has
earned? Don’t you know what I have come
to save you from? Don’t you know?” They didn’t know what made for peace because
they did not believe that they were at war.
And so just as they rejected God’s Word from Jeremiah, they persecuted
the Word of God made flesh and crucified him.
Jesus
wept. He cried. You can almost imagine it. He is so frustrated. But He is not simply crying for the
city. Cities rise and fall all the time.
Jesus cries because the judgment dimly
represented by the destruction of the holy city is the judgment of God almighty
against the sin of the whole world – judgment that will be poured out on Him
alone as He makes peace between God and man on the cross.
Now
don’t take this simply to mean that Jesus was crying because of the pain He
would have to endure. No. He is crying because even though He is dead
set on bearing the world’s sin, He sees even His own people reject what makes
for peace – the peace that His crucifixion would earn – the peace that the
Temple was designed to teach them about.
He is frustrated. He is
frustrated to see Christians embrace their sin and make excuses for it instead
of humbly crying for mercy. He is
frustrated to see young confirmands stop going to church because they think
they have graduated from hearing the word that saves them. He is frustrated with the young man who
thinks that he has the rest of his life to learn God’s word and with the old
woman who thinks she has already learned all that is important. He is frustrated with sinners whose sin does
not frustrate them, who are content to live at odds with their spouses at home
and with their brothers and sisters at church.
He is frustrated with what comes naturally to us.
Our
sin must frustrate us. It must bother
us. We need to see the weakness of our
sinful nature. We need to see the
strength of our flesh that desires to act contrary to God’s word. We are sinners. Just as God’s people gathering in the Temple
of Jerusalem needed to know and remember what the Temple was truly for, so we
Christians must never forget our great need for God to come to us and forgive
us our sin. God destroyed the Temple and
the city that housed it. No longer would
God reveal his mercy there, because his people had ignored the gospel. They preached “peace, peace” apart from the sacrifice where peace was
earned. They healed the wound of sin
lightly by not teaching rightly what the sacrifices of the Temple pointed
to.
But
this is not the Temple that we need. The
Temple that we need was torn down and built up again after three days. The sacrifice that makes for our peace with
God is not hidden from our eyes, but is revealed before the face of all people
– here where our wound is not healed lightly, but where the corruption of sin
is completely forgiven. Because it is
here that Jesus teaches us. He does not see
your weakness and get frustrated with you.
He sees your weakness and bears with it.
He does not see your sin and weep.
He has done his weeping. He sees
your sin and then he shows you where he has taken it away so that you can join
him in his victory.
Sin
is frustrating. Especially when it comes
naturally. You will be frustrated as
your old Adam fights against you. But
Christ fights with you and for you. He
who wept for you will drive out from you all malice and deceit and unbelief as
he enters his Temple – that is as he comes to you with the peace that he has
won. He who cleansed the Temple in
Jerusalem by being zealous for the truth, will cleanse you as well. He cleanses
you by teaching you. And so we as
children of God hang on Jesus’ words.
Amen.
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