OPEN: A young boy, about eight years old, was at the corner "Mom & Pop" grocery store picking out a pretty good size box of laundry detergent. The grocer walked over and, trying to be friendly, asked the boy if he had a lot of laundry to do.
"Oh, no laundry," the boy said. "I’m going to wash my dog."
"But you shouldn’t use this to wash your dog. It’s very powerful and if you wash your dog in this, he’ll get sick. In fact, it might even kill him."
But the boy was not to be stopped (he was one of those kids that you couldn’t tell anything) and carried the detergent to the counter and paid for it, even as the grocer still tried to talk him out of washing his dog.
About a week later the boy was back in the store to buy some candy. The grocer asked the boy how his dog was doing.
With a tear in his eye the boy said: "Oh, he died."
The grocer, trying not to be an I-told-you-so, said he was sorry the dog died but added,
"I tried to tell you not to use that detergent on your dog."
"Well," the boy replied, "I don’t think it was the detergent that killed him."
"Oh? What was it then?"
"I think it was the spin cycle."
APPLY: There’s just some people you can’t tell anything. Their minds are like steel traps – tightly shut and difficult to open. They have their mind made up and they’re not going to change for you, or me… or even God.
I. That’s pretty much the situation we discover here in Jeremiah 44.
Jeremiah warns the people that God is upset with their behavior… and they respond: "We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD!” (Jeremiah 44:16)
They’ve made up their minds.
They LIKE what they’re doing.
And they have no intention of stopping for Jeremiah or God… or anyone
Now, it helps to know a little background:
The Babylonians had just destroyed the nation of Judah, and Jerusalem is in ruins. The survivors of that tragedy have followed Jeremiah down into Egypt - looking for sanctuary.
It appears they’ve been in Egypt for awhile - and they’ve forgotten the lessons they’d learned from God’s punishment of their nation. They’ve fallen back into their old evil ways and God has called them on it.
SO… God’s upset with something they’re doing AND the Jews have no intention of changing their behavior. What exactly are they doing that God didn’t like?
II. Well, I’m going to introduce you to a $10 word: syncretism
The Jews were practicing syncretism. Syncretism is the attempt to combine 2 or more religions in your life. It’s a smorgasbord faith. A little bit of the God here… a little bit of paganism there.
It’s not a pure faith… but rather a mixture of two or more religious disciplines.
Now, look with me to Jeremiah 44:17-18. Part of Judah’s rational for offering incense and drink offerings to pagan gods was this:
“We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm. But ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine."
The Jews were using Syncretism as a kind of religious home owners policy.
If one God was good… several gods had to be better.
I don’t believe they had totally abandoned the idea of being the people of Jehovah… I suspect they practiced that part of their faith as well. But they wanted to buy a little extra religious insurance so that their homes would be protected. So that they’re lives would be better.
III. Obviously, God isn’t pleased with this idea (pause…)
Now, at first glance you might think this is no big deal.
I mean… so what if they offered a little incense and poured out a few drink offerings to a pagan goddess. What’s the big deal? It’s not like they were stealing or robbing or killing anybody. This seems basically to be a victimless crime.
Well, actually, their sin was not a “victimless” offense. What they were doing was even worse than all than stealing, or robbing someone… or even killing someone.
In the New Testament, we read about Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at a well and having a conversation with her. In the midst of the little talk, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman “salvation is from the Jews.” John 4:22
What did Jesus mean by that?
He meant that God’s plan for the salvation of the world centered around the Jewish nation.
· The Jews had been selected by God to receive His laws
· They had been chosen by God to show what it meant to be God’s special people
· And ultimately they were to be the nation in which the Messiah would be born
As Paul wrote in Romans 9:4-5 “…the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God over all, forever praised!”
The nation of Judah was a lynchpin in God’s plans for the salvation of mankind.
And what these Jews were doing was watering things down. They were attempting to substitute something new into God’s plans. Essentially, they were playing with things they didn’t understand.
ILLUS: Kind of like those TV shows where you’d see a person in a chemistry lab playing with chemicals they didn’t understand… and ultimately – you just knew they were going to blow something up and hurt somebody.
The Jews in Egypt were like that. They were playing with things they didn’t understand… dangerous things. And left to themselves… they were going to blow something up. They were going to damage God’s plans and possibly effect the lives of countless millions of people. God wasn’t going to permit that!
IV. That’s what happened to the Jews in that day… could it happen to us?
Well yeah. People try to mix paganism in with Christianity all the time.
ILLUS: Tina Turner (for example) said, “I’m a Buddhist/Baptist. My training is Baptist, and I can still relate to the Ten Commandments. It’s all very close, as long as you contact the subconscious mind. That’s where the coin of the Almighty is. I don’t care what they feel about me and my tight pants on stage, and my lips and my hair. I am a chanter. And everyone who knows anything about chanting knows you correct everything in your life by chanting every day.”
So there are individuals out there trying to mix and match their religions.
And there have been churches that attempt the same thing
· The Bahai Church was a popular movement about 20 years ago and attempted to combine all religious faiths under one roof. Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, etc.. You don’t hear much about the Bahai anymore… and there’s a reason for that. They didn’t have anything really to offer.
· Then there is the Universalist Church. This movement doesn’t so much attempt to mix and match world religions as much as it attempts to combine secularism with Christianity. Their teaching is that man is capable of attaining a kind of salvation by his own merits. The emphasis is on “good works” and while God and Jesus are somewhere in the picture… They’re somewhere outside the backdoor. Involved, but basically unnecessary.
· If you went down to the Caribbean, you’d find many of the churches down there mix Christianity with heavy doses of voodoo, or tribal religions.
In fact there is one church that has even gone so far as to worship the Queen of Heaven. Do you know who that might be? That’s right, it’s the Catholic Church. According to Pope Pius XII, Queen of Heaven is one of the names the Catholics have given to the Virgin Mary. And the Catholic church repeatedly offers incense and prayers to her just like the Jews of Jeremiah’s day did to their Queen of Heaven.
V. Now… we can laugh at people and churches try to mix Christianity with other religions
But, we really need to ask ourselves… Why would people do that?
Why would they engage in a practice that God has never liked and a practice which led the Jews of Jeremiah’s day to basically tell God: “We don’t care what YOU want us to do, we’re going to worship the way we want to?”
One of the most startling phrases in our text this morning is the one where the Jews tell Jeremiah that they weren’t going to listen to God any more.
And in essence,that’s what mixing and matching our religion would be saying to God:
We don’t want to listen to God
We want to have OUR own kind of worship
ILLUS: I recently visited a Christian web-site (where they discuss Bible topics) and one man wrote that he didn’t like the traditional view of God – the one described in Scripture. So he had “divorced” himself from that KIND OF GOD. Without realizing it, this man had told God – I don’t want to listen to YOU anymore. I want to listen to the type of God I want to hear.
Now… why would anyone basically tell God – I don’t like what you have to say?
Why would any individual, or any church, basically tell God - “We will not listen to you!”
Well, sometimes it’s simply because they don’t like what God has to say.
2 Timothy 4:3 tells us: “…the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”
Sometimes it’s deliberate decision to seek out a different god and call him Jesus.
Other times its not so much a deliberate decision as it is a mindset that they sort of slip into.
Look with me at Jeremiah 44:17
We will certainly do everything we said we would: We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm.
Did you catch that?
These Jews were offering incense to the Queen of heaven because:
#1 They’d always done it that way (“just as we… did in Judah”)
#2 Their families had always done it that way (“just as… our fathers… did”)
#3 People in authority over them had always done it that way (“just as… our kings and our officials did”)
#4 And they figured it worked – and you can’t mess with success (“at that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm”).
Essentially they were saying: we’re not going to listen to you Jeremiah because:
· This is what our family has always done
· This is what our friends have always done.
· This is what our church has always taught
· This has always satisfied us in the past
We think you’re wrong Jeremiah – because this is how we’ve always seen God. So we’re not changing.
Against such reasoning, Jeremiah simply said: “I know all that… but God said…”
(repeat for emphasis) “But God said…”
CLOSE: Now, we need to realize that these Jews were perhaps being very sincere. They sincerely believed that they were right.
Now granted they believed this despite what God’s Word said to the opposite, despite what their Scriptures had condemned. But they believed they were right because
§ that’s the way their friends and family had always done things
§ that’s what their church had always taught
§ and they found this practice quite satisfactory
But in spite of the fact that they were sincere…
In spite of the fact that their families had always done things that way…
In spite of the fact that their church had always taught them to believe it was ok…
AND in spite of the fact that they found their practice to be satisfactory…
GOD was going to condemn them because they refused to listen to His Word.
Now… we need to realize that the Israelites were not “stupid” people.
People like Tina Turner, and the individuals that go to churches that mix and match their religion are not “stupid” people.
Many of these individuals are very intelligent. They’re problem is not how smart they are. Their problem is their “frame of reference.” They approach God from a frame of reference that is outside God’s Word and they often depend upon their own “experience” or their circle of friends and teachers to guide how them on how they should perceive God’s will.
That’s kind of like the guy who refuses to read the instructions, because he’s sure he can figure it all out by himself. They end up (like me) ending up with one or two parts left over and often without being able to get the thing they’ve put together to function.
What happened to the Jews could happen to us.
They were God’s people then – and we are God’s people now.
They fell into a trap that has caught many other churches and denominations.
The Churches of Christ/Christian Churches have long held to certain principles that were designed to keep us from straying too far from God’s word. Principles like:
“Where the Bible speaks we speak, and where the Bible is silent, we’re silent” and
“No Creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, and no law but Love.”
Now, we’re not always going to be successful in holding to those principles. We’re going to fail once in a while, because we’re mortal and we suffer the same temptations and failings as other mortals. But as long as we uphold those principles… as long as we strive to point people back to Scripture as the source and power of our faith, then we’ll not go to far wrong.
That’s why it is so critical for churches to guard our families against false teaching by constantly teaching the Bible and the Bible only.
That’s what is so important about Sunday School and mid-week Bible Studies and youth groups.
That’s why it is so critical that you personally read and examine your Bible – rather than just taking my word for what is there.
And, that’s why it is so critical for you parents to teach your children to honor God’s Word.
ILLUS: While a train was being made up, two men entered a car and took comfortable seats. They hadn’t been there very long until along came a conductor who asked them to move to the next car.
What’s the matter with this car?” one inquired.
“Nothin’,” he grinned, “only, it ain’t coupled to anything that’ll take you anywhere.”
What we need to ask ourselves is not
Ø whether we’re comfortable with what we believe
Ø or whether our parents have always believed something
Ø or whether the church we grew up in has always taught something
We need to ask ourselves whether or not what we believe is actually hooked up to something that will take us someplace.
SERMONS IN THIS SERIES
· Formed For A Purpose - Jeremiah 1:4-1:10
· Accept No Substitutes - Jeremiah 2:4-2:13
· The Smell of Sin - Jeremiah 5:20-5:25
· If I’ve Got It Why Can’t I Flaunt It? - Jeremiah 9:23-9:24
· The Effect Of Judgment - Jeremiah 10:17-10:25
· Time To Decide - Jeremiah 15:15-15:21
· Planning For The Future. - Jeremiah 29:8-29:14
· A New Hope - Jeremiah 31:31-31:35
· Knowing God’s Phone Number - Jeremiah 33:1-33:3
· You Can’t Tell Some People Anything - Jeremiah 44:1-44:30
