On Wednesday this past week, I curled up on the couch with Melissa to watch ABC’s Emmy winning television show LOST. If you haven’t seen the show before, it is about a plane crash that leaves its survivors stranded on a Pacific island. As the men and women band together to try and escape, they begin to discover that the island has a lot of weird things going on. There are intense howls of a mysterious creature stalking the jungle, a polar bear, a marooned and possibly crazy French woman, a mystical boar, a mysterious group known only as "The Others," a ship called The Black Rock and...a hatch.
As the show ended last season the emphasis was placed on this random hatch that they found in the jungle. Four of the characters went out to the ship called The Black Rock, found dynamite and prepared to blow the hatch open so that they could hide everyone inside. Just before the fuse was lit, the character whose name is Hurley runs over yelling, “Stop! Don’t light it! Don’t do it!” John Locke, the character holding the fuse, ignores the warning, lights the fuse, and blows the hatch.
As the four characters explore the hatch in the episode on Wednesday, they realize that on the underside of the hatch is written, “QUARENTEED.” Despite the blunt warning, they decided to go and investigate and by the end of the show, one of the characters is potentially dead and two of them have a gun pointed at them as the show ends. If they had only listened to Hurley and later, to the warning on the back of the hatch, they wouldn’t have been in the mess they were in.
As we began our study of Jeremiah a few weeks ago, Pastor Tim defined the job of a prophet as someone “sent by God…to convey a message, or series of messages from God.” Their main role was to warn the people about their behavior and sound the alarm that would bring the people back to their senses and a relationship with God. As wee see in our text for this morning, there was definitely enough going on for Jeremiah to sound an alarm about.
In 5:1, we see that the people are liars and cheaters. God challenges the people to find “but one person who deals honestly and seeks truth.” If they can succeed, God will grant the city forgiveness. The hint of sarcasm in this message from God is similar to the charge he gave to Abraham about the city of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In 5:2, the people are using God’s name in vain. As they are running their businesses dishonestly, they are promising people things in God’s name in order to help them succeed in their schemes. “They say, ‘As surely as the Lord loves,’ still they are swearing falsely.”
In 5:7, we see that the people are committing idolatry. The people are forsaking the true God and worshiping other gods. This is what Pastor Tim talked about last week. The people traded in their full cisterns of “living water” and blessing from God for broken cisterns that have no hope or future. God is amazed that the people still flock to others even though He has supplied for all of their needs.
And in 5:8, the people are compared to a lusty stallion in how they “neigh” after other men’s wives. The people have no regard for the sacredness of marriage and spend their efforts on desires that can not be theirs. No doubt, this probably led to adultery and sexual immorality throughout the land as well.
With all of this immorality going on, Jeremiah is sent to sound the alarm and warn the people that their actions were not in line with what God laid out for the people in the first five books of the Old Testament. If the people did not change, then they would face the consequences of God’s judgment (5:6, 5:10-11, 5:15b). There are two main ways that the Israelites responded to Jeremiah’s warnings and alarms.
First, they simply just ignored them. 5:2 says that God, “struck them, but they felt no pain; [God] crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent.” These people didn’t care what Jeremiah was telling them or what God had told the people originally. They refused to repent and wanted to live their lives the way they wanted to. They choose to turn their backs on Jeremiah and Scripture and pretend that the warnings and alarms weren’t there.
The second way they responded was they tried to justify their actions or explain them away. 5:12-13 says that the people said, “He will do nothing! No harm will come to us; we will never see sword or famine. The prophets are but wind and the word is not in them; so let what they say be done to them.” These people heard Jeremiah, they knew what Scripture said about how to live their lives, and they just choose to put themselves above it. They had this, “It won’t happen to me,” attitude.
Has anyone here ever been in the mall when the fire alarm went off? I was in the North Shore Mall a few weeks ago when the alarm went off and I think it serves as a perfect illustration of these two responses to God’s warnings.
One would think that in a public building like that, that stores would have to momentarily stop their business but no one did. One would think that people would have to leave the mall when the alarm goes off but no one did. Instead, there were a lot of people who just went about their shopping like nothing was happening. They completely just ignored the loud sirens and went about their business. There were others though who you could overhear complain about the alarms and how inconveniencing and annoying they were. They chose, I chose, to put myself above the alarm and say, “Naaa, there’s not really a fire. We don’t actually have to leave.”
Now granted, there wasn’t really a fire in the mall most likely. My guess is that someone accidentally, or on purpose, set the alarm off or that somehow the circuit tripped. It was a false alarm. With God though, false alarms don’t happen. When the prophets brought God’s message, it came if the people did not repent. Never once in scripture do we have an account of a prophet assembling all the people together to apologize for that last warning he gave. You never read, “Whoops. That was for another town guys, I’m sorry” or, “Gotcha! You should have seen your faces!!” When God spoke, things happened.
Today we are surrounded by just as many alarms and warnings as the Israelites and we tend to respond just like the Israelites!
The first warning we have is Scripture. God has laid out for us how we are supposed to live and how we can have a relationship with Him. He has given us guidelines and rules not because He’s a jerk and wants to ruin our fun but because he loves us! He knows what is best for us and what will truly make us happy. I mean He did create us, he knows how we work best.
The second warning we are given is from men and women who truthfully preach God’s Word. God has given certain people the ability to preach His word and speak through them the same way that He did through the prophets in the Old Testament. They are a gift to us, even though sometimes they may seem like a curse, to keep us on track with God.
The third warning we are given is simply consequences to our disobediences. When we go against God’s will, we are going to have bad things happen. That’s not to say that every bad thing in life is a consequence of something we did wrong but often times they are. If we lie and cheat people, we won’t have many friends and will be lonely. If we commit idolatry by placing our worth in money and power we will not really be happy and we will die with nothing. If we have sex outside of marriage, one could get pregnant or get an STD. There are consequences when we go against God’s will.
The fourth and last warning that I want to talk about today is also a responsibility. That is the alarm of each other. The brief verses in chapter six that we looked at touch upon this point. “From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wounds of my people as through it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”
The image that comes to mind is a clip from Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. King Arthur comes across the Black Knight and they begin to fight. After a few moments Arthur has cut off the arm of the Black Knight and begins to celebrate but the Black Knight continues to try and fight. “What are you doing?” exclaims Arthur. “I’ve already won!” The Black Knight responds, “No you didn’t. It’s only a flesh wound!”
The priests were supposed to be the example but yet they did not take that call seriously. They were putting Band-Aids on large gashes and expecting them to solve the problem. They were saying there was peace when there was anything but peace.
Today, if you have a relationship with Christ, you are a priest. 1 Peter 2:4-5 says, “As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him— you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
We are called to be the example of faith today. We, as Christians, cannot just go the way the world is going or just pretend that nothing is wrong with our cultures morals and lifestyles. Nor can we sit back and let our Brothers and Sisters in Christ go down the wrong paths or fall away from a relationship with Christ. We need to be willing to lovingly sound the alarm and help each other continually grow closer and closer to Christ.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” (Romans 3:23) and “the wages of sin is death,” (Romans 6:23) but “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him, will not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). This is the warning and the alarm that is sounded today. If we choose to ignore it, it doesn’t change the fact that it is there. If we choose to put ourselves above it or have an attitude of “not me,” you are only lying to your self.
We must hear and seek out the truth in Scripture. We must listen to God fearing preachers, so to understand Scripture better. We must pay attention to the consequences of a life without Christ, both in the present and eternal. We must sound the alarm ourselves and not allow Christ and the message of the cross to be lost to our friends, family, and culture. If we can pay heed to these warnings, we will not be LOST in life finding ourselves in messes that we cannot get out of. But instead we will find ourselves with a joy that cannot be matched and the gift of eternal life forever with our Lord!
