Jeremiah 9

Mourning

Jeremiah 9:1–2

“Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!

Oh that I had in the desert a travelers’ lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a company of treacherous men.”

The God of Ages, the transcendent and omnipotent and omniscient Lord of heavens and Earth, is the one saying these things, through His prophet Jeremiah.

I have little patience for trying to figure out, in some kind of logical or systematic fashion, what it means that our God ‘feels’ things. Whatever it means, it certainly means something different than what it means when we ‘feel’ things because we are often at the mercy of our feelings and our feelings don’t always reflect true things, etc.

But it gives me great comfort, and no small amount of peace, to know that when I feel like bending my head and just weeping. Just weeping for the sorrow of the Earth, the loss of death, the destruction of sin, and the bitterness that is all around us- that the Lord, God our Father, weeps as well, in some way. Here in Jeremiah it is the Lord who is lamenting.

Likewise, when I feel that the sin of the world and its weight is too much for me and I feel like retreating to a cabin in the woods to live out my days as a hermit it is comforting to know that the Lord Himself expresses this same desire here in Jeremiah.

To mourn is Godly. To weep is divine. To want to distance yourself from the travails and burdens of this world is a ‘feeling’ that the Lord Himself expresses in His holy Word. Do not be ashamed of it.

Jesus Himself, God incarnate, as we might expect, exhibits sorrow and mourning for His people and He often went away into the wilderness to pray and to commune with His heavenly Father. Jesus is the Lord made flesh and so it is not unexpected that we would find Him exhibiting in humanly form, the feelings that the Lord displays here.

Yet we should take note. Mourning and weeping did not make Jesus bitter, nor did it paralyze Him. He mourned, He wept, and then He went about His Father’s business of ministering to and eventually dying for, His people.

In the same way, Jesus left to go and pray and to recharge at various times on His own, but He did that so that He could return and heal and be with and minister to His flock.

Elijah, exhausted by his battles, literal battles with idolatry in Israel, withdraws as well from the world and goes to a cave in the wilderness and it is there that he hears God’s voice in the silence. And he is comforted to know that the Lord is with him, but he doesn’t then stay in the cave for the rest of his life. The Lord tells him that next he is to go and anoint Elisha as his successor.

Do not be too proud or too ashamed to lament, to mourn, to weep and to express with your words and your whole body, the sorrow that is yours. Do not be too proud or ashamed to claim the Sabbath rest that your body and soul ask for at times, to get away, to lay down your burdens, to rest and to rejuvenate with the still small voice of God that offers comfort and healing.

It is the delight of God to offer you rest in Him. Come unto me, all you who are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest. (Mtt 11:28).

And why is the Lord mourning? Why does He lament and look for rest?

Jeremiah 9:2–6 For they are all adulterers, a company of treacherous men. They bend their tongue like a bow; falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, declares the Lord. Let everyone beware of his neighbor, and put no trust in any brother, for every brother is a deceiver, and every neighbor goes about as a slanderer. Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves committing iniquity. Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, declares the Lord.”

Let everyone beware of his neighbor, and put no trust in any brother, (for every brother acts like a Jacob.)

“Jacob Jacobs”

Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon 6117 עָקַב

עָקַב

יַעֲקֹב

Take note of the intimate relationship here between knowing God and truth, and not knowing God and falsehood.

Sometimes we as Christians are far too mealy mouthed, too coy, too fearful to offend to proclaim this Biblical tenet directly and without apology- that to know God is to know Truth, and to reject God is to embrace falsehood. All true things are of God, and all lies and deceptions are the purview of Satan.

What the Lord tells us here in His Word is that people who are far from Him, far from His truths, are a danger to their neighbor, that they will lead others into deception and will often attempt to sabotage their neighbors.

Why? Because they are advancing their own Kingdoms. A world without God (atheism) or a world of many gods (polytheism) both create a particular kind of human. This kind of human has no faith in divine justice or divine action. This kind of human has no hope that goodness and holiness will win the day in the end, and this kind of human has no reason to believe that they themselves are cared for or loved in any cosmic sense- for either there is no god, or the gods are too chaotic and unreliable to trust. They are orphans in the universe and therefore they are fearful and anxious and they worry constantly about their own kingdoms, above and beyond their neighbors. They are playing a zero sum game, and it is the survival of the fittest, the most cunning, the most aggressive, they will win. It’s a winner takes all universe, and those who hold to this view are deceptive, because their entire framework of the world is false, and what they model and what they teach and the actions they take, are all false.

It is no surprise to me, and it should come as no surprise to us as the Church, that as America abandons belief in an omnipotent and just God that our anxiety would fill the gap of faith and that our treatment of one another, in the public square or in politics, even in our families, would become more hostile, more aggressive, more fearful, more unforgiving.

I am in the process of memorizing 2 Timothy and I just finished memorizing this verse- But understand this, that in the last days there will be times of difficulty, for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God...and so on.

Jacob. (SLIDE)

Let everyone beware of his neighbor, and put no trust in any brother, (for every brother acts like a Jacob.)

“Jacob Jacobs”

It would take too long to go through this, but the Israelites of old would have been put in mind of Jacob here and his overall story. Jacob is an interesting sort. You know, Jacob was once the most popular boys name in America? And it’s not a terribly nice name in Hebrew. It can mean, grasping or overreaching, and in some forms it can mean dishonest. Jacob, of course, was loved by God and, like Simon in the New Testament, receives a new name from the Lord- Israel- which means to struggle or wrestle with God.

Jacob was not a good man. He was neither self sacrificial nor honest. But he was willing to struggle with God, and so he became Israel, from which the whole nation would draw its name. When Israel is no longer willing to struggle with God, when God’s holiness is no longer a concern for God’s people, then they cease to be Israel, and they become, again, Jacob. And they “refuse to know” the Lord.

Jeremiah 9:7–9 “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: “Behold, I will refine them and test them, for what else can I do, because of my people? Their tongue is a deadly arrow; it speaks deceitfully; with his mouth each speaks peace to his neighbor, but in his heart he plans an ambush for him. Shall I not punish them for these things? declares the Lord, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?”

Listen to how the Lord will deal with His people who are falling away from Him: He will “refine and test” and he will also “punish and avenge”. They are one and the same event- the coming of the Babylonians to destroy the last of Israel.

Would you rather be punished, and have someone wreak vengeance upon you, or would you rather be refined and tested?

What is the difference? What is the difference between being punished by God and refined by God? I would argue, and this will be a familiar theme for those of you who heard last week’s sermon, that the difference is repentance. There would be some in Judah who would receive the punishment from God’s hand, the loss of their homeland, the loss of their Temple, the loss of life, all of it, and count it the righteous judgment of their Holy God. There are not many of these people, but they are there. These are the Jeremiahs, the Daniels, the Ezekiels the Hoseas and the men and women who listened to them and took them seriously. These men and women would be refined and tested. They accept discipline from the hand of the Lord.

[Heb 12:5-6 NIV] 5 And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his child? It says, “My child, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his child”

The unrepentant, those who are not interested in wrestling with God, those who only care about their own personal Kingdoms, these will experience the same degradations and pain as the repentant but they will experience it as punishment and vengeance.

Those who repented of their sins and looked to the Lord for restitution and forgiveness in those days were doing exactly what we are doing today in this service- they were looking to Jesus. They did not know His name, they knew nothing of the Cross or the Resurrection, but in repenting before God, they availed themselves of the saving work of the Cross, which is a gift received through faith, not through being the best person ever. Which is also the story of Jacob, that salvation belongs not to the most moral person on the block, but the one who is willing to wrestle with and repent before a Holy and perfect God.

Jeremiah 9:10–11 ““I will take up weeping and wailing for the mountains, and a lamentation for the pastures of the wilderness, because they are laid waste so that no one passes through, and the lowing of cattle is not heard; both the birds of the air and the beasts have fled and are gone. I will make Jerusalem a heap of ruins, a lair of jackals, and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation, without inhabitant.””

Jeremiah 9:12–16 “Who is the man so wise that he can understand this? To whom has the mouth of the Lord spoken, that he may declare it? Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through? And the Lord says: “Because they have forsaken my law that I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice or walked in accord with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Baals, as their fathers taught them. Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will feed this people with bitter food, and give them poisonous water to drink. I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their fathers have known, and I will send the sword after them, until I have consumed them.””

Who is so wise that they can understand this? Do you understand why the Lord destroyed His own nation, His own people? Do we understand what idolatry is and how it manifests itself?

Because back then most people thought they understood very well why Israel was destroyed. In those days of polytheism and the beliefs that the more powerful gods defeated the less powerful ones the conclusion would be brief and simple. Marduk, the god of the Babylonians, proved to be stronger than YHWH, the god of the Hebrews. That is why Jerusalem was left desolate.

For the unrepentant Israelites, the answer was perhaps the same, or perhaps they felt that YHWH betrayed them in some way, blaming the Lord for their troubles. I am sure many of the survivors turned quickly to worshiping Marduk in light of those events. Most of them were already worshiping other gods anyway as the text shows.

At any rate, for most of those people who lived through these cataclysmic events the wisdom they pulled from the wreckage was not wisdom at all, just a doubling down on foolishness- that YHWH was not sufficient to defend, in other words, not all powerful, OR he was morally culpable, i.e., not all good.

For the modern historian today the answer is even simpler. Babylon became more powerful and tried to make Judah a client state and when Judah stopped paying tribute, Babylon attacked and destroyed Judah, the last vestige of Israel. That’s it. Full stop. There is no God, no judgment, no reason for any of it than just the normal ups and downs of Empires and lesser Empires.

The Bible tells the story of what happened. And these things did happen- the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians is easily verifiable in the archaeological record- so the Bible tells the story of what happened, but then it tells us WHY it happened and all of this, the judgment, the refinement, the return to Jerusalem later and all that came after, all of it is in service to Jesus Christ, His birth, ministry, death and resurrection. God’s Word tells us here that the Lord destroyed His people because they were unfaithful to Him. They were sinners who had forsaken His Laws and had started worshiping other gods.

This would not do. People who worship other gods would not recognize the Messiah when He comes. They would not even know why they need a Messiah. Why is the Lord so dismayed about them going after the Baals, increasingly worshiping other gods with each generation? Because Israel needs to be able to recognize and understand who Jesus is.

The 12 Disciples had many sins and shortcomings. But all of them only worshiped one God, YHWH, and YHWH alone. And this is because the Lord refined His people. He did not make them perfect. He did not make them sinless. But He did take away, once and for all, their polytheism, their worship of other gods, through these devastating experiences. He refined them, that they might recognize Christ when He came.

To whom has the mouth of the Lord spoken that he may declare it? To us.

1 Peter 1:8–12 “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.”

We know God in a way Jeremiah never did in his earthly life. We are possessed of knowledge and wisdom that no prophet of old had. It is to you that the mouth of the Lord has spoken, that you may declare it.

Ezekiel was given a scroll to eat, Isaiah had a burning coal touched to his lips. The scroll that Ezekiel was given was the prophetic word that he was to share. The coal that touched Isaiah was to take away his sin and shame so he could prophesy with a clear conscience.

We have the scroll here today, all of us, in God’s Word, we live not by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. and through the work of Jesus and the ministry of the Holy Spirit our lips are also touched by a coal that takes away our sins and makes our testimony true and holy. We are the prophets that have seen and heard that which angels longed to see and hear for centuries.

Jeremiah 9:17–22 “Thus says the Lord of hosts: “Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; send for the skillful women to come; let them make haste and raise a wailing over us, that our eyes may run down with tears and our eyelids flow with water. For a sound of wailing is heard from Zion: ‘How we are ruined! We are utterly shamed, because we have left the land, because they have cast down our dwellings.’ ” Hear, O women, the word of the Lord, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth; teach to your daughters a lament, and each to her neighbor a dirge. For death has come up into our windows; it has entered our palaces, cutting off the children from the streets and the young men from the squares. Speak: “Thus declares the Lord, ‘The dead bodies of men shall fall like dung upon the open field, like sheaves after the reaper, and none shall gather them.’ ””

The Lord tells Jeremiah here to look for women who are already in mourning for what has become of Israel. “call for the mourning women to come”. And these women are wise women- the ESV translates this Hebrew word ‘skillful’ but it is actually usually translated as ‘wise’ in the Bible. The first time this word is used is in Genesis when Pharaoh is looking for a wise man who can interpret his dream for him and he finds Joseph.

These are women of insight, who are sorrowful about what has happened in Israel, kindred spirits with Jeremiah. And he encourages them and tells them to listen to God’s Word and to teach others songs and poems of repentance- of lament and sorrow, not pretending that everything is OK but acknowledging the righteous judgment of God upon their land and their people. And in so doing they will change people’s experience of God’s judgment from punishment to refinement, through acceptance and repentance.

Jeremiah 9:23–26 “Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.”

Technically there is one more verse in chapter 9 but I am in agreement with many other commentators that this really is the end of Chapter 9, which is to say the end of this line of thought, and the next verse really belongs to the theme of Chapter 10.

Your wisdom is not impressive. Your power is not impressive. Your wealth is illusory. You have nothing before God that you can impress Him with, except one thing- knowing God. To know the Lord is that which impresses, nothing else does.

How blessed are we to know Jesus Christ, and to be counted among His flock? This is the only good boast that there is- that you have come to know Jesus and in knowing Him you have submitted to Him in gratitude and joy.

[Phl 3:8-11 ESV] 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— 10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

It has been said by someone that ‘the proper study of mankind is man.’ I will not oppose the idea, but I believe it is equally true that the proper study of God’s elect is God; the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead. The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God who he calls his Father. There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in the contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. Other subjects we can compass and grapple with; in them we feel a kind of self-content, and go our way with the thought, ‘Behold I am wise.’ But when we come to this master science, finding that our plumbline cannot sound its depth, and that our eagle eye cannot see its height, we turn away with the thought that vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild ass’s colt; and with solemn exclamation, ‘I am but of yesterday, and know nothing.’ No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God…. “But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind then the man who simply plods around this narrow globe…. The most excellent study for expanding the soul, is the science of Christ, and of Him crucified, and the knowledge of the Godhead in the glorious Trinity. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity. “And, whilst humbling and expanding, this subject is eminently consolatory. Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore. Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea; be lost in his immensity; and you shall come forth as from a couch of rest, refreshed and invigorated. I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead. It is to that subject that I invite you this morning.”—C.H. Spurgeon