Rekabites

Constancy

We saw in the previous chapter something of the nature of the Israelites in these last days of Judah before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. And what we saw was, among other things, inconstancy.

If you recall, the Israelites, in a moment of divine clarity, suddenly decide, with the blessing of Zedekiah, to free all the Hebrew slaves. But then, shortly after doing so, they re-enslave all the same people again. It was a short flirtation with holiness, with Jubilee, a brief experiment with liberty and obeying the Laws of God that they quickly decide doesn’t work for them, and they return to their normal ways of doing things which by and large involves not only ignoring YHWH and His laws, but often involves the worship of foreign deities, even within the Temple itself. They do not worship God. They mock Him by ignoring Him.

And this inconstancy, this inability to remain faithful to God’s word for any appreciable length of time, explains the following chapter, chapter 35 and the story of the Rechabites that is told there.

In Chapter 35, Jeremiah goes back to the reign of Jehoiakim, so at least 10 years before where we are at in the siege of Jerusalem right now in the book of Jeremiah. So this is a flashback of sorts. The inconstancy and capricious nature of the Israelites has reminded Jeremiah of a prophetic interaction he had with a clan of Israelites in Jerusalem some years back, the Rechabites.

The Rechabites serve as an example of a people who are given laws to obey, and not easy ones at that, by a revered ancestor, and they follow those laws, all of them together, for literally hundreds of years- roughly 300 years at the time of Jeremiah.

The point that the Lord makes through the story of the Rechabites is that it is not a bridge too far, or an impossible task, for them to be obedient to the Lord in the ways that He is asking them to be obedient.

Jeremiah 35:1–11 ESV

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: “Go to the house of the Rechabites and speak with them and bring them to the house of the Lord, into one of the chambers; then offer them wine to drink.” So I took Jaazaniah the son of Jeremiah, son of Habazziniah and his brothers and all his sons and the whole house of the Rechabites. I brought them to the house of the Lord into the chamber of the sons of Hanan the son of Igdaliah, the man of God, which was near the chamber of the officials, above the chamber of Maaseiah the son of Shallum, keeper of the threshold. Then I set before the Rechabites pitchers full of wine, and cups, and I said to them, “Drink wine.” But they answered, “We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, ‘You shall not drink wine, neither you nor your sons forever. You shall not build a house; you shall not sow seed; you shall not plant or have a vineyard; but you shall live in tents all your days, that you may live many days in the land where you sojourn.’ We have obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, in all that he commanded us, to drink no wine all our days, ourselves, our wives, our sons, or our daughters, and not to build houses to dwell in. We have no vineyard or field or seed, but we have lived in tents and have obeyed and done all that Jonadab our father commanded us. But when Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against the land, we said, ‘Come, and let us go to Jerusalem for fear of the army of the Chaldeans and the army of the Syrians.’ So we are living in Jerusalem.”

Jeremiah 35:12–17 ESV

Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Go and say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Will you not receive instruction and listen to my words? declares the Lord. The command that Jonadab the son of Rechab gave to his sons, to drink no wine, has been kept, and they drink none to this day, for they have obeyed their father’s command. I have spoken to you persistently, but you have not listened to me. I have sent to you all my servants the prophets, sending them persistently, saying, ‘Turn now every one of you from his evil way, and amend your deeds, and do not go after other gods to serve them, and then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to you and your fathers.’ But you did not incline your ear or listen to me. The sons of Jonadab the son of Rechab have kept the command that their father gave them, but this people has not obeyed me. Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing upon Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem all the disaster that I have pronounced against them, because I have spoken to them and they have not listened, I have called to them and they have not answered.”

So here is the message that the Lord has for us today through the Rechabites :

God was not asking of the Israelites an impossible task. Remember the Israelites did not have to be perfect. Indeed, that would have been an impossible task for us humans for whom sin is so deeply baked into our being. Perfection is not our task, that is God’s work within us. The imperfection of the Israelites and their many sins was assumed, which is why the Temple functioned as a kind of forgiveness factory. People who stole, for example, had a specific offering they needed to bring to the Temple, besides returning what was stolen along with interest. They had to bring a ram to the Temple to be sacrificed for a theft.

What about their internal sins, their sins of the heart, like jealousy and coveting, for example?

For internal sins, "hidden" sins, or sins of the heart that weren't resolved through specific individual offerings, the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) served as the "catch-all." On this day, the High Priest performed rituals to purify the entire nation and the Sanctuary from all "transgressions" and "iniquities"—including those of the heart like coveting.

When the Law was given to us humans through Moses, it was not designed to make us perfect, or even our society perfect. It was designed to reveal to us how sinful we are, and to show us that the cost of our sin is death, and in so doing point us to Christ, who takes the punishment of death for our sins in our place.

My point here is that God did not withdraw His protection from His people because they weren’t perfect. All the terrible things that we are reading about in Jeremiah that happened to the Israelites did not occur because they were sinners. Their sin was presumed by the Lord because of course He knows we are sinners and incapable of making ourselves NOT sinners on our own strength.

No, they were punished because they were unfaithful to the Lord, and uncaring of His presence, indifferent to His holy nature, and unfearful of His sovereignty.

So the message of the Rechabites is that God does not ask of us impossible tasks. His anger at the Israelites was a righteous anger because what He was asking of them was well within their ability to do. They simply did not want to do it, because they did not love God as He loved them.

And at this point a discerning listener might say in their hearts, “wait a minute- is the preacher saying that I don’t need to be perfect?”

And you might say to me, but does not God ask us to be perfect? W

Matthew 5:48 “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Well, let’s talk about this for a minute. If the message of the Rechabites is that the Lord does not ask of us unreasonable things then what does it mean that Jesus Himself in the Gospels asks us to be perfect?

1. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:48)

This is the most famous and direct command regarding perfection.

"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (NIV)

For one, when Jesus says this He is using the Greek word telos for perfect. We don’t have a good word for that in English. Perfect is probably the closest but what it really means is to become whole and complete or finished in a way that means you lack nothing, sometimes it is translated to be fully mature.

In this context, Jesus is teaching about loving one's enemies. The "perfection" here refers to an inclusive, impartial love that reflects God’s own character. (and as an aside ‘loving’ your enemies doesn’t mean feeling warm fuzzy feelings about them. It means forgiving them and desiring their redemption, not their condemnation)

2. The Call to Maturity (Colossians 1:28)

Paul often uses the term in the context of spiritual growth and maturity.

[Col 1:28 ESV] 28 Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature (telos) in Christ.

3. James’ Call to Endurance (James 1:4)

James links perfection to the process of remaining steadfast through trials.

[Jas 1:4 ESV] 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Now, how do we become complete? (Now Not Yet, Redemption and J Curve) We give our lives to Jesus. When we do that we become instantly complete in the sense that we clothe ourselves with Jesus’ righteousness. His righteousness, in a spiritual and judicial sense, becomes our righteousness. Those who are in Christ are lacking nothing. They have everything they could possibly need and more. SLIDE

Isaiah 61:10 (ESV): "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness...".

Galatians 3:27 “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”

2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV): "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God".

So the Bible is clear that as soon as you accept Christ as your Savior, you have in a very real and immediate sense become complete, or perfect, for Christ’s righteousness is yours- given to you as a gift, God’s grace given to you that covers all your sins.

Of course, when it comes to our sinful hearts, however, we still do have sin in this world while we are following Christ. But the Holy Spirit begins His work in us, shaping us, perfecting us, and we have every confidence that He will finish that work that He has begun in us, when we are past the sorrows of this life and have run our race.

So we who are in Christ are in right relationship with God, and are on a path to sinlessness. And in that sense we are mature, we are complete, we have telos.

God does not ask the impossible of us. He does not do that for us as followers of Christ in 2026, and He did not do that of the Israelites 2600 years ago.

However, He does ask things of us. He asks us to do things that are achievable goals for us. He asked the Israelites to not worship other gods. He asked them to obey Torah, His Law, and when they failed to do so to come to the Temple to repent and make offerings. They were achievable but underlying all of that was something deeper and more profound. God loved His people, and His desire was that His people would love Him, as things were meant to be from the beginning.

Consider the Rechabites. When they are asked why they will not drink the wine, what is the first thing they say? Do they say this is just our custom, the ways of our people? Do they say that it’s better for their health not to drink wine? No...

Jeremiah 35:6 “But they answered, “We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, ‘You shall not drink wine, neither you nor your sons forever.”

SLIDE

They are honoring their father. They love their ancestors and they honor them by remembering and fulfilling their father’s command. They remember where they came from and they love their ancestry. You can almost hear the pride in their voice that they are a different kind of people. They aren’t like other people, they are set apart because of what their father told them to do. You can see why the Lord uses the Rechabites as an example of the kind of relationship that He wants with His people.

But it is worth asking, how did the Rechabites succeed in following the commands of their forefather, Jonadab, for so long?

Well we aren’t told, but it’s not too hard to surmise. After all, even for those of us in central Illinois we aren’t too far from some modern day Rechabites.

The Rechabites said no to the city life and they said no to agriculture which gives rise to more modern ways of sedentary living. They were not to have houses or plant fields, they were to be nomadic and the prohibition on alcohol shows that they were to be self denying as well, ascetic in nature.

These are not, by the way, laws that they were adopting from the Torah. These were not God’s laws. Jonadab may have recommended adopting these things as an attempt to keep his clan pure from a perceived corruption or idolatry in the cities, but they were not laws from the Torah.

So they adopted these practices, and set themselves apart from the surrounding culture.

And this is precisely what the Lord wants of the Israelites and wants of us today- He wants us to be set apart from the surrounding culture. We are to be different, holy, a peculiar people. We are not supposed to be indistinguishable from the rest of the world we are supposed to stick out.

So what did the Rechabites do that the Israelites didn’t that allowed them to stay set apart all those years? How do the Amish stay Amish while being surrounded by a non-Amish world for all these years?

And the answer is very simple. Culture. You create a culture and you protect it.

What is a culture?

anthropology : the combined pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends on the transmission of knowledge to succeeding generations

Culture is a set of beliefs, practices, and symbols that are learned and shared. Together, they form an all-encompassing, integrated whole that binds people together and shapes their worldview and lifeways.

And if you dive deeper into the specifics of culture there are some things that are always mentioned.

Language

Clothing

Food

Rituals

Others could be added, but these are, in my view, the main ones.

Language

1. Gracious Speech

Colossians 4:6: "Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person."

Ephesians 4:29: "Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear."

2. Truth and Integrity

Ephesians 4:25: "Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another."

James 5:12: "But above all, my brothers, do not swear... but let your 'yes' be yes and your 'no' be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation."

Ephesians 4:15: "Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ."

If we want to retain our culture, and be faithful to our Father, this is our language, the language of truth and love.

Clothing- we clothe ourselves in the righteousness of Christ. (see above)

Food-

Deuteronomy 8:3 “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

Rituals- The Lord’s Supper and Baptism. These are the 2 rituals that are specifically and clearly laid out by Jesus in the Gospels. There are no others.

How do we become Rechabites? We honor our Father in heaven, whom we love, by preserving our culture. How we do that is not a mystery for He gives us the tools in His Word.

And I do think it is important here to point out the importance of the Church. By the Church I do not mean Cornerstone, but the worldwide Church that is the gathering of believers everywhere that Christ is preached. For when we gather together to worship God, to learn from His Word, to fellowship, and to engage in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, then we enjoy His blessing by being set apart as a culture. God’s culture is not just one culture among many. It is the only culture that will, in the end survive and flourish. God’s culture is composed on the surface of many languages, many customs, many types of clothing and food and ethnicities, but spiritually we share Christ and are one people, one culture, eternally bound by God’s love for us and our love for Him in turn.

We speak the truth in love as a language. We clothe ourselves not in our own righteousness, which would be pride, but in His righteousness, which is glorious. We eat the Word of God for our sustenance, for our food, and we remember Christ’s sacrifice through Communion, the Lord’s Supper, and we proclaim our life to be in His life forever through baptism that signifies our death and rising, even as Christ died and rose again.

That is our culture. Those are the boundaries we have proclaimed and those are the things that we will not compromise on. This is what it means to be the Church.

Jeremiah 35:19:

"Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Jonadab the son of Rechab shall never lack a man to stand before me."

Because they were faithful to a human father, God gave them a place in His presence forever.