Jeremiah was a lonely man, and we are lonely in many ways as Christian people. There are times of extraordinary prosperity when God sends revival, or there is a great awakening in the course of reformation, when many, many people are saved. But even so, it is never a majority in the land, and even at the very height of the Victorian blessing the great preachers could still speak of the church being a small minority, and graves filling up fast with unsaved people on every hand. Those were in days when it would seem that physically the majority went to church. Yes, but it was never a majority of the people who were saved, who knew the Lord and walked with him. Most of history the proportion of Christians in any one place, true Christians, is not very large at all.
Now there are some people who can't bear this, and they can't accept this. They must feel that there are huge numbers. Certainly, we want to go after as many souls as we can, and we put out the gospel as strenuously as we can, and we must pray for it constantly, but we know that we will always be, in the words of Christ, ‘the children of the little flock.’ In the last day when the elect are gathered together, drawn out of every land and nation and every period of history, there will be billions. Even now if we could get a glimpse into the reception hall of the paradise of Christ, there would be thousands of saved people coming in every minute from all over the world, called home to glory. But still in any particular place, it is a minority; we are the children of the little flock. But some want greater visible numbers than that, and they will employ wrong means to obtain them. When you get people going over to carnal methods just for the sake of numbers, methods which compromise the gospel and bring in false converts in huge numbers, that is just foolishness, but that is what happens. We cannot bear to be the little flock, so we stop winning souls by using Biblical methods, and relying on the power of God and answers to prayer by the Holy Spirit, and we begin to make use of wrong methods to get people in by hook or by crook. Of course, that is compromise.
We had in the 1980s the advent of the Seeker Sensitive churches. Pioneers of that movement in the United States made great names for themselves, touring round the world and the churches, putting across this concept: ‘Give people what they want.’ They were the first – though they didn't use this terminology – to be culturally adaptable. The main thing was, give people the music they want, the methods they want, the degree of participation they want; don't ask anything of them. Let them come in and be thoroughgoing worldlings, and yet on top of that, and alongside that, give them salvation. It was a myth; it was a delusion, of course, but that was the first. After that you had full-blown contemporary worship, attracting people through entertainment. Then in more recent years you have had the so-called Emerging or Emergent Churches, and now the Missional Churches. But it's all the same. All the adaptation of culture, the borrowing of it, conforming to it, getting people in by any means, and neglecting entirely the principles of the Scripture, which calls people to separate from the old life and the world, and from sin.
Now that is the thing about idolatry. When churches compromise with the contemporary worship and shape their program and their outreach and their lifestyles to what worldlings want to do; when they do that, it is the same as if they are making a god of these things. ‘We enjoy this music; we want this entertainment; we want visible things and all the paraphernalia that goes with the Missional, Emergent, and Seeker-Sensitive scene’, but they are making the true God only equal to those things. That is anti-worship; it is criminal before the living God. They get very offended if we say to them, ‘This is idolatry: this compromise of yours.’ ‘It is nothing to do with idolatry. We believe in the one true God.’ But no, they have made gods of all these other things, and things in which they trust alongside the true God. That is what brought ancient Judah into utter condemnation.
What is the appeal of idolatry? Why did the Jews of old wish to be idolaters, worshipping the idols of the Canaanites as well as their own God? The attraction was that the idols offered them prosperity. The idols offered them good luck and happiness in life, something for this material life. Furthermore the idols didn't ask anything of them apart from food sacrifices and other sacrifices of various things. They didn't ask any godliness, any holiness, any change of life. There was no imposition of any moral code by the idols and the Canaanite religions. ‘This is wonderful. I can become superstitious; I can invest in idol worship. It may mean that the gods are kind to me, and I get good fortune and all kinds of provisions, and at the same time I can do more or less as I like. As long as I go to the idol shrines and the feasts, and make the necessary offerings, then I can live as I like.’
What a wonderful thing it is for us that in the church age, in the gospel age, God has set us in families, in spiritual families, and even in bad times when we are a minority, and we may have to warn fellow churches not to get into this, and not to get into that; even when there is decay and unbelief in the land, and even in the churches, then none of us are actually isolated. We are set in families of God's people. This does not seem to be the case with Jeremiah. He no doubt had some people close to him, but he seems to be a lonely warrior much of the time, and so he is almost overwhelmed by it. And we praise and thank God that any who are called in the church age to labour in very hostile times, at least have the regenerate church, the family of God's people around them.