We could apply that so widely in the present day. Why are churches getting so worldly, when they have got riches at their fingertips. They have the teaching of the word of God, their gatherings together, their rejoicing together in prayer and serving the Lord, their being used of him and seeing their prayers answered, and their getting rich understanding from the word and blessing. What are they going and drawing from the world for? Why look for entertainment worship and all this type of thing? The argument is the same. They are under warning. I think the entire contemporary Christian worship movement is bringing thousands of churches under warning. Whether they have yet received a final warning before the collapse of this whole mess and order of non-worship and worldliness, it is hard to say. But it is right here. Why abandon the riches of God for worldly forms and performances, and such nonsense and theatre? ‘Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon?’ Beware: you may be under a final warning. We see in this world of mega churches: these exhibitionist pastors are getting into trouble, one after the other, because they are leading double lives, doing utterly disorderly and wrong things. Suddenly they are gone. They are exposed and down they go. There was no doubt a final warning of conscience. Are they saved? Maybe they are not really saved. But if they are, they have got to suffer a judgment from the Lord, and they are going to go through wasted years and a time of mourning, before he re-establishes them.
It could happen to an individual Christian: the sad case of a man or a woman who wouldn't listen to God. They carved out their own little lifestyle and way of doing things, never really consistent, never really serving the Lord, never attempting to conquer certain sins and problems, very complaisant and satisfied. Suddenly their little world collapses. Has there been a warning and after that God is going to reshape things – if they are really saved – in his own way? The potter will reshape that person one day, and in great mercy enable them to enter heaven. But how sad to resist the Lord for years and years on some serious matter, and then ignore a final warning! Spurgeon used to speak of the number of people he felt he had in his congregation who had sat there for years, and he felt sure they were saved, but they never listened to any exhortation. They just lived a sort of complacent semi-Christian life. So this could apply to the church, to a nation, to an individual.
Can we apply this warning to nations? It always applies to the church before the nation. You have to be very careful with the Scripture that you don't take something like this passage of Jeremiah, and immediately apply it to England, as though England is Israel or Judah. It isn't. But there is an application actually named here to nations, so in this case, if a nation resists the Lord it may go under judgment. And we hear this continually, particularly outside of London. In London and some other cities, we have always a number of people whose families came in from other countries, bringing with them a kind of Christian tradition. But so many of the provincial towns don't have that, and the towns and the villages that are all English make very heavy weather in evangelism and gathering people in, because as pastors are increasingly saying, there seems already to be a judicial blindness has descended upon the English for all that they have rejected over so long a time. It very much looks like it: as though there is a judicial blindness, and they can't hear; it’s too late.