Jeremiah (1-31) 6:7 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Jeremiah (1-31) 6:7

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The picture then changes again. Here is another view of sin: ‘As a fountain casteth out her waters, so she [the society of Jerusalem, and sinners in general] casteth out her wickedness.’ There you have got a picture of the continuous nature of evil, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of evil coming out of us as human beings. It is intense; it is driven, like the water coming out of a fountain, a continuous gushing spring: that is the nature of evil. Money isn’t continuous. If you spend your money too freely and extravagantly, you run out. Your energy is not continuous. You strive with something, and throw your whole self into it, and in a few hours you are exhausted. Pretty well everything in this life runs out, but the gushing fountain of evil is the exception. It never seems to stop from us, from human beings in general. What an extraordinary picture! Because of this undying and intense flow of wrongs against God, offences against him, the judgment will come. So the picture of these opening verses is the ugliness of sin, the tentacles of sin, the progressive entrapment by sin, the naïveté of man – not understanding this, not seeing this, not grasping this – and the need to try to appeal to people to change their mindset. It is the Pilgrim's Progress mindset that we need: to flee from the wrath to come, from one city and place, to another. That is the mental model, the picture of redemption or conversion, and our approach to evangelism must fit that.‘Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee; lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.’ The record doesn't tell us this at this stage, but we can be sure that there was a small remnant fled from Jerusalem, people whose hearts were opened who believed the warnings. There were not very many, but there were some, because the text keeps referring to the remnant. And they went south and they followed the beacon of light. The beacon of Bethhaccerem was like the gospel being proclaimed. And they went down to the trumpets that proclaimed worship and safety under Christ. ‘Thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall throughly glean the remnant of Israel as a vine: turn back thine hand as a grapegatherer into the baskets.’ This verse describes how thorough would be the Chaldean’s plundering of Judah and Benjamin, the remnant of Israel. As those who are gleaning in the fields go back a second time to find what they had missed the first time, so the Chaldeans will not be content to attack Judah just once. They will come several times until the land is bare. This had been forbidden to Israel (Leviticus 19:9-10), and Matthew Henry speculates that it was because they had failed to keep this law, that God allowed their enemies to do the same to them.‘To whom shall I speak, and give warning, that they may hear? behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold, the word of the LORD is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it.’ It is a sad verse. They hate the message, and they are not willing to be corrected. That is true of all society. Our evangelism takes account of this. We are all hardened and resolute. If it were not for the intervention of God, and his predestinating love, and his determination to save a remnant; – which amounts to millions and millions of people in every day and age – if it were not for his determination to incline hearts and regenerate souls, so that we long for and receive Christ and the gospel, every single person would resist and resent the appeals of God. ‘To whom shall I speak?’ They are all impossible. God must overrule, and he will overrule. Jeremiah represents himself – he didn't literally do this, but he represents himself for our understanding – as saying to God, ‘I have done all this, and they won't listen to me’, and God replies, ‘That is what you are to do, and I will work in the hearts of men and women.’

Application

I heard a gentlemen saying, a minister in one of these more modern types of Missional churches here in London, saying, ‘Out there, there are thousands of people just waiting to hear.’ That is not what Jeremiah thought, and it is not what is said throughout the Bible. Sadly, tragically, there are not thousands of people out there waiting to hear. There are thousands of people out there who are waiting to be offended if anybody witnesses to them and talks about sin, or if anybody preaches about sin, or if they read a tract about sin; that is what the Bible tells us. That is why we are utterly dependent upon the Holy Spirit, and we pray for souls, and we pray that the Holy Spirit will be present in convicting power in our witness, in our preaching, in our teaching of children. We are absolutely dependent upon him. We must be people of prayer.

That is why also we want to work in the Spirit’s way. We need to be very careful to observe, and adhere to, the methods of witness and evangelism which the Holy Spirit puts before us in the Scripture. Because if we do as so many do, and we say, ‘No, no, no; that's all very tame. We will devise our own methods. We will do things our own way’, there will be no real blessing. In the 1980s the Seeker Sensitive churches began to arise. It was seen, first of all, near Chicago, the very first one to actually articulate what they were doing, and then it became quite a movement. Many of them became mega-churches, and what start in America came here. ‘The whole idea is’ – the motto of those churches – ‘we give the people what they want. We build a church and make it so that you can come in at the back and wander around and look at things. You don’t have to sit in a pew, in fact, we have got rid of the pews’, they say. ‘We have got nice comfortable chairs instead, and we arrange them in a way which is as least like church as we possibly can, until things get too big. And then we don't expect people to join in and sing the hymns. We make it more like a concert so that people understand, they don't have to do that until they want to. In a pop concert people jump up and down, and wave their arms about, and join in if they want to, but otherwise they just stand and watch. This is a Seeker Sensitive church’, they say. ‘We don’t want anybody is to be offended. We don't upset anybody. We are not going to rant on about sin or anything like that. We are going to give people what they want. Don't you know, if you come to Jesus, he will hold your hand; he will make you happy; he will help you pass all your exams; he will make you successful.’ It’s a give-you-what-you-want church. But here in the Bible, it’s a matter of, we are sinners, and we are antagonistic to God, and we don't want to hear. The preacher or the witnesser has got to speak about things in the hope – and it's a strong hope – that through prayer the Holy Spirit will take these words and open the heart and incline the will and give the listening ear. It is a spiritual battle. We have the privilege of giving the word, but the Holy Spirit must do the work. If you want to do without the Holy Spirit, then you had better be a supporter of the Seeker Sensitive Movement, but the Holy Spirit doesn't like to work that way.

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Jeremiah (1-31) 6:7 Commentary and Bible Study