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We're starting this series on hope.
In keeping with the previous two,
the first one was, "First Love..." excuse me,
"First Life, Then Change", and then the second one was,
"First Faith, Then Freedom," and this one is,
"First Hope, Then Assurance".
Most people think of assurance
as coming first, because assurance has to do
with "I know today, and I'll hope for tomorrow,"
Well, because of love, or
why can't I say that?
Of....life and faith,
we have a guarantee
future, and so we have assurance today.
You see that?
We reverse the idea
on purpose because it's necessary.
If we try to nail it down today,
and move into the future, we always
become anxious. But when we look at the future and realize
that it's guaranteed, that our hope
is guaranteed, then the assurance of that informs today.
We want to look at that today, first, under the Old
Covenant. People might say,
"Well there's no hope in the Old Covenant! All that Law and
death and all that stuff!" Well,
you should read your Old Testament a little bit more.
The Hebrews had several words, had several concepts
for hope, and they used them a lot.
You might expect the main users of them to be people like David.
People like Isaiah.
Jeremiah; some of the later prophets.
And hope always had to do with
'I am the Lord they God.
'I brought you out of the land of Egypt.
'Listen to Me.
'I am Your hope." And when they lost sight of God,
and when they wandered off into the weeds, as they were so prone to do,
and suffered the consequences of their actions,
God was always there saying,
'Don't fret. There's hope." I want to take a look
at two little examples of that out of the hundreds of
that are in the Old Testament, and show you how the patterns
works, so that if you're ever studying in your Old Testament, and you
run across the word "hope", you'll know what to look for, okay?
And we'll do it by looking at hope first
in a positive sense, and second in a negative sense, but
you have to have a picture of the time of history that we're
talking about, okay? So,
It was the worst of times...
Notice that we've got a time line here,
the time line is going backwards, so we're in BC.
And on this time line,
I want to super impose the country of Judah. This was
the tribe of Judah, and the tribe of Benjamin. Notice there's no
country of Israel up here, because Israel had long since
been wiped out. The Assyrians cleaned out Israel.
They were far more wicked than Judah, and
God couldn't just leave them there,
doing all that stuff, because they were completely unfaithful to
Him. And so He allowed them to reap what they
sowed, and the Assyrians tore the place apart.
But Judah is still going, and in 640BC,
a king named Josiah became the king and he served
for a little more than 40 years.
He was one of the great kings.
There had been a lot of evil before him, but he came
and...under his reign, he brought the people back
to the One True God. They enjoyed a period of
relative peace, but they still had this tendency to
make alliances with other countries.
You see there, that there were several kings after him that didn't
reign very long. This guy named
Jehoahaz served for about a year.
till he was deposed. Then Jehoiakim
served for a few years, then his son Jehoiachin
served. Jehoiachin may have been the worst king in the
history of everything. (chuckles) He was a bad guy.
Then, followed this guy named Zedekiah.
Zedekiah was from Judah, he was a king,
but he had no power, because we had
this country called Babylon
handing out issues. Nebuchadnezzar became
king in Babylon around 606, 607
something like that. Don't worry about the dates, just get the overall picture I'm trying to
paint here. And when Jehoiachin
was king, Jehoiachin had been
desperately trying to work with the Egyptians
to stave off the Babylonians, because the Babylonians defeated Assyria.
So, Assyria had wiped out Israel, and then Babylon wiped out
Assyria, and it looked like they were going to take over everything, so the
folks from Judah tried to make alliances
with Egypt. That worked for about
3 minutes, because the Egyptians
went charging out there to fight against Babylon,
and had their heads handed to them on a platter. I mean, Babylon
just overran them. Well, that puts Judah in a very
bad place, because they've been allied
with Egypt, and Babylon says, "I don't think so!"
and Jehoiachin is ignoring everything
that's being told to him, and so Nebuchadnezzar
comes to Jerusalem and overruns
the city. Doesn't destroy it, just defeats them in battle,
and takes a whole bunch of people captive, back to
Babylon, and leaves this guy named Zedekiah, Jehoiachin was killed,
Zedekiah was made "king", but he's
just really a slave, a vassal of Babylon
and in fact, Babylon left a governor there to really
do the ruling. So,
Judah has been defeated, and you'd
think they had learned something, but there was still this hope
that maybe Egypt could come to their aid, and so they killed
the Babylonian governor,
and realized that Egypt wasn't going to be any help militarily,
so a whole bunch of them ran off to Egypt, and left Jerusalem
to fend for themselves, including Zedekiah.
Nebuchadnezzar comes back and burns down
the city. Destroys everything.
and takes the rest of the people captive, okay? It was
the worst of times.
Well, the two people we're looking at today, Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
had something to say during all of this. Jeremiah
served in that time period.
He served in Jerusalem as a prophet of God.
You know some of the stories, I mean, he was arrested several times; he was
kept in a pit for a while, he was always saying things that kings didn't like.
Not Josiah, he and Josiah got a long great. But as soon as
these other guys came in, and tried to bring back idol worship,
and all these crazy political maneuverings, Jeremiah
would tell them things, that God wasn't pleased.
and they'd say, "I'm sorry, who told you God isn't pleased? Because we've got
"several other prophets here, who are saying, 'go for it!'"
Jeremiah would say things, "well, it's not going to work"
It's not going to work. Jeremiah was called the crying prophet
sort of a nickname of his. He's the guy that wrote Lamentations.
OOOOoohh Lord! That was Jeremiah's
life, and he was one of the people who was forced
to go to Egypt when this whole thing blew up in their faces.
So, Jeremiah, as far as we know, died in Egypt.
Well, that kind of leaves Israel
or Judah, rather, without a prophet.
Well, God isn't worried about that. God had
Ezekiel all prepared. Ezekiel was in the
first group of people who were removed from Jerusalem and taken to Babylon.
So, he's in Babylon during the last years of Zedekiah's
reign. Jeremiah's in Jerusalem,
Zedekiah's back in Babylon.
When Jeremiah was no longer able to say anything,
Ezekiel was there to give the word of God
to the people who were now in Babylon.
So, we've got this
terrible situation going, in terms of the political
and life of Judah. Into this
situation, God is speaking. First
He speaks through Jeremiah, and then He speaks through Ezekiel. We want to take a look
at a couple of the things He said to them.
Got the historical context of this?
As we look at these few verses, I hope you see how this context
has worked itself out. There'll be a quiz later.
(chuckles from audience)
Okay, You might be surprised, but we're going to start in Jeremiah
31. What's famous about Jeremiah 31?
The New Covenant.
Did you know that Jeremiah 31 has a lot more in than the New Covenant?
I'll show you a few
verses, but I want to read a few of these, just to read them.
to you. I'm starting in verse 1,
and I'll read through verse 14.
Let me set this up.
This prophecy is given during the time of Zedekiah.
The reason we know that is because
a couple of chapters back, Jeremiah is dealing
with a problem. There are false prophets who are in
Babylon, who are writing to the people that
in, and saying, "Don't worry about this, God's taking us home
"tomorrow." Jeremiah had
sent a letter to Babylon saying, "Go ahead
"and buy your homes, build your homes, plant your fields, you're
"going to be there for a while" and
you know, the king, Zedekiah,
wanted to believe that.. it was... you know..."They're just coming right back, and then we'll be fine."
and Jeremiah says, "No, they're not, I'm telling you, they're' going to be
"there for years." So you've got this conflict going on,
between false prophets, and the one true prophet of the one true
God. God tells him,
"At that time," Declares the Lord, "I will be the God of
all the clans of Israel and they will be my people"
First of all, right there, you can tell this prophecy is different
it's not a prophecy just to Judah.
It includes all of
the tribes of Israel. Even the ones in Israel who have
already ceased to exist for all practical purposes.
So, this is different. This is what the Lord says:
"The people who survive the sword will find favor
"in the desert; I will come to give rest to Israel."
The Lord appeared to us in the past saying: "I have loved
"you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness.
In that verse, the closest thing
Hebrews could use for agape love, because they didn't have a word for
agape love that the Greeks did, was to talk about everlasting
love. The closest words they could use to
describe grace, because they didn't have a word for grace,
was loving-kindness. So this
is God telling them that He loves them, perfectly.
and draws them with His grace.
"I will build you up again
"and you will be rebuilt, O *** Israel." Notice He calls them
*** Israel. If any of you have heard of the stories
about Israel and Judah, what was God constantly calling them?
Either a *** or an unfaithful
wife. So, something's going to change.
He can call them *** Israel, again. "Again you
"will take up your tambourines and go out to dance with the joyful. Again you
"will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria; the farmers will plant them and enjoy
"their fruit. This will be a day when watchmen cry out from the hills of
"Ephraim, 'Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.'"
Ephraim here, is another word for Israel, the Northern Kingdom. So the Northern tribes
Ephraim, are going to say, "Let's go to Zion, back to Jerusalem."
So there's going to be unity again. "This is what the Lord
"Sing with joy for Jacob; shout
"for the greatest of the nations. Make your praises heard and say, 'O Lord,
"save your people, the remnant of Israel.' SeeI will bring them from the land
of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them
will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor; a great
"throng will return. They will come with weeping
"they will pray as I bring them back. I will lead them beside streams of water
"on a level path where they will not stumble, because I Israel's father."
and Ephraim is my firstborn son.
"Hear the word of the Lord, O nations; proclaim it in the distant
coastlands: 'He who scattered Israel will gather them
and will watch over his flock like a shepherd.' For the Lord will ransom
Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger then they.
They will come and shout for the joy on the heights of Zion; they will
rejoice in the bounty of the Lord--the grain, the new wine
and the oil, the young of the flocks and herds. They will be like a
well-watered garden, and they will sorrow no more. Then maidens
will dance and be glad, young men and old as well.
I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy
instead of sorry. I will satisfy the priests with abundance,
and my people will be filled with my bounty," declares the Lord.
What have we talked about
before, when we say, "God speaks"
What happens when God speaks?
It's already done. It's already done.
Now, as you read this,
has all of this come to pass yet?
It hasn't. Some of it has, some of these things
happened, but what was... for example, what was the country of
Israel like during Jesus' day?
Terribly divided. The Samaritans were the
the decedents of those people who were intermarried from the Northern Kingdom.
the Ten Northern Tribes, with the Assyrians, and various peoples, they had gone
conquered and sent there. So the people who came home
from Babylon thought of them as half-breeds.
As not real Israel. So when God is talking about
this unity, He's talking about something else.
Now we've got verse 15.
Seems to be all out of proportion, all out of context.
14: I will satisfy the priest with abundance, and my people
will be filled with my bounty. This is what the Lord says:
verse 15, "A voice is heard is Ramah, mourning
and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more.
Where have you heard that before?
Story of Jesus' birth.
It's in Matthew 3. After the Magi finally found Him,
and God warns them in a vision to go home
a different way, Herod figures out that he's been
hoodwinked, and just to make sure, because it took
the Magi up to two years to get there.
He has all the male children in Bethlehem two years
and under, killed. Matthew describes that
as the fulfillment of this verse.
This verse is in the middle of all this incredible
call by God that "I'm going to bring you back, I'm going to create
"a new people who are one again, who are Mine,"
Who are in essence,
spiritually virgins.
I want you to be able to
see this.
What he's promising them, is that they will be out of the ashes,
eventually. That's always
the hard word: eventually. Look at this is the next
This is what the Lord says, next two verses:
"Restrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears,
"for your work will be rewarded," declares the Lord.
"They will return from the land of the enemy. So there is
"hope for your future," declares the Lord.
"Your child will return to their own land..."
Isn't that amazing?
There is hope for the future, and He's talking
to people many of whom, you know, in terms of
Israel, all of whom, have been overrun. In terms of Judah,
Most of them have been overrun, and we're getting ready in just a couple of years,
to have Jerusalem completely destroyed and the rest of them sent
any of the survivors sent to Babylon. And God is saying,
There is hope, because
I am God. I will do this.
I will do this.
Turn ahead to verse 35.
Notice I'm purposely skipping the New Covenant.
I don't want you to lose the point, because you'll
grab on to verses 31 and following and say
"Oh yeah, yeah, we got that!" No, we don't usually 'got that'.
God's not done. So starting in
verse 35. Now, notice how God
describes Himself there.
"This is what the Lord says," He hasn't said anything, yet.
He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decree
the moon and starts to shine by night, who stirs up the sea.
so that its waves roar, the Lord Almighty
is His name: "only if these decrees vanish from my
sight," declares the Lord, "will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before me"
This is what the Lord says,
"Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below
be searched out, will I reject all the descendants of Israel because of
all they have done," declares the Lord.
What is one of the things that science is discovering right now,
this very day, about the heavens above?
They can't be measured.
Everything that had been
positive about the universe,
said that it was expanding as a result of this thing
called the Big ***, and that because of the elasticity of
various things, it will end up slowing down,
and then gravity would pull it back together and it would go
whoosh! into a black hole, and then it would explode again,
in a new round of growth
evolution, and then it would collapse again. What they're
discovering, thanks to some really
really cool science, is that the expansion of the universe,
is accelerating.
It's actually accelerating. So you can't
get a full measure ever, of the universe.
You can't measure something unless it's static. You can measure things
about it, but you can't measure 'it'.
So God says, "if the heavens above can be measured,
"then Israel will cease to be a nation" But the heavens above cannot
be measured. So Israel will
never cease. Okay?
Pretty wild stuff.
So, now we go into verses 38 to 40.
and the slide is... I've left some out,
just in the interest of time. "The days are coming,"
declares the Lord, "...The whole valley
"where dead bodies and ashes are thrown,
"and all the terraces out to the Kidron Valley on the east as far
as the corner of the Horse Gate, will be holy to the Lord.
The city will never again be uprooted or demolished."
Has that come true yet?
No. How do we know that?
Because in 70 AD, the Romans ruined the place again.
And then it's been built up, and invaded, and half
destroyed, many times since. And now we've got a
reasonably stable environment over there.
(chuckles)
Everybody's trying to find a way to uproot Jerusalem.
God's just waiting.
He's saying,
"hang in there. I am God,
"and I said that I am going to create a new Israel."
and so
we wait. And we wait, and we try to imagine who
the Israel is.
Some Christians--I was raised this way--well of course I'm the new Israel.
Because, you know, everybody else in the world
doesn't keep the commandments; I do.
So that makes me Israel. Some of you know this argument.
The different churches that believe that. So, replacement theology
is what it's called. So now we're Israel, and we're keeping the law.
And if you look even a little bit at those
of us who are keeping the law, what you discover is that God can call us
prostitutes and unfaithful wives. Because we're no
better at keeping the Law than Israel was. So,
what's going on here? What is God
trying to show us back here in
you know, 600 and 500 BC,
before Jesus comes; the first
time. God is saying, "There is hope!"
There is hope, hang in there. I'm going to do something. I'm going to bring you back.
Well, we've
heard about some of that from Paul.
What did Paul say about true Israel?
True Israel is something that is
a spiritual reality; not a physical reality.
That's why we know that
the New Covenant that I conveniently skipped over, though it's stated,
to this new Israeli entity that God
has defined, is not just talking to a race
or a DNA
issue. He's talking about something else.
So, back here in the
Old Testament, one of the things that makes these prophecies difficult to figure out
is because many of them had a least partial fulfillment...where?
In Jesus.
But then, there's another whole group of them that haven't been fulfilled.
yet. And, you know, if you think that
reading Revelation twists your mind up, try to go back and
grab all of these prophecies and say, "Well, when did that happen?"
Or has it happened? If it hasn't, when will it happened?
What's it going to be like? Notice what we
do when we get locked up in that
logic. We're trying to prove today
so that we might have hope in the future.
When what God has been saying from the beginning of time,
is, "I am God, there is hope for your future,
"so let that hope for your future, inform your today."
What did God say to Adam and Eve?
One of the first things He told them after they sinned.
"Don't worry. Someone's coming"
Well, I'm sure they would've done what we do.
Alright! We're going to have a family
and one of our sons is going to fix all of this.
Well, in a manner of speaking.
How can we finite, time-bound people
understand the workings of God?
I've talked about this before: One of the things that makes God
God, is that He is not bound by
our decisions. Every decision we make
which causes us to behave a certain way or go a certain
direction, or whatever, impacts certainly
our future, and the future of those around us.
Multiply that by the untold billions of people who have lived on the earth,
in the history of the earth, and you can see how hard it is to predict history.
God knows every one of those.
He knows every possible choice that could ever be made, that ever has been made
and He is sufficient to them to bring His
plan to pass. That's one of the things that makes Him God.
and me, a lowly human. So whenever
we get locked into trying to figure out these prophecies,
other than looking at them in total of what
they say in this case, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
We've put ourselves in great danger.
So,
Jeremiah goes on. You know, there are other
things that happen. One of the things that God has him do, in the very next chapter,
actually--feel free to read it--God tells him to go out and buy a field.
This is months, just months before the whole
place is torn apart. And Jeremiah says, "You want me to what??"
You want me to invest in real estate?
Yes! I want you to go buy this field. Why?
Because when I bring you back--whenever that is--
your descendants will still own that field.
That will prove that I am God.
Does anybody know where the field that Jeremiah bought is, now?
Someday, God's going to bring
everything together and say, "That's Jeremiah's field right there."
By the way, it still belongs to his descendants.
So, there are these stories that come out, and God is
trying to instill in them, this expectation
for the future. We know, because we're so far down
the road, that some of that future was intended to be fulfilled by Jesus
Himself. His first coming.
That's why Matthew said, this verse right out of nowhere, where it says a voice
is heard in Ramah. Rachel weeping for her children.
That's right here! Jesus was born, and Herod did that
to these kids!
You go through the Gospel of Matthew, and you see this all the
time. This was to fulfill the word that said,
Matthew has this picture
in his head of God working just
as He said He would work. It's one of the things
that for Matthew that Jesus indeed was the Messiah.
The Promised One.
Well let's flip over to Ezekiel, because I want to
tie this together. It goes Jeremiah, Lamentations,
Ezekiel.
Turn to chapter 37. This is another famous
chapter, and I picked it on purpose.
First of all, I want to review the picture.
So we've been talking about Jeremiah.
And in chapter 31, God gives him all these promises, and says
"You have hope because of who I am"
I am going to do something for you!
One of the things--the important things that God was going to do for them
was to create a New Covenant.
Where their sins and lawless acts, I will remember no more.
Well, we know, that Jesus
is that New Covenant. That He completely
fulfilled the Old, and ushered in the New.
So, Jeremiah is done.
He has gone off the scene, I don't know where he died, when
he died, but he ceases being a prophet
to Judah. Now we've got Ezekiel.
who's living in Babylon, and asking interesting
questions and if you've ever read Ezekiel,
it's a head scratcher.
You know, Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air.
Ezekiel had
amazing visions about the temple and all this stuff
that people are still scratching their heads over.
So, what we have done with Ezekiel, because it is a style of
writing called apocalyptic,
just like Revelation. So what is
Ezekiel revealing about God?
We try to do things with these styles of writing and say
"what does it reveal about the future?" No.
In this case, what does Ezekiel reveal about the One True God?
Ezekiel is still living under the Old Covenant. He doesn't know there's a Jesus.
He just knows there's a promised Messiah. As long as
we've got this Old Covenant, it's ours. I mean, it's the way God
and us are relate to each other. So when God says something,
and talks in very strange language, it must not
be primarily about me,
it must be primarily about God, and what He's doing.
So we come to this very famous passage,
Ezekiel 37.
Can these bones live?
37,
1 to 3.
Everybody there? Looking it up?
"The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit
"of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley;
Why do you think I read that last passage
from Jeremiah 31
the whole valley where dead bodies and ashes are thrown.
Could they be related?
"Brought me out and set me in the middle of a valley;
"it was full of bones. He led me back and forth
among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley,
"bones that were very dry." What does it mean
when it says, 'bones are very dry'? These had been laying out
in the sun for years and years and years.
When you find an animal carcass,
these bones--they become hard as rock, they're almost petrified.
Dry bones.
He asked me, "Son of man,
"can these bones live?"
What would be your
obvious answer? Well, no.
Ezekiel had learned something. I'm going to read you his answer.
in the second half of the verse.
I said, "O Sovereign Lord, you alone know."
Because I'd a been arguing with Him, "Oh no, they're dead! Leave 'em be!"
Let's get out of here, it's a creepy place!
Ezekiel said, "O Sovereign Lord,"
"You alone know.' Then He said
to me, "prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones,
hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones:
I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and
make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin. I will put breath in you
and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord." How many times did he
talk about breath there? Twice.
What happens in Hebrew when you repeat something?
It's adding an exclamation point. So,
I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying,
there was a noise, a rattling sound," Remember he's
standing in the middle of this. Any of you remember the original
Hercules that was done back in the
50's, and they did it with stop-action? You know, one frame at a time,
and one of the things he had to fight were skeletons.
These skeletons come in with swords, you know and they'd hack up
them apart and all this. Take that picture,
and put it--put yourself in here
with Ezekiel as God asked him, and the bones
start moving.
There was a noise, (chuckles)
a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked,
and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them,
but there was no breath in them.
Verse 9. Then he said to me,
"prophesy to the breath; prophesy,
son of man, and say to it, 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain,
that they may live." So I prophesied as he commanded me,
and breath entered them; they came to life
and stood up on their feet--a vast army.
What do you need to be alive?
Breath.
What happened at Pentecost?
Breath. The Spirit
Up until then,
all of us were wandering around as brain dead zombies.
You know. You know how zombies...
All they do is eat your brain.
They find live people and eat their brains, and it still doesn't help them be alive.
Feel free to find any
any... any... Roger Corman produced zombie film
from the 50's. Again the picture comes to mind. That's what we were
Why were we that? Because that's what we inherited
from Adam and Eve. We had flesh and bone, tendon,
muscles, all of that stuff.
And there we were... dead.
Alive, but dead. Somebody
needed to breathe on it.
God did. Because of who Jesus was.
And what He accomplished.
Look at what He says
in verse 11.
Then he said to me, "Son of man, these
bones are the whole house of Israel,
They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope
is gone; we are cut off.
If you've ever read any of
you know... Leviticus, Deuteronomy and some of those places
when someone is cut off from Israel,
they have been destroyed completely out of the covenant people.
and people in Babylon
had come to this conclusion: We were
so bad, that God has cut us off.
We have ceased
to be covenant people. Even in the Old Covenant.
Talk about having no identity!
They couldn't be Babylonians, they didn't think they were
covenant people either, so they had lost hope.
You see, when you're looking at present circumstance,
and projecting into the future, all you can do is lose hope.
That's what's the problem with
our country today. All we can see is
the problems right now.
As a society, we have resolutely refused to acknowledge
the one True God, Jesus Christ, whom He has sent.
Is it any wonder that the
problems are intractable. They're too complicated. Every
answer we seem to come up with only adds to the complexity.
and makes the crash--whatever the crash is, more
inevitable, and people are scared.
You can hear it in the phone calls we get.
You can hear it in the emails.
People are looking for answers.
God actually gave them their answer.
Look at this--skip ahead to verse 14.
I will put my spirit in you
and you will live,
and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know
that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done,
declares the Lord." What is his answer
to their statement that "we've lost hope"?
Fear not. Because
I will put my spirit in you--
IN you.
None of them ever got to experience the Spirit
IN them. Several of them
we know them as people like David, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah...
Habakkuk and all the rest, had the Spirit on them,
for special work.
God right here, in the valley of dry bones,
says, "fear not"
Because I will put my Spirit IN you
You will live.
Take hope.
That's what He's saying to people under the Old Covenant. People who have sown
ruined that covenant. Right? Why did God change that covenant? Was it because
of the covenant? No! It was because of the people. So those people had
so thoroughly destroyed that covenant, that God
had no choice--I'm over stating it, than to
give them over to their own choices.
and they reaped what they've sown,
and they say, 'wow. '
We've reaped what we've sown. We've been cut off.
God says,
"No you haven't. You will never be cut off,"
You have reaped what you've sowed,
We reap what we sow.
But I will never leave you.
The fact, for you folks, who own
only have this covenant, that you've discovered
finally, that you couldn't keep. Notice every generation
has to figure out that they can't keep the covenant. We've talked about this,
after they came back from Babylon, they said, "never again will we break God's
Covenant" and they made it an idol, and therefore broke the covenant.
That's what we do. Every generation has to go through
this. Discovering that I can't do anything to please God.
and I come to the end of myself, and I say, "Man, I must be cut off!"
and God says, "no!
"I will put my Spirit IN you."
and sure enough, He did.
and we are the recipients of that.
If you can find this kind of hope
under the Law of sin and death,
because of who God is, and what He's promised,
why do we find it so difficult in our day under the New Covenant
when we have the indwelling Holy Spirit, to have hope?
Why do we take a look at a season like Christmas and get lost in the
noise?
Jesus came.
He fulfilled the hope promised.
He expanded to give us
hope that is promised. If
through all those thousands of years of history, God kept the
promises, because He is God, and when He speaks, it happens,
Why shouldn't we sit down
relax, and say,
"I think He can handle
just maybe,
When He says
I'll never leave you. He says, Nothing can separate you from my love,
when He says, No one can take you out of my hand;
why don't we say,
I hope.
I know that my future is guaranteed.
therefore, I will walk today
in the reality of that.
of that hope. Wasn't
Was it the worst of times? Not really.
For a nation, it was. That nation
ceased to exist. Was it the worst of times
for the people? No.
It was a hard time. It was a terrible hard time.
But they were never cut off.
God gave them these messages.
through Jeremiah and through Ezekiel, so that they
could keep moving forward by faith.
Can we do any less? Let's pray.
Lord,
we see these stories
and these prophecies,
back in the Old Testament, and we're so
often confused. We try
to make them into things that are not. We try to deny
the things that they are, and in both extremes,
we lose sight of You. Help us
to realize that Your plan all along was to bring Jesus
Your plan all along was to make sure that hope was
certain. First, the hope in Jesus,
and now our hope in the returning Jesus,
help us to look at these stories
with Your eyes. Help us to
apply them into our lives, that we don't get lost in the noise.
of seasons like Christmas, or the noise of
politics or economics or sin.
Help us to be able to maneuver our way through
our world soley because
You are who You are. You live
in us. Thank You for that, in Jesus name. Amen.