Jeremiah 23:5-8
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
The Old Testament lessons for Advent are not saccharine Messianic prophecies of swaddling babes and lowing cattle, of Virgin Mothers and shouldered governments. Neither are they about head stomping Seeds and army drowning Theophanies. Although, you do get a taste of such joy on Gaudate, the Third Sunday in Advent.
For the most part the Messianic prophecies of Advent are of the kingdom toppling, false prophet blasting Yahweh Sabaoth. He is fed up with the idolatry and immorality of His people and He is going to bring the hammer of His Word, shattering every flimsy excuse and destroying every lying conscience.
If we’re honest about it, the God which the prophet Jeremiah describes throughout his preaching, but especially here in chapter twenty-three, seems to sound an awful lot like the straw-man god that new-atheist Richard Dawkins so vehemently dislikes, when he asserts,
“The [g]od of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (The God Delusion).
To such blasphemous braggadocio we may respond, The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Cor 2:14). Hey, Richard, you’re not as chic as you think. We heard all that before with Marcion. He who has ears to hear, let him hear (Mt 11:15).
Yet, on the other hand, we must address the issue presented, for if you want to receive the Babe of Bethlehem, Son of Mary and Son of God, who is Emmanuel, the Branch of Jesse’s tree, you must reckon with the God of the prophet Jeremiah. For they are, in fact, one and the same.
The days of Jeremiah were wicked and evil. Israel fell to the Assyrians about a century earlier. And in an effort to be relevant, acceptable, and tolerant to the multi-cultural presence of the incoming Babylonians, Judah had acquiesced on her liturgy and worship. The prophet describes it plainly later in this chapter: Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in My house I have found their evil,” declares the LORD. In Samaria I saw an unsavory thing: they prophesied by Baal and let my people Israel astray. But in the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hand of evildoers, so that no one turns from his evil (Jer 23:11, 13-14).
The hypocrisy and lies and deception had crept even into the Lord’s house, into His Temple. Pastors preached in the name of Baal right from the holy altar. They would not visit the people of the Lord with His true Word and promises. The Lord did not send them, but they ran. He did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. They preached “its all okay” to those who continually despised the Word; and “you do you,” to everyone who stubbornly followed his own heart (23:17). All of them have become like Sodom to Me, says the Lord, and its inhabitants like Gomorrah (Jer 23:14). Babylon was coming. Jeremiah was sent to proclaim repentance.
“And sadly, nearer the punishment, the worse the people became. They more Jeremiah preached to them, the more they despised his preaching. As it was with Pharaoh while Israel was in captivity in Egypt, as it was for the Israelites themselves in the wilderness, it was God’s will to inflict punishment. He makes the people become hardened so they may be destroyed without any mercy and not appease His wrath with any repentance.
So the men of Sodom long ago had not only to despise the righteous Lot, but even afflict him because he taught them - even though their won affliction was at the door. Likewise Pharaoh, when about to drowned in the Red Sea, had to oppress the children of Israel twice as much as before. And Jerusalem had to crucify God’s Son when its own final destruction was on the way.
So it goes everywhere even now.” (Luther, Preface to Exodus). We are living in the last days. We have been since the time of our Lord’s Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Shepherd’s do not feed the Lord’s flock, but destroy and scatter the sheep of His pasture. They shall be held accountable. Lord, have mercy!
But the people also rage and rave horribly against God. They blaspheme and damn God’s Word, though they know that is God’s Word and truth. They grow bored and tired of His Word and service. They want to be like the world around them, so they acquiesce.
And like the Lord’s prophet your heart is broken within you. You grieve and mourn for the house of the Lord, for the inhabitants of Zion, for the one, holy, Christian and apostolic Church who is rent asunder by schisms and heresies, scattered upon the winds and left desolate.
You grieve, beloved, not only for others, but because you see it within your own heart and flesh. This fighting and waring and raging against the Word of the Lord. It strikes at your flesh and gnaws at your secret sins. Your conscience is restless and you worry whether you are indeed forgiven. This is the hammer of God’s Law which crushes the spirit and renders the heart contrite, acknowledging the magnitude and multitude of sins. Such that the mind begins to hate and detest sins, to fear the wrath and judgment of God” as Chemnitz says in his Enchiridion.
Am I part of the remnant? Shall I dwell securely? All the people who came out of Egypt died in the wilderness, forsaking the Lord who ransomed them. How shall I fair?
Jeremiah lived to see the destruction of Jerusalem which he prophesied. He was among some of the inhabitants who attempted to flee to Egypt. He died along the way.
But amid all the suffering and gloom that fill his prophesies, in the wider context of the severity of his preaching and the call to repentance, which is the proclamation of every pastor of the Lord, there also shine rays of sweet hope and comfort. He predicted the One would be a righteous Branch, indeed whose name is the Lord our Righteousness. He told of a day when mourning would turn to joy, when God would give His people gladness for all their sorrow. He foretold the cutting of a new covenant that would be unlike the old covenant that Israel had broken. This would be a covenant of forgiveness: For I will forgive their iniquity and will remember their sin no more (Jer 31:34).
Above all, Jeremiah proclaimed to a broken people left in a destroyed city, who despaired that God would ever forgive their great sin, that His steadfast love does not fail and is new every morning. Great is His faithfulness.
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and He shall reign as King and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. Indeed, that Day has come. Isaiah t’was foretold it, Jeremiah reinforced it, Zechariah pushed it into the people’s memory, but it was St Matthew who announced it as here. It has arrived. The One who rode into Jerusalem, that city that stoned the prophets and killed those sent to her, the One who comes as Anointed King on a lowly beast, He is the Righteous Branch. He is the Naz’ar. Yahweh who is your righteousness.
He is the true King and His reign is from everlasting to everlasting. His justice has been executed upon your enemies and upon the hand of all who hate you. This King indeed destroys nations and topples kingdoms. For He has abolished the kingdom of the devil.
He has destroyed his stronghold and loosed you from the bonds of your sin and captivity.
He silences the accusations and lies of the Evil Foe by becoming Bait; by taking into Himself the wickedness of His people, the evil of their deeds, and lying in wait for the Great Dragon to do his worst. And in His resurrection the Devil’s Babylon is fallen and you are set free.
He is the Lord and He lives.
As it was during the days of Jeremiah, who proclaimed the return of the exiles, the Lord sends you shepherds who care for you, who gather His flock and they are fruitful and multiply in the goodness and righteousness of the Lord who is their Chief Shepherd. Who give you the sweet word of His Gospel to sooth your terrified conscience and set it at ease with the righteousness of Christ which covers all your sins.
Indeed, He has brought you up out of the north country and the foreign lands filled with false gods and perverse idols, who you, in your ignorance, adored and worshipped. But now He gives you to dwell in your own land. That is, He has placed you here in the Judah and Israel of His Church, where He is your righteousness and peace and sanctification (1 Cor 1:30).
He has ascended the hill of the Lord, both in Golgotha and now in Zion. His hands are clean of any wrong doing, but they are still scarred with the impressions of His love for you. Christ Jesus has received blessing from His God and righteousness from His Father. These He bestows upon you by the river of your Baptism into His death and by the humility of His Sacrament.
Therefore lift up your heads, O Christians, for our Lord Jesus indeed sustains His own. For your sake He caused His Word to shine forth in this shameful time of ours, just as at Babylon He sustained Daniel and those like him, for whose sake Jeremiah’s prophecy had to shine forth. To the same dear Lord be praise and thanks, with the Father + and the Holy Spirit, one God over all and to eternity. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
The Old Testament lessons for Advent are not saccharine Messianic prophecies of swaddling babes and lowing cattle, of Virgin Mothers and shouldered governments. Neither are they about head stomping Seeds and army drowning Theophanies. Although, you do get a taste of such joy on Gaudate, the Third Sunday in Advent.
For the most part the Messianic prophecies of Advent are of the kingdom toppling, false prophet blasting Yahweh Sabaoth. He is fed up with the idolatry and immorality of His people and He is going to bring the hammer of His Word, shattering every flimsy excuse and destroying every lying conscience.
If we’re honest about it, the God which the prophet Jeremiah describes throughout his preaching, but especially here in chapter twenty-three, seems to sound an awful lot like the straw-man god that new-atheist Richard Dawkins so vehemently dislikes, when he asserts,
“The [g]od of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (The God Delusion).
To such blasphemous braggadocio we may respond, The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Cor 2:14). Hey, Richard, you’re not as chic as you think. We heard all that before with Marcion. He who has ears to hear, let him hear (Mt 11:15).
Yet, on the other hand, we must address the issue presented, for if you want to receive the Babe of Bethlehem, Son of Mary and Son of God, who is Emmanuel, the Branch of Jesse’s tree, you must reckon with the God of the prophet Jeremiah. For they are, in fact, one and the same.
The days of Jeremiah were wicked and evil. Israel fell to the Assyrians about a century earlier. And in an effort to be relevant, acceptable, and tolerant to the multi-cultural presence of the incoming Babylonians, Judah had acquiesced on her liturgy and worship. The prophet describes it plainly later in this chapter: Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in My house I have found their evil,” declares the LORD. In Samaria I saw an unsavory thing: they prophesied by Baal and let my people Israel astray. But in the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies; they strengthen the hand of evildoers, so that no one turns from his evil (Jer 23:11, 13-14).
The hypocrisy and lies and deception had crept even into the Lord’s house, into His Temple. Pastors preached in the name of Baal right from the holy altar. They would not visit the people of the Lord with His true Word and promises. The Lord did not send them, but they ran. He did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. They preached “its all okay” to those who continually despised the Word; and “you do you,” to everyone who stubbornly followed his own heart (23:17). All of them have become like Sodom to Me, says the Lord, and its inhabitants like Gomorrah (Jer 23:14). Babylon was coming. Jeremiah was sent to proclaim repentance.
“And sadly, nearer the punishment, the worse the people became. They more Jeremiah preached to them, the more they despised his preaching. As it was with Pharaoh while Israel was in captivity in Egypt, as it was for the Israelites themselves in the wilderness, it was God’s will to inflict punishment. He makes the people become hardened so they may be destroyed without any mercy and not appease His wrath with any repentance.
So the men of Sodom long ago had not only to despise the righteous Lot, but even afflict him because he taught them - even though their won affliction was at the door. Likewise Pharaoh, when about to drowned in the Red Sea, had to oppress the children of Israel twice as much as before. And Jerusalem had to crucify God’s Son when its own final destruction was on the way.
So it goes everywhere even now.” (Luther, Preface to Exodus). We are living in the last days. We have been since the time of our Lord’s Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Shepherd’s do not feed the Lord’s flock, but destroy and scatter the sheep of His pasture. They shall be held accountable. Lord, have mercy!
But the people also rage and rave horribly against God. They blaspheme and damn God’s Word, though they know that is God’s Word and truth. They grow bored and tired of His Word and service. They want to be like the world around them, so they acquiesce.
And like the Lord’s prophet your heart is broken within you. You grieve and mourn for the house of the Lord, for the inhabitants of Zion, for the one, holy, Christian and apostolic Church who is rent asunder by schisms and heresies, scattered upon the winds and left desolate.
You grieve, beloved, not only for others, but because you see it within your own heart and flesh. This fighting and waring and raging against the Word of the Lord. It strikes at your flesh and gnaws at your secret sins. Your conscience is restless and you worry whether you are indeed forgiven. This is the hammer of God’s Law which crushes the spirit and renders the heart contrite, acknowledging the magnitude and multitude of sins. Such that the mind begins to hate and detest sins, to fear the wrath and judgment of God” as Chemnitz says in his Enchiridion.
Am I part of the remnant? Shall I dwell securely? All the people who came out of Egypt died in the wilderness, forsaking the Lord who ransomed them. How shall I fair?
Jeremiah lived to see the destruction of Jerusalem which he prophesied. He was among some of the inhabitants who attempted to flee to Egypt. He died along the way.
But amid all the suffering and gloom that fill his prophesies, in the wider context of the severity of his preaching and the call to repentance, which is the proclamation of every pastor of the Lord, there also shine rays of sweet hope and comfort. He predicted the One would be a righteous Branch, indeed whose name is the Lord our Righteousness. He told of a day when mourning would turn to joy, when God would give His people gladness for all their sorrow. He foretold the cutting of a new covenant that would be unlike the old covenant that Israel had broken. This would be a covenant of forgiveness: For I will forgive their iniquity and will remember their sin no more (Jer 31:34).
Above all, Jeremiah proclaimed to a broken people left in a destroyed city, who despaired that God would ever forgive their great sin, that His steadfast love does not fail and is new every morning. Great is His faithfulness.
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and He shall reign as King and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. Indeed, that Day has come. Isaiah t’was foretold it, Jeremiah reinforced it, Zechariah pushed it into the people’s memory, but it was St Matthew who announced it as here. It has arrived. The One who rode into Jerusalem, that city that stoned the prophets and killed those sent to her, the One who comes as Anointed King on a lowly beast, He is the Righteous Branch. He is the Naz’ar. Yahweh who is your righteousness.
He is the true King and His reign is from everlasting to everlasting. His justice has been executed upon your enemies and upon the hand of all who hate you. This King indeed destroys nations and topples kingdoms. For He has abolished the kingdom of the devil.
He has destroyed his stronghold and loosed you from the bonds of your sin and captivity.
He silences the accusations and lies of the Evil Foe by becoming Bait; by taking into Himself the wickedness of His people, the evil of their deeds, and lying in wait for the Great Dragon to do his worst. And in His resurrection the Devil’s Babylon is fallen and you are set free.
He is the Lord and He lives.
As it was during the days of Jeremiah, who proclaimed the return of the exiles, the Lord sends you shepherds who care for you, who gather His flock and they are fruitful and multiply in the goodness and righteousness of the Lord who is their Chief Shepherd. Who give you the sweet word of His Gospel to sooth your terrified conscience and set it at ease with the righteousness of Christ which covers all your sins.
Indeed, He has brought you up out of the north country and the foreign lands filled with false gods and perverse idols, who you, in your ignorance, adored and worshipped. But now He gives you to dwell in your own land. That is, He has placed you here in the Judah and Israel of His Church, where He is your righteousness and peace and sanctification (1 Cor 1:30).
He has ascended the hill of the Lord, both in Golgotha and now in Zion. His hands are clean of any wrong doing, but they are still scarred with the impressions of His love for you. Christ Jesus has received blessing from His God and righteousness from His Father. These He bestows upon you by the river of your Baptism into His death and by the humility of His Sacrament.
Therefore lift up your heads, O Christians, for our Lord Jesus indeed sustains His own. For your sake He caused His Word to shine forth in this shameful time of ours, just as at Babylon He sustained Daniel and those like him, for whose sake Jeremiah’s prophecy had to shine forth. To the same dear Lord be praise and thanks, with the Father + and the Holy Spirit, one God over all and to eternity. Amen.
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