Though I taught them, teaching again and again, they would not listen and receive instruction (Jeremiah 32:33).

God brought the Babylonians against Judah because the nation would not listen to His repeated calls to obedience. This speaks to the stubbornness of their hearts. They were this stubborn even though they were the people of God and had the oracles of God and saw the power of God. Should we imagine that we are any different apart from the grace of God? Perhaps the most precious words in Jeremiah's prophecies are the promises concerning the New Covenant:

I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me (Jeremiah 32:40).

God declared that He Himself would put the fear of God in the hearts of His people so that they would not turn away from Him. He would do this unilaterally apart from human effort. Having made it abundantly clear that even the people of God continually fell short of the obedience that God required, God stepped in to do for them what they could not do for themselves.

Friends, this is the grace in which we stand today. We are no better than the Israelites of old, except that we have a fuller experience of this grace than they. We have the New Testament, the embodiment of the New Covenant promises in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Let us simply praise Him!

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. The army of the king of Babylon was then besieging Jerusalem, and Jeremiah the prophet was confined in the courtyard of the guard in the royal palace of Judah. Now Zedekiah king of Judah had imprisoned him there, saying, “Why do you prophesy as you do? You say, ‘This is what the Lord says: I am about to give this city into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he will capture it. Zedekiah king of Judah will not escape the Babylonians but will certainly be given into the hands of the king of Babylon, and will speak with him face to face and see him with his own eyes. He will take Zedekiah to Babylon, where he will remain until I deal with him, declares the Lord. If you fight against the Babylonians, you will not succeed.’” (Jeremiah 32:1-5)

Zedekiah king of Judah put Jeremiah in confinement because while they were in the midst of defending Jerusalem against Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah had been going around publicly preaching to the people inside the walls that the city would fall to Babylon, that the king would be captured, and tht their resistance would not succeed. In any ordinary situation this would certainly constitute treason and sedition.

But this was no ordinary situation. This was no ordinary city. This was no ordinary people. God had decreed destruction for the city because of her sins. Jerusalem was the city of God, where God had established His presence. And these were the people that God had graciously chosen to give this land long ago in order that they might worship and serve Him in obedience to His covenant with them. But they had disobeyed. And not just once or twice but repeatedly from generation to generation, until God's patience waned thin, and He judged them. 

King Zedekiah asked Jeremiah, "Why do you prophesy as you do?" His question was not seeking a response. It was a self-justifying charge: "Why do you prophesy treason and sedition!" "Why do you prophesy against me and not for me!" King Zedekiah was not interested in any perspective, even God's Word, when it conflicted with his ideas and plans. He may have even thought, "God delivered Hezekiah from the Assyrians. Why wouldn't He deliver me from the Babylonians?" But all he knew was that Jeremiah's prophesies were negatively stirring up a people that he needed to carry on his resistance against the Babylonian seige. Zedekiah did not entertain the notion that perhaps Jeremiah's words were indeed from God and he and the people needed to immediately surrender to the King of Babylon or else perish.

How frustrating and depressing it must have been for Jeremiah. As I study the life of Jeremiah in preparation for my upcoming message and Bible Study, I have learned that from beginning to end Jeremiah's life was filled with sorrow. He even echoed some of the same sentiments as Job, cursing the day he was born (Jeremiah 20:14-18). One may even say that he experienced a worse fate than Job, for his distress of soul lasted pretty much his entire life without any respite or consolation, even in the end. The Book of Lamentations is attributed to him. 

I don't pretend to know what it must have been like. Isaiah had a similar commission. He was sent to prophesy to a leadership and a people that would ultimately reject his message. But Jeremiah's experience was harder, for he did not prophesy of distant things but matters right at hand, as God's judgment came upon Jerusalem in his lifetime. 

Today, as I write these daily comments, I sometimes feel a bit of frustration, though nowhere near the level of Jeremiah. When I speak of biblical truth, I sometimes get an "Amen" and other times a strong reaction because I have stepped on someone's theological toes. But honestly I am neither looking for affirmation nor a debate. What impresses me are those that open the Scriptures to test what I have said or written. What impresses me are those that say, "I can see your point but have you considered this text."

Three influential people have approached me over the last few years at different times. Each of them held a relatively significant sway over a number of people. Each came to speak to me about something I taught. When I presented my case, the first person's almost immediate reply was, "I don't want to debate you." The second person's reply was, "I agree with everything you said, but..." The third person's reply was, "C'mon man. It's all about unity." Not one of them opened the Scriptures to even test whether what I had spoken was true. 

Therefore, while many people are optimistic about church growth and revival, I am not. As I look over the landscape of our times, I see that more and more preachers will preach what they want to preach and people will hear what they want to hear.

But still, until Jesus comes, we must keep proclaiming the whole testimony of God's Word. It may not be in our generation or the next or for another hundred generations, for every generation in history has thought theirs was the last. But our concern should not be whether or not we are the final generation but to be faithful in our present generation, for to us, who live and die, it is the final generation.

Therefore, friends, keep reading, meditating and diligently applying God's Word. You don't need pastors, teachers, or theologians to teach you. You have God's Word and His Spirit. A trainer can help, but you must ultimately be concerned for your own body. Religious leaders can help, but you must ultimately be concerned for your own soul. 

I'm not sure but Jeremiah's statement about rewarding someone based on their conduct and deeds in Jer. 32:19 seems to be contradictory to God's sovereignty:

¹⁹ great are your purposes and mighty are your deeds. Your eyes are open to all the ways of men; you reward everyone according to his conduct and as his deeds deserve.

As long as I am good then I will be rewarded as such?  What am I missing?  Did one of God's prophets misspeak?

Yujin responds... Great question, brother Matt! Throughout history, both in the NT and OT, God has always excercised justice in judging people as their deeds deserve. This is why it was necessary for Jesus to die on the cross. If people were to receive grace, Christ had to suffer the punishment for sin on their behalf. That is why we often consider grace not as "free" but "costly." It's free to us, but it was costly to Christ. So also in speaking of the New Covenant, it had to be ratified by the blood of Christ (Hebrews 8-10 speak of this). The sovereignty of God is not a complete repudiation of free choice; however, it is one that directs those choices so that sinful people can and will choose Christ for salvation. But for everyone else, by their free choice, they will inevitably choose to reject Christ and remain in their condemnation. And when God judges them for their deeds of sinfulness, He will be completely just in doing so. For as Romans 1-3 argue, "no one does good, not even one," and even the good that is done by some is not nearly enough to be acceptable to God. Everyone comes short. Therefore, with respect to rewards a person may claim for deeds done apart from Christ, they may in the end arrive at perhaps a little cooler chamber of hell. For there are only two types of books that will be opened in the final judgment. One is the Book of Life, which is not a book of deeds but a book listing those for whom Christ died. The other is the Books of Deeds. And everyone in these latter books will be thrown into the Lake of Fire (Revelation 20:11-15), not only because their deeds were evil but because they were not found in the Lamb's Book of Life.

In the midst of looming judgment we find prophecies of mercy. I would like to highlight the unique nature of these prophecies, namely, that God unilaterally acts to bring them to pass, particularly with respect to the obedience of His people. Notice in Jeremiah 32:39-40 we read, "I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever...I will put My fear in their hearts so that they will not depart from me." God will not just create the conditions that are conducive for faith and obedience, He will actually give them the heart to believe and obey, and then He will actually create the faith and obedience in that heart. This is just a reiteration of the New Covenant promises from Jeremiah 31:33-34. By bringing about faith and obedience in this way, there is no room for His people to fail, and there is no room for His people to boast.

And we are the co-inheritors of these promises, as it is proclaimed to us in the New Testament in passages like Ephesians 2:8-9, where we read, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." And for us too, by such promises, there is no room for us to fail, and there is no room for us to boast. And while in this earthly body we may struggle daily with sin (Romans 7:25; Galatians 5:17), from the perspective of God's grace and His Spirit, who lives within us as the guarantee of our salvation(Ephesians 1:13-14), there is a sense that we do not sin and we cannot sin (1 John 3:9). How can we say this? It is because when we are recipients of the grace of God, God no longer looks at us in the dirtiness of our sins but through the holiness of Christ, for as Christ became sin for us, and paid the price, we adopted His righteousness as our own:

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

That's why after the painful soliloquy of Romans 7, where Paul disparages his seemingly hopeless sinfulness, he declares at the end:

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24-25).

Dear friends, I struggle with sin every day. And when I consider my sinfulness, I echo Paul's sentiment in 1 Timothy 1:15, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." And any measure of righteousness in me, whether it be the blanket of Christ's righteousness or my own, all of it is by the grace of God. I have no room for any boasting except in the Lord. And I know that this is the testimony of every believer. So, dear friends, let us be encouraged, but not so much because we have made a measure of progress in our pursuit of holiness but because we are "the righteousness of God in Christ!"