Thus says the Lord, ‘Do not deceive yourselves, saying, “The Chaldeans will surely go away from us,” for they will not go. For even if you had defeated the entire army of Chaldeans who were fighting against you, and there were only wounded men left among them, each man in his tent, they would rise up and burn this city with fire.’” (Jeremiah 37:9-10).

Zedekiah did not understand that his fear was misdirected. It was not the Babylonians he needed to fear but the LORD. Even if he could fight off the entire Babylonian army, God would still destroy the city, for He had so decreed it. 

Friends, let us understand this principle: "We live by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). It is not what we can see, strategize or assess that determines the ultimate outcome of our lives. It is the LORD. So we read,

A man’s heart plans his way,
But the Lord directs his steps (Proverbs 16:9).

Therefore, let us commit our every plan to God in prayer. When we commit our way to Him, God will guide our thoughts, so that they are in line with His will:

Commit your works to the Lord,
And your thoughts will be established (Proverbs. 16:3).

It is in aligning our wills with God's will where we find true success:

Commit your way to the Lord;
    trust in him and he will do this:
He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn,
    your vindication like the noonday sun (Psalm 37:5-6).

 

In the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now. Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about every disaster I plan to inflict on them, they will each turn from their wicked ways; then I will forgive their wickedness and their sin."

The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll, and Jehudi brought it from the room of Elishama the secretary and read it to the king and all the officials standing beside him. Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe's knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire. The king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes. (Jeremiah 36:1-3, 21, 23, 24 NIV)

This is remarkable. God graciously provides His people an eleventh-hour opportunity to repent, but instead of repentance the king and all his attendants manifest no fear of God and simply and literally toss God's Word into the fire. Is this fearlessness to be praised? Wow, the king is standing up to God's Word! Look at that boldness! 

No! There is nothing praiseworthy in spurning your Creator. There's nothing wise in slapping the gracioiusly offered hand of the Judge that can condemn you to hell forever. Yet, this is exactly what King Jehoiakim and his attendants do.

Friends, there is a time to be afraid. Even when you think you are right, you should be terribly afraid if you discover that God is against you. Even if you are not afraid of the stronger army or the fiercer opponent, you should be afraid of God. I recall in the Chronicles of Narnia one of the children asking the talking mice about the great Aslan, a lion who represents the God-man, Christ Jesus. They ask them, "Is He safe?" I believe they answer, "No. He is not safe. But He is good." It is this representation of God that Paul probably had in mind when he wrote to the Philippian church:

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (Philippians 2:12, 13 NIV)

Paul is not simply talking about reverence for God here. This expression, "fear and trembling," speaks of an awareness of God's freedom and power to save or to completely destroy. The motivation to trust in Christ because God can otherwise cast you into hell is just as valid as the the motivation to trust in Him because God loves you. As Jesus aso taught:

"I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him. (Luke 12:4, 5 NIV)

That said, when God is with you and when You are walking in His will and accomplishing His purposes, then you have nothing to fear. In that case failure is nothing, rejection is nothing, defeat is nothing, death is but a prelude to eternal life. Why? Because God is greater than all of these things. Today, I share with you this psalm of praise for God, our only hope:

Truly my soul finds rest in God;my salvation comes from him. Truly he is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will never be shaken. How long will you assault me? Would all of you throw me down—this leaning wall, this tottering fence? Surely they intend to topple me from my lofty place; they take delight in lies. With their mouths they bless, but in their hearts they curse. Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him. Truly he is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge. Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge. Surely the lowborn are but a breath, the highborn are but a lie. If weighed on a balance, they are nothing; together they are only a breath. Do not trust in extortion or put vain hope in stolen goods; though your riches increase, do not set your heart on them. One thing God has spoken, two things I have heard:"Power belongs to you, God, and with you, Lord, is unfailing love"; and, "You reward everyone according to what they have done." (Psalm 62:1-12 NIV)

So friends, let us trust in the LORD! This weekend I have the wonderful privilege of sharing at our first Youn Wha Martial Arts Retreat. I have not crafted a message for the occasion, but I will simply be sharing from my daily reading of God's Word. As we are reading from Jeremiah, I have chosen to share a little about Jeremiah's hope-filled description of the New Covenant. Please pray that I will speak both clearly and boldly to all that God brings to hear me.

In Jeremiah 37:18-19 we read of Jeremiah petition to King Zedekiah: “What offense have I committed against you, against your servants, or against this people, that you have put me in prison? Where now are your prophets who prophesied to you, saying, ‘The king of Babylon will not come against you or against this land’?" Even so, Zedekiah keeps Jeremiah in prison.

Isn't this amazing? You would think that once the king realized that all the other prophets were wrong and that Jeremiah was right all along, he would commend Jeremiah and listen to his words. In the past the king had repeatedly chosen to listen to the prophets that prophesied peace, even though they were proven wrong time and time again. Now, all those prophets were gone and only Jeremiah remained. Yet, the king still refused to listen to him. Why?

There is a major lesson here. People tend to hold fast to their biases even when confronted with clear truth. People prefer to stay on familar ground, even though it is destructive, than to admit that they were wrong and change course. Even when all the evidence points one way, people often rationalize that this time things will be different. This is true in all kinds of areas of life. In the stock market, this kind of attitude usually leads to large financial losses. In relationships, it leads to dissillusionment and emotional damage. But even worse, in the realm of Christian belief, it can lead to a distorted conception of God, a misguided pursuit of His will, and a wrong interpretation and application of His Word.

Many Jews in the time of Jesus fell prey to this kind of attitude. Paul writes in Romans 10:1-3

Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved. For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God.

And again in Romans 10:21 Paul cites Isaiah 65:2,

All day long I have stretched out My hands; To a disobedient and contrary people.

The Jews of Jesus' day stubbornly refused to listen to truth and zealously followed their own way to their self-destruction. They did not examine the Scriptures, like the Bereans. Their only concern was to control the masses and keep them on their side. They had no genuine fear of God.

Dear friends, I fear that we are in a time not unlike the days of Jeremiah and Paul, when people refuse to discern truth and only follow their own subjective experiences, even turning to pagan resources because biblical truth is not pragmatic enough for them. I was appalled to learn that Paul Yonggi Cho may have founded the largest church in Korea on the flimsy foundation of "healing" miracles, the practice of which he patterned after the Buddhist monks in Korea and the Japanese Buddhist sect led by Soka Gakkai, who boasts some twenty-million adherants (cf. The Fourth Dimension, p. 37). Cho talks about a fourth-dimensional power, which entails imagining mental pictures of health and willing them into their bodies. He wrote that the Buddhists and yoga adherants worked "miracle" cures because they explored and developed their fourth-dimensional power. Cho said that Christians need to do the same, but to harness this power for God. This is a radical departure from biblical truth.

What is more, one of the most ardent followers of Cho is John Wimber, who acknowledged that Cho's massive church growth success is attributed to his healing ministry: "Full Gospel Central Church is growing fast because of an emphasis on healing. When Yonggi Cho prays for the sick in the Sunday service, many people are healed... After they are healed by God, they become Christians and good evangelists... this is the secret of church growth of FGCC" (Signs and Wonders and Church Growth). John Wimber has been influential as the leader of the Vineyard Movement and the neo-charismatic denomination, with a strong emphasis on healing and that by every Christian. His influence has carried over to people like Peter Wagner, an influential person out of Fuller Theological Seminary, and Mike Bickle, who leads the Kansas City prayer ministry and the International House of Prayer.

Friends, I have now been examining the so-called "faith healers" for a number of years, as well as trying to see the validation of their claims. I have come to understand that there is a difference between the kind of healings that Jesus and the apostles did in the NT vs. the claimed healings today. In Jesus' day, the healings were "organic" in nature (e.g. blind seeing, dead arising, deaf hearing, mute speaking, a withered hand being restored), but today the healings are "functional" in nature (sore back, misaligned leg, headaches, etc.). And if there are claims of organic healings today, none are verified or documented; however, the NT takes great pains to document that a person was born blind, or a man was a recognized invalid by an entire community for thirty-eight years, or even the Pharisees had to acknowledge the miracle was real. Most if not all of what passes for miraculous healings today by faith healers are perhaps nothing more than psycho-somatic recoveries. And often, many who are "healed" are only "healed" temporarily. Even some at our church that I checked on experienced the same pain that they were purportedly healed of some months before. And more seriously, there is documentation that people that claimed to be healed (e.g. by Benny Hinn) were soon after hospitalized or died shortly after the purported healing. As I looked through the literature going back to the early part of the twentieth century, I saw repeated literature from medical examiners and news reports exposing the fraud in the "faith healing" ministry, but I was amazed to find that faith healers are still doing what they are doing and that millions are still following them. Even at GHC we invite such "faith healers" and those that make claims of such without any documentation every year. In a recent service, when one speaker got a message on his iPhone that nine blind people received their sight, he just preached it without checking anything. When another speaker heard a story by his taxi driver of how he raised someone from the dead, he just accepted it as truth, again without any documenation. I realized that both of these speakers may have thought their exposition of Scriptures was rather dry and they needed to spruce it up with a miraculous story. And by the reactions from the people around me, it certainly did wake some people up; however, at what price?

King Zedekiah stubbornly refused to listen to Jeremiah, even when Jeremiah proved the truth of his prophecies to him. He chose instead to listen to the false prophesies of the other prophets, even to the very end. When will we wake up and not gullibly and stubbornly follow the hype of the neo-charismatic renewal movement, which has in a way "drugged" Christians with its emotionally-charged pill, so that these Christians have lost their sense of discernment, even stubbornly refusing to examine the Scriptures to see if what they are told is truly so.

Dear friends, even though I am now seeking to expose the fraud in "faith healing" today, along with its dangerous sister, the modern-day "prophetic" movement, the message of the Gospel remains the same: Salvation is through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who paid the price for our sins. But mark my words, these current departures from our orthodox faith, while seemingly harmless now, can eventually draw people away from the absolute truth and sufficiency of the Scriptures. And the warning of Paul will come to bear:

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables ( 2 Timothy 4:3-4).