In God We Trust
June 30, 2024
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Jeremiah 17:1-13
1 “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of their altars,2 while their children remember their altars and their Asherim, beside every green tree and on the high hills, 3 on the mountains in the open country. Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your high places for sin throughout all your territory. 4 You shall loosen your hand from your heritage that I gave to you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever.”
5 Thus says the Lord:
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
and makes flesh his strength,
whose heart turns away from the Lord.
6 He is like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see any good come.
He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.
7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
8 He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
9 The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
10 “I the Lord search the heart
and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.”
11 Like the partridge that gathers a brood that she did not hatch,
so is he who gets riches but not by justice;
in the midst of his days they will leave him,
and at his end he will be a fool.
12 A glorious throne set on high from the beginning
is the place of our sanctuary.
13 O Lord, the hope of Israel,
all who forsake you shall be put to shame;
those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth,
for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.
We don’t necessarily advertise this part of our ministry, but you should know that one of my aims in all that we do here is to help you suffer well. We want to help you make it through adversity and hardship in a way that glorifies God and keeps you from shriveling into despair.
To that end, this summer we’re teaching through the book of Jeremiah. It’s the longest book in the whole Bible. We won’t cover everything, but we are trying to hit as many of the highlights as we can, or, in some cases in Jeremiah, we’d probably better call them the lowlights. Our passage today is there to help us become those who suffer well. As we turn our attention to God’s Word, let’s ask for his help. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
This last week I was reading a book and saw an endorsement from a pastor in the front of that book. For the point I’m making, the book doesn’t matter, the author doesn’t matter, and even the person who wrote the endorsement or what he said doesn’t matter. What caught my attention—what matters—was the name of the church. You might judge me for what I’m about to say. That’s okay. I’ve been judging myself for it too.
The name of the church was Fearless Church. Call me shallow, but when I read that, I thought to myself, Nope, not for me. I can’t tell you exactly why I felt that way. I’ve been trying to interrogate my own reaction to figure why. I think for me the name Fearless felt a little too confident, a little too triumphal, a little too victorious when this life, even the Christian life, is not always so full of confidence, triumph, and victory.
But then I started thinking, What do I want them to be called? The Fearful Church? No. Or maybe they should be the Sorta Fearless but also Sorta Fearful Church. Perhaps that’s more honest, but, admittedly, it’s a little clunky from a marketing perspective—if you care about those things.
And the longer I thought about this, the more I saw the church name in connection with our passage. God speaks through Jeremiah of the blessed person as the one with roots into God such that the person lives without fear. Not sorta without fear. “No fear” is the wording God uses. I’d like to have that. I know that behind so much of my sin and angst is, probably, deep fear. It’s probably the same for you.
The experience of becoming fearless by drawing strength from God, is an experience spoken of often in the Bible, even if using different metaphors. I’ll give some examples.
In the familiar story of the woman at the well in John 4, there’s a detail we don’t talk much about. The woman is there at the hottest part of the day, likely ostracized from her community and all of that. The story begins with Jesus choosing to be left there while the disciples go into town to find food. (They were all super hungry from the long journey). And Jesus has that whole conversation with her about sin and about her thirst for living water. But when the disciples return, Jesus doesn’t seem to need to eat, which confuses the disciples. And Jesus simply says, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (John 4:32).
I love that line. More confused, the disciples say to each other, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” (4:33), as though Jesus has this secret stash of Sour Patch Kids or a Chipotle burrito hidden in his bag. Jesus explains, saying, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (4:34). In the heat of the day, Jesus had spiritual food to sustain him. Love that.
There’s another line I love related to this in the book of Proverbs. The book ends with a portrait of a godly woman, showing her across all the seasons of her life. It’s said that this godly woman “laughs at the time to come” (Prov. 31:25b). When others fear, she laughs. When dangers and calamities arrive uninvited, when the heat comes and a drought follows, she laughs. As her body ages, and as her young beauty turns into older beauty or it doesn’t, as her children continue to follow the Lord or they don’t, as her family business grows prosperous or it doesn’t, as her husband lives or he doesn’t, and in the face of nearly infinite possibilities about the time to come, whether blessings or hardships, none of which she can know, she laughs because of what she does know.
She knows her life and her time to come are held in the hands of her God, and by his grace whatever comes next and whatever comes next after that, even if it’s her own death, she knows God has her. Love that line. Whether you’re a man or woman, don’t you want to be like that? (Cf. Mike Bullmore’s comments about this line in his message “Growing in Faith and Trust,” CrossWay Community Church, October 2, 2009.)
Again, the Bible often describes this idea of being rooted in the reality of God such that the rootedness makes us fearless and joyful. I think of Paul’s lines near the end of his letter to the church in Phillipi. Paul is in jail somewhere else when he writes that letter, and yet it’s a letter full of joy. He tells Christians that “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7). While he’s being guarded by jailers, he is saying that in God there are supernatural resources that guard us and experiencing them might not even make rational sense, but you can experience them nonetheless. I love that line from Paul.
And now, I think again of the lines in the passage. I was talking with another person on staff, and he said that the imagery from Jeremiah 17:8 might be his favorite verse in all the Bible. I’ll read v. 8 again.
8 He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.
Don’t you want that? Fearless, bearing fruit, remaining green. And note the phrase, “not anxious in the year of drought.” The year. Year. Droughts do not unfold over hours, days, or months. Over a year, panic could overtake an agrarian community. At first, there’d be lots of small talk about the weather. In marketplaces, barbershops, and wherever people gathered—and over dinner conversations among family and friends—one person would casually ask another, “When’s it gonna rain?” Someone would say in return, “Dunno, but gotta be soon.” In the year of drought, eventually, these same people would kneel down in a patch of ruined crops, fill their fists with dirt, and throw it up to the sky, yelling at God or whoever they thought was up there. The year of drought.
When the drought comes, do you have food that others don’t know about? Can you laugh? Can you have peace? Can you remain green? You can. We can. But how?
This was a long introduction to ask the question, how do we bear fruit in that year, in that heat? How do we remain fearless? That’s what God wants for you and what you want for yourself. It’s what I want. I want us, in Christ, to be a fearless church.
But before we see how to become that, we must consider that we are all, at every moment, putting our trust in something or someone. And it’s not always God.
1. What are you trusting and how do you know?
As we look at this passage, it’s clear that God understands us to all be putting our roots into something or someone. Often adversity shows us what we’re really trusting. Let me read the poem in the center of our passage again.
5 Thus says the LORD:
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
and makes flesh his strength,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
6 He is like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see any good come.
He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.
7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD.
8 He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
You’ll remember that Jeremiah was born around the middle of 600 BC. As a young man God calls him to be a prophet. He’s the son of a priest called to preach against the unconverted priests and preach against the false prophets, of which there were many. And he’s also called to preach against the people, but to do it for their good, to wake them up because so many were asleep and so many others were spiritually dead.
The “heat” in their day was the rising power of Babylon. Babylon made Israel afraid. So Israel looked, as you would look, for solutions. “Maybe we can pay Egypt to help us.” “Maybe we can build a stronger army.” Or “Maybe if we can’t fight them, we can join them and try to play nice and flatter them.” Different kings tried different solutions.
We have different problems; we look for different solutions. We have different global problems, different personal problems. But our differences are not so different. This passage shows we are all trying to solve the same problem of heart. Look at vv. 5, 7.
5 Thus says the LORD:
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
and makes flesh his strength,
whose heart turns away from the LORD. . . .
7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD. (Jer. 17:5, 7)
The image used for trust is of roots. Roots either go into God or into something (or someone) else. To phrase it the way the passage phrases it, we either put our roots into man, which v. 5 calls a turning away from the Lord, or we put our roots into God.
Many of you will be familiar with v. 9, even if you didn’t know it came from the book of Jeremiah or this part of the book specifically. God says in vv. 9–10,
9 The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
10 “I the LORD search the heart
and test the mind,
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.”
This is why the modern anthem “to follow your heart” is so troubling. Yet we all, at times, find ourselves trusting in someone or something that is not God. We often don’t know what we’re trusting until the heat comes.
I had a friend text me the other day to ask for prayer. He had surgery that day. I was happy to pray for him. I think everything went fine. What’s interesting is that my friend has pretty much walked away from his Christian faith, questioning whether there really is a god or not. His request for prayer encouraged me that maybe his roots will find God. Again, the heat has a way of clarifying what we’re really trusting, and whether there are truly any resources to survive in what we’re trusting. When we get the financial bill we were not expecting or when the relationship goes sideways or when our career takes a nosedive or whatever, the year of drought has a way of bringing clarity about our roots. It has a way of refining whether our trust is in God or man.
2. Where does your trust end?
The next thing we need to see is that the someone or something we trust will lead to radically different outcomes. Compare the different outcomes in vv. 6 and 8.
6 He is like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see any good come.
He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land. . .
8 He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
Very different, aren’t they? The one person becomes a shrub. A shrub can grow, especially when the rains come. But when the heat comes and the drought comes, the land might as well have been salted. And note that if a shrub grows, it grows for itself, in uninhabited land. The shrub has no fruit for others, except maybe a tiny bit of shade, and if it has this, it has it only for a little while. As you consider the wider passage, this image becomes worse. Look at v. 1 and v. 13.
17 “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of their altars . . .
The image is of something resolute and fixed, something hard and permanent. The sin on their hearts is written with an iron pen. And on the altar where there was supposed to be atonement and the forgiveness of sin, there was only a diamond hard record of their sin (see Peter C. Craigie, Paige Kelley, et al. Jeremiah 1–25, Word Biblical Commentary). Then look at v. 13.
13 O LORD, the hope of Israel,
all who forsake you shall be put to shame;
those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth,
for they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living water.
The phrase “written in the earth” means their great names and the deeds they did will blow away with the wind. We didn’t cover these verses, but in v. 11 the image is of wealth achieved by injustice that just flies away.
Contrast all this with the tree that not only remains green but continues to produce fruit in a drought. It not only survives, but it helps others survive.
On the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, there is a place called Sabino Canyon, this seven-mile road and hike is a tourist attraction. There’s a stream that flows down between mountains in the canyon. Along the stream, there are many giant cottonwood trees (example). They grow tall because they drink freely from the stream every day. Every Monday, each tree drinks up around 500 gallons of water. Then on Tuesday, 500 more gallons. Wednesday, 500 more. Every day, every week. Being planted by the stream and being rooted there, makes the outcome very different when heat arrives.
The language Jeremiah uses is of blessed and cursed. “Cursed is the man… Blessed is the man.” In the Bible, that pairing is loaded terminology. When we opened the series, I mentioned how King Josiah began to do some renovations on the temple, and the people found what they called “the Book of the Law” (2 Kings 22:8). In the book of Deuteronomy, as well as Leviticus, there are several places with extended passages where God holds out to the people both blessings and curses. Jeremiah is using language that would have been familiar and also charged language. That is especially true because the cruses for not following the Lord, not putting their roots into God but instead turning away from the Lord, were about to be enacted. After years and years and years of patience with the people, God was going to bring judgment.
3. How do I become blessed?
So, we’ve seen how we are all putting our roots into something or someone, whether God or man. And we’ve seen how different the outcomes are, whether blessing or curses, heaven or hell.
As we close, I want to spend a few minutes talking about how we become those who become blessed, those who have food to eat that others do not know about, those who laugh at what is to come, who have a peace that surpasses understanding, those who, in Christ, become fearless.
How do we become this? The first answer is probably obvious, but it needs to be said. We need to become Christians. The language of the passage is that of planting by the stream. Trees don’t plant themselves. God plants trees. And he does it by changing hearts. He knows we’re sinful. And he causes you to become aware of your own sin and aware that you can’t forgive your own sin. If we commit a crime, we can’t go to the judge and say, “It’s okay; I have forgiven myself.” We need God to do that for us. And the way he does this is through the cross. Jesus lived, died, and rose so that your sins could be atoned for. And when God gives you spiritual thirst, spiritual hunger for forgiveness, and he gives you spiritual eyes to see the beauty of the cross, then you become planted by the stream of grace. In short, you become a Christian. That’s the first and only way to begin experiencing the blessings described.
But we can say more. After being planted by God, your roots must go down into the stream. While being planted is the work of God, here, we can also talk about growing as a both-and. We put our roots down and the stream flows by. We participate with God in our growth. We put down roots, and he sends the stream of grace.
We put down roots in all sorts of ways. We can become involved a church, we can pray, we can read the Bible. But we have to make sure these are not the end goal. It may seem strange or jarring to say this, but church and prayer are not the end goal. Even Bible knowledge is not the end. A strong root system is not helpful if it doesn’t connect to the stream. The goal is connection to God. He’s the end goal.
Consider what Jesus himself said about this. In John 5, Jesus was speaking to a bunch of people who were experts in the Bible but didn’t actually know God. He said to them, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). The point Jesus is making is that the roots of prayer and church and Bible are about connecting us to God. That’s what roots are for. This is why in all that we do, in all that we preach and sing and study, we try to connect it back to Jesus. You can know about the book of Jeremiah and what was happening in Israel in the 600s BC and about Babylon, but those are all ways to know God in Christ better.
Conclusion
As we close, I want to underscore how special these promises of blessing would have been to Jeremiah. I’ll say it another way, this promise is not for perfect people. There are no perfect people. These promises are for people planted by God. You see, Jeremiah himself struggled with fear. He struggled at times with his calling and often lamented.
Pastor Ron preached last week from Jeremiah 20 about lament. It was a wonderful sermon. There are a few passages that we could have chosen to teach about Jeremiah’s laments. One in chapter 12, one in 15, and the one he used in chapter 20. But go with me for a minute back to chapter 15. I’ll just read a few verses. The section begins in v. 10 with the heading, “Jeremiah’s Complaint.” Notice his final line to God in v. 18.
18 Why is my pain unceasing,
my wound incurable,
refusing to be healed?
Jeremiah’s ministry was so hard and seemingly ineffective, such a drought, if you will, that he referred to it as an incurable wound. He goes on,
Will you be to me like a deceitful brook,
like waters that fail?
Jeremiah calls God “a deceitful brook” and “like waters that fail.” Ouch. “God,” he says, “you’re not a fountain of living water; you’re a swamp.” How does God respond?
19 Therefore thus says the LORD:
“If you return, I will restore you,
and you shall stand before me.
If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless,
you shall be as my mouth.
They shall turn to you,
but you shall not turn to them.
20 And I will make you to this people
a fortified wall of bronze;
they will fight against you,
but they shall not prevail over you,
for I am with you
to save you and deliver you,
declares the LORD.
21 I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked,
and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless.”
God promises that if Jeremiah returns to the Lord, if he surrenders afresh, God will be a source of strength to him. God will make him fearless, give him food others don’t know about, help him laugh at the time to come, and give him a peace that surpasses understanding. By God’s grace, Jermiah would not turn toward the people in their sin, but people would turn toward godliness in him.
And reflecting on this, at least to me, it’s so interesting. It’s so interesting because, throughout the book, the people almost always need to turn and repent. The false prophets and the evil kings and the unconverted priests and the sinful people need to turn. But when we look at chapter 15, we see that even the great Jeremiah, the hero of the story, needed to be corrected. Which reminds us that Jeremiah is not the real hero of the story. It’s God. And the words we have after chapter 15, the words we have in chapter 17 about blessings and streams and no fear and no anxiety encourage me. They encourage me because the people God plants are not perfect, but they are planted and they are loved and he supplies what they need to bear fruit.
In summary, God is the source of unending power and peace. If you need 500 gallons of living water today and 500 tomorrow, he has it. And if in three days, the heat comes, and you need even more, there is more in God for you.
Let’s pray as we invite the music team up to close us in song. “Dear heavenly Father…”
Discussion Questions
In what ways do you feel the heat and drought? What about others around you?
Read the poem in vv. 5–8 again. What images are most striking to you and why?
Deuteronomy 28 is a long chapter devoted to blessings and curses. What do you notice about the chapter? What are some connections to the book of Jeremiah as a whole and this passage of chapter 17 specifically?
We enjoy God in this way, we need to be planted by God. And we need to send our roots into his stream. How does this connect to the theological concepts of justification (how we are saved) and sanctification (how we become like Christ)?
Sometimes we refer to activities like prayer, gathering as a church, and Bible reading as “means of grace.” I’ve heard them called the “grooves of grace,” meaning the grooves that God uses to pour his grace into our lives. What means of grace, or grooves of grace, do you find come the easiest and which come with more challenging? Why?
