My People Love to Have It So
June 16, 2024
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Jeremiah 5:1-31
1 Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,
look and take note!
Search her squares to see
if you can find a man,
one who does justice
and seeks truth,
that I may pardon her.
2 Though they say, “As the Lord lives,”
yet they swear falsely.
3 O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth?
You have struck them down,
but they felt no anguish;
you have consumed them,
but they refused to take correction.
They have made their faces harder than rock;
they have refused to repent.
4 Then I said, “These are only the poor;
they have no sense;
for they do not know the way of the Lord,
the justice of their God.
5 I will go to the great
and will speak to them,
for they know the way of the Lord,
the justice of their God.”
But they all alike had broken the yoke;
they had burst the bonds.
6 Therefore a lion from the forest shall strike them down;
a wolf from the desert shall devastate them.
A leopard is watching their cities;
everyone who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces,
because their transgressions are many,
their apostasies are great.
7 “How can I pardon you?
Your children have forsaken me
and have sworn by those who are no gods.
When I fed them to the full,
they committed adultery
and trooped to the houses of whores.
8 They were well-fed, lusty stallions,
each neighing for his neighbor's wife.
9 Shall I not punish them for these things?
declares the Lord;
and shall I not avenge myself
on a nation such as this?
10 “Go up through her vine rows and destroy,
but make not a full end;
strip away her branches,
for they are not the Lord's.
11 For the house of Israel and the house of Judah
have been utterly treacherous to me,
declares the Lord.
12 They have spoken falsely of the Lord
and have said, ‘He will do nothing;
no disaster will come upon us,
nor shall we see sword or famine.
13 The prophets will become wind;
the word is not in them.
Thus shall it be done to them!’”
14 Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of hosts:
“Because you have spoken this word,
behold, I am making my words in your mouth a fire,
and this people wood, and the fire shall consume them.
15 Behold, I am bringing against you
a nation from afar, O house of Israel,
declares the Lord.
It is an enduring nation;
it is an ancient nation,
a nation whose language you do not know,
nor can you understand what they say.
16 Their quiver is like an open tomb;
they are all mighty warriors.
17 They shall eat up your harvest and your food;
they shall eat up your sons and your daughters;
they shall eat up your flocks and your herds;
they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees;
your fortified cities in which you trust
they shall beat down with the sword.”
18 “But even in those days, declares the Lord, I will not make a full end of you. 19 And when your people say, ‘Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?’ you shall say to them, ‘As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours.’”
20 Declare this in the house of Jacob;
proclaim it in Judah:
21 “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes, but see not,
who have ears, but hear not.
22 Do you not fear me? declares the Lord.
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as the boundary for the sea,
a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass;
though the waves toss, they cannot prevail;
though they roar, they cannot pass over it.
23 But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and gone away.
24 They do not say in their hearts,
‘Let us fear the Lord our God,
who gives the rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us
the weeks appointed for the harvest.’
25 Your iniquities have turned these away,
and your sins have kept good from you.
26 For wicked men are found among my people;
they lurk like fowlers lying in wait.
They set a trap;
they catch men.
27 Like a cage full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
therefore they have become great and rich;
28 they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no bounds in deeds of evil;
they judge not with justice
the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
29 Shall I not punish them for these things?
declares the Lord,
and shall I not avenge myself
on a nation such as this?”
30 An appalling and horrible thing
has happened in the land:
31 the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the priests rule at their direction;
my people love to have it so,
but what will you do when the end comes?
If you were here a few weeks ago, I situated our summer sermon series through Jeremiah by describing both the historical climate and the spiritual climate. Speaking of the historical climate, Jeremiah is the son of a priest who is called to preach against the priesthood, the prophets, and the people—he does so faithfully for forty difficult years. Jeremiah ministered during the period leading up to and through Babylon’s crushing of Jerusalem around 600 BC, which led to the exile of many Israelites. Speaking of the spiritual climate, they are in such bad shape it would be almost impossible for me to pick the most telling yet haunting passage in the book because there are so many; I wouldn’t know how to rank them. But for the last fifteen years, I’ve been thinking about the gravity of the final verses in our passage. I’ll read them again, and then we’ll pray.
An appalling and horrible thing / has happened in the land: / the prophets prophesy falsely, / and the priests rule at their direction; / my people love to have it so, / but what will you do when the end comes? (Jer. 5:30–31)
Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
Years ago I worked as an associate pastor in another church. We actually preached through the book of Jeremiah, and I contributed a few sermons. When we came to Jeremiah 5, my wonderful boss and pastor, Greg Lavine, introduced me to a poem that continues to haunt me. I’d like to introduce it to you so it can also haunt you.
The poem was written by a man named Wilber Rees. He was born in the 1920s and died a few years ago. He pastored several churches, quite faithfully, it would seem, according to his obituary. In 1971, he published a series of poems, which means I assume he wrote them amid the turbulence of the 60s. The title of the book comes from the lead poem called “$3.00 Worth of God.” The poem mockingly pictures a man standing in line at the checkout counter of a convenience store wanting to buy, as he says, just “$3 worth of God.” The poem is supposed to sting a little bit. It goes like this.
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.
Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep,
but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk
or a snooze in the sunshine.
I don’t want enough of God to make me love a black man
or pick beets with a migrant. [I’ll explain those lines in a minute.]
I want ecstasy, not transformation.
I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth.
I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please. (Wilber Rees, “$3 worth of God”)
Pastor Rees was a white pastor who, I assume, struggled with those who spoke of their desire to love and serve God but spoke better than they lived. They spoke, it seems, of racial harmony but were unwilling to act on the clear implications of their faith. That’s what those lines about race and ethnicity mean. God loves all people and so should his people. But they weren’t doing that. And they spoke of wanting God to rule and reign over their lives but lived too often with themselves on the throne. So, Pastor Rees wrote this haunting poem. And whether you are white or black or young or old or rich or poor, we all know that there are implications of the Christian faith that we don’t often embrace as fully as we should, and so the poem still stings. When I was in college, a guy who discipled me described it has having a life filled with the world and then “sprinkling Jesus on top.”
Something similar is going on in the book of Jeremiah. God helps Jeremiah see a disconnect between what people say about God and how they live. So Jeremiah wrote a haunting poem, many of them actually; this one in Jeremiah 5 is just one of dozens. We won’t spend the whole summer pouring over such dark realities, but we will spend a few Sundays here and there doing just that, figuring out why God put this in his Word and how we can learn from it.
So, how are we to hear these words from Jeremiah? How are we, as a Christian church gathered in the name of Jesus, to hear these words and the others like them?
In this sermon, I’ll give two answers to that question. Both answers use the metaphor of a light switch. There are two main kinds of light switches. You probably have both in your home. There are regular on/off switches and there are dimmer switches. Those two kinds of switches help us think about not only these words in Jeremiah 5, but all the words in the book and, for that matter, many other places in the Bible. If that’s confusing now, I hope it will get more clear as we go along.
1. Hearing Jeremiah 5 as a normal light switch (“on” or “off” as categories)
Let’s start with the first answer to the question of how we hear Jeremiah’s words. I’m going to say first, we hear them as a category, like a regular light switch that is either on or off, with no in between.
I’ll show this from a few places, but let me read the opening verses again. God invites Jeremiah to look throughout the streets of Jerusalem to find anyone who loves God. I say “anyone” on purpose. God invites Jeremiah to find a single person who loves God.
5 Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,
look and take note!
Search her squares to see
if you can find a man,
one who does justice
and seeks truth,
that I may pardon her.
2 Though they say, “As the LORD lives,”
yet they swear falsely.
3 O LORD, do not your eyes look for truth?
You have struck them down,
but they felt no anguish;
you have consumed them,
but they refused to take correction.
They have made their faces harder than rock;
they have refused to repent. (Jer. 5:1–3)
God says to Jeremiah, “Go to Jerusalem, the epicenter of holiness, and see if you can find one who fears me. Go to the churches, the Christian bookstores, the campuses of seminaries. Go to the headquarters of denominations and see if you can find one person, one pastor, one professor who actually loves me. Oh, they’ll say, ‘As the Lord lives’ and ‘Amen’ and ‘Praise God,’ and they’ll listen to Christian radio and wear their Sunday best, but their hearts are as hard as rock,” says God. Ouch. That stings.
That’s what Jeremiah finds, not only among the poor and uneducated but among the rest, what he calls the “great ones,” those with means and education. Look at vv. 4–5.
4 Then I said, “These are only the poor;
they have no sense;
for they do not know the way of the LORD,
the justice of their God.
5 I will go to the great
and will speak to them,
for they know the way of the LORD,
the justice of their God.”
But they all alike had broken the yoke;
they had burst the bonds.
“Broken the yoke” and “bust the bonds” is a metaphor for unrestrained sin. Whether the people were poor or prosperous made no difference. They all alike had turned away, they had all become like sheep without a shepherd.
Let me reframe this search for one faithful person using different language to illustrate the point. I’ll frame it as a search for one bite of food in a store. Can you imagine going to a store and every shelf in every aisle is empty? It’s not like they don’t have your favorite cereal or candy, or they are out of special gluten-free bread made from sourdough. That’s not it. Rather, it’s that they have no cereal, no candy, no bread. So, at first you say, “Well, it’s just a convenience store. I can’t expect a gas station to have food.” Then you go to Giant and Weis and Trader Joe’s on the West Shore—nothing.
How are we, as Christians in a Christian church, to hear about this terrible situation where Jeremiah can’t find one person who loves God? I would say two ways, but the first way we’re talking about is as a category, as a normal light switch, as either on or off, and in this case off.
The tragedy in the book of Jeremiah is that the people of God had basically become not the people of God. What I mean is that the light was supposed to be on; they were supposed to be converted and soft-hearted toward God. Yet their hearts were as hard as rocks. If we put it in our terms, we’d say it’s not that they had become bad Christians who should be better, but that they were not Christians at all. The switch was off.
We see this in many other places in the chapter. We can’t cover them all, but I’ll just point you to a few other places. In v. 6 we read that their apostasies are great. Look at it. “Their transgressions are many, / their apostasies are great” (5:6b). We don’t use the word apostasy much. We might be more tempted to use the word “deconstruction,” most often when a person is hurt by abuse in a local church. But when the church has been faithful, and the doctrines have been rightly perceived, and you turn away from God anyway, the language the Bible uses is of apostasy. To apostatize is to deliberately turn away from the Lord and his grace and his mercy. Jeremiah speaks of their apostasies as “great.”
I won’t read again what is said next in vv. 7–9 because the language is so pointed. We could paraphrase it as spiritual unfaithfulness then becoming sexual unfaithfulness.
Look down in vv. 12–13. They treat the Lord’s warnings as empty threats.
12 They have spoken falsely of the LORD
and have said, ‘He will do nothing;
no disaster will come upon us,
nor shall we see sword or famine.
13 The prophets will become wind;
the word is not in them. (Jer. 5:12–13a)
Basically, they say God is like a Father who sees his children disobeying and counts to ten. “Don’t make me come over there. One, twooooo, threeeeee.” And the child keeps disobeying because he knows the longer he disobeys, the longer God will keep stretching out the number. They presume God’s patience means his impotence.
I’ll give two more. Look down in vv. 22–25. God says there is no reverence of him.
22 Do you not fear me? declares the LORD.
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as the boundary for the sea,
a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass;
though the waves toss, they cannot prevail;
though they roar, they cannot pass over it.
23 But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and gone away.
24 They do not say in their hearts,
‘Let us fear the LORD our God,
who gives the rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us
the weeks appointed for the harvest.’
25 Your iniquities have turned these away,
and your sins have kept good from you.
God is saying that in Genesis I spoke, and galaxies obeyed and flung into being. I put the sea here and land there, and they obeyed. But when I created Adam and Eve, and everyone else, they don’t stay put. And in v. 25 that rebellion is said to be what actually keeps them from good. God is more than a nap in warm sunshine, to use the lines from Rees’s poem. He is living water that transforms, and the transformation is also good.
And of course we could come to those words at the end.
30 An appalling and horrible thing
has happened in the land:
31 the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the priests rule at their direction;
my people love to have it so,
but what will you do when the end comes? (Jer. 5:30–31
Among the prophets, priests, and people there had become a sinful feedback loop where they each give each other what they want. The New Testament language of itching ears is helpful. Paul writes to a young pastor, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Tim. 4:3).
Again, when we stand back from the list, we need the category of a light switch that’s off. I’m laboring this point at the start of the summer because if we don’t get this, we won’t understand the book, and then we won’t understand God. If we don’t see them as “off to God,” the punishment that’s coming upon these people will feel over the top and vindicative and petty. It’s like, in God’s opinion, someone has a hangnail, and he gets out the defibrillator, those shocking paddles. “What’s that? A hurt pinky nail? Clear!” [Thud!]
When we see how dead the people are, we see that Jeremiah’s words are an intervention, a last attempt to help a struggling, unconverted people. These words are loving and deliberate. The words are harsh, but they aim for restoration and redemption. They aim to produce surrender. This is where Jeremiah comes in and why his role was so hard. His role as a prophet was not so much to predict the future, although prophets did some of that. The main role of a prophet, and the main role of Jeremiah, was to call people back to faith and to hold out the promise of restation if they surrendered.
As preachers, we ran into this same issue when we got into portions of the Gospels, most recently as we preached John. There are times when Jesus rails against the religious leaders and their hypocrisy in passage after passage, week after week. He’ll say things like, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single [convert], and when he becomes a [convert], you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matt. 23:15). When Jesus said things like this, he was not talking to believers who should be better. He was talking to people who didn’t know him.
I’ll give you an example from our city. Last summer I found myself at an event standing with another pastor I only knew a little bit. He was in the process of leaving his church and his denomination because he felt they had lost the gospel. He was joining another more faithful denomination. We’re standing around talking about all this. I can see how troubled he is. Through his stories, I could tell he had experienced the worst of religious-political power and the evils of unfaithful shepherds toward faithful sheep. And so I say something to him like this: “Look, I know this sounds offensive, and I don’t mean it to be that way. But when you think of the men and women leading your current church denomination, doyou think of them as unconverted church men and unconverted women?” He had this long pause, as though he was replaying the last difficult years of his life, and he said, “You know, it pains me to say it, but it’s true.” And to this pastor, a book like Jeremiah would be a special comfort that God sees.
Before we move on, we need to pause. It’s a big, spiritually diverse room, and some of you right now are categorically off to God; you don’t know him. And the invitation is here: Come to him. Surrender, he welcomes you.
2. Hearing Jeremiah 5 as a dimmer switch (“less bright” or “more bright” as a continuum)
But many of us, I think, do know the Lord. We have seen our sin as offensive to God and we cling to his mercy and grace and love. We know that Jesus lived and died for us, and so we have hope, and we have a changed life and we serve and love. The Bible, specifically the New Testament, no longer calls us sinners. Even though we still sin, we’re called saints, not because we earned it but because God gives us his holiness. The Bible calls Christians his new creation, the Bride of Christ, Friends of God.
So, where does the list leave us? Well, I mentioned there were two ways to hear the words of Jeremiah. We can hear them like a normal light switch, whether on or off. We can also hear like a dimmer switch, which is to say, “less bright” or “more bright.” This helps us personalize the words. It’s a way to say that although we do love God, we are not as bright in our love as we could be or should be.
If we were to go back to Pastor Rees’s poem, maybe it wasn’t just that he looked out at Christians who talked a big game but then didn’t follow God. Maybe he wasn’t just mad at those out there who wanted ecstatic experiences with God but didn’t want to follow through in obedience. Maybe he looked in his own heart and saw that his own love was not as bright as it ought to be. Maybe, just maybe, he was a pastor who sometimes wanted his sermons filled with only $3 worth of God, just enough to please a crowd and have them say, “Nice sermon, pastor,” but not enough to explored his soul or theirs.
Which is to say, we should all hear Jeremiah in this way too. Which is to say, if we love God and if we have been saved by him, we should all strive to have the softness in our hearts to hear these haunting words of Jeremiah. And if we keep choosing to hear the Word of God this way, if we choose to keep bringing the Word of God close, if we keep choosing to have a soft not a hard heart toward the Lord, even when it stings, then this will be the very means by which God keeps us from becoming unconverted. If, but for the grace of God, we see the potential of our own apostasy… if, but for the grace of God, we see the potential our own desire to have itching ears… if, but for the grace of God, we see the potential of viewing the Lord as issuing empty warnings… if we do this, then that’s the very means whereby God keeps us bright for him. Which is why the book of Jeremiah is important.
Conclusion
I’ll close with this thought. Jeremiah is told to search Jerusalem to see if he can find a single person who is faithful. Look at the wording again.
5 Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem,
look and take note!
Search her squares to see
if you can find a man,
one who does justice
and seeks truth,
that I may pardon her.
Then in v. 3 we read, “They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent.” We don’t have the exact date of this search, but it was likely somewhere around 600 BC. Jeremiah couldn’t find one person. But imagine with me if this same invitation had been given around AD 30. If Jeremiah had searched Jerusalem, he would have found Jesus. Indeed, we find Jesus. The one who does justice and seeks truth.
And not only does he do that. He determines resolutely to go to the cross to pardon his people. Jeremiah speaks of those whose hearts had become hard to the Lord. In the Gospels we read that Jesus also had a hard, resolute commitment, but it was to follow the Lord, not abandon forsake his Father. Listen to what Luke 9:51 says, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Jesus set his face to pardon us, so that we might live for him, knowing him as living, transforming water.
Let’s pray as we invite the music team up to close us in song. “Dear heavenly Father…”
Sermon Discussion Questions
What did Benjamin mean by the light switch and what were the two different ways the metaphor worked? How did it relate to Jeremiah? How did it relate to the ministry of Jesus? How does it relate in our own day?
Read chapter 5. What lines seem most “haunting” to you in this poem?
What was the central problem that God had with his people in chapter 5? Benjamin said it was that they spoke of God differently than they lived, speaking of him positively but not living for him. How would you phrase the problem in your own words?
Look again at Wilber Rees’s poem. What lines most bring conviction to you?
If you were in a context overrun by unconverted people who called themselves Christians, how would this passage encourage you?
What are ways you fight to keep your heart soft to the Lord?
Benjamin mentioned vv. 1–3 and the idea that “if Jeremiah had looked in AD 30, he would have found Jesus as one who seeks truth.” What did he mean by this? Why is it encouraging? How does it relate to the line in v. 1 about “pardoning”?
