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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, looking at the Old Testament reading, the first reading from Jeremiah.
Please be seated. The Old Testament is full of prophets of God. In fact, 23 of the 39 books of the Old Testament are written by prophets. Four other books in the Old Testament are a history of the prophets’ works. Jeremiah is one of those prophets. A prophet’s role, his job, was to proclaim, to speak for God. “Thus says the Lord,” or as the King James Version puts it, “thus saith the Lord.” It’s in the Old Testament 400 times. More than 400 times, prophets say, “thus says the Lord.” Jeremiah says 150 of them.
And what prophets proclaimed back then oftentimes wasn’t too appreciated, certainly not popular. People didn’t like what prophets proclaimed. Case in point with Jeremiah, right? What was the people’s response to him? “You shall die.” That’s putting it mildly, I suppose. But the prophets proclaimed what was written, what God had already proclaimed to His people through previous prophets, especially Moses.
In the Old Testament reading today, the people are upset that Jeremiah prophesied about Jerusalem and about the temple. That’s the house of the Lord mentioned there. Jeremiah compares them to the Israelite city of Shiloh, which at one time had been a great place of worship for the Israelites, but at the time of Jeremiah, it had been reduced to ruins.
Jeremiah uses this example of Shiloh to warn the people, to warn the people of Jerusalem and of the temple that this could happen to them. Like Shiloh, Jerusalem, the temple, and all the people there could fall under God’s judgment. Judgment that’s been pronounced against them already, as the reading says. Kind of a spoiler alert, eventually that does happen, but that’s another sermon. The people didn’t want to hear that. Not a popular prophecy. Not appreciative words of God.
But there was plenty of reason to why Jeremiah is making this prophecy, why he’s proclaiming this word of the Lord. Because the people of Jerusalem had for years been committing all kinds of atrocities against God, disobeying the law, disobeying the commandments of God, disobeying what the prophets had said before, doing, like I said, great atrocities, even sacrificing children to idols. And previously, part of the Israelite nation had already been allowed by God to be conquered by another nation. And now Jeremiah is warning the people of Jerusalem that this could happen to them, and that there’s this confrontation from God through Jeremiah that this could happen to them.
But Jeremiah also has good news for them. Maybe you saw that in there. He says to them, “Mend your ways and deeds. Listen to God and obey Him, and He will relent of the disaster that He has pronounced against you.” Basically, it’s not too late. Correct your wrongs, and God will save you from destruction.
Christians, especially Lutherans, we call this proclamation Law and Gospel. A very beautiful doctrine in the Scriptures. Especially Lutherans, we like this Law and Gospel proclamation. A very famous Lutheran, C.F.W. Walther, wrote a rather large book about it. Here there’s actually just part of it that I would really commend to your reading: some theses that he wrote about law and gospel that are really beautiful about how God’s word is proclaimed in our world today.
Law and gospel is to teach. It’s the doctrine that God’s word is proclaimed in both bad news and in good news. In the law, God communicates to us the bad news of our sin, of breaking His laws, of disobeying His commandments, and the ways that we should relate to others and relate to God. That’s the law. And breaking God’s law is something that we’re all guilty of. In our thoughts, in our words, or our actions, or letter D, all of the above. Whether the smallest of lies or the most harmful intentional suffering you’ve caused someone, we’re all guilty. And like the people of Jerusalem, God judges us for those atrocities.
But God doesn’t proclaim the law to us because He hates us or He wants to punish us. God confronts us with the law to correct us. In this way, the law acts as a mirror. It shows our sins, showing us our sins so that we’ll confess them and seek forgiveness for them because God also wants to proclaim to us good news, the gospel, so that He’ll relent of the disaster that He’s pronounced against us, too.
For our sins, we deserve death and destruction. But God wants us to mend our ways and our deeds and listen to God and obey Him. And we do that. We mend our deeds and our ways by confessing our sin and receiving God’s forgiveness, relenting, not sending disaster, not judging us, not punishing us. All of that good news comes because of another prophet.
One that came to Jerusalem, like Jeremiah, he came to Jerusalem too, but 600 years after Jeremiah. One that also lamented over the city about what had happened there in the past, lamenting about prophets who were killed there, and that he himself would be killed there. Of course, talking about Jesus.
When Jesus was there in Jerusalem, the people said to Him, “You shall die,” and they did kill Him. Jesus was killed in part because of what He also proclaimed: law and gospel. Jesus was a law and gospel guy. There, Jesus was a Lutheran. How about that? After all, Jesus confronted people’s sins and still does. Jesus confronts sin to correct us, and He did so by dying for them, dying for us.
Because of that, God relents of the disaster of punishing our sin because Jesus died in our place. The destruction that we should have because of our sin, death and eternal damnation, Jesus has taken away, dying in our place, suffering that destruction instead of us. That’s the gospel. That’s the good news that God proclaims through His prophets to us that in the death and in the then afterwards resurrection of Jesus—in that, instead of disaster, instead of judgment, we’re forgiven.
Jesus then gathers us under His wings like a hen gathers her brood, protecting us with His love and forgiveness. In His death and resurrection, Jesus protects us from what we really deserve, that destruction of death. We deserve the full judgment of God’s law, and instead, He pronounces good news to us. He pronounces the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins.
Yeah, Jesus is a prophet in proclaiming this to us, but He isn’t a prophet that only proclaims the gospel; He provides it. Jesus actually, He is the gospel. And again, the Old Testament is full of prophets, but Christianity has them today, too. We have prophets today, and in fact really, in a way, all followers are prophets of God. That is that we all proclaim God’s law and gospel.
Yeah, pastors do it publicly on Sunday mornings in front of their flock and at other times, but all of us can have the opportunities to proclaim law and gospel. But like Jeremiah and even Jesus, what prophets proclaim today isn’t always appreciated. It’s certainly not too popular sometimes, okay, especially God’s law.
There are issues in culture today that Christians proclaim the law and it isn’t too well received. There are things that God’s law says is a sin and we proclaim it too in our culture today. And if and when you do proclaim this, people may not only disagree with you but even attack you. Maybe they’re not looking to kill you, but they’ll say, write, or post things about you, trying to shame you, get you to change your mind, apologize, and shut up and go away.
Maybe they’re not trying to kill you, but that can sure make you feel dead. But that’s what culture does to its prophets today. No different than it was years ago with Jeremiah and with Jesus. What we proclaim as “thus says the Lord” is not too popular, not always appreciated. And you may get labeled with all kinds of isms or phobias or accused of being unloving and even hateful. None of that is true, and people we interact with have got to understand this, or we at least have to explain that to them—that in proclaiming God’s law, it’s not out of hate or out of fear or that we’re unloving.
It’s actually that we are very loving as Christians. Speaking against what God says are sins in our culture today is actually very loving, because we are loving so much to confront that sin and have it corrected. Examples of that that happen that nobody questions today are parents; they often confront misbehaving children. Why? To correct them. If you have a friend who is involved in some sort of destructive habits, don’t you confront them to correct them? That’s love. That’s proclaiming the law in love.
Loving so much that that sin is confronted and corrected. It’s the same with cultural issues today. Christians, we love people enough to confront, to proclaim warning about destruction in their sin so that they’ll be corrected. If Christians have any phobia about some cultural issues, it’s because we fear the destruction that can come to people. We don’t want to see that. We want them to be corrected.
And this is what’s really important about proclaiming law, when we’re pointing out sin, about what God says is sin, that as Christians we have to keep this in mind: that we do that to be able to proclaim the gospel, to proclaim that good news. We have to keep this in mind and be able to, as clearly as we can, communicate that to others who are accusing us of hatred or whatever ism or phobia they want to throw at us is that we’re seeking lovingly to confront that and correct it, and then Christify.
I know I just made up a word, okay? And I made Jesus into a verb. I understand that as well. And if you write “Christify” in a Word document, it puts a little red line underneath it, and you can’t use it in Scrabble either. What I mean by that is, by “Christify,” to confront, to correct, and to Christify. What I mean by that is, it’s our goal in proclaiming the law of confronting sin and correcting it, is to point people to Christ, to that gospel good news of Jesus’ love and His grace and forgiveness.
So that those that we’re confronting, correcting—that they can know Christ in that. That’s why we proclaim law. It’s not because we’re hateful, not because we want to punish people or make ourselves look better. No, it’s because we love these people. We want them to turn to Christ.
Jeremiah, the prophet, he’s famous for being the weeping prophet, he was called. He cried a lot. You read the book of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations, which he wrote, which is basically a book of crying. Anyway, he wept for the sins of the people that he was proclaiming law and gospel to. And like Jeremiah, we might weep for the sins of our culture to see even what are considered atrocities today. We want them to know Jesus too, that they will be corrected, they’ll mend their ways and their deeds and turn to Christ.
We don’t want to see that in our culture. We don’t delight in the evil of our culture; we don’t affirm it or celebrate it. We want them to be forgiven too, so we have to proclaim the law. But we darn better proclaim the gospel.
And unfortunately, maybe this isn’t seen enough by those that are confronted in the world with their sin. They’re not seeing the gospel. A lot of very high-profile and public preachers, you know, rail against the atrocities of our culture, about the sin of it, but there’s got to be gospel.
In fact, as C.F.W. Walther would say about the gospel, it should always predominate our proclamation. Not be equal to, not be balanced with law and gospel; there should always be more gospel. It should always predominate. Like Jesus, you know, we lament too over the sins of culture and of ourselves. Kind of like Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I would love to put you under my wings, and yet you reject me.
We want them to be gathered with us in Christ. Those who are sinning today that we confront with the law so that they know the gospel too. And we got to love them enough to confront and correct, but also to Christify, so that they know about Jesus.
Because we know the joy of that, don’t we? We know the joy of being Christified. We know the joy of His forgiveness, of His relenting of our destruction and giving us eternal life instead. We know that. We want that for others too. At least I hope you do. I hope you’ve got non-Christian friends, and maybe even some that are hostile to you, attack you. Good. You’ve got them right where you want them. Right there to hear the gospel too.
We know that joy. May we be able to share that joy with them so that they too could be gathered under Him in His love. Amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the name of Christ Jesus. Amen.