Words Without Weight

Transcript

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[0:00] We'll get into it later. So what Clark just read there was the beginning of the divided kingdom. And maybe you kind of got that. It was that Jeroboam, kind of like twins, Jeroboam, Rehoboam. You can't ever keep them straight. It's like, you know those two crows? What are their names?

[0:18] Or Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But anyways, yeah, the people were like, are you going to be lighter to us than your father, Solomon? And he's like, no, I'm going to throw scorpions at you. Like, who wants to hear this? I'm going to throw scorpions at you? And so they're like, we don't want you as king. We're going to go up north to our land and we're going to start our own country. And so this is the beginning of what was kind of a cold civil war at first, but at various times it flared up. And so that's the divided kingdom.

[0:49] Well, I was just kind of wanting to put that into context because it's related to what we're doing today. I want to talk again about, what we're doing. We're in a six week series on the Old Testament. Now, how do you do the whole Old Testament in six weeks? This is impossible. So it's just a smattering of six passages from six representative sort of areas of the Old Testament.

[1:13] And I want to talk about that. I'll talk about all those sections later. But today we're going to talk about Jeremiah in the southern kingdom who's preaching to Jerusalem. So this is the group that didn't go off and sort of divide the kingdom. They stayed in Jerusalem. They stayed sort of loyal subjects to the southern kingdom and to the dynasty of David and Solomon.

[1:39] And today, really, I want you to be thinking about this. The idea is how do you worship? Not just how you worship, but what do you worship? And do you use worshipful words to cover up a heart that's not worshiping? It's really an interesting question. Okay. So that's going to be kind of tough. But I want to touch on today with Jeremiah, one of Jeremiah's sermons called the Temple Sermon.

[2:02] So he's concerned with how people worship because God's concerned with how people worship and who they worship. So either how you worship affects how you live or how you live affects your worship or both. Right? These things are connected, you know.

[2:18] So God cares about these things. And in the time of Jeremiah, people were living badly. They were living in a bad way. They weren't living good lives. They weren't living upright lives. And they were worshiping poorly. They were worshiping other gods at the same time. Even though they were saying all the words that God told them to say, it was kind of empty. And so it's possible to say the right thing but not really mean it, not really have it in your heart. And this is a big problem for God. In the last line of our reading today, it says, God says, I too am watching. And you could also add, I too am listening. God can tell. It's like... The most omniscient creature in the universe. Do you think you could hide?

[3:01] You could hide sort of that two-facedness from him? He'd be the first person who could see it all. You can fool a thousand other people, but you cannot fool God. But we think we can. That's the funny thing. And Jeremiah gets to that. You cannot fool him. And you cannot use pious words to push him off. He knows. He knows. I too am watching, says the Lord. You'll see. So...

[3:25] Judah... Right now in the time of Judah, there's a little bit too much nationalism that's going on. And it will get them into trouble with more powerful nations like Egypt, Assyria, and eventually with Babylon. And in their worship life, the effects of the incomplete conquest of the land. This was a theme two weeks ago. And the mistakes of Solomon. This was the theme last week, that Solomon allowed all these false gods to enter into the worship life of the country. These two things combine. and so they worship God with one side of their mouth, but then they go out and engage in pagan worship that's not even remotely similar. So this is the interesting thing, is that the worship of God is so different than the worship of pagan idols. For one thing, there's no idol to God. That's just an empty—the Holy of Holies is empty. Like, you go in there, maybe the Ark is in there if it hadn't already been stolen, which it was at one point. But after that, it was empty. So they worshiped an invisible God who cannot be contained in a physical form. But the pagans were worshiping idols. They actually had to build something. And the pagan practices were so much related to land and fertility and involved the sacrifice of vulnerable people.

[4:41] And in the Jewish worship, the worship that God told them, there were festivals and feasts. There were sacrifices. But it was of animals. It wasn't of people or children. That's an important difference, right? So the pagan worship includes the sacrifice of the vulnerable. And never are the powerful sacrificed in pagan worship. I wonder why. You know, the ones who are like, oh, we have to have a sacrifice to appease the gods.

[5:09] And let's pick that person there who can't fight back. You know, let's just grab him. And instead, why wouldn't the leaders of that religion go, you know, the more— the more precious the person, the more powerful the sacrifice. Maybe I should go and be the sacrifice for this whole nation. They never did that because it was a sham. It was a sham, right? But Jesus does. And this is a very important way that Christianity is different from other religions is that the most important one is sacrifice. And his death means a whole lot. Okay. So that's the time. For another time, we're actually going to have a sermon on how Christianity is really different from other religions because I think that's worth knowing. And that's one of the major things. Is that the most powerful person in Christianity is actually sacrificed instead of the most vulnerable person. Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet. If you go through— the men are reading through Jeremiah right now and it talks about him crying all the time, you know. He speaks of his own great sorrow as he watches— as he watches his nation make mistake after mistake. And he's a good model for a prophet. He loves the people and he wants them to be faithful to God. He's not—he's mad at them, but he loves them.

[6:18] Think about being mad. Think about being mad at somebody. You don't love. That's different than being mad at somebody you do love. Okay. Inside your family, you might be mad at your spouse from time to time. I know not a single person in this crowd has that ever happened to. But being mad at somebody you love is different than being mad at somebody you don't love. And it shows differently. When you're mad at somebody you love, your heart is also breaking. Right. But if it's somebody you don't love, it's just pure anger. So he loves these people and he weeps for them. He does not want them to be destroyed. He does not feel good about giving them the new life. He does not want them to be destroyed. He does not want them to be destroyed. And again, that's another good reminder that when we're given a prophetic voice to speak, if we speak against justice, we have to start by loving the oppressor and the oppressed alike. You can't do it if you just love one. You have to love both. And we speak through our own tears. If it ever feels good to be prophetic, watch out because the devil has a foothold already there. The devil, as righteous as that feels, the devil is right there waiting for you to fall. So let's— go to our reading. Our reading is Jeremiah 7, 1 through 11, and I'm reading from the NRSV today,

[7:25] a little bit of a break from tradition. Jeremiah 7, 1 through 11. The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, that's the temple, and proclaim there this word and say, hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words. This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.

[8:05] For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly with another, if you do not oppress, the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house which is called by my name and say, we are safe, only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house which is called by my name become a den of robbers in your sight? You know, I too am watching, says the Lord. Let's pray.

[9:15] Heavenly Father, thank you for this word, this difficult word. Help us to learn from it and add your blessing to it, and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, we're going to come back to this, but that was a little dramatic. I felt a little dramatic about it. I want to yell a little bit, because, you know, don't you think God kind of raises his voice a little bit here and there?

[9:36] Are you going to stand right? It's like when your child lies to you, which I know never happens in this group. Are you going to stand right before me and lie to me? I'm going to stand right before you, and lie to my face? You know, are you really going to do that? That's how God is like, you're going to come in here, and you're going to do that? Okay. Well, I want to go back a little bit, just to kind of go back out for sort of this larger view, because the promise in the six-week series is to kind of overview the Old Testament. So I'm going to do that real quick, going through the sort of the stages, the first five stages of our walk through the Bible series. So just kind of, this is more the lecture time, strap on, you know, your thinking cap, you're like you're in college again, just put, you know, take some notes if you want. But just think about it this way. The first, sort of the first week, we talked about Genesis, which is the story of God's creation, and the calling of God's people into a special covenant nation through the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, because Joseph figures prominently very, very much at the end. And by the way, we, in a larger sense, we love the Old Testament, because it tells this

[10:39] really fascinating story of God and God's people, how he created them, and how he created them, and created the universe, and then sort of had this relationship with his people, a relationship that's really tempestuous and fascinating. And there's all this tenderness that comes from God, but there's also all this sort of anger and righteousness that he insists on. And so it's like a love letter, but it's also like a therapy session. It's like an intervention, you know. There's all sorts of things going on in the Old Testament, and it's worth looking at. And that's why I always say I'm really excited about this. And I'm really excited about this. And I'm really proud of us. I haven't done the exact numbers, but I think we preach from the Old Testament about once every seven to ten weeks. And I'm proud of that, because honestly, there are Protestant churches that don't even preach from the Bible, the Old Testament once a year, maybe once a year. And they're missing out. They're missing out, because as we always say, the Old Testament's always pointing forward to Jesus anyways. So the next section was Exodus, plus three more of those books in that latter section, which was the story of God's rescue of his people from slavery,

[11:41] and the giving of the covenant. The covenant of the law, plus instructions on how they should live and worship. He gave them identity and promised them a land, promised to bring them back to the land in that next section. Then the section that came after that was Joshua and Judges and the conquest of the land, which was promised to Abraham. And the problem again was that they were told to do it, but they didn't do it right, and they didn't finish the job. And so they were left with an intermixture of other religions and other peoples in the land that they took back, and that always led to problems, because they didn't fully follow God's laws and instructions, and there was this yeast of false worship still amongst them. And it grew, it grew, because that's how God described it. And then last week, Victoria preached on the United Kingdom, which are the kings Saul, David, and Solomon, plus the literature. Such as the Psalms and the Proverbs, and some of the Psalms are actually from a later period, but a lot of them are at David's hands. And then there's all sorts of problems that arise. King Saul had problems, King David had problems, he fell to lust and he had someone killed.

[12:56] And then Solomon, right, not paying attention to the needs of the people, grand sort of construction architectural projects, and was exacting a lot of taxes and labor from the people. And then Solomon also, as wise as he was, you wonder how wise he actually was, he had too many wives, too many concubines, and he allowed them to bring their false worship into Jerusalem itself. It was almost like a, it was like a fifth column, you know, like something that just infiltrated from the inside. So there's all sorts of problems. And now, today we're talking about the divided kingdom, and that starts right at our first reading, where Solomon's son takes over and says, I want even more, I want even taller towers, I want bigger roads, I want you to work harder, I'm going to throw scorpions at you to motivate you. And that all blew up in his face, because they're just like, we're leaving, and we're going to go north, and we're going to start sort of our own country. And so one thing that just is always good to clear up is that, you know, one thing that struck me is it sounds like how the Egyptians increased the labor on the Israelites when they were in captivity, isn't it? And so, you know, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a,

[14:07] interesting how the Israel, an Israelite king could treat his own people the way the king of Egypt had treated the Israelites. And so it kind of just goes to show how power is so corrupting. And it's, these are things like this that make the Bible seem awfully true, right? Like here, here, he's almost making slaves of his own people, he's trying to, and they had come out of slavery. God had delivered them from slavery. So there was no way that God was going to let that sit. And so the north, northern kingdom went off.

[14:40] Right in the north. So that's called the northern kingdom, except I'm going to clear up, hopefully, something that's incredibly confusing, is that sometimes the northern kingdom is called Israel. And you're like, oh, come on. Isn't the whole thing Israel? Yes. So there's like five Israels in the Bible, right? The first Israel is Jacob. God gives him a new name. His name is Israel. Thus, all his descendants really are the people of Israel. And then there's Israel, Israel, the whole country, the unified country under the combined monarchy or the united monarchy. And then in the divided monarchy, there's Judah in the south, and the northern kingdom is called Israel, which is confusing. And so I wish actually in most Bible translations, they would just say the northern kingdom of Israel every time they say Israel in reference to that. I think that would be really helpful. And if they would say the southern kingdom of Judah, you know. And then after that, Israel kind of, again, is a unified country, you know, and then after that, Israel kind of, again, is a unified country, after they return from Babylon. And so it's talked about that way, and that's how Jesus talks about it. And in another way, Jesus is the fulfillment of this idea of Israel. And in

[16:02] another way, there's a modern country named Israel, which has some connections to the old Israel, but it really is not as connected to it as most people think. Okay. So all clear as mud. But in this case, when we say Israel in this context, we'll be talking about the northern kingdom. But just keep, I hope you took notes. I could give you a guide. Let's give you a guide. I'll have to create that. So the divided kingdom is where we are today.

[16:28] And this northern kingdom of Israel, it only exists for a few hundred years before it's destroyed by the Assyrians, and most of its people are scattered. And in that time, the northern kingdom Israel would sometimes be an ally of the southern kingdom Judah, or at other times, there would be a war between them. And almost all of the kings of the northern kingdom were bad. They didn't want anything to do with the Davidic kingdom. They didn't want anything to do with the Davidic dynasty, so they started their own dynasties. And there were multiple dynasties. It was a lot of palace intrigue. They were warned, but they led their people astray. They went to other gods. Finally, God judged them and allowed them to be destroyed by the Assyrians, just only about 300 years into their existence. And so the people in the southern kingdom of Judah saw that. They're like, oh, the northern kingdom's gone. Actually, now Assyria is at our borders, basically. The Assyria is Assyria, or Avast. The hostile state of Assyria is now just 30 miles north of Jerusalem. And so there's this tension, like, oh, we better make nice. And so actually, Judah starts paying tribute to Assyria, but they don't like it. And the nationalistic voices are like, we can overthrow the Assyrians. We can ally

[17:38] ourselves with the Egyptians. We can have, you know, I guess you could say, let's make Judah great again. They kind of want to, let's just be, you know. And God's like, this is not the time. There's no time for nationalistic voices. There's no time for nationalistic voices. There's no time for nationalistic voices. There's no time for nationalistic voices. There's no time for nationalism right now. You're going to, you're in trouble. You're all in trouble. You have to pay that tribute. If you want peace, if you want to stay alive, keep paying that tribute. Even King Josiah, who was a good king, he made one huge mistake. He allied with himself with Egypt against Assyria. He died in battle because of that, you know. And God's like, I told you. You love your nation, but you need to love me. This is the worship, right? You can worship your nation, but that's not God, right? Don't put your faith in princes. And so there's all sorts of things. But you would think the people in the southern kingdom of Judah would look at the northern kingdom and go, oh, we better straighten out or that will happen to us too. And that's exactly what Jeremiah says to them. This is going to happen to you too. Only a few kings of the southern kingdom of Judah were good. Josiah was

[18:39] one of them, but he made a sort of a fatal error. And he's a contemporary of Jeremiah. There were one or two other good kings of the southern kingdom, but not many. And this cycle of being close to God and running from God and being close to God continued over and over and over again. The larger message of the divided kingdoms time is that people keep alternating between loyalty to God and loyalty to pagan religions or trying to do both at the same time, which I don't see how you could. But they tried because they're like, it was like a buffet, like a little bit more of this, a little bit more of this. It all tastes great together. Maybe this one's right. Maybe this one's right. Maybe if I worship to all, if I sacrifice, all the gods will have all my bases covered. Maybe that's how they thought about it. But God doesn't allow that. He's like, no, no, no, no, me only. He's very jealous, very selfish. And I think that's a good thing. So in this time, we hear of God's great love for his people, his desire to have them back, his anger at their infidelity. And you heard all of that in this passage today, right? And we're going to look at that. And at the end of it, we'll look at how this all points to Jesus. So that's the review.

[19:50] That's the grand picture of the Old Testament so far. There's one more week to come next week. I've been enjoying this. And so thank you for kind of, thank you for sitting through the college lecture part, but let's take a look at our reading. The first thing I want you to notice, and maybe put the reading back up there, Steve, would you, the very first slide, is I want you to notice that God, despite all this, has this tender heart. Let's go to the next slide. Look at verse three, right? He still wants to be with his people. He uses the word dwell twice. Once in verse three, where it says, amend your ways and your doings and let me dwell. Let me, it's almost like an invitation. Please help. Please have me back. You know what I mean? Let me dwell with you. And in verse seven, let's try to get to seven. He says, if you do all these things, then I will, there it is, then I will dwell with you in this place. He wants to be with his people. It's kind of incarnational. It's actually kind of pointing forward to Jesus. This word dwell is very similar to the Greek word that you find in the Bible. It's a word that you find in the Bible. It's a word that is prologue to the gospel of John. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. This idea of God

[20:56] being with us is very much, it's very much echoes of this, right? He tabernacles with us. He makes his presence known with us. He set, he, he, he sets down roots among us. God says, I want to be with you guys. I want you to be with you. But the implication, this is a two-edged sword. The implication of this is, if you amend your ways, I will dwell with you.

[21:22] If you don't amend your ways, I will depart from you. That's the other thing that's not written explicitly, but that's all in there. And God does say that, this very sobering idea that at some point he will remove his presence from Jerusalem and with it, his protection. If you look at the prophet Ezekiel, there's a vision of God's, it's called the Shekinah, a very interesting word, God's presence.

[21:50] Lifting up and floating away from the temple in Jerusalem. That's a vision, but it kind of, I guess it probably did happen, right? This idea that God would actually take his presence and pull it away from his chosen people. Why? Because they're, he can't coexist with what they're doing. He cannot be in the same space as them. So he warns them about the temple. In the temple is where his presence is in the Holy of Holies. He's living there, although the whole, that, that can't contain him. He's living there, although the whole, that, that can't contain him. Clearly he can be wherever he wants to be. But just because my presence is in the temple now, it won't always be. And so he's telling Jeremiah to really preach a sermon about the temple because the temple has become an idol in the place of God himself. They look at the temple. This is Solomon's temple, how beautiful it is, how great it is. We did a good job building it. They're almost worshiping the temple, not the God who lives in the temple. And God says, I'm going to remove this confusion for you. If you're not careful, take God out of the temple. And then what will you be worshiping? Just a building. I won't be there. Okay. And so Jeremiah says to them, you can't just jump into the temple when a foreign army comes

[23:02] and imagine that the temple will magically defend them. Like it'll suddenly become fireproof and arrowproof and swordproof. And anyone who walks up to it will be struck dead. And it'll be this like magical, like when you're playing tag, you know, base, if you play tag, you know, or some, some safe zone, right? The temple doesn't, it doesn't work that way. Right. And actually in 586 BC, the Babylonian army comes, comes down, they get through the walls of Jerusalem and they go right into the temple and they take everything they can get their hands on and they carry it off and they take a lot of the people off. And the temple itself did not kill a single Babylonian soldier who walked into it. Do you get what I'm saying? Like there was this thinking, that if anyone went into this place and they're not the right person, they would die. But that didn't happen because God was gone. So this is what they say. They say, if they say, this is the temple of the Lord, this is the temple of the Lord. And you notice how it's three times. It's like a magical incantation. Now we're replacing God with magic. This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. It's like a Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, or whatever. Insert

[24:15] your name there, right? Whatever name it is. And they show up. No, this isn't magic. I'm either in the temple or I'm not in the temple. And if you don't amend your ways, I will not be in the temple and it will not protect you. And I will stop protecting you. It's not, I'm not, I can't be summoned with magic. You know, even Aslan, you know, in the Chronicles of Narnia, you know, they're like, let's get Aslan to show up. And they do all these things and he doesn't show up. He shows up when he wants to. That's what they say. He shows up when he wants to. He leaves when he wants to. He's not quite tame, which is a good thing. Same with our God.

[24:51] So this is the problem. And this is for us too, I think, is we mistake a place for God. And this is happening in America. This could be happening in this church. I have to be careful with this church. I love this building. We're doing all these things to fix the building. I have to make sure I'm not worshiping the building or worrying about it too much. I mean, we need to worry about it so that it doesn't fall down. But the building is not Christ. The building is not God. You know, we can worship land. Holy cow, can we worship land?

[25:20] We can worship a building. We can worship a country. But those places are only great if God is in them. I'll say that again. Those places are only great if God is in them. And God is the one to worship, not the temple or the building or the land or the nation. You worship God.

[25:38] And what if you turn the temple into a den of robbers? What if in the area around the temple, there's child sacrifices to false gods? You can go to Jerusalem now and the site of the old temple, it's right there on the temple mount, not 50 yards away is the valley, the Gehenna Valley or the Hinnom Valley, the Gehenna. So that's how we get the word Gehenna. And that's sometimes there was a smell coming up from it because people burned their trash there, but sometimes children were sacrificed there. 50 yards away from the temple were all these false worshiping and destructive, dangerous worship happening to other gods. How could God stay that long with the smoke of that coming up into his nostrils, you know? So what if you turn the temple into a den of robbers? Or what if the area around the temple has child sacrifices? What if a land claims to love God, but practices the kinds of injustice that Jeremiah accuses them of? God can see it. You can use all your pious words like this is the temple, but not mean them, right? So I want you to listen to the list and I pray that it breaks your heart because it breaks my heart. We have to let our hearts be broken for this. This is what it says, and we'll go back there to that second slide. For if you truly amend your ways and your

[26:51] doings, oh, let's go to the next one. Thank you. Yeah, very good. If you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, and then here's this list, and listen to this list. This is a current list. If you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, that's five, six things that are right there. These are the injustices that Jeremiah is telling the people about. Then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. The promise of this land is contingent on them following God and not going after other gods, and it's also contingent on them not practicing injustice. The way you live affects how you worship. The way you worship affects the way you live. Both are true.

[27:43] And our pious words, I'm talking about us now, our pious words won't help us. Our worship of the wrong things won't help us. Slogans and loyalty oaths, they won't help us. Going through the motions won't help us. Putting on a show won't help us. God cannot exist next to idolatry, and the greatest idolatry is idolatry of the self. This is our challenge, right? You're not, I know you're not, I don't, you don't have a statue of a little god in your house that you're worshiping. I know that.

[28:11] But I worship myself. I put myself on the throne. This is the most pernicious idolatry. It's the one that affects all of us, right? And so I'm guilty of all this list, because when I care only about myself, I don't care about any of these other people, right?

[28:30] So we have to, we need to answer. This is a hard word, right? And I don't want you to leave here today saying, God is going to pull his presence away from me if I continue this way, because it has changed. And I'm going to talk about that real quick, because we want to talk about how this points to Jesus, right?

[28:52] Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. are in Babylon, what's left of them, and there's really nothing in this land, in the southern land, at all. So that's the end of the surviving half of the divided kingdom. So we could say the divided kingdom era is over, at least in our thinking. But what does Jesus say, right? Does Jesus talk to us the way God talks to his people? There's something different because Jesus is different, all right? The very last sentence of the Gospel of Matthew, I know you know this one, right? He says this, and remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

[29:56] So that threat that God will pull God's self away from us is not there anymore, but it's replaced by a promise. Jesus has taken on the sins of the world by his work on the cross. Yes, we're still idolaters, but he's going to forgive us, and he does forgive us, and he's not going to take his own sin, but he's going to forgive us, and he does forgive us, and he's not going to take his presence with us, but he's going to stay with us incarnationally. I am with you always to the end of the age. You really can't get rid of him. You could try, but he's going to kind of be with you all the while. And if you're a believer, you also have the Holy Spirit in you, indwelling you all the while. So I don't think we need to fear that we're going to be abandoned again. Jesus is with us even when we sin. And I would even say this, even the people of Judah, thousands were carried off. They were marched. Nobody carried them. Nobody gave them a free ride. They had to march. A lot of them died on the way, no doubt. A lot of them marched to Babylon. Even there, God didn't really abandon them. He was with them. And it was a very rich time. It was a time of them waking up. It's a time when a lot of the Bible was actually put down to paper or parchment,

[31:06] because up until that point, a lot of it had been oral traditions that were really well preserved. And this is when the synagogues began to exist. And the synagogue was kind of this hope that we could have this sort of worship in our own little space, because the temple's gone. The temple's gone. And so the temple as an idol, its destruction might have been a good thing, so that people could remember we can worship God anywhere. And so they lost one more idol, which I think is good, right?

[31:37] So we don't need to fear that we will be abandoned again. Don't go home afraid that Jesus is going to leave you, right? But I do think we need to be concerned about what God is concerned about. And that's the idolatry of the self and the nation and the place and about the justice that he demands of us. And we can't ignore that. We can't say, this is the church, the church, the church, nothing. We don't have to pay attention to any of that. We can just sit here, right? We don't have this magic spell that spares us from the earthly consequences of our own sin. And note that I say earthly, right? Because we do. We do have a Savior who will wipe away the eternal consequences of our sin, and we praise him for that. But there's no magic spells, you know? There's nothing that we can do. We have to worship God. One other way that this points to Jesus, we're almost here at the end here. Jesus quotes this passage. Did you notice that at the very end? Jesus quotes this passage when he clears out the temple. He says, you have turned my father's house into a den of thieves. And so Jesus, when he says that, he's taking on the mantle of Jeremiah. He's continuing the work. He's calling people to true worship. And zeal for his father's house is consuming him. This is the

[32:49] only time Jesus does anything remotely forceful in his ministry. Very interesting. But he cares about the temple because it's his father's house, and he wants true worship to happen there, not commerce, all right? And so there's a bake sale after church today. We're going to raise money. I'm kidding. Just kidding. That's sometimes I worry about if the church is collecting money here, here, here, here, here. I get a little worried about it, right? Jesus is going to show up and he's like, what are you doing? Why so much money changing hands here, right? It's for another time. So that's the choice before us. It's really simple, but it's hard to do. Are we going to worship ourselves and all the other idols, or do we worship God? We can't do both at the same time and not be hypocrites, right? So this is the story of the divided kingdom. It's writ large, and it plays out in our individual lives too. I think that's plenty to think about for a week. Let's pray. Father, thank you again for your word. Thank you for this challenging, passage. Thank you for the stories of this difficult time in the life of your people. Thank you that Jesus is with us always, even to the end of the age. Amen.