THE SERMON - Living in a Time of Judgment | Lamentations 2 examines the decline of American Christianity, citing a 40% loss in Presbyterian congregations and 30% in the ELCA between 2000 and 2015. The speaker condemns denominations like the PCUSA for embracing feminism and the homosexual agenda, comparing modern apostasy to Judah's rebellion against Babylon in 587 BC. He argues that God's judgment on Jerusalem serves as a warning, urging believers to grieve over sin rather than offer false empathy to those mocking divine design. Ultimately, the message calls for public worship and repentance, suggesting that God's judgment purifies His name and may yet lead many to salvation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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A Time of Divine Judgment00:04:38
Our text this morning will be Lamentations chapter 2.
And as is customary, we'll stand to read it, but I want to say a couple of introductory remarks about why I picked this passage.
So as you're looking that up in your Bibles, I'm going to take just a few minutes here to explain myself.
Why did I pick this passage?
We live right now in a time of judgment, God is judging individuals.
God is judging nations and God is judging his people.
It is good to ask what should we do as faithful followers of Christ in times of judgment?
How should we live?
As I look at the state of the church in America, who ostensibly is God's people, I'm grieved by the fall of the evangelical and the Protestant church.
I'm grieved by the fall of Christendom.
I'm grieved by the collapse of public religion.
At best, what we have now are Orthodox churches doctrinally who still maintain their worship of God only privately.
The church is in decline.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America lost about 30% of its congregation and closed 12.5% of its churches in the last 15 years.
Even before the debacle recently with the affirmation of gay pastors, the United Methodist Church had already lost 16.7% of its congregation and closed 10.2% of its churches.
The Presbyterian Church was the hardest hit.
It's lost over 40% of its congregation and 15.4% of its churches closed between 2000 and 2015.
The Southern Baptist Convention, while more solid, has also experienced decline.
Between 2006 and 2020, it lost 2.3 million members.
It's not a coincidence that as this is happening, Churches and denominations are moving further and further into apostasy, false teaching, and heresy.
The PCUSA, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and many others have openly embraced feminism, the homosexual agenda, and all sorts of false teaching.
And on the one hand, their rejection of the one true God angers me.
They violate the third commandment because they put the name church, Christian church, On their building or on their sign.
They say, We are those who worship the Lamb who was slain.
And then right next to that name, they hang the rainbow flag.
It's an abomination and a slap in the face to Christ.
We know that these are not true churches, but many in our culture do not know that.
They see the name church on the side of the building and they think these people will lead me to God.
And so, on the one hand, I'm angered.
By this violation and by this deception.
And on the other hand, my heart breaks as well.
These were once faithful churches, these were once faithful denominations.
They preached a true gospel.
People could go there and hear how to be saved and how to live in a way that honors God.
I feel a little bit like the nation of Israel in Judges when the tribe of Benjamin, the entire tribe, had engaged in massive wickedness and God commanded the rest of the nation to utterly destroy.
The tribe of Benjamin, and the judgment was so severe that only 600 men of the tribe of Benjamin were left alive.
And after that had finished, the rest of the tribes gathered together.
And this is what Judges 21, 2 through 3 says.
It says, And the people came to Bethel, and they sat there till evening before God.
And they lifted up their voices and wept bitterly.
And they said, O Lord God of Israel, why has this happened in Israel that today there should be one tribe lacking in Israel?
They could not imagine the nation of Israel without the tribe of Benjamin.
And even though I disagree with the points of doctrine of many of these other denominations, I also can't bear to imagine Christendom without Christians who descended from Calvin and Luther and Wesley.
The Lord Has Become an Enemy00:05:23
And so I grieve for what's going on in the American church.
And that's why we're looking in Lamentations today.
My goal today is to help us understand what God is doing, both in the church and in our own lives, and to help us to understand how to live in a time when God is judging his people.
Will you stand with me, please, for the reading of God's word?
Once again, it's Lamentations chapter 2.
When I finish reading, I'll say, This is the word of the Lord, at which point I would appreciate if you would say, Thanks be to God.
I'm going to read the whole chapter.
How the Lord, in his anger, has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud.
He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel.
He has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.
The Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the habitations of Jacob.
In his wrath, he has broken down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah.
He has brought down to the ground in dishonor the kingdom and its rulers.
He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel.
He has withdrawn from them his right hand in the face of the enemy.
He has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.
He has bent his bow like an enemy with his right hand set like a foe, and he has killed all those who were delightful in our eyes.
In the tent of the daughter of Zion, He has poured out his fury like a fire.
The Lord has become like an enemy.
He has swallowed up Israel.
He has swallowed up all its palaces.
He has laid in ruins its strongholds and has multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.
He has laid waste his booth like a garden laid in ruins his meeting place.
The Lord has made Zion forget festival and Sabbath and in his fierce indignation has spurned king and priest.
The Lord scorned his altar, disowned his sanctuary.
He has delivered into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces.
They raised a clamor in the house of the Lord, as on the day of festival.
The Lord determined to lay in ruins the wall of the daughter of Zion.
He stretched out the measuring line.
He did not restrain his hand from destroying.
He caused rampart and wall to lament.
They languished together.
Her gates have sunk into the ground.
He has ruined and broken her bars.
Her king and princes are among the nations.
The law is no more, and her prophets find no vision from the Lord.
The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground in silence.
They have thrown dust on their heads and put on sackcloth.
The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.
My eyes are spent with weeping, my stomach churns, my bile is poured out to the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city.
They cry to their mothers, Where is bread and wine?
As they faint like a wounded man in the streets of the city, as their life is poured out on their mother's bosom.
What can I say for you?
To what compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem?
What can I liken to you that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion?
For your ruin is as vast as the sea.
Who can heal you?
Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions, they have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes.
But have seen for you oracles that are false and misleading.
All who pass along the way clap their hands at you.
They hiss and wag their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem.
Is it this city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all the earth?
All your enemies rail against you.
They hiss, they gnash their teeth.
They cry, We have swallowed her.
Ah, this is the day we have longed for.
Now we have it, we see it.
The Lord has done what he purposed.
He has carried out his word, which he commanded long ago.
He has thrown down without pity.
He has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes.
Their heart cried to the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears stream down like a torrent day and night.
Give yourself no rest, your eyes no respite.
Arise, cry out in the night at the beginning of the night watches.
Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord.
Lift your hands to him for the lives of your children.
Who faint for hunger at the head of every street.
Look, O Lord, and see, with whom have you dealt thus?
Should women eat the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care?
Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?
In the dust of the streets lie the young and the old.
My young women and my young men have fallen by the sword.
You have killed them in the day of your anger, slaughtering without pity.
You summoned, as if to a festival day, my terrors on every side.
And on the day of the anger of the Lord, no one escaped or survived.
Those whom I held and raised my hand destroyed.
This is the word of the Lord.
Jeremiah's Intense Grief for Judah00:02:17
You may be seated.
The Book of Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah.
He was a prophet during the time leading up to the devastation and destruction of Jerusalem.
The book itself is a series of five different poems.
They all stand on their own.
Chapter two stands on its own.
They were written at different times, but they work together to convey a singular message of Judah and Jeremiah's grief.
The first two chapters are an acrostic poem, meaning.
Each verse starts with a sequential letter of the Hebrew alphabet, 22 letters in the alphabet, 22 verses.
Chapter 3 does the same thing, but it's 66 verses because Jeremiah did three.
So it'd be three that start with A, three that start with B, et cetera.
The last two, four and five, don't have the acrostic, but still intentionally poetic.
And I think even before we dive in, there's a lesson here that when we grieve, it's good to pour out our hearts, but it's good to be disciplined in our speech as we approach God.
Even in his grief, Jeremiah was not flippant, he wrote carefully.
He wrote intentionally.
The word lamentation in Hebrew, which is the title, is echa, which sounds less like a word and more like a sigh, a groan, a grieving.
Echa.
One commentator said the book of lamentations is the sound of a broken heart.
The question to answer today is why is Jeremiah so grieved?
And how does he respond to this grief?
Notice back in verse 11 how intense this grief is.
He says, Jeremiah is having physical grief here.
He's convulsing, he's weeping uncontrollably, he's vomiting bile onto the ground.
What has happened to cause this?
In short, something has happened to Jerusalem that no Jew would really have believed was possible.
Destruction and Blood in Jerusalem00:09:20
From the time of David, King David on, when Jerusalem was established as the capital, Jerusalem for 400 years had been the blessed city of God, totally protected by God, the apple of God's eye.
Listen to how David describes Jerusalem in Psalm 46.
He says, There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her.
She shall not be moved.
God will help her when morning dawns.
For almost half a millennia, God had protected Jerusalem and, by extension, his people.
But now, when Jeremiah writes Lamentations, God has acted in an astonishing way.
He has judged his people utterly.
And this leads us to the first point.
How do we respond and live in a time of God's judgment?
First, we acknowledge that God is right to judge, that God has a right to judge sin.
Let me give some historical context to help us understand how right indeed God was.
After Israel's first three kings, that was Saul, David, and Solomon, the nation of Israel split.
The ten northern tribes became the kingdom of Israel.
The two southern tribes became the kingdom of Judah.
The northern kingdom was a wreck from the beginning.
They were wicked, wicked, wicked, and they didn't last very long.
In 722 BC, God allowed the Assyrians to destroy the ten northern tribes, to take them off into captivity, and they basically never returned and never had a land.
Judah, however, remained a little bit more faithful to God.
It had some good kings, and God allowed Judah to continue on for several hundred years after the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed.
However, even that was a descent into sin.
And even by the time of King Josiah, who was a good and righteous king, he found the book of the law.
He tore down the high places.
He killed the false priests.
He instituted the law in the land.
Even by then, it was too late.
The kings that followed King Josiah were wicked, and in response, God allowed the Babylonians.
To invade Jerusalem and to plunder the city.
That's the time that Jeremiah lived and prophesied during.
Actually, Babylon invaded Jerusalem twice.
During the first invasion, the Babylonians won the battle, they marched into the city, they plundered the temple goods, the gold and the silver, they plundered the palace, and they took captive all the promising young men and women.
This is when Daniel and his companions were taken off to Babylon.
That was the first time.
But they did not destroy Jerusalem.
Instead, they allowed for Jewish kings to continue to serve kind of as governors, but they were definitely subject to Babylon.
They had to pay a tribute, they had to follow Babylon's requirements.
These took place for about 20 years, and finally, the last king of Judah, named Zedekiah, King Zedekiah, decided he had had enough of this, and he rebelled against Babylon.
And in particular, he made an alliance with Egypt to the south.
And he thought, I'll ally with Egypt.
We can throw off Babylon's yoke.
We can be a free country in an alliance rather than a subjugated country.
Now, all this time, Jeremiah was prophesying against Judah's sin.
He warned them to repent again and again.
He warned them not to ally with Israel, but to trust in God for their salvation.
But as we see in Lamentations 2 14 that we just read, Judah chose to follow false prophets.
They made their alliance with Egypt.
And when they did, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had finally had enough.
He was going to come back to Jerusalem, and this time he was coming for blood and for destruction.
Now, interestingly enough, Nebuchadnezzar knew his history, and he was reluctant to destroy Jerusalem, and in particular, the temple.
He knew what had happened about 100 years earlier when King Sennacherib of the Assyrians had invaded Judah and tried to destroy Jerusalem.
You'll remember that was the time of King Hezekiah.
And 2 Kings 19 tells us this.
And that night, the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians.
And when the people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.
Nebuchadnezzar knew that a divine, powerful deity protected Jerusalem, and in particular, the worship going on in Jerusalem, which was in the temple.
He was reluctant.
So he enlisted his own sorcerer to seek out his own divine guidance.
And the records report that this sorcerer took a bow and arrows and shot arrows from Babylon in the relative direction of the nations around Babylon.
And the reports say that as he fired arrows at different nations, the arrow in mid flight split.
And the only arrow that flew.
True and straight was the arrow that they fired in the direction of Jerusalem.
And Nebuchadnezzar took this as a sign that he would prevail and that the divine power there would not resist him.
And yet, Nebuchadnezzar was wiser than the Jews, and he still feared retribution from God.
And so, when he marched from Babylon towards Jerusalem, he actually camped outside of Judah on the border of northern Israel and Assyria in a city called Riblah.
And from there, he sent his general in the army south, and he stayed there.
Output transcript Out of the blast zone, as it were.
His general, Nebuchadnezzar, marched south to destroy Jerusalem.
And Nebuchadnezzar actually warned this general that he must be careful not to allow the Jewish people to pray to their God or to repent, because he knew that if they did, God would intervene.
It's amazing that even a pagan king had the spiritual insight that the Jews lacked, that God's people lacked, to see that if they repented, God may have intervened.
And they certainly had plenty of time to repent.
This siege lasted two years.
The Babylonian army set up siege works around the city and they just waited them out and they cut off the food supply.
And finally, because of that starvation, the Babylonians were able to breach the walls in the month of Tammuz, which is July 587 BC.
2 Kings 25 records the event like this.
In the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, and on the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came with all his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to it.
And they built siege works all around it.
So the city was besieged till the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.
On the ninth day of the fourth month, the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.
Then a breach was made in the city, and all the men of war, this is the Jewish men of war, fled by night.
By way of the gate between the two walls, by the king's garden.
And the Chaldeans, who are the Babylonians, were around the city.
And they went in the direction of Araba.
But the army of the Chaldeans pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho.
And all his army, this is Zedekiah's army, was scattered from him.
Then they captured the king and brought him to the king of Babylon at Riblah.
And they passed sentence on him.
They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes and put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains and took him to Babylon.
In the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, that was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.
Nebuzaradan, that's the general, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of the King of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.
And he burned the house of the Lord and the king's house and all the houses of Jerusalem.
Every great house he burned down, and all the army of the Chaldeans who were with the captain of the guard broke down the walls around Jerusalem.
And the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had deserted to the King of Babylon, together with the rest of the multitude, Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, was carried into exile.
But the captain of the guard left some of the poorest of the land to be the vine dressers and plowmen.
After this destruction, they sifted through everything and they even went so far as to melt down the metals.
They had taken most of the gold and silver, but they melted down the bronze and the iron and they carried it off to Babylon to use for themselves.
Rebellion Against God's Word00:10:36
The point here is it would have been impossible at this point for either civil government or religious worship to have been carried out by God's people in Jerusalem.
There was no temple.
There were no articles in the temple.
There was no means to offer sacrifice.
Nothing was left.
And that's why in Lamentations 2 7, Jeremiah says this The Lord has scorned his altar.
He has disowned his sanctuary.
He has delivered into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palace.
Here's the point Jeremiah wanted it to be very clear that it was not the Babylonians who were responsible for this destruction.
That it was God Himself who was responsible.
You see, the Lord would rather that the instruments of His worship, the place of His worship, and the people of His worship be burned, destroyed, and taken away rather than continue to be used improperly for false and idolatrous worship.
God would prefer, bringing this to modern times, that the buildings of the apostate and blasphemous churches wrought.
And become homes for mice and spiders than that they continue in perpetuity to reject and defame the name of Christ.
Brothers and sisters, God would prefer to destroy this church, Covenant Bible, if we ever were to allow ourselves to devolve into idolatry or false worship.
He would rather kill your body or remove you from the body of Christ.
Then allow you or us to worship and serve other gods.
He loves the purity of his name and the purity of his people more than anything else.
So there's an obvious application here.
Be zealous to purify yourself before the Lord, be zealous to deal with sin, be zealous to follow and worship God as he commands.
At this time, the Babylonians killed the priests, they killed the kings.
They killed princes, they killed young people, they killed old people, they killed men, they killed women.
The carnage was horrific.
Whatever was left of the rubble was covered in ash from the fires.
The siege had been so bad that the people were starving.
And we see in Lamentations 2 20 that they were so desperate that they had resorted to the worst and most vile form of cannibalism imaginable that I won't spell out here because of the young ears.
Jerusalem was not just conquered.
It was utterly ravaged and violated.
This is why Jeremiah is in such shock.
But notice how he responds.
As I said, we are to acknowledge that God is right to judge and that he is directly responsible for the judgment.
So, first, Jeremiah acknowledges that God is directly responsible for the destruction.
In spite of all of this, Destruction and war and famine.
Nowhere in this chapter and nowhere in the book of Lamentations do we see Jeremiah accusing God of being unfair.
In the chapter before this one, chapter 1, verse 18, Jeremiah writes on behalf of Israel, The Lord is in the right.
We have rebelled against his word.
And in chapter 3, verse 42, Jeremiah writes, We have transgressed and rebelled, and you have not forgiven.
You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us, killing us without pity.
Jeremiah wants this lesson to be crystal clear to the Jews at that time.
Even though Nebuchadnezzar, his army, yes, had destroyed the city, Jeremiah says that it was God.
Look back at chapter 2, verse 5 the Lord has become an enemy to us.
Verse 6 the Lord destroyed the temple and laid the city in ruins.
Verse 8 the Lord humiliated his people.
Verse 17 goes so far as to say, The Lord has done what he purposed.
He has carried out his word, which he commanded long ago.
He has thrown down without pity.
He has made the enemy rejoice over you, and he has exalted the might of your foes.
Jeremiah is only preaching what God has already said.
God promised that this would happen long before, when he gave them the law and commanded them to follow him.
Leviticus 26 has this.
Stern warning that we see fulfilled here in Jeremiah's time.
Moses said, But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, God, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins.
You shall eat the flesh of your sons, you shall eat the flesh of your daughters, and I will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your idols, and my soul will abhor you.
And I will lay your cities waste and will make your sanctuaries desolate.
And I will not smell your pleasing aromas.
And I myself, I myself will devastate the land so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled at it.
See, it was not just politics, conquest, the nature of empires, trade routes, political decisions.
This was God's judgment.
He had done this to Judah.
God is able to weave a thousand, thousand details of natural consequences, divine intervention, and the way the world is working exactly according to His will to bring judgment on whom He will.
He is able to judge nations and individuals and churches.
And this, brothers and sisters, is one of the jobs of the church, especially in times of judgment.
One of our jobs is to point out that God has, in fact, judged.
It's not just economic policy, it's not just international politics.
God is the one judging.
And as we confess this, we pray and trust that some will have ears to hear that message and they will see that it is indeed the hand of God that has brought calamity on their life, their church, or their nation, and that they will repent.
But Jeremiah did not just confess that God had done it.
That's only half of the equation.
Because if we leave it there, some might be tempted to think well, God is cruel.
God is an angry God who is unreasonable.
God did this?
What kind of God is this?
So Jeremiah also affirms that God was right to do this.
Even though Judah has just been destroyed and devastated, I mean, think about it.
There's dead all over.
The people are in complete desolation.
Jeremiah writes chapter 2 and points out over and over and over how the people abandoned God and is pointing out God is right to have done this.
Yes, even this, God is right.
In verse 3 of chapter 2, we see that they abandoned him.
And Jeremiah says, You abandoned God, so he withdrew his hand from you.
In verse 4, we see that they sided with God's enemies, so God made himself their enemy.
In verse 6, we see that they did not keep the Sabbath.
Nor the festivals that God had commanded.
So God replaced those joyous songs with screams of terror in the temple.
In verses 5, 6, 8, and 9, we see that Israel had put its hope, or Judah had put its hope, in its walls and fortifications.
So God utterly destroyed those.
In verse 7, we see that they abandoned the worship of God.
So God destroyed the temple.
In verse 9 and 14, we see that they abandoned the law.
And followed false prophets.
So God destroyed the law.
That's a striking statement there.
That is, He destroyed the ability for them to carry out the law, both in a civil sense, there's no more king, in a religious sense, there's no more temple, but also they now are carried off to Babylon and they must follow the laws of a pagan king.
They cannot any longer carry out and obey the law of God as they ought.
Though they were an exalted city, the last thing Jeremiah says, though they were an exalted city, verse 15 and 16, that kings used to travel to and pay homage to and hold up as a jewel on the earth, God had made them laughingstocks and beggars, disease, something to look at with revulsion, to mock.
In fact, when Nebuchadnezzar took this group of exiles back to Babylon, He did something horrible.
Many, many of them he stripped naked and put in chains and made them march in their chains along the side of the riverbank in Babylon publicly for all to see.
And then he sat on his boat out in the river and he observed them pass by and he took special notice of the Jews who were the most beautiful.
And he ordered them executed on the spot and their bodies mutilated and disfigured in a message to his people that this people, the Jews, are not to be.
Pointing to Repentance Through Pain00:15:23
Shown compassion, not to be mixed with.
We are utterly shaming and scorning them.
What do we do with this?
The first thing to do with this is to recognize humbly that this is the kind of God that we serve.
He is holy, He will not be negotiated with, He will not be mocked, He will not be patient forever, though He is slow to anger.
He was perfectly just to do this to Judah.
The second thing that we are to do is we are to bear witness to God's judgment and to defend God, not man.
We don't try to excuse man.
We don't go to God and say, Yeah, but it's not so bad.
You're kind of being mean here.
No, we get that backwards.
Our job is to uphold God's right to do what he is going to do.
And you, oh man, are the one to repent, you are the one to question God.
If you are in the wrong.
So, when we look at what's going on among God's people now, by that I mean in our context, the evangelical church, we are being judged for abandoning God's commands.
The judgment is not complete.
We're a little bit different than Jeremiah here.
And so we preach repentance and we warn whenever possible.
In Revelation 2 and 3, Jesus threatens to remove the lampstand from churches that will not submit to Christ and repent.
This is absolutely possible.
God could utterly destroy the churches and denominations in America and would be totally right to do so.
How do we think about this for our church?
Here's a message I think we need to hear.
We live in a time of judgment, which means we live in a time of chaos.
We are all very diligent and concerned to try and figure out our place in culture.
We're trying to figure out who is in charge, what alliances to make, how to remain faithful.
Who we can partner with, who is an enemy.
We want to be like the sons of Issachar, who understood the times and what to do.
And that's very good.
But remember, the most important thing that we can do is to fear and obey God.
And I mean publicly, publicly.
I don't just mean in your home, although you must.
I mean, we must publicly fear and obey God, all the more as the church around us abdicates its responsibility.
God did not spare Judah, but he judged and disciplined them.
And our greatest zeal should be for obedience to God's law.
And I am so thankful that I say this to you not as a rebuke, but as an encouragement to excel still more, because this is the desire of most of us here.
I'm very thankful for that.
Individually, we must get rid of sin.
We must get rid of sin in our lives.
We must get rid of sin in our lives.
We must fear God.
Don't coddle your sin.
You know what coddle is?
It's to treat it gently.
Don't play with it.
Don't hide it.
Don't minimize it.
John Gill said that the prophets that now speak are the entire Bible.
Open yourself up to the prophet of God, which is his word, that it can examine and expose you.
Matthew Henry, commenting on this chapter, says, If we allow sin, our greatest adversary, to have dominion over us, justly or rightly will other enemies also be suffered to have dominion.
This is always the pattern.
Israel allowed sin to have dominion over them.
Judah allowed sin to have dominion over them.
Church after church and friends, sometimes we individually allow sin to have dominion over us.
And when sin has dominion over us, it is not long after before other enemies of God have dominion over us.
So that's the first point.
That's intentionally the largest one.
Don't panic.
The other two are shorter.
But the first and main point of today's sermon is that when we live in a time of judgment, we are called to acknowledge that when God judges and punishes, he is absolutely right to do so.
We have no room to complain, we only have room to grieve over sin and to hope in God's grace.
Which leads to the second point How do we live in a time of judgment?
We grieve over sin because sin dishonors God and sin destroys.
Jeremiah had preached and prophesied for a long time.
And after Jerusalem was destroyed, he could have gloated.
He could have run around saying, I told you so.
See, you should have listened to me.
You're all a bunch of idiots.
I was right.
And yet, instead, God commands.
We see that in Jeremiah.
God commands Jeremiah to write lamentations.
Matthew Henry, again commenting on chapter 2, says this.
He says, It is a great sin to jest or to mock.
It is a great sin to jest at others' miseries and adds much affliction to the afflicted.
Again, it is a great sin, he says, to jest at others' miseries.
When someone makes an utter shipwreck of his life, Through sin.
And God judges him, and he comes to the point where it is obvious to all, kind of like the prodigal son, that he has indeed sinned.
That is not the time to say, I told you so.
This person really has dishonored God, which is tragic and deserves grief.
And he really has destroyed his life, which is tragic and deserves grief.
We need to be careful here, though.
Grief has been weaponized in our time, false grief for things that are not sin.
It is true that there is a natural feeling of grief when we see death and devastation, when a loved one dies, and this is good and appropriate.
But one of the reasons that we are to grieve, that we see in Lamentations 2, is that our grief over people's sin is to show them that we are to grieve.
What is the proper response that they should have?
Over and over in the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah speaks as though he had offended God.
He says, I have done this.
I am sorry for this.
I grieve over this.
He is modeling for what's left of the nation of Judah and teaching them what their response should be, that they should be grieved.
Here's the key obviously, the people of Judah are grieving over the devastation and the death.
But Jeremiah knows.
That's not enough.
They need to grieve over their sin and over the fact that they have abandoned God.
And so I think that one of the reasons that God commands Jeremiah to write these laments is to show the people that their primary grief, the root of their grief and mourning, is not for the dead, as terrible as that is, but for their rebellion against God.
And in this is the difference between Jeremiah's approach and the modern evangelical approach.
As people are descending into sin, Jeremiah is warning.
And then, after God judges and they're left with wreckage, Jeremiah grieves.
But what we want to do is, as people are descending into sin, we want to grieve and empathize with them as they're doing that.
Modern evangelicals often want to grieve with the woman who has just aborted her baby, they want to put their arm around the LGBTQ member as that person mocks God's design.
That is not when we are to grieve.
Remember that as Judah plunged into wickedness, Jeremiah did not empathize.
He preached God's law and he called them to repent.
And it was only after God judged that Jeremiah was commanded to grieve with them.
God's judgment is always designed to teach something.
God doesn't waste his efforts, doesn't waste his actions.
His judgment also is designed to teach.
When God gives physical discipline, he brings someone to ruin in their marriage when he is unfaithful to his wife.
He brings the nation of Israel or Judah to complete destruction because of their idolatry.
When God disciplines in a physically obvious way, It's designed to teach a spiritual truth.
The truth that God is teaching to Judah is that though the destruction of the city is great, the destruction for your sin in eternity will be greater.
As horrific as this is, it pales in comparison to what awaits those who do not repent.
So Jeremiah calls Judah to repent, and now as he does so, he grieves with them.
Our grief over the sin of others.
Who are going through God's judgment teaches them what to do.
I know someone whose children, one child in particular, walked away from the faith, made terrible choices, received terrible consequences, and when all of this came to light, the parents grieved stronger and harder than the children, than the child in this case.
But it was the parents' evidence and demonstration.
Of this is a big deal, and we are weeping and grieving for days and weeks that eventually led the child to realize that is supposed to be my response.
I am kind of upset about my sin.
Mom and dad are crying.
Okay, I'm pretty upset about my sin.
Mom and dad are crying.
I am utterly overwhelmed at my sin because mom and dad are crying.
This is the progression.
When God's people weep, we don't weep just.
As an arm around the shoulder, we weep as a teaching demonstration to people that this is what their sin has done.
Because sin always hardens, and people who are going through God's judgment need to be told how to respond.
Some who go through God's judgment are hearing the voice of God.
What do I do?
Ah, I grieve.
Let me give one example from the culture that I think is coming down the line.
Transgender agenda that is running rampant in our country, really across the world.
Right now, this movement and the people who engage in this are hardening their hearts to God.
And right now, our message is unequivocally repent, for destruction is coming.
But I think we're not too far away from the time when these so called transgender people realize that they have mutilated their bodies, that they have utterly distorted all sense of sexuality that God has given them.
And that they will begin to come to their senses.
And as they do, the sense of horror, not just for what they have done to themselves, but for some of how they have violated God's standards, will descend on them.
And we are called to grieve with them because they are called to grieve.
We are called to point them to repentance.
The first step of repentance is grief for sin.
We have received grace upon grace, and as God judges, Churches and individuals, who are we to withhold that grace from them?
Many people in AA realize that they have hit rock bottom.
That's not what they need to realize.
Rock bottom is not the lesson that God is trying to teach them.
The lesson that God is trying to teach when He judges someone is, You have offended me.
You have sinned against me.
So, how do we grieve over sin?
A couple of pointers from Lamentations 2.
It's not an exhaustive list, but it's helpful.
We see in verse 10 of Lamentations 2 that Jeremiah and the people put dust on their head, they wore sackcloth, they bowed their faces to the ground.
This is a public Humble posture towards God.
They grieved publicly.
They grieved with their body, saying, I am a wretch before you, God, and I have nothing to offer.
We mentioned already the weeping and the vomiting.
This is a real grief, not a fake grief.
It's the grief that leads to repentance, the godly sorrow that does.
If you are caught in a sin and you're not grieved by it, you need to pray for grief.
But I would also seek.
Counsel from an older, wiser saint.
Think about this.
You have a child who's sick.
The mom knows the child is sick and she's concerned.
She goes to the doctor and the doctor runs some tests.
The doctor maybe knows the family, a family doctor.
The doctor gets the test results back and the doctor begins to weep.
That is serious.
The mom was concerned.
The doctor weeps at the test results.
If you are hard towards sin, go to someone who is.
Righteous and mature, and let their response to your sin teach you.
Let their, oh no, this is devastating.
This will destroy your life.
I weep for the destruction you've already done.
Let that teach you.
Jeremiah was silent in verse 13.
Sometimes silence is the appropriate way to grieve.
He cried out day and night.
Grief is a process, especially for serious sin.
It's a discipline and it's a process.
Don't beat yourself up on the one hand for a minor sin.
Grieve it, confess it, and move on.
But for major sin, it's a process and a discipline.
Jeremiah grieved for the people, and God calls us when people are going through judgment, especially when they're becoming aware of the judgment, to grieve with them.
But grief is not the final word.
Discipline Proves God Loves Us00:08:51
We are Christians.
We serve a triumphant king who is making all things new and therefore blast.
The third way for us to respond in times of judgment is to hope.
It is proper, even in times of judgment where we would be tempted to despair, it is proper to hope.
There are two reasons for this.
The first is that when God judges and removes wicked people from his assembly, from his people, he is doing this to glorify his name.
God can utterly destroy the wicked, even those who call themselves Christians.
And as he does this, he purifies his name.
Notice he doesn't purify himself.
He has no sin.
But the idolatry of his people can make his name look tarnished, look dirty, look broken.
And so when he judges, he removes people who are idolatrous and wicked, and this lifts up his name.
This glorifies his name.
And this is always very good because when God's name is elevated properly, people respect and fear and honor it.
And so, even in judgment, if the only thing that happens is God utterly destroys, and what's left after that is his name shining and bright and glorious, this is a good and worthy thing for us to hope in.
But, second, when God judges, it is the pattern that that same judgment that cleans and washes away the unrepentant can also lead some back to repentance.
We know this in Hebrews 12.
It says that for the Lord disciplines whom he loves.
Jesus says the same thing in Revelation 3.
He says, Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline.
Jeremiah doesn't know who who were exiled or who of the survivors will repent.
But he's diligent to call them to this.
In chapter 3, 38 through 41, he says to them, Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?
Why should a living man complain, a man, about the punishment of his sins?
Let us test and examine our ways and return to the Lord.
Let us lift up our hearts and our hands to the God of heaven.
As Augustine said, the same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay, and we don't know when God judges which is being hardened and which is melting.
And so when God judges, we are right to hope that he will save some.
But there's a vital lesson here for us to end with.
Look with me at Lamentations 2 13.
Jeremiah is so dismayed at the devastation of Judah.
He's casting about for some words, comfort, guidance to give them.
And he says, What can I say for you?
To what compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem?
What can I liken to you that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion?
For your ruin is vast as the sea.
Who can heal you?
Here, Jeremiah has no answer.
He doesn't know.
Who can heal you?
How can God possibly heal after this level of destruction?
We don't know if God will save our lost family member or friend.
We don't know if God will cause a church or a denomination or a nation to repent.
We might be tempted to be overwhelmed when we look at the church in America and what a disgrace it is.
But we know that God will judge and attendance will decline, and the church, unless it repents, will become the laughingstock among the people, and their buildings will rot and become home for mice and spiders.
And this great loss is better than the alternative of those churches continuing in idolatry.
But in the midst of this uncertainty, Jeremiah puts on truth.
He girds himself with truth, he fortifies himself with what he knows about God, and he wraps himself with faith.
And he writes one of the most famous passages in the Bible in the very next chapter, Lamentations 3 21 through 26.
He says this, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Brothers and sisters, it is vital for us to see that our hope in God during a time of judgment does not mean that we will necessarily know what God is doing or how God is doing it.
Let me say that again.
Our hope in God, rightful, proper, faithful hope in God, does not mean that we will know how God is going to work.
Or when he is going to work.
On the one hand, Jeremiah says, Your ruin is as vast as the sea.
Who can possibly heal you?
And on the other hand, he said, The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
I hope in God because I know his character, he says.
God will purify his name and he will call some to repentance.
Brothers and sisters, we live in a time of judgment.
That is why things are so chaotic.
God is punishing his people, the church.
He's making the church his enemy in a way.
He's making the church a laughingstock.
But through this, he will preserve a remnant.
He will purify his bride because he loves her with an everlasting love.
And our response is to acknowledge that God is right to judge, to defend God to the people around us who mock him, to warn people that God's judgment is here and will likely get worse.
Our second response is.
Is, especially as we see people go through judgment, to grieve over their sin, to teach them what sin does through our grief, and then to grieve with them.
And third, our response is to hope in God's character, to continue to build, to continue to laugh, to continue to feast, to continue to preach repentance, to continue to worship, to lead and shepherd your family.
For God's faithfulness is great, His mercies are new every morning.
Therefore, we will hope in him.
We will not give in to despair.
We will proclaim him and love him and worship him publicly.
This is our call.
This is our privilege.
This is our witness to the world and to the apostate church.
Let's pray.
Gracious Father, our only hope is you.
Our only hope is your character and your faithfulness, the fact that you love your name.
And you will do whatever it takes to purify your name.
Lord, we pray that we would be individually soft, that we would deal with sin, that we would weep over sin, that we would repent over sin, that we would heed the warnings in your word about sin.
We pray as a church that we would be faithful to you, to obey you publicly and in our own dealings here in the church, that we would be zealous to be a light for you and to stand for truth.
Lord, we pray for the church in America and in Canada and in Europe that is so, in many ways, so far from you.
Lord, we pray that you would judge in a way that spares many.
Lord, if that is not your will, that you would judge in a way that brings honor and glory to your name.