Flight JLA01 - Part A

Chapter 31 verse 31. Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a covenant. Not we will, not a bilateral covenant. It's something I am going to do for people.

It is unilateral. I'm going to do the heavy lifting. I'm going to be the one who sets the terms of the covenant.

I'm going to get the job done. All people will have to do is believe, receive, trust. God has made covenants with His people because He desires to be in relationship with them. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip talks about these covenants, including the new covenant you're a part of today. But first, we want to share about where you can hear even more encouraging Bible messages from Skip. I want to invite you to follow my podcast so you can get even more inspiring teaching. Just search Skip Heitzig, that's Skip, H-E-I-T-Z-I-G, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to follow the podcast so you know when a new teaching is available.

Thanks Skip. Now, we're in the book of Jeremiah as we dive into our study with Skip Heitzig. Second part of the book of Jeremiah is where we're going to look at tonight, very briefly, before going into our five chapters of the book of Lamentations. Yes, this is the Bible from 30,000 feet.

Yes, we are moving rapidly. Yes, this is an important book. It is the kind of a book, frankly, that a lot of people would just brush over, not give it a whole lot of attention.

Especially if they're prophecy buffs, there's not a whole lot in here about prophecy. It's a sad kind of a book. It's a sad section of scripture.

But we're going to find some nuggets in this section of the Bible. Now, I don't know how you were in school when it came to dates, memorizing dates. Did you hate that when the teacher in history said there are certain dates you need to memorize?

And of course, we memorized them and forgot them the next 20 minutes after the test, right? But there were some dates in Israel's history that I want to share with you that are important. And it's the third one that is the real, real important date. But there were three successive attacks on the city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and that's the period of history we're dealing with. The first date, and since we're dealing with BC, the numbers get smaller, even though the years move on chronologically. The first year is 605 BC. In that year, the Babylonians attacked the city of Jerusalem, and they took some of the people captive, bringing them back home with them to Babylon as slaves. In that first deportation, or group of people that were deported to Babylon, in that first group, a young man whom you know by the name of Daniel was taken. That's 605 BC. In that year, Daniel left Jerusalem and moved to Babylon, where he ministered successfully for years.

That's the first date. The second date, 597 BC, a few years after 605. In 597 BC, Babylonians again came against Jerusalem, and this time they took some of the nobles and the leaders of the land, depriving the land of strong central leadership politically and spiritually. The final year is 586 BC, and in 586 BC, that is when ultimately Jerusalem fell, everyone was taken captive that the Babylonians wanted, the city was destroyed, and the city was burned with fire because the walls of Jerusalem had been breached. Now in chapter 21 of Jeremiah, all the way to chapter 29, from 21 to 29, the prophet affirms the certainty of the conquest.

What do I mean by that? Well, Jeremiah predicted Babylon is coming. Most people didn't believe it. They said, we like what the other prophets are saying better than you, Jeremiah. They're saying Babylon isn't coming. They're saying we're not going to be taken captive. They're saying we're not going to be destroyed. But Jeremiah is so utterly certain that what God told him is coming to pass, that Babylon will indeed destroy ultimately Jerusalem, that Jeremiah penned a letter to the captives or the would-be, will-be captives of the city of Jerusalem.

In Jeremiah 29, it is that letter. And he tells them, look, you're going to be there a long time. You're going to be there 70 years. Get used to it. Make a life out of it. Get married. Have kids. Get busy.

Get involved in the city. But I am going to eventually bring you back to your land. And he says, for I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord.

Thoughts of peace, not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. You know that verse. But now you know the context of that verse. The people who would be utterly defeated and morally depleted, who would think the Lord has forgotten about us. He allowed this to happen. God is saying, not only did I allow it to happen, but I am powerful with my righteous right hand to bring you back into the land, the land of Israel, the land of Canaan as your inheritance.

So God reveals to them the reason for the captivity. Think of it as a spanking. A spanking they would never forget so they would run back into their father's arms. As a parent, I hated spanking my son. There were times I had to spank Nate just last week. No, I'm just kidding.

Fortunately, it was a period of time that didn't last long, but every time I did it, I hated to do it, but I loved the result. Now with grandkids, it's not my job. My job is to fill them with sugar and send them home happy. Let the parents deal with that.

But as a parent, you would want to win their heart. And so you would administer certain hurts to them in order to do that. So the Lord spanked the nation, knowing the nation would eventually be brought back into that land of inheritance. Now knowing the repeated failure of his people, God eventually, and you'll see it now in chapter 31 of Jeremiah, knowing the repeated failure of his people, God promised a brand new covenant eventually. You see, if you remember back when God gave the Torah, the law to Moses and Moses gave it to the people and the people had said to Moses, you Moses, you go near to Mount Sinai.

You hear what God says and whatever it is that God instructs you to tell us, tell us and we will do it. It was a good heart. It was a noble thing to say. It was the right thing to say, but God knew of their inability to keep his law completely. And so he said, oh, that my people had such a heart within them. God yearned for that heart to be able to follow through.

He loved their commitment, but he knew they were eventually unable to keep it. So in Jeremiah 31, the time has come for God to announce a brand new covenant, a change of covenant. Chapter 31 verse 31. Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord. When I will make a covenant, not we will, not a bilateral covenant, it's something I am going to do for people.

It is unilateral. I'm going to do the heavy lifting. I'm going to be the one who sets the terms of the covenant.

I'm going to get the job done. All people will have to do is believe, receive, trust. So he said, I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant, which they broke. Though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people. Now fast forward to the New Testament, the Gospel of John, when in chapter 1 it is written, For the law came by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. The old covenant tried to control people's conduct. The new covenant changes people's character. Because with the new covenant comes the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and giving us power to be able to pull off what God commands us to do. There's a little poem I've used it for years. Do this and live the law commands, but gives us neither feet nor hands. A better word the Gospel brings, it bids us fly and then gives us wings. What the law could not do, Jesus in the covenant of grace can do.

Think of it this way. Under the law, we were limited to sheet music. If you are a musician and you know about the little dots and dashes on the lines of a sheet of music, and you learn to memorize whole notes and half notes and the syncopation and the meter, you learn all that.

And you read that in order to get through an instrumentation. That's the Old Testament. In the New Testament, God says you're going to be able to play by ear. I'm going to put the ability for you to hear the song in your heart.

And it'll just supernaturally, naturally flow out of you. I'm going to put the law in your mind. I'm going to write it in their hearts. I will be their God.

They shall be my people. Again, comparing the old and the new, it's important because by the time we get to Romans chapter 3 in our weekend studies, Paul will make this point. He will say, by the law is the knowledge of sin. The law can't cleanse you from sin. It just makes you very aware that you are indeed a sinner. So through the law is the knowledge of sin, but compare that to the covenant of grace. Through grace is the forgiveness of sin. One gives you the knowledge of it, but can't cleanse you of it.

One can forgive you of it. That's the new covenant. Now, I'm going to sum up several chapters here so we can get through this. The next several chapters are very personal. You should know that of all the prophets in the Old Testament, the writings of Jeremiah are the most personal, and he gives you details about his personal life more than any other prophet. So in chapter 38, he is thrown in prison. Verse 6 kind of sums that up. And they let Jeremiah down with ropes, and in the dungeon there was no water but mire, so Jeremiah sank in the mire. Now this prison, think of it as a cistern.

That's probably what it was. You know what a cistern is. It's dug out of solid rock, water, rainwater was stored in it, and because they didn't have the kind of systems we have for cleaning water, you have to think of mud mixed with water, and somebody being lowered by ropes into that muddy, watery cistern. So who's doing this? The leaders are doing this. The ones who will be taken captive in 597 B.C.

The leaders, the political leaders, the leaders, the spiritual leaders, the ones who think that Jeremiah is a wacko, conservative preacher, right-wing, crazy guy who needs to be eradicated or arrested. So let's give him the mud treatment. Not like a spa mud treatment. They threw him in a cistern. It would be hard to breathe. He didn't have food, so the idea, let's starve him to death, or being in a wet, dank, muddy environment could cause hypothermia. If you're there long enough, you'll just die of hypothermia.

Well, story goes on. He doesn't die. After the commercial break, he gets released, and he goes and stays in the court of the prison, the court of the house or the building where that cistern was, and he has a face-to-face conversation with King Zedekiah, the last king of Judah before the Babylonian captivity. In that conversation, King Zedekiah asks him a slew of questions. What's going to happen?

What does this mean? In that conversation, the prophet begs the king to turn to God. It's not too late, man. Right now, at the eleventh hour, you could turn your heart back to God. Of course, Zedekiah does not do that, and the captivity goes on. Chapter 39 is Jeremiah's eyewitness account of the fall of Jerusalem and the capture of King Zedekiah, where they poked his eyes out after killing his sons and took him captive. Chapter 40, 41, and 42, this is now, the Babylonians have entered the city. Jeremiah is under Babylonian care.

He gets freed. He gets to live among the captives or the Jews still in Jerusalem until chapter 42, 43, and 44, where he is taken down to Egypt. Again, personal details of the prophet. Chapters 46 through 51 is a series of warnings, not to Judah anymore, but to nations that touch Judah, that have had dealings with Judah. Surrounding nations like Moab on the east, like Judah down south, like Philistia in their midst and up to the northwest. And Damascus, and eventually Babylon.

All those nations are mentioned. Now we get to chapter 52. Get to the end of the book. Chapter 52, call it an historical supplement. That is, it's a recap of the fall of Jerusalem. We're going to go into more detail as we look in the book of Lamentations. But this is a recap of the fall of Jerusalem. Jeremiah predicted the fall of Jerusalem. Jeremiah predicted the fall of Jerusalem. Habakkuk, called a minor prophet, predicted the fall of Jerusalem.

And now it happens and the story is told. Question. What city in the Bible is mentioned more than any other city? Jerusalem.

Want to guess how many times? 810 times Jerusalem is mentioned. The second most often mentioned city in the Bible is Babylon. Mentioned not nearly as many times, but mentioned 287 times. People have even said you could look at the Bible as a tale of two cities. And there's a lot to that. We've looked at it before.

We won't go into detail tonight. Jeremiah mentions Babylon 164 times. Meaning, Jeremiah mentions, not Jerusalem, Babylon, 164 times more than the rest of the scripture combined.

Now let's look at chapter 52 verse 4. It came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and all the army came against Jerusalem and camped against it. And they built a siege wall against it all around. A siege wall was a wall around a wall to keep people from going out of that protected wall and let other people coming in like supplies come in. It was to starve them.

It was to isolate them. In verse 5, so the city was besieged until the eleventh year of king Zedekiah. So we have a two and a half year siege that takes place. Verse 13, he burned the house of the Lord. What is the house of the Lord? The temple. And the king's house, the palace. All the houses of Jerusalem, that is all the houses of the great, he burned with fire. Now this took place in what year?

Class? 586 B.C. Would you believe it if I told you I could march you over to the digs just outside the city of Jerusalem today and point to some of the very houses from ancient Jerusalem at the time of Jeremiah, at the time of Nebuchadnezzar from 586 B.C. And you with your own eyes could look at the walls and see the marks where the fire left burns still in the stones visible to the human eye today. So when we go to Jerusalem and we do the digs in the city of David and look at it, it's just one of those places where you just stand and look in amazement. I'm looking at the very marks made by the Babylonian fires from 586 B.C. fulfilling the word of the Lord through Isaiah, through Habakkuk, through Jeremiah.

Totally amazing. Well, now we get to the book of Lamentations. In the book of Jeremiah, think of it this way. It's a book of warnings. We get to the book of Lamentations.

It's a book of mornings, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G. In Jeremiah, the prophet warned the people of the impending conflict and Babylonian takeover. In the book of Lamentations, he mourned over the city that had been taken over.

The judgment had come. It's interesting because usually when you come to a book in the Old Testament of the prophets, the title of the book is the prophet's name. This is one book where the name is not given, but the activity of the writer is given. A Lamentation, the Septuagint version, is an even stronger word. Whalings is the name of the book.

Turn to the book of Whalings, a loud cry, a funeral cry. Now, Jeremiah in this book, in this short book, five short chapters, is witnessing the death of a nation. And in this book, like you heard so beautifully by Alyssa moments ago, it is a poetic wail, a poetic lamentation. In fact, there are five songs altogether, five funeral dirges. And the five are the five chapters. Somebody has even noticed there are five voices in the book of Lamentations.

Can I give them to you? In chapter one, it's the voice of the city personified, as if the city is crying out. In chapter one, the Lord is speaking, it's his voice, as if he is answering the city's cry in an antiphonal sort of way. In chapter three, the longest of the chapters of the book, 66 verses in that chapter, it is the voice of the prophet speaking. In chapter four, it is the voice of possessions talking. That is, the things people accumulated, the gold, the silver, the stuff.

The stuff is talking. And then finally, chapter five, it's the voice of the captives, as they feel the chains around their ankles and around their wrists and they are taken to captivity. So, you really do have to read this book with as much emotion as you can, and if you're a musician and you're going to put music to it, make sure you use the minor key for this book. There's not a lot of joy in it.

There are some high points, but not a lot. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series, The Bible from 30,000 Feet. Right now, we want to share about an exciting resource that helps you understand why Jesus' resurrection is so vital for your faith. It's pretty obvious that this world is filled with imperfect people, and that's on purpose. God is into restoring human beings.

He could make perfect people and then populate heaven with perfect people, but He doesn't do that. He takes people who are dinged up, who've been beat up, bruised by time, damaged by sin, and He does a full resto job on them. Complete restoration. Celebrate the joy and beauty of redemption with The Morning That Changed Everything with Skip Heitzig. This DVD collection of six hope-filled Easter weekend messages is our thanks to you when you give $35 or more today to help connect more people to God's Word and the redeeming love of Jesus Christ.

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Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares how you can deepen your relationship with the Lord and nourish your spiritual growth. He stood in the temple precincts as people were going to worship, and he said, Trust not in lying vanities, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these. They were trusting in a ritual in a place rather than a relationship with a person. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the crossing. Cast all burdens on His word, make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.