Warning to an Apostate Nation

The fact is, for whatever giftedness God has prepared you, for whatever task He has given you with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When you watch TV, read the news, even just look around your community and think about how bad the world has become, it's worth noting that many great nations have gone down similar roads before. On today's grace to you, John MacArthur considers the prophecies of Jeremiah in a study dealing with ancient nations and some frightening similarities that we share with them. In this series, God's Word to an Ungodly Society.

Follow along as John shows you how to follow Jeremiah's example, the bold stand he took for the truth, in a culture that hates truth. God has been replaced by money, sex and human ego. It seems to me that man has gone beyond the bounds that God set and stands on the edge of an eternal night. Our nation has for the most part forgotten God. I would have to say that worse than that, they pretty much mock God. As the Scripture says, we could say of us, there is no fear of God in them. Evil abounds in our society and sadly has even filtered its way into the church.

I really believe that we've gone too far, too far in the church and too far in our nation. And I think we face a divine judgment in these days. The prophet Jeremiah faced the very same kind of time.

He faced a nation on the brink of a disaster. And this was not just any nation, but the nation of Israel specially loved, specially chosen, specially made the objective of God's plans and purposes in reaching the world. And yet this nation had rejected God. And because they had rejected God, God was going to come against them in a very severe judgment. And Jeremiah was the prophet of doom. Jeremiah is the one who brings to them the Word of God just before the judgment comes to pass. It could be summed up perhaps in Jeremiah chapter 5 verses 22 and 23. This is what it says, "'Fear ye not Me,' saith the Lord, will ye not tremble at My presence who have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree that it cannot pass it? And though its waves toss themselves, yet can they not prevail?

Though they roar, yet can they not pass over it? But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart, they are revolted and gone." Now that is very graphic language. It is true of Judah and I offer you the thought that it is also true of America. What is Jeremiah really saying? Well the first thing that comes to mind as you look at the verse is this, he is saying, "'Does not My majesty cause you to fear Me?'" The first statement of verse 22. "'Are you not in awe of a God who can bound the sea with a strip of sand?

And no matter how fierce the sea becomes and no matter how it pounds and beats upon the shore, it knows its limits and it is restrained. The almighty power of Jehovah God is so clearly manifest in the works of His creation,' Paul said, "'that man is without excuse if he doesn't see God in creation.'" Now that is essentially what Jeremiah is saying. Your mind should be stirred to realize the creative power, the providential majesty of God and should melt your will into worship and obedience when you know that God controls the elements. The pride of the waves has stayed by the hand of God. Spurgeon said, "'I can scarcely conceive a heart so callous that it feels no awe or a human mind so dull and destitute of understanding as fairly to view the tokens of God's omnipotent power and then turn aside without some sense of the fitness of obedience.'"

So has all this no lesson for man? How can we sin against the greatness of such a God? And yet Jeremiah says, "'Still my people are a revolting and a rebellious people. Have they forgotten that the same God that stops the roaring of the sea and confines it to its limits is the same God who will stop the roaring of a sinful man and confine that man within a certain tolerance?' The sea knows its bounds, it's one up on man."

This is the great lesson. Man shakes his puny fist in the face of Almighty God and forgets that it is God who controls everything. "'Poor puny man, the little creature I could crush like a moth,' says God, will not be obedient to me. My people are a revolting and a rebellious people, they go astray."

And I think there's a most insightful thought here. He says that, "'I have placed the sand for the bound of the sea.'" How amazing it is. Sand is anything but formidable. Sand can be picked up and it drips through your fingers.

You can pick up a handful of it and throw it at somebody and it's harmless. Sand can be moved around. Sand is not particularly strong. And yet with one simple little band of sand, God controls the raging roaring of the mighty oceans of the earth. God in effect is saying this, "'Something stronger than sand I have given My people. I have given My people Israel My promises, My Word, My covenant, My love, My forgiveness, but all of the strength of all of My love and all of My covenants and all of My promises have not been able to restrain their roaring and they are rebellious and have overstepped their bounds. Man, you see, is not like the sea.

The sea knows its limits. Man doesn't and man oversteps the bounds. Man breaks beyond the categories that God has given. Even Adam, man innocent, man without sin, overstepped his bounds. How far worse is sinful, man?" And so this is the thrust of what Jeremiah is saying throughout his great prophecy. My people are a revolting and a rebellious people and they have not considered mighty God.

They have gone too far. Now Jeremiah's time was the time of the holocaust. Jeremiah was 80 to 100 years later than Isaiah. Everything that Isaiah said was going to happen did happen at the end of Jeremiah's time. Isaiah, you remember, had said that judgment was coming and Jeremiah says it's here.

Jeremiah says the Babylonians are going to arrive and the Babylonians are going to slaughter you and the Babylonians are going to take you into captivity and that is exactly what happened. Jeremiah stood on the edge of the holocaust. Jeremiah was the prophet of the end of the glory days of Israel. The late Dr. Moorhead said it was Jeremiah's lot to prophesy at a time when all things in Judah were rushing down to the final and mournful catastrophe, when political confusion was at its height, when the worst passions swayed the people's hearts and the most fatal counsels prevailed to see his own people whom he loved with the tenderness of a woman plunge over the precipice into the wide weltering ruin. That was Jeremiah's lot. Jeremiah was the prophet of Judah's midnight hour.

Isaiah prophesied at 11 o'clock and Jeremiah prophesied at midnight. Jeremiah preached for 42 years...42 years. During the reign of five kings, Jeremiah preached, the first of those kings was a man named Josiah. And if you've read the Old Testament, you know that Josiah was a good king and near the end of the reign of Josiah there was a period of Reformation in Judah, a period of great revival, if you will. And Josiah, you know, went to the high places where all the idols had been erected, to the groves where the people had worshiped the false gods of the pagans around them. And Josiah led a great Reformation and he tore down the high places and he demolished the idols and he removed idolatry from the land of Judah. He was a great reformer. But before all of this happened, the prophetess Huldah said this, Josiah, you will lead a Reformation with no permanent results.

All of your efforts will not last beyond your lifetime. And the reason is this, the people will follow you because they are attached to you as a person, not because they are truly attached to God. And so the revival in Judah was a revival based upon Josiah, not on God. Josiah was a charismatic celebrity. He was an attractive human being.

And the people followed Josiah through a reform and the moment Josiah died, the reform ended. Oh, how that speaks to our time. I'm afraid that what looks like a revival and a Reformation in our country is nothing but a preoccupation with certain celebrities. I wonder to myself whether all that's being said in the name of Christianity isn't an attachment to certain personalities. We are celebrity conscious. Much of our evangelism is based upon some celebrity getting up in front of a group and saying, This is what happened to me.

Wouldn't you like it to happen to you? Or some speaker who has charisma about him who can move people to follow himself. And I fear that what we're seeing today and tending to call revival is nothing more than a preoccupation with certain famous people.

I question whether it has any lasting value at all. Josiah was followed by a man named Jehoahaz. Jehoahaz was only on the throne for three months and he was bad. He was followed by Jehoahakim. And Jehoahakim, you'll be sad to know, put back all the idolatry that Josiah tore down.

Put it all back. Jehoahakim was followed by Jehoahakim who also only ruled for three months and he was bad. And then the fifth of the kings in Jeremiah's life was a man named Zedekiah.

He was a vacillating, cowardly, weakling who saw the nation swiftly sliding down the slide of depravity into ruin and extinction and couldn't do anything about it because of the evil of his own life. Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, five kings, a phony revival and four bad kings and then came the holocaust. And Israel was slaughtered and led into the Babylonian captivity where the Bible says they hung their harps on the willows because they had no more song to sing. The glory days were gone. Their land was decimated. For forty-two years Jeremiah preached.

Listen to this, for forty-two years it got worse. Jeremiah preached during the time of Josiah because Jeremiah knew what Huldah knew, that it wasn't real revival, that it wasn't a real reformation, it was a façade. And he knew what was coming.

He knew the inevitability of the judgment. And he wasn't fooled by what appeared on the surface to be a revival. As I look at our own country today, I have to feel a little bit like a Jeremiah. I see a lot of activity around the concept of Christianity but I question its validity. I'm not sure it's really centered on God.

I'm afraid it's centered more on personalities. I believe we stand near a holocaust in our own country and I believe this quasi-reformation will have little lasting results. We'll look at the church.

If this were a true revival, there would be such a running, abounding, overrunning attitude of righteousness that we would all be caught up in it because true revival always results in righteous living, always. I don't necessarily see that as I look at the church. I look at the church, I see divorce. I see the breakup of homes.

I see no commitment to care for the children. I see an encroaching materialism. I see gluttony. I see the desire for fame.

I see a success, madness. All of these factors I see in the church belie the fact that there's a genuineness to the revival. I feel we're a doomed society, hell-bound, godless, on the edge of night.

Now you say, well, I'm a Christian, John, and so are you. Where do we fit in? Are we to take part in this world? Are we to buy the world's fare, laugh at the world's jokes, sit, smile at its entertainment?

That's what we've been doing in the church. What did Jeremiah do? How did he get along in a dying nation? How did he confront an apostate people?

Well, let's find out. And I want to talk to you on the responsibility of the godly in an ungodly day. The responsibility of the godly in an ungodly day, how to live on the edge of the holocaust, how to live in a doomed society.

Three things to recognize, all right? Number one, a divine mandate, a divine mandate. What is to be our position in this society, a godless, humanistic, atheistic, materialistic, indulgent society?

What is it to be in a society where there is religious tokenism and even a bone now and then thrown at Jesus Christ? How are we to live in that society? Are we to get engulfed in it? Are we to buy what it's selling?

If not, how are we to view ourselves? Number one, we are to know we have a divine mandate. And this is the first reality facing Jeremiah in his dying nation. Chapter 1, Jeremiah chapter 1. Jeremiah had to face this fact, people, and I want you to get this, that he was called out of that society, that he had a divine mandate that lifted him out of that society. He was to preach judgment.

That was his calling. I think we've been way, way too soft on this. We want to receive everybody. We want to water down our evangelism so people can get in who don't even believe the right thing. We want to accept anybody who lets out the word Jesus from between their lips. We don't want to condemn anybody, we want to make sure we soft-soap and cajole and pamper everybody so nobody gets offended because in the name of love we might lose them. Now nobody loves more than God and nobody loves more than Jesus and nobody in the Old Testament that I can find love more than Jeremiah, at least nobody cried more, but nobody preached a stronger message of judgment either. You see, he had to realize that he had to preach to the issue of the day, that he couldn't bypass it in the name of love or anything else. He had to confront that evil society where it needed confrontation.

People often say to me, you know, I have this so-and-so person and I know they're doing this, but I just feel that I better not say anything because they might get offended. You see, whoever sold us that hunk of baloney. Where did we ever get that? Not from Jeremiah. Three features can be seen in chapter 1 verses 4 to 10 that lead us to comprehend his divine mandate. Three features that tell us he was set apart for God's service. First, he was prepared by God, verse 4, Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee. And before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Now stop there. Now that's a pretty hefty bit of information for Jeremiah to handle. Before you were born, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. Before you were born, I ordained you a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah, your life has one intention.

You are to be set apart from these people to speak to these people. And by the way, Jeremiah gives messages not only to Judah, but to all of the nations surrounding as well. He was a prophet to the nations, prepared by God before he was ever born. First of all, before I formed thee means before he was conceived, God knew him. That's predestination.

That's foreordination. God knew him, set His love on him, called him before he was conceived. Before he ever came out of the womb, he was ordained as a prophet. Now listen, an artist who wants to make a beautiful piece of sculpture finds a suitable piece of marble to shape. God doesn't do it that way.

God creates the marble to start with. God doesn't pick up the pieces of what you are and make you into what He wants you to be. He starts from before you were ever born to set in order what He has for your life. God gives the biography of Jeremiah in eleven short Hebrew words when He says, Before you were conceived, I knew you. Before you came out, were born, I sanctified you and ordained you a prophet to the nations. There is a life history that begins in the timelessness of eternity past as God begins to set things in motion for the creation of this prophet.

It ultimately ends when this age is over and Bibles are no more and the prophet is silenced. What a man, a man for a crisis. When we face a crisis, we think of a program. When God faces a crisis, He immediately thinks of a baby because God uses people, people ordained by His own sovereign decree. Now Jeremiah had to know at the very beginning that he was especially appointed by God to be separated from the system to be a voice for God.

And I want to tell you why this is important. Unless you have a sense of a divine call before you were ever born, you will never be committed to the degree it takes to make a difference in your world. If you think you're some johnny come lately or some tacon or some add-on or some final move by God who couldn't get it done another way, you've missed the whole point of your life. The fact is, for whatever giftedness God has prepared you, for whatever task He has called you to do, He predestined that before you were ever conceived.

Therefore, that is why you exist. With that in mind, it ought to give you some new thrust in the ministry you have, a ministry for which you were made. And so God wants Jeremiah to know that first of all, he was prepared by God.

And beloved, that's true of us. We stand in the midst of a society on the edge of the holocaust. Do we really understand that God has prepared us as He did Esther for just such a time as this? Do you really believe that God has created you and redeemed you and set you here in this place to pull you apart from the world to accomplish a ministry for Him?

Or have you found yourself engulfed in the system? If we begin to see our calling, it's going to make a difference. And it's true of all Christians. Sadly, most people in the church today who call themselves Christians and perhaps are, are so busy with creature comforts, so busy fitting into the current fashion of the world, making sure they dress right and they drive the right car and the right stuff in the house and have the right job and climb the social ladder and have the right associations and all this, so busy doing that, that we get lost in the system and we have no sense of a predestined call of God to come out of that system and stand as a rebuke. As Paul said to the Philippians, coming apart as lights and holding forth the Word of Life. Jeremiah's whole nation, the whole of Judah should have been a witness. The whole should have been a witness to all the other nations, but they had all failed. So God had to pick up this Jeremiah who almost was alone in what he did. But I believe God has called us all to that kind of separation. Oh, I believe certain of us are appointed to preach, but all of us are called to speak to this nation. Some of us have voices louder than others, not necessarily more effective.

That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His lesson today is from the book of Jeremiah, and it's part of his study called God's Word to an Ungodly Society. John, this notion of dealing with an ungodly society, I can imagine that a lot of us at one time or another have thought of unbelievers as adversarial, the enemy, and that the way to deal with them is to force a biblical standard of morality on the culture. But you've made the point that moralism can be more dangerous than immorality.

So talk about that for a minute. Well, yes, I think morality gives you the illusion that you're a good person. Somebody who lives in an immoral life has to face the fact that they're not a good person, and they probably know it, although it doesn't seem to be able to change the way they act. Moral people are always the toughest people to reach with the gospel because they're not sure they need to be saved from anything.

Witness the classic illustration of all illustrations of that fact would be the Pharisees, right? There's immense danger in morality on its own without it being attached to divine truth and genuine conversion and salvation. And that fact reminds me to mention a message that I gave some years ago called the danger of moral reformation. I actually gave that message, Phil, after I had visited the White House and talked to the White House staff in Washington, and they had been asking me questions about how, as Christians working in the White House, they deal with people in the other parties and the activists who do things that are against God, against the Bible, against the life of the church, and even against life, like things like abortion and all. How should they view that?

And I said, you have to view those people not as the enemy, but as the mission field. And that struck a chord with them. In fact, we had some interesting conversations and dialogue about that, and they actually listened to that message, the White House at that particular time, staff, because obviously when you get into grappling with the sins that define some political parties today, obviously gross kinds of things—you have abortion, you have the mutilation of children, you have the breakup of marriage, you have the destruction of everything—it's right to be righteously indignant. It's right to have a righteous anger, and that's a legitimate thing.

Christ showed that when he cleansed the temple. His righteous anger there was not against immoral people, it was against moral people. So if he's righteously angry with the moral, we certainly would be righteously angry with the immoral. But in either case, whether the moral or the immoral, we can't allow ourselves to turn them into an enemy that we simply want to denounce. We have to see them as the mission field. And so we have this message, The Danger of Moral Reformation.

You can go to the website, gty.org, and search for the title, The Danger of Moral Reformation. You can download both the audio and the transcript of that message. I think it'll be a very great help to you. And Grace To You exists to give you access to the Word of God in a way that you can understand it.

That's what we're all about. Take advantage of that as we have it available for you. Again, the title of that message, The Danger of Moral Reformation. Right, and friend, this message could revolutionize how you interact with those you disagree with on political issues, and every issue for that matter. It will help you see why people don't just need to change their actions, but they need spiritual transformation. To download The Danger of Moral Reformation, contact us today. You'll find that lesson at our website, gty.org. The title again, The Danger of Moral Reformation. That lesson, as well as our current series titled, God's Word to an Ungodly Society, and every sermon from John's 50-plus years of pulpit ministry.

All of it free to download at gty.org. Also, as John said, we exist to give people access to the Word of God through this radio broadcast, through our free online resources, and through books that we make available free of charge. We recently heard from a listener who received a free MacArthur Daily Bible. He said he was struggling to read the Bible, but the MacArthur Daily Bible changed everything for him.

It made it easy for him to spend more and more time in Scripture, and now he says he's much closer to the Lord. Remember, friend, we are connecting people with free biblical resources because of the support of listeners like you. If you'd like to stand with us to help make a difference in people's lives, make a donation at gty.org, or when you call us at 800-55-GRACE. That's our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, inviting you back for our next broadcast, another 30 minutes of Unleashing God's Truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.