Our Father in heaven, we thank you that you have given us a time of refreshment, a time where we can separate away from our anxieties and cares and be reminded that you are on the throne, that you are a just and holy God and that you have declared peace with mankind, with us, by the blood of Jesus Christ and therefore we can rest in you. We thank you for that and we thank you for this reminder and this time of worship where we can gather in your presence and hear your words and be reminded of the rest that you give us. Cause us to rest this day. Give us peace. Cleanse us by the blood of Christ. May our worship be acceptable in your sight. May those who are still traveling have safety on the road. Be with those who are sick, those that are injured, those that are struggling with various things. We pray your mercy upon them. Be with us today. Open our hearts and our minds to your word. In Jesus name, amen. For the last few weeks, Margaret, you can start. We live stream this on Facebook. For the last few months, we have been going through the divided kingdom, the kings of Israel and Judah. And today, it's my goal to finish up with this. And then I'm gonna start when I come back with the book of Isaiah and we're gonna go through Isaiah. But for today, I'd like to talk about the fall of Jerusalem and some of the events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem. We started this last week and we're gonna be going to Isaiah 38, I'm sorry, Jeremiah 38 in just a moment. So you can start turning there. After the reign of Josiah, Josiah followed King Manasseh and King Ammon who were extremely wicked kings and they were so wicked that the writer of 2nd Kings says, would not pardon Israel because of the sins of Manasseh, because of the blood that flowed in the streets. It is, I think I made a comment on this last week, but it's very common today in our revivalist type circles that you can commit whatever sin you want to but since God is a forgiving God you may have heard to err is human but to forgive divine you walk down the aisle and you say I believe in Jesus and God just says okay well everything's okay just for now and we tend to forget there's a slight amount of truth to that God is a forgiving God God does have mercy, God does forget his anger, God does pardon iniquity, and there is no sin that is too great for God to pardon. However, God is still just and he can never deny his justice. The truth of the matter is not that God decides to be nicer this time because that would be unjust. The truth of the matter is that God lays the penalty for our sins upon Jesus Christ on the cross. And so God's justice and God's mercy are both satisfied on the cross of Christ. But God being a God of justice does bring justice and exercise justice on this earth. And the fact is with Manasseh's reign, Manasseh was so wicked, the innocent blood flowed in the streets of Jerusalem to the point where it said, the scripture says, God would not pardon them. There are very, sobering passages in the scripture. One being that one, and that's in 2 Kings chapter 23, verse four, where God would not pardon them. Another one has to do with Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, where Eli rebukes them and rebukes them sternly. But scripture says that they would not listen to Eli because God would take pleasure in destroying them. And that's a very sobering verse as well. And we're looking at this very sobering judgment that's coming on Jerusalem, the place where God had chosen to place his name. What made it so horrendous was that God had done such good things to Israel. God had delivered them from the land of Egypt, and it's repeated over and over again. How God delivered them from Egypt, he sent them prophet after prophet after prophet. He fed them, he protected them, he was a shepherd to them, he was their God, they were his people. Jerusalem was a place where his temple was, where the Holy Spirit was poured out, where God met with his people, where God spoke with his people, where God had fellowship with his people. And to turn that temple of the living God into the abominations that Manasseh did were unforgivable. And God would not pardon their sin because it got to the point where they were past the point of pardon. And that's a very sobering thought. And with that in mind, after Josiah dies, even though Josiah was a good king and he was a righteous king, yet the character and the heart of the people of Israel did not change. They were still idol worshipers at heart, as we read about in the book of Isaiah. All of their problems in Isaiah, there was no justice, they did not care for the orphan, they did not care for the widow, they were greedy and vicious and cruel and heartless. Even though Josiah was a good king, I'm sorry, I said Jeremiah, I'm not talking about Isaiah, I'm talking about Jeremiah and Zephaniah, talking about the reign of Josiah. I've got to get my references right. Even though Josiah was a good king, yet God was finished because of the bloodshed during the days of Manasseh. And so after Josiah dies, as I said last week, and I won't go through all these names again, because I know that gets tedious. There were four kings, all of them related in one way or another to Josiah. Three of them were Josiah's sons, and the fourth one was Josiah's grandson. And through all of the politics and all of the warfare between Egypt and Babylon and Assyria. The whole Middle East was in a tremendous amount of turmoil at this time. And especially in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, who was the king. In 605 BC, the decisive battle of Carcamesh is fought. And from then on, Babylon is the world power. Egypt is no more, or Egypt is driven back down to where Egypt is. And they've not been a world power since that time. 605 BC, just like the prophet said. Over on the east of Babylon was the Assyrian Empire, and after the Battle of Carchemish, the Assyrian Empire is no more, and never to be heard from again. And the world power is Babylon. And God said through Jeremiah that Jerusalem was going to fall, and that Judah is going to be taken captive for 70 years but even then God gave them chance after chance after chance to repent and so after Jehoiakim rebels and he's taken away Jehoiachin rebels and he's taken away we talked about some of that last week the last king is Zedekiah and Zedekiah is on the throne and thus we come to Jeremiah chapter 38 which prefaces the fall. Zedekiah, let's just read it, Jeremiah 38. And Jucal, the son of Sholemiah, and Pasher, the son of Malchiah, heard the words that Jeremiah had spoken unto all the people, saying, Thus saith the Lord, he that remaineth in this city shall die by the sword, by the famine, by the pestilence, but he that goeth forth to the Chaldean shall live, for he shall have his life through prey and shall live. Thus saith the Lord. This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of the Babylon's army, which shall take it. Therefore the princess said unto the king, We beseech thee, let this man be put to death. For thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of the people, in speaking such words unto them. For this man seeketh not the welfare of this people, but the hurt. Then Zedekiah the king said, Behold, he is in your hand. For the king is not he that can do anything against you. And then they took Jeremiah and cast him into the dungeon of Melchiah, the son of Hamilech, that was in the court of prison. And they let Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon, there was no water but mire. So Jeremiah sank in the mire thus far. So a little bit of the context of this. Babylon is now fully established as a world power. They are untouchable. To show where God's judgment is, Zedekiah is one of the most foolish, weakest kings of Israel's history. Zedekiah was put on the throne by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, took the previous king captive, that was Jehoiachin, and Jehoiachin is now in a dungeon in Babylon. Zedekiah Nebuchadnezzar takes the first group of captives back to Babylon. They're already there and in this group is Jehoiachin the king or Jeconiah as Jeremiah calls him. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Ezekiel, and the wealthy of the land, the godly that were left in the land, the remnant that were left in the land, they were the good figs, in the words of Jeremiah, that God removed to the land of Babylon and leaves Israel in chaos. Nebuchadnezzar puts Zedekiah as the king, makes him a puppet king. Zedekiah takes vows of allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar. But now there's a faction of rebellion. I have no idea why these princes thought it would be a good idea to rebel against the king of Babylon, because the king of Babylon is a huge power. A lot of speculation as to why they did this, but I think the easiest response is that God gave them over to a reprobate mind. And God gave, and Zedekiah was such a weak king. It says Zedekiah, all the scripture says Zedekiah did evil in the sight of the Lord and everything that he did. And yet his evil was not like Jehoiakim. Jehoiakim's evil was active. In other words, Jehoiakim was the one that cut Jeremiah's scroll up into shreds and threw it into the fire, that continually threatened Jeremiah, that slaughtered the prophets of the Lord until Jehoiakim was killed. Zedekiah was not like that. Zedekiah was one who wouldn't do anything. He wouldn't stand up against evil. He wouldn't stand up for good. He just said, well, there's nothing I can do about it. And so he's going along with these princes of Jerusalem who think it's a good idea to rebel against the king of Babylon when they don't have an army. The king of Babylon has already taken the most powerful ones back to Babylon and enslaved them. And Jeremiah, Speaking the words of the Lord, He has said repeatedly the exact same message. God has given Jerusalem to the hand of the King of Babylon. There's nothing you can do about it. If you submit to Babylon, you will live. If you rebel, you will die. That's the word of the Lord. Jeremiah says it's not my message it's the message that God has given you and God warned Jeremiah that no one was going to listen to him and nobody did listen to Jeremiah and Jeremiah repeats the same message over and over again well now chapter 38 Jeremiah is convicted of treason and he's thrown into a dungeon for making the hand of the men of Jerusalem weak by saying what the word of the Lord says because they didn't like the word of the Lord And so he's put in the dungeon. Now let's continue on with verse number seven. Now when Ebed-Melech, the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs which was in the king's house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon, the king then sitting in the gate of Benjamin, Ebed-Melech went forth out of the king's house and spake to the king, saying, My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon, and he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is, for there is no more bread in the city. Then the king commanded Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian, saying, Take from hence thirty men with thee, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon before he die. So Ebed-Melech took the men with him, and went into the house of the king under the treasury and took thence old cast clothes and old rotten rags and let them down by cords into the dungeon of Jeremiah. And Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian said to Jeremiah, put now these old clothes and rotten rags under the arm holes under the cords and Jeremiah did so. So they drew up Jeremiah with cords and took him out of the dungeon and Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison. Then Zedekiah the king sent. and took Jeremiah the prophet unto him into the third entry that is in the house of the Lord. And the king said unto Jeremiah, I will ask a thing of thee, and hide nothing from me. And Jeremiah said unto Zedekiah, if I declare it unto thee, thou wilt not surely put me to death, and if I give thee counsel, wilt thou not hearken unto me? And Zedekiah the king swear secretly unto Jeremiah, saying, as the Lord liveth that made us this soul, I will not put thee to death, neither will I give thee into the hand of these men that seek thy life. Eben Melech the Ethiopian, he's a servant of the king. He sees what's going on with Jeremiah and he pleads for Jeremiah before the king. And the king says, okay, let's take him out of the prison. So he goes secretly and pulls Jeremiah out of the prison and cleans him up and feeds him. Well now, Zedekiah doesn't know what to do. Zedekiah is scared. He sees the king of Babylon coming. Zedekiah has two options. Both of them, in his mind, are bad options. One is, he can listen to Jeremiah, but if he listens to Jeremiah, all the princes of Judah are going to be angry with him for being a traitor against Judah. And if he listens to Jeremiah, if he doesn't listen to Jeremiah, he's afraid the king of Babylon is gonna stomp him. And so he pulls Jeremiah out of the prison and he says to Jeremiah, he says, I wanna ask you something. I'm going to ask you something. And Jeremiah says, why do you want to ask me something? If I don't give you the right answer, you're going to kill me. And if I tell you what the Lord wants to hear, we have to remember that Jeremiah has said the exact same thing now over and over and over again. Jeremiah's story has not changed. He has faithfully said exactly what God has wanted him to say over and over again. I don't know if you've ever had those people that come to you and they They want counsel from you, and so you give them counsel. This is what the Word of God says. Thou shalt not commit adultery or whatever it is. But they don't like that answer, and so they keep coming back for another answer over and over and over again. And it doesn't change. It's still the same answer. If you get drunk and commit adultery, bad things will happen to you. That's what the scripture says. It's not going to change all of a sudden because you don't like it. Anyway, that's a side note. Jeremiah has been saying the same thing now for years. It hasn't changed. And so he is right to be skeptical now that Zedekiah is now asking him secretly. What am I supposed to do? So let's move on to verse 17. Then Jeremiah said to Zedekiah, Thus saith the Lord, the God of hosts, the God of Israel, if thou wilt assuredly go forth unto the king of Babylon's princes, then thy soul shall live and the city shall not be burned with fire. And thou shalt live in thine house. But if thou wilt not go forth to the king of Babylon's princes, then shall this city be given into the hands of the Chaldeans, and they shall burn it with fire, and thou shalt not escape out of their hand. And Zedekiah the king said to Jeremiah, I am afraid of the Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their hand, and they mock me. But Jeremiah said, They shall not deliver thee. Obey, I beseech thee, the voice of the Lord, which I speak unto thee, so it shall be well with thee, and thy soul shall live. But if thou refuse to go forth, this is the word that the Lord hath showed me. And behold, all the women that are left in the king of Judah's house shall be brought forth to the king of Babylon's princes. And those women shall say, thy friends have set thee on and have prevailed against thee, and thy feet are sunk in the mire, and they are turned away back. So shall they bring out all thy wives and thy children to the Chaldeans. Thou shalt not escape out of their hand, but shall be taken by the hand of the king of Babylon. And thou shalt cause this city to be burned with fire. Then Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, Let no man know of these words, and thou shalt not die. But if the princes hear that I have talked with thee, and they come unto thee, and say unto thee, declare unto us now what thou hast said to the king, hide it not from us, and we will not put thee to death, also what the king said unto thee, then thou shalt say unto them, I presented my supplication before the king, that he would not cause me to return to Jonathan's house to die there. Then came all the princes to Jeremiah, and asked him, and he told them according to all these words what the king had commanded so they left off speaking with him for the matter was not known so Jeremiah abode in the court of the president till the day that Jerusalem was taken and he was there when Jerusalem was taken so here's this exchange and there's a reason why I'm bringing out this exchange because there's a lesson here Zedekiah He doesn't even get his question out. Jeremiah knows what the question is. And Jeremiah gives him the same answer that he's been giving him for years. If you submit to the Chaldean princes, you will live. If you rebel, you will die. And Zedekiah then gets to what his problem is in verse 19. If I give in, I'm going to lose clout with the Jews that have already defected to the Chaldeans. They're going to mock me, they're going to ridicule, they're going to mistreat me. The scripture tells us that the desire of the righteous shall be granted but the fear of the wicked shall come upon them. We all as human beings created in God's image desire dignity and acceptance and love and intimacy those things that we were created for that we desire and so many of the choices that we make to rebel against God is because we think we're going to get those things that we desire in rebellion against God as if God is not on the throne. So here's the choices between Zedekiah or for Zedekiah. Zedekiah can obey God Even though every single thing, according to his rational rationality, everything according to his rationality and what he sees tells him that if I obey God, I'm going to be ridiculed, mocked, cast out, mistreated, perhaps tortured and killed. If I disobey God, I might have a chance to escape and I can keep my position in my power. And Jeremiah gives him a very simple choice. I'm not going to prove it to you. I'm not going to demonstrate it to you. But here's what God says. If you submit and bow before the king of Babylon, you will live. Jerusalem will be spared. The city will be spared. you will be spared and you will live. If you rebel, you will die. It's the exact same thing Jeremiah has said over and over and over again. And Zedekiah refuses to listen. He gives Jeremiah a story to tell the princes so the princes don't find out because he's afraid of the disapproval of these princes. And yes, the disapproval of the princes could mean his death. That's true. According to all Outward appearance, these princes are very powerful and Zedekiah is afraid of them. And yet, who is in charge of the nations of the world? Is it the princes of Jerusalem? They had already been defeated once. Who are the ones that are left? All the ones with any sense, all the ones that had money and power, they've already been sent back to Babylon. And so Zedekiah now is fearing the wrong thing. so he refuses to listen to Jeremiah and the very last verse Jeremiah abode in the court of the prison until the day that Jerusalem was taken there's that foreboding we know how this is going to end. In the ninth year chapter 39 of Zedekiah king of Judah in the tenth month came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army against Jerusalem and they besieged it." Zedekiah now does the stupidest thing you can possibly imagine and he rebels against the king of Babylon there are several things first of all there's this is directly contrary to what the Lord has told him to do the second thing is he even has the written word of God the Ten Commandments written on tables of stone that say thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain And Zedekiah made a solemn oath to Nebuchadnezzar, an oath of allegiance. And so he has not only disobeyed God and disobeyed his king, he's acted extremely stupidly. What does he think is going to happen now? It's like, think it through. What are you going to do now? So he's rebelled. He's rebelled to the point where he's absolutely lost all sense and Nebuchadnezzar gathers together his massive army and marches on Jerusalem because God will destroy them and yet God still gives them chance after chance after chance Let's pause for one second and go back to the previous King Jehoiachin, who's now in prison in Babylon. Jehoiachin lived, and the reason Jehoiachin lived is when Nebuchadnezzar came, Jehoiachin surrendered. And so Jehoiachin listened to Jeremiah, he surrendered to Babylon, and he lived. He was in prison, but he lived. Zedekiah should have remembered that. But Zedekiah, for whatever reason, thinks he's going to outlast a Babylonian siege. No one has ever outlasted the Babylonian siege. Perhaps he's remembering Hezekiah, who outlasted the Assyrian siege 100 years earlier. Perhaps he's thinking that, that he can manipulate God somehow with his magic tricks, forgetting that God has already turned against him and said, this city is going to be taken. If you submit, you will live. That's what God has already said so clearly. Here's the last chance that he has. Zedekiah comes and Jeremiah says again, if you surrender to the king of Babylon, you'll live. If you rebel, you will die. And Zedekiah continues to rebel. There's a siege that goes on for several years. And then the princes of the Babylon come in. They make a breach. The city was broken up. They tear down the walls. They utterly destroy everything there. They kill Zedekiah's sons before his eyes. He tries to escape. They capture him. They capture his family. They capture his wives and his kids. They kill all of his children before his eyes. So that's the last thing that he sees. And then they put his eyes out. It was not a good thing to rebel against Nebuchadnezzar, especially when God was against you. When God has turned against you, then you're in trouble, and then what will you do? And you say to yourself, well, that doesn't seem fair. How many times does God have to tell you to repent before you will listen? And now we have a key, and I was talking about these sobering passages in scripture, because the Jews continued to rebel When they were stoning Stephen in the book of Acts, Stephen ended his sermon right before they stoned him with, you stiff necked, heart of heart people, you do always resist the spirit of God. The spirit of God is, that the third person of the Trinity that inspires the scripture that inspires the prophets by which the word of the Lord is spoken and hear the Spirit of God has come upon Jeremiah and all of the prophets and they have spoken with one accord the words over and over and over again and The nation of Judah refuses to listen over and over and over again until they finally lost all their sense completely. They've become just like the Pharaoh's army riding into the Red Sea, thinking they were going to fight against the living God. They've lost all their sense. They did the same thing in the days of Christ. When Christ came as the conqueror, casting out demons, And he says, if I come casting out demons by the Spirit of God, know that the kingdom of God has come upon you. He was the heir to the throne of David and he was the literal fulfillment of all of this that this was just a picture of. The Babylonian army was simply a picture of the kingdom of the demons and the devils that Christ came to conquer our true enemy. And he came and he was conquering them, throwing out demons one right after another. And the Pharisees came up with one objection right after another. Why they weren't going to believe, and why they weren't going to submit, and why they weren't going to obey, and why they weren't going to come to Christ. Until finally they said, you're just casting out demons by the Prince of Demons, Beelzebub. doesn't even make sense and Jesus points out that their statement makes absolutely no sense and then gives them the warning blasphemy against the Holy Ghost will never be forgiven not on this earth nor in the one to come. And this is a clue as to what he's talking about. There comes a time, this is the consistent testimony of scripture, when the testimony, the proclamation of God's grace and God's mercy and God's forgiveness is given to man over and over and over and over and over. And God in his mercy continues to give the gospel. And there comes a time when God's mercy runs out there comes a time when the rebellion and the hardness of heart against the proclamation of the gospel is final and it's not a matter of. men saying, I really want God to be merciful to me and forgive my sins. I'm afraid of the judgment to come. It's that when God hardens the heart, he hardens the heart. And so even when Zedekiah is fleeing from Babylon, he still will not bow the knee. He still runs. And what about the rest of the nation? After Zedekiah is killed and his sons are killed and the last Remnant of the Jews are taken back. They leave a small remnant of the poor, the extremely poor in the land. By now, it's just the dregs. They send back the destruction crew. In verse number nine, Nebuchadnezzar. How's that for a name? Verse number nine of chapter 39. He comes back with the destruction crew and his job is this, tear down every stone. Every stone of the temple, every stone of the wall, tear it all down and burn it all with fire. And he does. He tears it all down. He burns it all with fire so there's nothing left. And there's a tiny handful of people left that are going to till the ground and they're going to, you know, pay the tithe of the grapes and the corn and the oil and all of that stuff. And they're going to keep that going, the very poor of the land. And Nebuchadnezzar then appoints another governor, not a king, a governor. They're under the king of Babylon. The governor he appoints is a man, excuse me, a man named Gedaliah. Gedaliah is one that his message is the same as Jeremiah's. If you submit to Babylon, you'll live. Submit to Babylon. And yet the last remnant of Jews left in the Southern Kingdom, rebelled against him and killed him. Jeremiah is with him because they pulled Jeremiah out of prison and the guy that was doing the cleanup had the order of the King of Babylon and said to Jeremiah, you're free to go wherever you want to. We have no beef with you, obviously. So Jeremiah stayed with Gedaliah and the message is the same thing. The message was the exact same thing. And a faction of Jews rose up under a man named Nishmael. They murdered Gedoliah, rebelled against Babylon. And Jeremiah's saying, really, this is what you're going to do? Now, they all come to Jeremiah saying, now we're afraid. This is in chapter 40 and 41. We're all afraid of what's going to happen now. What do we do now? And Jeremiah says, well, you should have listened to me a long time ago. He says, here's what the Lord says. He's going to be merciful to you one more time. One last time. Don't go to Egypt. Right now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, we can escape to Egypt and we can bypass the vengeance of the King of Babylon. See, the King of Babylon is not going to take very kindly to the fact that the governor, Gadaliah, was just murdered by a small band of insurrectionists. You know how many they had? They had 10 people. Ishmael has 10 people with him against the might of the King of Babylon. And I should also remind you, that the King of Babylon put down rebellion in very nasty ways. You did not want to be on the bad side of the King of Babylon. They were the beginnings of the ones that figured out how to do crucifixion and make it last as long as possible. It was not a good thing to be on the bad side of the king of Babylon. And so the people in Judah were justly afraid. Babylon's gonna come and he's gonna put us all to death for this. And Jeremiah says he's not. If you stay in the land, if you just live quietly, if you plow the fields, if you grow your grapes, grow your corn, make your oil, live quietly, You'll be okay. If you go to Babylon or if you go to Egypt, you'll die. And the reason he said that is he said, I promised when I took you out of Egypt that you would never go back to Egypt. He says, now if you want to rebel against me and turn back everything that you know about the last thousand years of the covenant of being my people and head back to Egypt, you will die. And the nation of Israel said to Jeremiah, You're lying. That's not true. God hasn't spoken to you. First they said, tell us what to do. We'll do anything. We'll listen to you. Jeremiah says, you're not going to listen to me. You've never listened to me. You're not going to start listening to me now. No, we will listen to you. We swear we're going to listen to you. Don't go to Egypt, you liar. And so they all go to Egypt and they take Jeremiah captive with them. and the king of Babylon bypasses the entire nation of Judah heads right to Egypt and the first place he comes to is where all the Jews were in Egypt and we never hear from them again in history that's the last we hear of Jeremiah he dies with the captives down in Egypt. Why are we telling you all of this? God takes his word very seriously there's a couple of lessons that we learn here one is God is extremely merciful, extremely gracious, extremely kind. Jeremiah saw the emptiness of Jerusalem after it was taken out and after it was destroyed, and he wrote the book of Lamentations. And in the middle of that book of Lamentations, he says, thy mercies are new every morning. Great is thy faithfulness. In the middle of the destruction, Jeremiah can say that, but that makes it so much more heinous. that Israel continued to rebel against their maker. That's what makes it so much worse. They were given chance after chance after chance. And like Jesus said, it was even worse when he came into the world and the Pharisees and the Sadducees rejected him. He says, it's going to be easier on Sodom and Gomorrah than it's going to be on you because Christ came to you and you turned your back. If God was like this in Jerusalem, how much more is it gonna be today when the gospel is proclaimed, not by thundering off the top of Mount Sinai, but by his only begotten son that he sent into the world to declare peace to the world and take the sins of the world upon himself so that all might listen and be saved. And if we reject that, how much worse is it going to be? Don't let the goodness of God get in the way of your repentance. That's the point of all of this. God is good, but his character has not changed. This is the same God that comes in judgment. He has over and over and over again, and he will come again. Christ himself will come in judgment, and he will not turn his back on the bloodshed on the streets of Jerusalem. the blood that shed, the wrongs that we have done, and the rebellions that we have done, and the refusal to listen, and the refusal to submit, and the refusal to bend the knee. Over and over and over again, God is still proclaiming his word, and there does come a time, scripture teaches us, when that word is finished, and God is finished, and then comes the end. So Paul says don't let the goodness of God keep you from repentance. God is good and now I'm going to give you a word of comfort too because when we are building the kingdom of God, when we are speaking against oppression in the kingdom of the devil, when we're fighting against the Zedekiahs and the Jehoiachins of the world and trying to get them to see sense. Oftentimes we find ourselves in the pit with Jeremiah under the reproach of the princes of Judah and threatened and we feel like what what's the point Jeremiah there in the bottom of that pit and what is the point and how many people died in those pits Jeremiah was pulled out and he died in Egypt But there were a lot more that would have just died in the pits so when we're on that end of it fighting against the injustice and Proclaiming the gospel of peace and trying to get people to see reason they turn on us and they get angry with us And we wonder if God is paying attention. And so here is the comfort of the gospel. Just because God right now is merciful and gracious and has not come in judgment, doesn't mean he never will. He is going to come in judgment. As Peter says, a day is as a thousand years. He's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and eternal life. that is what God is doing. He's proclaiming the gospel throughout the whole world because he's not willing that any should perish. He's giving chance after chance after chance after chance for repentance but he also is hardening the hearts of those that continue to refuse the call because we know that God according to Jeremiah chapter 9 exercises loving-kindness righteousness and judgment on this earth and therefore we can rest We can obey in faith and rest and hope knowing that God has this all under control in his own time. Let's close in prayer and then we'll have a couple of minutes for questions. Our Father in heaven, we thank you that you are exercising righteousness and loving kindness in this earth. We thank you that you are a God of justice as well as a God of mercy. We know, Father, that you will one day wipe away every tear and that you will one day avenge all the blood, all the innocent blood that has been shed. And we know that day is coming and therefore we can place vengeance in your hands because we know that you will repay and your justice will be perfect. We pray before that day that the gospel of Jesus Christ would proclaim clearly throughout the whole world and that many might come and learn what it means to bow the neck to Jesus Christ. In his name we pray, amen.