If you would turn in your Bibles please to Jeremiah chapter 42 and chapter 43 and chapter 44. I hope to cover all of them to some degree as an overlook this evening and eventually we will get there. You can turn there, and all the rest of the previous verses, that address will show up on the screen. If you wish to take notes, you can. Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank thee for his love for us, and we thank thee for his desire for us to walk in truth and in love, as Pastor mentioned to us this morning from your Word, and we pray that you would help us to be faithful and obedient to those tasks. that others might see Christ in us and desire Him to be in them as well. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Here's our verse. The people said to Jeremiah, whether it be good or whether it be evil, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God to whom we send thee, that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God. The first 41 chapters of Jeremiah. They never listened to what he said. They didn't like him. They wanted to kill him. They set a death sentence for this man. They said, let's throw him in the pit and let him starve to death down there. We don't care what happens to him. He's a traitor. He doesn't love us. He doesn't love our nation. He doesn't like our king. And he heard that the whole time. 41 chapters, a whole bunch of years. Jeremiah kept telling them, if you don't repent, God's going to send Nebuchadnezzar in here and he's going to tear this place apart and tear down the temple and you're going to be carried off into captivity and a whole bunch of you are going to be dead. You really, really want to listen to what God has to say, but they didn't listen. Nebuchadnezzar came in, carried him off captive, set up a new man over the land of Israel, who was very shortly assassinated. And the people of Israel were saying, what are we going to do now? So they came to Jeremiah. But in order for you to understand that, we're going to back up to see a whole bunch of history, okay? And how in the world did they get there? Did you ever ask yourself the question, how did we get here? The people of Israel were asking themselves the question, how did we get here? We're making a decision whether to stay in the land and perhaps face the wrath of Nebuchadnezzar, or whether we're going to go into Egypt. And they said, if we go to Egypt, everything will be good there. And so how did they get there? The first death after creation was some lambs. to cover Adam and Eve and their sin. And the lamb's skin represented the love of Christ and the skin of Christ and the righteousness of Christ that is ours when we receive him as our Savior. And this was the first sacrifice that was made. Job sent and sanctified them and rose up early in the morning, them being his children, and rose up early in the morning and offered burnt offerings. So then we see fathers making sacrifices for their children. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering instead of his son. Again, you see a picture of Christ and his sacrifice for us. Abraham was the father. And from creation up until the exodus, there was no formal religious system set up. It was a father interceding on behalf of his children. And so the people of Israel went down into Egypt. Because of the famine in the land, they went down into Egypt. What kind of formal religious system did they have? They didn't have one. That was established at the beginning of the Exodus. They had no national system of laws. God established that for them at the beginning of the exodus. They had no religious system of laws. God set that up. God set up the tabernacle that showed Christ. We're not dealing with all that. And so during the 430 years they were in Egypt, what kind of religious system did they have? You know what they had? They worshiped the idols of Egypt. When God began the plagues, it was not just to show the Egyptians that God was stronger than their gods, but it was also to show the people of Israel that God was a God over all gods. And he was more powerful than the gods that they had been worshiping for 430 years. And they began to see that here was a true God, a God of omnipotence and power and love. And the last part of the plagues that they suffered, the people of Israel were protected from those. And so God showed them that he could punish other gods and still protect the people of Israel. On one of those occasions, as Moses went to see Pharaoh, he said, we have to go into the wilderness to sacrifice. And Pharaoh basically said, well, you can just do it here. And Moses said, it is not meet to do so, for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God. If we sacrifice the abominations of the Egyptians before their eyes, will they not stone us? And if you read that verse and think about it for a few minutes, you realize that they were not able to make sacrifices when they were living in Egypt. because what they would sacrifice would be one of their gods, like a calf. Suppose you went to India and you decided that you would like to sacrifice a cow. Guess what? You don't sacrifice cows in India. You know why? Because they believe in reincarnation. And I'm not saying this to be funny, but grandma may be the cow. in her reincarnated state. And so you don't want to kill grandma because in the places I'm finding Nietzsche and Nirvana, she's pretty well up there if she's a cow. And so that's something you would not do in India. Well, in Egypt, it was basically the same thing. You don't sacrifice animals here. So when Joseph and his family and Jacob went into Egypt, they soon learned, you don't do sacrifices here. You mean you kill an animal and put it on an altar and burn it to your God? No, no, you're not allowed to do that here. We'll kill you, we'll stone you. And so for 430 years, they began to worship the gods of Egypt. I'll show you that in a few minutes as we progress. They get out in the wilderness, and Moses is up on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, and the people say, we don't know what happened to him. It's probably some animal ate him. He may have got lost and not found his way back down here. We don't know what happened to him. So they go to Aaron with gold, and they say, you need to make us gods. Guess what they made him? Gods of Egypt. The golden calf was a god of Egypt. And after he made it, he made this statement, and when Aaron saw it, that is the golden calf, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, tomorrow is the feast of the Lord. So I can take a false god out of a country, and I can say, I can worship this false god. No, I'm not worshiping the false god. I can worship God with the false god. or am I worshiping the false god and pretending I'm also worshiping the Lord, or can I worship both gods at the same time? A lot of countries have a lot of gods. India wins because they have more gods than any other country in the world, 300 and some thousand, okay? Any one of them is okay except for Christianity. But which one of them is right? or can I just pick and choose? One of the things you have to do as a missionary when you're talking to people in other countries is that they don't, we use a phrase, add Christianity to their God shelf. What the people of Israel had done is they had worshiped the idols of Egypt for a long time, and then they added God to their God shelf. And so Aaron says, we can worship the Lord with this golden calf. But the Bible says they rose up to play. And they weren't playing marbles either, okay? They were playing around. And God said to Moses, the people have sinned. And he sent him back down. Moses said to Aaron, how did this happen? Now listen to this one, this is a good one. He says, I threw all this stuff into the fire and the calf walked out. How many of you could do that? Throw a bunch of gold into a fire and a calf walks out, okay? One made out of gold. Moses didn't even discuss that issue with him, okay? But they were worshiping the Lord with a golden calf. And God said, no, you're not going to do that. Remember Commandments 1 and 2. And they had said about all 10 commandments, we're gonna do whatever God wants us to do. We're gonna obey God. And God had said, thou shalt have no other gods before me. And here's a golden calf already, one of the gods of Egypt. Moses didn't buy it. There were 3000 dead people that day. We come to Joshua's time. Now this is at the end of the book of Joshua, so the end of the time when Joshua was in charge of the nation of Israel, after Moses had been in charge of the nation of Israel. And as he's getting ready to leave, he's giving them some instruction. And if it seems evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served were on the side of the flood, being the Red Sea, being Egypt, He says, are you gonna keep serving those gods of Egypt? Or are you gonna serve the Lord? You have to choose one of the two. You can't have them both. You've been having them both. You can't have them both. Choose one. Where are the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell? In other words, we can add another god into the gods of Egypt besides the God of heaven. And Joshua said, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And meaning we will serve the Lord alone. Verses 23 and 24, same chapter. Now therefore put away, said he, the strange gods which are among you. They said, we're gonna serve the Lord. And Joshua knew that they still had the gods of Egypt with them. He said, no, you don't get it yet. He said, this is not the way it works. And they said, the voice of Lord our God we will obey. And he's like, okay, then let's get rid of these other gods. The gods that were on the other side of the flood, the Red Sea, the gods of Egypt. Why do you still have them with you? Fast forward a few hundred years. For Solomon went after Ashtaroth, the goddess of Zydonians, and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. You know, when you read about Solomon, it just boggles your mind, at least it boggles my mind. Of course, it doesn't take much to boggle my mind. But it boggles your mind to think that a guy that had such wisdom and had such love of God and had such a good father and good teaching would go to the idols. And God came to him and said, Solomon, you can't do this. But he did anyways. God came to him again and said, if you keep on doing this, I'm going to tear this place apart. And I'm going to tear down this temple that you just got done building. And it's going to be trashed. And people are going to be carried off into another country. You need to quit. But he wouldn't quit. You know why? He didn't think God would do it. He thought he could get by with it. And Jeroboam, that's the guy who split the kingdom after Solomon died, and Jeroboam ordained a feast of the eighth month on the 15th day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered it upon the altar. So he did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the, notice the next word, calves. You know, you mean like the calf, the golden calf? Yeah, that's the idea. And the calves that he had made and placed in Bethel, the priest of the high places which he had made, so he made his own religious system about calves, the idols of Egypt. And God came to him and said, you know, if you don't straighten this out, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to destroy this altar. You're going to lead the nation of Israel into captivity And they had a mess from then on until they went into captivity. They worshiped idols. And it came to pass, as it had been a light thing for him, that is Ahab, to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ephbaal, king of the Lydonians, and worshipped Baal and served him. So he said, OK, we can have another god. What we need is another god. If you read your Bible, the nation of Israel after Egypt had consecutively and continually problems with idol worship. Sometimes so much so that the word of God was lost, the temple service was lost, and they didn't even know what was right and wrong. Then said I unto them, Ezekiel talking to the people of Israel, cast ye away every man the abominations of his eyes, and defile not yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Ezekiel, are they still having problems with the idols of Egypt? And Ezekiel saying, yes, they are. They're still having them. You know, Egypt is a type of the world. And when you live in the world, you can pick up the idols of Egypt. And you can carry them with you. And they can be really hard to get rid of. Because there's something that the flesh enjoys about the idols of Egypt. And Ezekiel said, define not yourselves with the idols of Egypt, next verse. But they rebelled against me and would not hearken unto me. They did not, every man, cast away the abominations of their eyes, neither did they forsake the idols of Egypt. Then said I, I will pour out my fury upon them and accomplish my anger against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. God said they wouldn't get rid of the idols of Egypt. Therefore, I will pour out my fury upon them. In other words, if we're trying to serve God and we're trying to serve the idols of the world in Egypt, God's not gonna be really happy with us. Leviticus chapter 26, very fast, okay? If you read the first 13 verses, you'll see that there's blessings for obedience. Pastor talked about that this morning. There's blessings for obedience. God says, if you'll do what I tell you to do and serve me alone, There's blessings for obedience. Verses 14 through 43, there's penalties for disobedience. Now, if you read those last part of that chapter, 14 through 43, it says God says, I'll punish you seven times for your iniquities. And if that will not bring you to repentance, I'll punish you seven times more for your iniquities. I will punish you seven times more for your iniquities. I will punish you seven times more for your iniquities. And you know what? They didn't listen. You have a similar chapter in Deuteronomy chapter 28. And I picked out two verses that I want you to see there. Basically, it's the same concept. And all these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God. God says, if you'll listen to what I tell you to do in my word and through my prophets, I'm gonna send you blessings that will come upon you and overtake you. I'll get to that same phrase in the next verse. Verse 15. But it shall come to pass if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day, that all these curses shall come upon thee and overtake thee. Notice you have a choice, obedience, being overcome and overtaken by blessings. Curses being overcome and overtaken by curses with disobedience. Now, if you read through those curses in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy chapter 28, when you get down toward the latter part of those, there's some pretty horrible consequences that people were gonna suffer if they were not obedient to God's word. In fact, so much so that there would be cannibalism among the country people, the nation of Israel. And you would think about that time, you would wake up and say, why are we here? What are we doing here? Notice the phrase shall come upon thee and overtake thee. How many understand a little bit about football? How many don't want to talk to me about football at all and you don't want to talk to you about football? I'm going to use a football illustration to help you understand this underlying phrase of this verse and the previous one. Okay? The guy makes it through the line and he's heading down toward the goal line. He's carrying the ball. He's going to make a touchdown. But somebody that's a whole lot faster than him catches up with him. And I mean, he just mows him down. And the guy who was carrying the ball gets up in a daze. And he hardly knows where he is. What happened to him? The tackler came upon him and overtook him. Now that's what God says will happen to you if you obey his word with his blessings. His blessings will come upon you and overtake you and tackle you. But he also says the same thing about the curses. If you disobey his word, those curses shall come upon you and overtake you and tackle you. So it's just a matter of what you want to be tackled by. God's blessings or God's curses. The people didn't listen. They forgot about Leviticus and they forgot about Deuteronomy. And they didn't listen to the prophets. They just killed them. They wouldn't listen to them. They wouldn't listen to Jeremiah. And what Jeremiah told them was going to happen happened because of their disobedience, and people were killed, and the streets of Jerusalem were filled with dead bodies, and buzzards were eating them, and bears were eating them, and there were rotten bodies in the streets of Jerusalem, and there was a problem comes with disobedience. But they, the people of Israel, mocked the messengers of God, despised his word, misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people till there was no remedy. You know what no remedy means? That's when the doctor comes in and says, there's nothing I can do to help you, you're gonna die. The time comes when God can come into a nation like he did the nation of Israel and say, there's nothing that I can do to help you, you're gonna die. And after that happened is when the people of Israel went to Jeremiah and said, we don't know what to do. We're afraid to stay here because the person who was appointed over the land was assassinated. And they said to him, pray to the Lord for us. In other words, go to God and find out what he wants us to do. Now, I'm sure when Jeremiah first heard that, he thought, wow, this is really a different attitude. I've never heard this in my entire life of my minister. I heard, let's kill him, let's throw him into the pit, let him starve to death. We don't care what happens to him. Now they're saying, go find out from God what he wants us to do. And I'm sure Jeremiah was like, wow, I don't even know how to hear that. You know? These are all Jeremiah verses when you just see 42.2 and 42.3. Now, the Lord your God may show us the way wherein we may walk. In other words, go find out from God what we're supposed to do. Whatsoever the thing the Lord shall answer you, I will declare it unto you, Jeremiah said. They said, whether it be good or whether it be evil, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God. You know, sometimes when God tells us to do something, it seems evil, we think, oh, that's really not a good idea. God, did you really think about that a little bit? And God said, just do what I tell you to do. And they said, whether it's good, whether it seems the right thing to do for us, or whether it's evil, whether it seems the wrong thing to do to us, we're going to obey the voice of the Lord our God. Why are we going to do that? Ah, we want to get tackled by the blessings. That it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God. And I'm sure Jeremiah was like, wow. Why couldn't this happen sooner before the nation was destroyed and thousands of people were murdered and carried off into captivity? Why couldn't we have done this sooner? So he goes to God and he's all excited. And God kind of brings his excitement to an end because God knows what they're gonna do. They said, whatever God wants us to do, whether we think it's a good idea or a bad idea, we're going to do it because then it's going to be good for us. Here's God's answer. If you will still abide in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down. I am with you to save you. God says, you stay right here and I'm going to protect you. I'm going to take care of you. It's going to be good for you right here. Stay right here. But if you say, we will not dwell in this land, neither obey the voice of the Lord your God, no, but we will go in the land of Egypt. Now, how did God know, because he is omniscient, that that's what they were gonna say? And that's what they were gonna do, regardless of how much misery it cost them, no matter how many of those curses had to come upon them and tackle them and mess up their lives. Jeremiah said the sword that you feared, notice the word feared, shall overtake you. Remember overtake, the curses shall overtake you. The famine whereof you are afraid shall follow after you, overtake you. You shall die by the sword, by the famine, by the pestilence. Now right about then, it was time to get the message, don't you think? Say okay, we're gonna go into Egypt, and we're gonna die by the sword. People are gonna run swords through us. We're gonna starve to death and we're gonna have all kinds of pestilence. Is that really what we want? God said, none of them shall escape the evil that I bring upon them. What did he say? The curses shall come upon you and overtake you, tackle you, smash you to the ground. God said, you're never going to see this place again. So you go into Egypt, you're never going to come back here. The people that were carried off into captivity to Babylon, God said, you're going to come back. The people that decided they were going to go into Egypt, God said, you're never going to be back here. Jeremiah said, I have this day declared it unto you, but ye have not obeyed the voice of the Lord your God. He said, you didn't listen. You're not listening. You're not planning to listen. Here's what you do when pastor preaches a message or Sunday school teacher preaches a message and you don't like it. You can say the Lord didn't tell you to say that, right? That solves that problem. God didn't say that. Yeah, maybe God did. Maybe God did. They said it's false. You're telling a lie. Baruch doesn't like us. Baruch was Jeremiah's secretary, as you remember. The Sunday school teacher doesn't like me. The youth leader doesn't like me. The pastor doesn't like me. Nobody likes me. God doesn't like me. That's why he doesn't want me to do what I want to do. No, the reason he doesn't want you to do what you want to do is because he doesn't want you to be overtaken by the curses. All the people obeyed not the voice of the Lord. What did they say? Whatever you say, God, we're going to do it, whether it's good or bad. It didn't take them very long before, we're not going to listen to that. Albeit I sent you all my servants, the prophets, rising early and sending them, saying, oh, do this, not this bondable thing that I hate. But they hearkened not or inclined their ear to turn from their wickedness. They weren't going to turn from that. As for the word that thou hast spoken to us, the people of Israel said in the name of the Lord, we will not hearken unto thee. How did we get so quickly from God, tell us what you want us to do, whatever you say, we're gonna do it, whether it's good or bad. And now we're saying, you're not gonna tell us what to do, God. We're not gonna listen to you, God. We're not gonna listen to your prophet Jeremiah. He lies. He doesn't like us. Nobody likes us. God hates us. They said, we're going to do whatever thing goeth forth out of our mouth. We will decide what we're going to do. God, you're not going to tell us what to do. God says, wait, you sent Jeremiah to me to ask me what to do. I told you what to do so that the blessings of God might come upon you and overtake you. And what you want instead is the curses of God to come upon you and overtake you. Is that what you want? They said, we're going to do whatever we want to do. First Corinthians chapter one in verse 25. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. You know what that means? That means God's a whole lot smarter than you and me all put together. And he loves us, he really does. And he really knows which best, which choices would be best for us so that we could be tackled by his blessings. Our minds and thoughts are micronic, and I know the spell checker doesn't like that word, when compared to the love and mind of God for us. Somehow, we have the idea that we're a lot more intelligent than God. And we have a lot better aspect of what's going to come in the future, depending on our actions right now, than God does. When you think you're going to do what God told you not to do, that's what you're thinking. That you're smarter than God. And you're not. Nor am I. Nor is everybody's intelligence total of the world put together. better than God's? Do we think that we know better than our loving God who always wants our best? Now sometimes people say, why should I obey God's word? How about because He loves you? He wants what's best for you. He wants the blessings to come upon you and overtake you and tackle you. He doesn't want those curses to come upon you. God said to the people of Israel as they were in Egypt, all the remnant, that's the people of Israel that went to Egypt, shall know whose word shall stand, mine or theirs. God said, I'll show you that I am still God and you're gonna suffer the consequences of your rebellious decision. God is always right and will always be known to be right in the end. God said, I will watch over them for evil and not for good, and they shall be consumed until there be an end of them. God said, I will punish you in this place. Jeremiah was talking to the people of Israel who had gone into Egypt despite God's commandment not to go. And God said, I'm gonna punish you right here. You're gonna have all the curses of the law come upon you and overtake you and tackle you and destroy you. The place of disobedience to his word is the place of God's punishment. when we decide that what God says is not good and best for us. People of Israel experienced that. Those people that went into Egypt never walked out of there. None of them. This verse has two things in it. says or despises now the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering. Why does God put up with us in our rebellion? You know why? To lead us to repentance. God is good to us even when we're not obedient a lot of the time. As he had been with Israel for hundreds of years. His goodness, forbearance, and long-suffering had put up with their serving the idols of Egypt. But then it came to an end. Because sometimes we don't understand not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth us to repentance. People of Israel said, Jeremiah, we haven't liked you. We hated you. We wished you were dead. Here's what we want you to do. We want you to go to God and find out what he wants us to do, whether he wants us to stay here or thinking about going into Egypt. What do you think we ought to do? Jeremiah said, I'll go find out. God said, they're going to go to Egypt. But protest unto them, give them the final warning. Tell them not to go. They said, we've been living in rebellion all these years and things have been okay. That's because they despised the goodness, the riches and the forbearance and the long suffering of God. And they didn't realize that what it was purposed for was to lead them to repentance, not to continue in their sin to suffer the consequences of their rebellion. God loves us. He really does. And he always wants the best for you and for me. And in his word, he tells us what to do so that we can have those best things. And we need to realize that if we despise the goodness and riches and forbearance of God, we can get hurt really, really bad. God doesn't want that to happen. but it's your choice. Obedience, being tackled by the goodness, the blessing, the forbearance of God, or disobedience, being tackled by punishment and horrendous things. Shall we pray? Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the truth that lies therein. We pray that you would help us that we would not pick up the idols of Egypt while we live in this world, but that we might serve Thee and Thee alone, according to Your Word, and that we might be responsive to Your Word, as Pastor spoke to us about this morning, that we might walk in Your truth. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.