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JESUS IS THE ONE WHO COMFORTS THOSE WHO MOURNJeremiah 31:1-20 INTRODUCTION There is a scene in the biblical account of Jesus' birth, that, as far as I know, has never been included in any Christmas play. I know it's not in that most famous of Christmas plays, the one that occurs in the Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon. Our family owns dozens of story books recounting the Christmas story and as far as I can recall there is only one of those books that includes this scene. The scene I'm referring to is the scene where Roman soldiers by order of the Roman governor, Herod, go to Bethlehem and slaughter every boy that is two years old or younger in a vain attempt to kill Jesus. Children don't come home from Christmas play practice and in reply to their parent's query regarding their part in the play answer, "I get to be one of the murdered toddlers!" "I get to play a Roman soldier who murders a baby boy." "I get to play a mother who runs with her baby in her arms from homicidal soldiers." It is a scene that just does not fit with our sanitized and sentimentalized accounts of the birth of Jesus. It doesn't fit with peaceful sheep and magical angel choirs and a lantern lit, warm and cozy stable and three kings bowing in worship. Yet, there it is, the proverbial "elephant in the room". God warns Joseph in a miraculous dream that Herod is going to try to kill the boy and so he should flee to Egypt, which Joseph does. So God protects one baby while giving dozens of other babies over to butchery. Matthew's account of this scene, while brief, compounds the consternation of anyone who is paying attention when he says that this massacre occurred in order that what the prophet Jeremiah said might be fulfilled. It's not bad enough that God didn't stop this mayhem but Matthew tells us he knew about it at least six centuries in advance and did nothing to stop it. If you were trying to get people to believe that the coming of Jesus was God's loving plan to save people then why would you include this barbaric story? None of the other gospel writers mentions it. As is true of every historian and biographer, Matthew cannot include every event that happened in Jesus' life. So why does he include this event? It would have been a simple thing to leave it out. We would never have known about this travesty of justice. Why tell us that God miraculously preserved the life of Jesus but abandoned dozens of other toddlers and their families to this horror? Before I answer that question let me just point out that the inclusion of this story and of many others like it in the Bible is a key reason for why I trust the Bible. You will find no other religion's book that includes stories like these. These stories that seem to call into question the character of God litter the pages of the Bible beginning with his throwing Adam and Eve out of the garden for simply eating a piece of fruit, his commanding Abraham to drive his son Ishmael and his mother Hagar out into the desert, his command to Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, his choosing the sons of Jacob and making them a great nation in spite of the fact that they murdered an entire city of people in order to get revenge for the perceived dishonoring of their sister, his killing of Nadab and Abihu for burning the wrong incense, his command to stone a guy for picking up firewood on the Sabbath, his killing of Uzzah for just trying to help get the ark of the covenant safely into Jerusalem and the list goes on. These stories are in the Bible not only because they are true but to shock us into examining what we believe about God. What you and I naturally think about God is wrong. Our conception of reality is warped and perverted. God has given us his word, has recorded the history of his work in the world so that we can have a true understanding and a true faith in the true and living God, not some pliable God who conforms to our own desires and ambitions and finite thinking. This story confronts us with the true God and his ways in the world. It is necessary for us to know about it and to see what is revealed through it. So, when Herod realizes that the magi have tricked him and have not returned to tell him which baby is the one called "king of the Jews" he sent a contingent of soldiers to Bethlehem to kill every baby boy that was 2 years old or less in order to be sure to kill the Messiah. The age of those to be killed was determined by the report of the magi as to when the star first appeared. Notice, there would have been no murders if there had been no strange star appearing in the heavens and if the wise men had stayed home and not come to worship the baby Jesus. It was their arrival in Jerusalem asking about the baby born "king of the Jews" that first alerted maniacal Herod and it was their report of sighting the star that set the limits of the bloodshed. Upon reporting the massacre, Matthew, by divine inspiration quotes Jeremiah 31:15 and says that this slaughter of the babies is a fulfillment of what was written there. Therefore, Jeremiah 31 is in some way a foreshadowing of what happened at Bethlehem when Jesus escaped the clutches of Herod while the children were murdered. In order for this to make any sense to you I need to fill you in on the setting of Jeremiah 31. The prophet Jeremiah lived in and preached to the southern kingdom of Judah during the reign of the last kings of Judah. The northern kingdom, Israel, had been destroyed by Assyria about 75 years prior to his birth. Judah, in order to not suffer the same fate, was paying tribute to Assyria when he began his ministry. However, during his life Assyria crumbled and Babylon filled the power vacuum left by Assyria's demise. Judah paid tribute to Babylon until the last king of Judah, King Zedekiah stopped doing so. At this provocation Babylon attacked and besieged Jerusalem for 7 years. Jeremiah predicted and then lived through the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and its destruction by King Nebuchadnezzar. He witnessed all the horrors of a city under siege for 7 years. He witnessed the killing of many Israelites and the deportation of most of the population to Babylon. After the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah he remained in the land of Israel with the few poor people that Nebuchadnezzar left to live in the land. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of most of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Jeremiah wrote a letter to the captured exiles in Babylon. False prophets were telling the exiles that they would be back home in Israel within a couple of years. Jeremiah's letter is preserved in chapter 29 of his book. In it he tells the exiles that they should settle down and build houses and plant gardens because they will not be coming home until 70 years have passed. Chapters 30-33 of Jeremiah are a poetic description of this return to the Land of Promise from the exile. However, as we will see the return from the Babylonian exile is about far more than just a few thousand Israelites returning from Babylon to Israel. The prophesied return from the Babylonian captivity is a clear picture of the salvation that will be given to God's people through their Savior, Jesus. Jeremiah 31:15 refers to a specific historical event that Jeremiah experienced. After the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem they began rounding up the Israelites who were in the city and who had run away from the city into the countryside. They brought these captives to the town of Ramah, which is a few miles north of Jerusalem. At Ramah the fate of each of the captives was determined. Some were executed, some were taken into exile and a few, like Jeremiah, were left to remain in the land of Israel. It was at Ramah that families were torn apart by murder and deportation. Mothers wept as children were taken away. It was also near Ramah that Rachel died and was buried. If you will remember, Rachel was Jacob's favorite wife and the mother of his favorite sons, Joseph and Benjamin. Rachel is pictured as weeping as she watches her children, her descendants killed and taken into captivity. In a poetic metaphor she is viewed as the mother of Israel who is overcome with sorrow because of the murder and exile of her children. She symbolizes all the mothers of Israel who weep for their children, just as the mothers of Bethlehem weep for their children, whom Herod murdered. Notice in vv. 16-17 the Lord commands her to stop weeping because the children are not permanently gone. He says to her that there is hope for her future. Her children will return. This is the point of the quote in Matthew. The killing of those babies in Bethlehem by the foreign king is the event of which the killing and exile of the people at Ramah was the foreshadowing. The hope of return that is promised in Jeremiah is now realized with the coming of Jesus. His birth means that the tears of those mothers in Bethlehem will be ended. God is at work and the salvation promised in Jeremiah and throughout the entire OT is at hand with the birth of Jesus. Matthew, by connecting the birth of Jesus and the murder of the babies at Bethlehem with the events surrounding the exile of Israel and the specific promises in Jeremiah 31 aims to teach us that… MAIN POINT The birth of Jesus is the only source of hope in this sad world because his birth reveals that… I. God rules over all things, including human evil (vv. 10 & 15-18) I do not think there is a more troubling or a more important question facing all who profess to believe in God than the question of God's relationship to human evil. It is one thing to acknowledge that God controls natural catastrophes like hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes and even accidents but it a wholly different matter to talk about God's "controlling" human evil. Most people out of a desire to protect God's reputation and to preserve human accountability talk about human evil as solely the result of human free will. The usual argument goes like this: God made humans with the ability to choose between good and evil and he does not interfere with human free will. If God were to interfere with human choice then people could not be held accountable for the evil they do. In addition, if God in any sense "controls" evil human choices then he is responsible for doing evil. Therefore, in this view of things, the tragic events in Bethlehem were solely the result of human choice. God could not interfere with their free choices, therefore Herod and his soldiers are guilty of a great evil which God is right to punish. God could not have prevented the murders without altering the way the world functions. When Matthew records that these events fulfill what was written in Jeremiah 31:15 he merely means that God saw in advance what these evil men would do and so he had Jeremiah write down v. 15. This is the explanation that the majority of the religious people in the world favor when it comes to explaining God's relation to human evil. However, this is not how the Bible understands God's relation to human evil. When Matthew says the murder of these babies "fulfilled" what Jeremiah said, he is not merely saying that God passively observed something happening and then had Jeremiah write about it. The verb "fulfill" is used 13 times in Matthew to indicate various fulfillments of OT prophecies in the life of Jesus. The whole meaning of the word "fulfill" necessarily requires that God is working out a plan that he established long ago. It's the only way to understand Jesus' statement that he did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them. All that he is, all that he does and all that transpires in the course of his life is the fulfillment of God's plan to save his people which the entire OT talks about. It was God's will that Jesus be betrayed and that he be murdered on that Roman cross and it was, in some sense his will that those babies be murdered. If we look back at Jeremiah 31 we can see how the Bible acknowledges that human evil is under the sovereign control of God in such a way that humans "freely" do what they want to do and their willing actions fulfill God's will but in such a way that God is not guilty of doing evil, they are. Verse 10 tells us that God is the one who scattered Israel. How did God scatter Israel ? He did it by sending the Babylonians to besiege and then destroy Jerusalem and then take the people captive after murdering large numbers of them. This sort of statement is all over the OT. 2 Chronicles 36:15-21 recounts the fall of Jerusalem and the exile of the remnant of Israel. Verse 17 says this: " God brought up against them the king of the Babylonians who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary and spared neither young man nor young woman, old man or aged." When you read the detailed accounts of what the Babylonians did to the people of Jerusalem you cannot avoid the conclusion that they did great evil. Yet, God is the one who sent them to do it. They did exactly what God wanted. The people of Israel themselves acknowledge that the Lord is the one who did this to them in 31:18 when they say, "You disciplined me like an unruly calf and I was disciplined." So God sent the Babylonians to destroy Israel and yet in Jeremiah 50 God says that he is going to destroy Babylon because of how they treated Israel. In other words, the Babylonians did evil in what they did to Israel and God is going to hold them accountable for the evil they did, even though God is the one who sent them to do it. What we discover in the Bible is that God is absolutely sovereign over every part of his creation, including the evil actions of evil people in such a way that everything serves the good and holy purposes of his will and he is never guilty of doing evil. Yet, at the same time, human beings always do what they want to do and so are guilty of doing evil. God did nothing to coerce Herod and his soldiers to perform their wicked deed. They did exactly what they wanted to do and they did what God wanted. There is so much more that can be said about this and about how knowing this should affect us. There are more questions that need answering. However, I only have time to concentrate on just one thing. When evil men do evil they are serving the good purposes of God. Evil does not ever win, God does. Everything is going according to plan. While we do not always know what God's good purposes may be we do know, on the authority of passages like this that God is in charge and evil will not have the last word. Indeed, in eternity one of the things that we will marvel at and worship God for is as we see how God ruled over evil men in such a way that they, while rebelling against him, only served him. While it is right to weep for and with the mothers of Bethlehem and to work against injustice and to rejoice in the just condemnation of those who do such evil acts, we never need to fear the evil that men do. We never need to despair when people treat us in an evil manner for they are not in control, no matter how they boast. God is ruling over all things for his glory and our joy. This is an incredibly practical and helpful thing to know when your child breaks your heart by his foolish choices and actions, when a co-worker sabotages your work, when you face the abuse you suffered as a child. God is always in control and is working for your good even through the evil done to you by evil people. The birth of Jesus is the only source of hope in this sad world because his birth reveals that…
II. God has made a way to justly love sinners (vv. 1-6, 10-11, 18-20) The promises that God makes in chapter 31 are astonishing in light of what God has said in the previous 30 chapters of Jeremiah. Listen to just a few verses that describe Israel's conduct and how God feels about it: Jeremiah 2:32-35 Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number. 33 How skilled you are at pursuing love! Even the worst of women can learn from your ways. 34 On your clothes men find the lifeblood of the innocent poor, though you did not catch them breaking in. Yet in spite of all this 35 you say, 'I am innocent; he is not angry with me.' But I will pass judgment on you because you say, 'I have not sinned.' Jeremiah 3:19-20 "I myself said, "'How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you a desirable land, the most beautiful inheritance of any nation.' I thought you would call me 'Father' and not turn away from following me. 20 But like a woman unfaithful to her husband, so you have been unfaithful to me, O house of Israel ," declares the LORD. Jeremiah 5:1-9 "Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem , look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city. 2 Although they say, 'As surely as the LORD lives,' still they are swearing falsely." 3 O LORD, do not your eyes look for truth? You struck them, but they felt no pain; you crushed them, but they refused correction. They made their faces harder than stone and refused to repent. 4 I thought, "These are only the poor; they are foolish, for they do not know the way of the LORD, the requirements of their God. 5 So I will go to the leaders and speak to them; surely they know the way of the LORD, the requirements of their God." But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke and torn off the bonds. 6 Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out, for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many. 7 "Why should I forgive you? Your children have forsaken me and sworn by gods that are not gods. I supplied all their needs, yet they committed adultery and thronged to the houses of prostitutes. 8 They are well-fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for another man's wife. 9 Should I not punish them for this?" declares the LORD. "Should I not avenge myself on such a nation as this? In light of the long centuries of rebellion of Israel against the God who made them a nation and gave them everything and revealed himself to them in the Law and the temple and through the prophets, how can God say what he says in 31:1? "'At that time,' declares the Lord, 'I will be the God of all the clans of Israel , and they will be my people.'" These people have repeatedly broken the promise they made at Mt. Sinai where they declared three times "We will do everything the Lord tells us to do." The Lord plainly told them that if they broke his covenant he would reject them as his people and would pour out on them the curses he enumerated in that covenant. So how can he be the God of all the clans of Israel ? After calling Israel an adulterous wife and a prostitute how can he turn around and say 31:4, "I will build you up again and you will be rebuilt, O Virgin Israel ?" How can a prostitute become a virgin? Jeremiah 31 answers that question. It is because it contains the answer to that question that Matthew identified the murder of the babies with the image of Rachel weeping for her murdered and exiled children in 31:15. I want you to follow with me the way this chapter shows how God makes a prostitute into a virgin, how he justly saves a wicked, hell-deserving people. It begins in v. 3 where God says that he has an eternal love for "you." Because of his eternal love he draws this person with his lovingkindness. Notice, the Lord does the drawing because of his love, not because of the worth or performance of the one he draws. Notice the person is drawn, the person does not come to the Lord on his own. Who is this one who is drawn? Virgin Israel; Jacob, the foremost of nations; the remnant of Israel; people who live at the ends of the earth; the blind, the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor--in other words, the weak and vulnerable; those who are weeping; those oppressed by one stronger than they; those who mourn and sorrow; the children of Rachel who are held captive in the land of their enemy; those like an unruly calf; those who strayed and then repented, those who are ashamed and humiliated by their sin; those who are God's dear son: all these are descriptions of those people whom the Lord will draw to himself with his lovingkindness. We don't have the time to do this but virtually every one of those descriptions can be found in the NT descriptions of Christians, those who trust in Jesus to save them. God loves and draws to himself the scattered remnant of Israel who are weak and helpless and oppressed and unruly and sorrowful and ashamed of their sin. Notice in v. 10 how the Lord uses a familiar metaphor: he will gather those whom he scattered and he will be their shepherd. Jesus says that he is the good shepherd of his sheep for whom he lays down his life. In v. 11 the Lord ransoms and redeems his people from the hand of the one who is stronger than they. Jesus said, "The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." In Matthew 12 he says that he is the one who frees his people from the strong man, Satan. Peter says that it was with the blood of Jesus that every believer is redeemed from the empty way of life we inherited from our forefathers. Now look at the end of v. 18. God's people pray a very simple prayer. The force of it is lost in translation as the same verb in two different forms is used in the prayer. Literally, the end of v. 18 says, "Cause me to turn back and I will turn back." In other words, what God's people know is that they have no ability to turn away from sin and to the Lord unless the Lord gives them the desire to turn to him. What characterizes the people of God is this knowledge: I have no ability to turn from sin and to turn to God. I have no ability to trust in Christ. My only hope is that God himself turns me back and when he does, then I will turn back. God must act, before I can act. The really cool thing about Matthew's quoting Jeremiah 31 is vv. 31-34. Read them. This is God's promise that he will enter into an agreement with his people that does not depend upon their obedience but depends upon his giving them hearts that want to obey. This passage is quoted in Hebrews 8 and in Hebrews we are told that Jesus is the mediator of this NC. In other words, by his life, death, resurrection and present intercession the promise of forgiveness and a new heart that wants to turn from sin to God and wants to know God is given. This is the passage that Jesus is referring to when he institutes communion the night before he was killed, when he said as he lifted the cup: "This is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." Jeremiah connects the destruction and exile of Rachel's children as the sign of the helplessness of God's people to save themselves and then announces the good news that God has made a way to save his people by giving them new hearts. Matthew recognizes that the murder of the babies at Bethlehem is the ultimate sign of the inability of man to save man and as it coincides with and is related to the birth of Jesus sees that the promises of God's love drawing his people, of redemption, of the giving of new hearts that turn back to God have now come true in the birth of Jesus. Jesus is the one who accomplishes the salvation of God's sinful, suffering, enslaved people. God has made a way for we prostitutes to be made into virgins. He has made a way for we who are traitors to his kingdom to be made citizens and eventually rulers in that kingdom. He has made a way for exiled rebels to return home and live with him. That way is Jesus. It is through Jesus that we are forgiven and given new hearts. Let me urge you to pray the prayer of God's people: "For the sake of Jesus and because of his life, death and resurrection, cause me to turn back and I will turn back." The birth of Jesus is the only source of hope in this sad world because his birth reveals that…
III. God is going to make every sad thing come untrue for his people (vv. 8-10, 12-14, 16-17) Have you ever wondered why it is that we love stories that have happy endings? None of us like movies or stories that do not end well for those in the story. We want our stories to end, "and they lived happily ever after." We want the boy to get the girl, the hero's name to be cleared, the lost people to be found, the bad guys to get what is coming to them. We want to know that all the suffering and sorrow and conflict in the story has a good and just resolution. We are hard-wired to expect and long for the end of the story to reunite friends and lovers and restore justice in the world. We are this way because we live in God's world and the story of this world has a happy ending for the hero of the story, Jesus, and all those whom the hero loves. What the Lord says he is going to do for his redeemed people is to reverse the curse. He is going to undo everything he did to Israel because of their sin. He tore down their cities and so he promises to rebuild. He removed them from the land and caused the land to turn back to wilderness. He will put them back in the land and they will again farm the land and it will produce abundant food. He took away every reason to have a party when he removed them from the land. When they return to the land they will again have dances and throw joyful parties in which all the people will participate with joy. He destroyed Rachel's children, but now they will return to their own land. In other words, every sad thing will become untrue. Every sorrow that we experience in this life is due to sin and God's curse on sin. Through Christ all of the sadness's of this life will be undone. This is the promise of the New Covenant that Christ has secured for us. Rachel is commanded to stop weeping because the Lord is going to make every sad thing untrue, he is going to restore all that was lost due to sin and sin's curse. The losses that we experience as God's children are only temporary. All that we have lost will be restored beyond our wildest dreams. This is the source of our joy and our security. We grieve the losses here but not like those who have no hope. Our hope is not that every illness will be cured or that every broken relationship will be restored here but that there is a day coming when there will be no more illness and there will be no more broken relationships. Look in chapter 31 how many times the people of God are described as those who mourn and have sorrow but then God will turn their sorrow into joy. As v. 12 says, "They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion; they will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord…" So we have joy now only because we view the losses of this life the way the apostle Paul did when he said: "I consider our present sufferings not even worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed in us." This isn't a stoic, stiff upper lip, endurance but a grieving the loss while rejoicing in the knowledge of the great reversal that is coming. There is probably no greater portrait of this sorrow turned to joy in all of literature than the great reversal of fortune that Frodo and Sam experience at the end of "The Lord of the Rings: The King Returns". After destroying the ring of power in Mt. Doom they sit together on the side of the mountain as it is torn apart in a massive volcanic eruption. They have lost everything and are waiting to die. They succumb to the fumes and pass out. But suddenly out of the sky the great eagles appear, guided by Gandalf. They pick up the two hobbits and fly them to safety. As they come to their senses in the house of Elrond and discover that Sauron and his evil empire have been defeated and all their friends, including Gandalf whom they thought was dead, are gathered around them Sam exclaims, "has every sad thing come untrue?" This will be the delight of every person who has been saved by Christ. It is in the hope of that day that we live now with joy in the midst of all this sorrow. The birth of Jesus is the only source of hope in this sad world because his birth reveals that…
© Copyright 2007 John Swanson.
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