Lessons on False Prophets from the Book of Jeremiah: Jeremiah 23:9-40

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1 Lessons on False Prophets from the Book of Jeremiah: Introduction: Good Morning! Jeremiah 23:9-40 I bring you greetings in the name of Jesus Christ from the Booth at the back of the Worship center. For those of you who don t know me, My name is Tom Whiteman; I m the Director of Administration here at Cornerstone. With Jim out of the country, it is my privilege to bring you God s Word this morning and as usual, we re going to be staying on topic from a different area of Scripture. For the past few Weeks, as most of you know, Jim has been preaching from the book of 2 Peter and a couple weeks ago we began looking at Chapter 2. Dealing mostly with False teachers, There was a verse that we went over last week that I want us to look at again really quickly as it lead directly to the passage we ll be dealing with this morning. Take a look again at 2 Peter 2:3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. Those words, their judgement from long ago Lead me to think let s go there and see that and talk about it. So turn your Bible this morning to Jeremiah chapter 23 and today we re going to be looking at verses I want to show you several lessons we can learn about False Prophets and False Prophesy and hopefully give us some tools to deal with it. Before we read it though, let s get caught up with the wider context and then what s going on in the passage so far. Provinence: The Book of Jeremiah, in the Hebrew text, comprises the largest book in the Bible. Surprised? I was too. If we ask folks the question What s the longest book of the Bible? I suspect we d get answers like Psalms or Genesis. But, We have to remember that the verse numbers and chapter numbers were added much, much later. Verse numbers and Chapter numbers don t account for the number of words in a verse or a Chapter. So, if we re counting by how many total words are in a book, then Jeremiah takes the cake by far, having a couple thousand more than the next closest, Genesis. Psalms come in 3 rd in word count. Why do I bring this up? Because it explains how we know so much about Jeremiah

2 and his world. Of all the Prophets in the Old Testament, Jeremiah is easily the most accessible. What do I mean? Because Jeremiah wrote so much (under God s expressed direction, according to Jeremiah 36) We not only know A precise dating for much of the book itself, but we also know a tremendous amount about what was going on around him; Who all was involved; What God thought about it; and finally, We have a great deal of personal detail about the mind and heart of the prophet himself as these things transpired. He tells us how he feels and some of his most private thoughts as he struggled to make God s words known to the people of Jerusalem and the wider nation of Judah. And we cannot see his prophetic life as anything but a constant struggle. Jeremiah was called to be YahWeh s prophet at a very strategic time in the history of Judah and its surrounding nations. The geopolitical landscape of the region was rife with Change. The great Assyrian empire which had overtaken the northern kingdom of Israel and expelled them from their land was on a swift decline after the death of their great king Ashurbanipal. After his death, it would only take about 20 years for Babylon and Egypt to reassert themselves within the region, and smack dab in the middle between these 2 empires was Judah, who found themselves having to defend their land from both sides regularly. In Jeremiahs lifetime, he would see Egypt and Babylon take turns laying siege to Jerusalem and take turns controlling God s people with their own puppet Kings; Until eventually the Lord would give them over fully into the hands of Babylon as punishment for their many unrepented sins and stubborn refusal to turn back to Him. There was also great change within Judah itself. When Jeremiah was called to be a prophet at the young age of 12 or 13 (According to most Scholars), the last great King of Judah was on the throne, King Josiah. Judah had become a very heathen nation in the years leading up to Josiah s reign. They had reincorporated Baal and other gods into their regular worship and even given them place within Yahweh s temple. To simply say they had turned from God s way would be a bit of an understatement. But, just a few years into the reign of King Josiah, a priest named HIlkiah (You can read all about this in 2 Kings 22) found a scroll of the law of the Lord in the temple. Apparently things were so bad; the Law of God had been completely forgotten. When he read it, he immediately recognized that this was something the King needed to see and they took it to Josiah.

3 So Josiah had them read it to him and when they were done, Josiah saw just how badly things had turned away from Yahweh and Judah s need to repent and return to their God. From then on, Josiah commanded reforms throughout the land. He banished the false gods, destroyed the temples of Baal and others in Judah, commanded that only YAHWEH be worshipped, started back up the temple worship according to God s law. He was, for all intents and purposes, God s man in Judah. So much so that 2 Kings 22:2 tells us He did right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David, nor did he turn aside to the right or to the left. Regrettably, Josiah s reign lasted only 31 years. After his death, his evil sons took the throne in succession and each of them lead the nation back further and further into depravity, not just religiously but also in civil matters. All the false god worship returned, all the temple worship dwindled and ceased, alliances were made with nations they had no business dealing with; within just a few years corruption had spread to every level of government and religious life in the nation of Judah. And it was amidst all this, Judah s darkest hours, that Jeremiah was called to prophesy the Lord s words. Jeremiah had to deal with a lot almost from the outset of his ministry. His message was constant, a call for repentance and return to faithful dependence upon the Lord and the judgment coming because of their rebellion. He preached this message for over 40 years and always at great personal cost. No matter how hard he tried, the people would not listen. To say that Jeremiah s message was unpopular in its time would be a drastic understatement. During his time as God s messenger to the people of Judah, He was imprisoned more than once, beaten, whipped and chained up, put in the stocks and mocked, all for the message the Lord had given him to share. Yet he persisted, though as we can tell from his writing, he struggled greatly with feelings of depression and failure. No doubt one of the greatest sources of this was the stubborn defiance of God s people to hear the message the Lord had given him. It was like speaking to a concrete wall. And one of the primary reasons for this was the existence of so many false teachers and prophets throughout Judah. Jeremiah was vastly outnumbered. How were the people to know who to believe? While he was preaching judgment at the hands of Babylon and repentance to the Lord, these false prophets were declaring peace or Shalom because of the temple.

4 Their message was often something like We have the temple of God, where God dwells, He will never forsake us or abandon us. They had turned the Temple into a sort of talisman or idol in and of itself. It would be like if we said God would never judge us, because we have this church building. Utter foolishness. So it s amidst all this confusion in Judah; conflicting religious messages, threats of war from all sides, corrupt leadership in every area of life; that Chapter 23 comes into play. It s a sermon Jeremiah delivered during the reign of the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, wherein the Lord will address these problems and his solution to them. He first deals with the corrupt Government. Verses 1 through 8 see the Lord condemn the evil civil leaders, called Shepherds in the text. He declares they will be removed from power and judged severely for Destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture according to verse 1. In their place, the Lord says he will raise up a new kind of leader, a superior King, a Righteous Branch of David who will rule well with Wisdom and Justice and righteousness. This new King will be save Judah and His name will be The LORD our righteousness. As you may be able to tell, this is a prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ! The Messiah will be raised up to rule over all and to rule perfectly with God s Wisdom and perfect Justice and righteousness, in contrast to the present leader s lack of all 3. Even His name is set to contrast with evil King Zedekiah. While Zedekiah s name means the righteousness of the Lord, this new perfect King of Kings will instead be the LORD our righteousness, Something the apostle Paul will pick up on many times in the New Testament. Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 1:30-31 But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. After dealing with the Bad civil leaders in verses 1-8, he then turns his rod to the religious elite of Judah who have mislead His people for so long. And before we read it, it s worth noting the obvious; He only spends 8 verses here dealing with the bad civil leaders, but now He is going to spend 32 dealing with the bad religious leaders. So much does He have to say about them, He will spend 4 times as long getting it out. That alone should tell us something right there. As one commentator put it, for without Justice a nation suffers, but without the truth it sickens. Ok, finally, lets read it. Jeremiah 23:9-40.

5 Lessons on False Prophets and Prophecy: Lesson 1 Toxic Message: Once of the first things that jump out as we read this text is just exactly how Toxic false prophecy and false teaching is! It s toxic not just to the people of God, but also to the false prophets themselves, and to the very land they inhabit. Their false message of peace isn t with surrounding nations, they are preaching peace with God. Look at verse 17 again. The word Peace here is Shalom, and it s one of the most important words of the Old Testament. Shalom is a word that encompasses much more than a simple lack of conflict between people or nations. It means well-being, prosperity, good health, welfare, and Peace with God. These are the health and wealth gospel preachers and liberal theologians of the Old Testament! And despite Jeremiah s constant preaching and the Lord s pleading otherwise, they are going about telling God s people not to fear or worry, because they have Shalom with God simply because they have the Temple. This has led to a number of toxic results. This false sense of peace has resulted in a denial of the sinfulness of sin. We see this in verse 14. Instead of leading people toward God in righteousness, they strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one has turned back from his wickedness. They not only deny the sinfulness of sin, they condone sin, they support it. They treat utter moral failings like greed, adultery, and homosexuality as just honest mistakes or preferences. Anything except the sin that it is. Not only that, but these religious leaders appear to participate in the same. They are most likely here taking place in the many fertility rituals of Baal which include many sexual sins. These rituals are supposed to bring prosperity to the land and harvest, but they ve had the opposite result entirely according to verse 10. Instead the pastures of the wilderness have dried up. And so we see them at the end of verse 14 compared with Sodom and Gomorrah once again. They are soft on sin, which has led them to be completely silent on God s wrath against it. They are hypocrites by the very definition of the word and have filled the people with false hopes leading to destruction. SO much so that the Lord declares in verse 32 that they are utterly worthless and provide no benefit to anyone. Lesson 2: The message is toxic because the source is utterly polluted. We actually see 3 different sources listed in the text for their false messages. The first one appears in verse 13, They prophesied by Baal and led My

6 people Israel astray. We may as well think of this source simply as Satan. The evil one, the enemy, through the means of a false religion has led these priests to declare false prophecies in the name of a false god. The second source listed shows up in verse 16. It says They speak a vision of their own imagination. The source is themselves! And who are they? They re making it up. And in the case of those declaring I had a dream later in the text, they may have had a dream but it wasn t of God, it was from their own minds. Can you imagine if I got up here today and declared I had a dream and then told you all about my crazy dreams as though they came from the Lord and were a message for you? It would be utter nonsense. First of all, my dreams are often baffling and weird. Second of all, I can t ever make sense of them, how could anyone expect you to? It would be foolishness. You get the point; the source was their own minds. And our minds, as a result of the fall, are often and easily confused and misled. In the study of theology we call this the Noetic effects of the fall or the Noetic effects of sin. R.C. Sproul describes it this way Sin has affected our minds and causes our thinking to become futile apart from Christ. So apart from God s intervention, our thinking is often, from an eternal point of view, fruitless and pointless. This is why we see the Lord tell us things like Proverbs 3:5-6: Trust in the Lord with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He will make your paths straight. We can t rely on our own thinking ability alone to lead us to the truth. And yet, this is exactly what these false prophets were doing and frankly what the health and wealth teachers and liberal theologians today are doing. Based on their own minds and thought process, they are declaring things to be true which are anything but. As Phil Ryken describes it, They are frauds, imposters, dreamers, and liars; Their messages being the product of wishful thinking as opposed to being divine revelation. The last source we see is mentioned in verse 30: Therefore behold, I am against the prophets, declares the LORD, Who steal my words from each other. It s plagiarism. Some of these false prophets can t even be bothered to make up their own false messages; they just steal what someone else has said and pass it off as their own. They re doubling down on the sin of putting words in God s mouth with the further sin of lying in the piracy of someone else s words.

7 Did you notice what all these have in common? They do not come from God! In fact, they are from anywhere except the Lord, who is the only source of truth, or what Francis Schaeffer called True Truth. We see Jeremiah make these comparisons for us starting at the end of verse 16, saying They speak of vision of their own mind, not from the Mouth of the LORD. And again in verse 18 But who has stood in the council of the Lord, That he should see and hear His word? Who has given heed to His word and listened? Finally, we re told by Yahweh in verse 22 But if they had stood in My council, Then they would have announced My words to My people, and would have turned them back from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds. In contrast to the worthless words of the false prophets of Jeremiah s day and the false teachers of today, God s word is instead very powerful and capable of changing people s hearts and minds and supplying actual truth to lead them in the right way. In verse 28 the Lord says What does straw have in common with grain? The implied answer being Nothing whatsoever! It s good for little more than bedding for animals. And so He declares in verse 29 Is my word not like fire? declares the LORD, and like a hammer which shatters a rock? Because of all this, we learn throughout the text that their judgment will swift and complete. It will be utter destruction. It will be violent and full of God s Wrath against them. And according to verse 40, it will be everlasting. These are the judgments of old that Peter was talking about. For details we can look to Verse 12, or verse 15, or 19, or 20, or 30 and on and on. By my count there are no less than 15 declarations of judgment against the false prophets in Jeremiah Chapter 23 alone. They have caused people to forget His name, and for this they will completely abandoned, destroyed, and cursed forever. So our last lesson here is this; putting words in God s mouth which did not come from Him is so utterly false and rebellious that the eternal torment of the one speaking them is at stake. Verses 23 and 24 make the point Am I a God who is near, declares the Lord, And not a God far off? Can a man hide himself in hiding places So I do not see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill the heavens and the earth? declares the Lord. There is nowhere to hide from God, nowhere to run. Their judgment is sure.

8 Closing Application: So then, What are we to do with all this? Well, there are a few things. For starters, We can attribute the truth with its proper worth. We have the example of Jeremiah to draw from here. Look at verse 9 again (READ VERSE 9). He didn t get angry. He didn t try to get even with them. Instead, he lamented their false teaching. He so well understood the holiness of God s Word that when he heard it misused, maligned, or outright denied, he was deeply disturbed. Also notice, the fact that they were false prophets with false words over against his True words from God as a true prophet did not make him selfrighteous or arrogant. The fact is, if not for the intervention of God, that could have just as easily been him or us. How does that old saying go? There but for the grace of God go I? And seeing people misled toward a path of eternal destruction should not make us puffed up about our own faith. Instead, it should make us sad and heartbroken as it made Jeremiah here. And then we can let that lament tint our defense of truth with Charity and humility instead arrogance or boastfulness. We can declare the truth in love instead of vain conceit. The second thing we can do to attribute truth with its proper worth is to learn to speak carefully about the Lord s leading in our lives. We ve all heard folks speak carelessly or casually about this, sounding as though they ve received some private revelation from the Lord, we may have even done it ourselves. Phrases Like The Lord has been telling me or I m being led by the Lord to or The Lord has laid it on my heart or even more worryingly God told me to tell you.. Unless we re about to quote some passage of scripture directly, we probably shouldn t speak this way. In our text, the False Prophets did exactly this kind of thing, using phrases like I had a dream in verse 25 or The oracle of the Lord in verse 34 or The LORD declares in verse 31. These Cliché s are used regularly and God grew so tired of it that He declares in verses 33-38, basically, that He never wants to hear it again and is against anyone who says them. Now, generally speaking, when someone uses one of these phrases today we understand that what they really mean is something more akin to what one commentator calls a Warm spiritual hunch. And that s fine. It s safe to say we all have those at one time or another. I think that s one of the ways we experience the Holy Spirits leading. Christians definitely get warm spiritual hunches. But if what we have is a warm Spiritual hunch, then let s by all means just call it that, a warm spiritual hunch. We otherwise risk using the Lords name in vain by declaring the Lord told me when it wasn t truly so.

9 I really like how careful Pastor Jim is in this area. You ll often hear him use the phrase I had a sense of peace about so and so after much prayer and consideration. That s a great way to honor God s word and avoid putting words in the Lord s mouth. There s more I could say on this, for sure, regarding how scripture itself declares the canon of scripture closed and how we re no longer receiving this kind direct revelation but I think you get the point. We honor God and the truth by being careful with the words we use. Listen to Jesus in Matthew 12:36-37 But I tell you that every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for it in the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. This actually brings us to a third way we can apply the text of Jeremiah 23, We can listen to Jesus Christ. He is the true prophet of God. He is the word. He is the truth. He has stood in His presence and council and speaks His words only. And we can honor Him by examining the teachings we hear against Him and His teaching to determine whether or not it s true. We can consider the source of the message and if it s not from Him (and by extension His word, the scripture) then we can know it s most likely not true. Furthermore, We know that the teachings and life of Jesus lead people to eternal life in Him, sanctification from evil, and Salvation from eternal judgment. If the message we re examining leads somewhere else, somewhere other than Godliness or faithfulness to Yahweh, then we can be certain it isn t true. He is The LORD our righteousness, and we attribute proper worth to Him by honoring his words, listening to them and living according to them. Let s Pray.