Christmas at the Castle – Part 2

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Old Testament studies from Jeremiah 3:4-4:4.

It is often said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. George Santayana insisted that those who learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it. The point is that we keep making the same mistake as our forbearers. Do you ever read through Old Testament narrative sections and think, “How stupid can you get?”

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You know? You read through the book of Judges, and there goes another cycle. They slide down to idolatry. Then they turn to the Lord and call for mercy. Then God comes in, saves them, and gives them another judge. Then there’s sort of national reformation revival for a generation or two and then they slide down again. You think, “Didn’t they learn anything?” Then the same sorts of cycles go on with the kings.

Yet Western history is not all that different. A hundred years ago, throughout most of the Western world there was, from one perspective, a rather astonishing optimism. The world was getting better. Science was going to triumph, with a little more education and a little more endeavor to help the poor of this world. Well eventually we would, as it were, bring in the kingdom. Often it was cast in very religious terms.

The optimism was endemic to Western culture. Anybody who was saying, “Yes, but there’s so much sin in our hearts. There are things of which we need to repent” was deemed a horrible pessimist. Then came World War I, then the Great Depression, then World War II, and Vietnam. Gradually, people began to speak again of sin, especially after the ovens were found at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Now we’ve come to the beginning of the next century, a bare hundred years later. Then, for slightly different reasons, partly because the impact of postmodern perceptions in which we create our own goods and evils in which these things are entirely socially defined, we’ve come to the place again where we’re very reluctant to talk openly about evil. There is a kind of endemic malaise, and yet at the same time a feeling that, “If we could only just get reasonable people together and sit around a table and talk, we’d sort it all out, wouldn’t we?”

Haven’t we learned anything? The entire section before us expresses wonder at this horrible inability to learn from history. It turns on this tale of two sisters, as it were: Israel and Judah. We begin with the two sisters themselves in verses 6–10. It’s important to review the history. When Israel was constituted a nation, there were 12 tribes, one nation.

Eventually, the Davidic king was installed, David himself. Before him, King Saul. He didn’t end up very well. Then he was replaced by David. David was succeeded by Solomon. Then when Solomon died and his son Rehoboam took over, the kingdom split. Ten tribes went north, and the northern section came to be called Israel. Before that, Israel regularly refers to the whole 12, but at this juncture, Israel refers only to the 10 in the north.

In the south, Benjamin and Judah, they are collectively called just Judah, or the kingdom of Judah, or the south, or the southern kingdom. Now the northern kingdom had already been taken away in captivity. In the ancient world, one of the reasons why the leaders were taken off (not everybody was transported, but the royalty and the priests and the artisans and the educated people, the aristocrats, they were all taken off) was because it was then far less likely that the remainder would rebel.

In the ancient world there was a presumed connection in three parts … land, people, and gods … forming a three-fold cord, and if you could remove one of those posts, then the whole thing fell apart a wee bit. If you could move some of the people off to another land, they’re removed from their land and now they’re dealing with other gods. (That was the theory, in any case.)

So how could they possible rebel? They didn’t have the incentive to. They were 700 miles away from where they had been and now they had foreign gods. This was a way of pacifying territories that were taken over. What the Assyrians did was remove the leaders (that had already happened to Israel), and then they brought in foreigners who intermarried with the Jews in the north who were still left and this produced a syncretist kind of religion that was partly the religion of Israel, partly paganism, partly Baalism, and partly who knows what.

That runs all the way down to the New Testament. Do you remember how you read in the New Testament that the Jews in the south have no dealings with the Samaritans in the north? That’s partly because their religion had so been compromised by this intermarriage that at this juncture it was a little far removed from the historic religion of ancient Israel.

Israel, then, by the time this is being written, has been transported for almost a hundred years. About the same time as our hundred years of forgetting. The whole condemnation of Israel and invitation for Israel to repent and come back and promises from God to show mercy, that occupies almost all of this text all the way down to chapter 4, verse 3. Then, suddenly, this is what the Lord says to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem. “Namely, you haven’t learned anything from the experiences of the north.”

So look again at chapter 3, verses 6 and following. “During the reign of King Josiah [in the south], the Lord said to me, ‘Have you seen what faithless Israel [in the north] has done? She went up on every high hill and under every spreading tree and has committed adultery there.” That’s where the Ashtaroth, the goddesses, the Baalim were. They were on these hilltops. So there was a spreading adultery up there in the hilltops.

Then God says, “I thought that eventually they’d see their guilt and repent, but she didn’t, and her unfaithful sister saw it.” (And as the text unwinds, learns nothing from it.) “I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce …” That’s a way of referring to the transportation when the Assyrians came in, almost a hundred years earlier, and took them north. They were removed from God.

“… and sent her away because of all her adulteries. Yet I saw that her unfaithful sister Judah had no fear; she also went out and committed adultery. Because Israel’s immorality mattered so little to her [that is, to Judah], she defiled the land and committed adultery with stone and wood.” Obviously that means adultery with idols, spiritual adultery with these false gods made of wood and stone. “In spite of all this, her unfaithful sister Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense.”

She kept up a kind of pretense of faithfulness to God, a pretense of observing the covenant, a pretense of following Yahweh, but in her heart, she was really committed elsewhere. Have you noticed the pairs again and again? Faithless Israel, but unfaithful Judah. The expression returns again and again. Faithless Israel, unfaithful Judah. It shows up again in verse 11. “Faithless Israel is more righteous than unfaithful Judah.”

The expression faithless Israel means defecting Israel, turn-able Israel, turning away, but in the Hebrew, unfaithful Judah means treacherous Judah. That is to say Judah does not blunder into evil. She plans for it and opts for it. She sees the lessons from the north and turns away from them. She learns nothing from them. She’s choosing to forget her history. That’s the way that the whole section is set up: a tale of two sisters, Israel and Judah, verses 6–10.

Then Israel’s story is teased out a little bit more. God’s appeals to Israel in the verses that follow. His first appeal to return, verses 11–13: “The Lord said to me, ‘Faithless Israel is more righteous than unfaithful Judah. Go, proclaim this message toward the north.” Not necessarily in the north. After all, the land has been transported. The idea is to do this in a symbolic-laden way so that the people of Judah can see it. This is what God still says, though he says it in the hearing of the Judahites.… It’s what God still says to the Israelites in the north.

“ ‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the Lord.” In other words, repent. Come back! “ ‘I will frown on you no longer, for I am merciful,’ declares the Lord.” Some translations render that “for I am faithful.” It’s the word chaciyd in Hebrew, which refers to God’s covenantal grace. He is faithful to his covenant, and in the covenant he shows forth his mercy and his grace.

“ ‘I will not be angry forever. Only acknowledge your guilt.’ ” Repent, turn from it. “ ‘You have rebelled against the Lord your God, you have scattered your favors to foreign gods …’ ” That’s the spiritual adultery again. “ ‘… under every spreading tree, and have not obeyed me,’ declares the Lord.” That’s his first appeal.

Then there is a second appeal. Verses 14–22, which is even stronger. In verses 14–15 when God says, “I will choose you—one from a town, two from a clan,” he means he will choose some of them to return. They’re scattered in the northern tribes, but he’ll choose one from here and one from there and another one here and another from there, and they’ll gradually come back to the land and settle in it once again. Then this remarkable vision of the future.

Verses 16 and 17: “In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land …” That is because they are returning at the end of the exile. They’re beginning to return to come back and settle in the land. “ ‘In those days, when there is this increase in number,’ declares the Lord, ‘men will no longer say, “The ark of the covenant of the Lord.” It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made. At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the Lord, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord.’ ”

This is a stupendous vision. You must remember how important the ark of the Lord was to ancient Israel. The ark was the box in which the Ten Commandments and a pot of the manna and the rod of Aaron that had budded at the initial exodus were placed.

On top of it was a lid, which came to be called in our older translations, the mercy seat. It was placed in the most holy place of the temple, in that final cubicle room (before that, the most holy place of the tabernacle), with two cherubim, angelic creatures, with their wingtips touching over the ark of the covenant, with the outside of their wingtips touching the two side walls.

On this ark of the covenant, only once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest would enter carrying a small bowl of the blood of a slaughtered bull and a slaughtered goat. The blood is to indicate atonement, both for his own sins and the sins of the people. He would splash some of it on the top of the ark of the covenant and God’s glory would hover over this ark of the covenant, a representation, a symbol for God’s very presence.

Now we read in this text that this ark which was so important, right at the very center of temple worship, this ark of the covenant which bore the symbols of covenantal renewal: the Ten Commandments, no less, “People will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ ” How is this a sign of blessing?

The temple and the ark of the covenant all symbolized mediation by a priest. The average person, like you and me, couldn’t go into the Most Holy Place. It was all done by mediation. It was always done by a priest who represented us, and even then, only once a year. Here, instead, there is a vision now that is so powerful, so complete in the presence of God felt among the people that the entire city is called the throne of the Lord.

Think through how the language of temple changes as you go through the Bible. There’s the tabernacle. Then there’s the temple. Then about the same time that Jeremiah is preaching, Ezekiel is preaching to exiles already off in Babylon. The first wave of exiles had been transported and with them was Ezekiel the priest. Ezekiel is telling his people, “Don’t you understand? Jerusalem is going to fall. Jerusalem is so wicked it is going to fall.”

Those who were in exile didn’t want to hear that either, because then there would be no home to go home to. They, too, found it difficult to believe that the temple could ever fall, it could ever be forsaken by God. This was the place where God met with his people. This was the place of atonement. How could God let his temple come down?

Then in Ezekiel 8–10, Ezekiel has this spectacular vision in which he is transported 700 miles to Jerusalem, and he sees all the horrible wickedness going on. Then the glory of God in his vision abandons the temple and moves to the mobile throne chariot of God. This chariot abandons the city, crosses the Kidron Valley, rises up the Mount of Olives, and simply looks over the city. It’s a way of saying that God is judicially abandoning the entire city.

So that when Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian hordes finally come down and destroy the city, it’s not because God isn’t strong enough. It’s because God has judicially pronounced judgment upon it. It’s precisely because God has abandoned the temple and the city because of their sin. Then when Ezekiel comes out of his trance, out of his vision, he tells all the elders in exile his vision, and they’re horrified, because this means Jerusalem is gone.

God then says to the exiles through Ezekiel, “Don’t you understand? The sanctuary is gone, but I will be a sanctuary for you.” In other words, the real temple is where God is, not where the masonry is. Don’t confuse the symbol with the reality. Eventually another temple is rebuilt, but that’s still not the end of things. Centuries later, six centuries later, there was heard a voice on the streets of Jerusalem saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” John, chapter 2.

The disciples didn’t have a clue what Jesus was talking about, and his opponents certainly didn’t. “Destroy this temple? Good grief! What are you going to use? Dynamite?” It hadn’t been invented yet. Rebuild it in three days? In the day before hydraulics and mass production and this sort of thing? It just seemed one of those enigmatic things Jesus was prone to utter that nobody understood.

In fact, the disciples said they had no idea what he was talking about until after he had risen from the dead. “Then they remembered his words and understood the Scriptures.” The ultimate temple is not masonry. The ultimate meeting place between God and sinful human being is not the tabernacle or the temple. It’s Jesus himself. He bore our sins in his own body on the tree. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.”

They understood that he died and constituted that sacrifice that paid for our sins once for all and rose again, constituting himself as the great meeting place between God and his own rebellious image-bearers. This image of Christ as the temple plays out in a variety of ways until you come to the last vision of the entire Bible, Revelation 21 and 22. John says, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The old things have passed away.”

Then he describes this reality as a new city, a New Jerusalem. This does not mean that Jerusalem is part of this new heaven and new earth. It’s a different metaphor. Apocalyptic literature tends to push the metaphors together. You can think of it in one sense as a new heaven and a new earth, or you can think of it in another sense as a brand new city, the city of the great King, the city of God. What does this city look like? What sort of dimensions does it have? What does it appear like? Remarkably John, in his vision, says it’s built like a cube.

Now I think I’ve been in most of the cities with the skyscrapers of the world. I was in Kuala Lumpur a few weeks ago, and for a long time its tower was the tallest one in the world. It gets replaced by another, then it gets replaced by another. These towers keep being built. Even the cities with the highest towers, the cities don’t look like cubes; they look like cities with tall towers.

John, in his vision, says this city in his vision is built like a cube: as high as it is wide as it is long. What’s his point? Strange dimensions for a city. The point comes out of the symbolism out of the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there is only one cube. It’s the Most Holy Place, the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, in the temple. The place where God meets with his people by the sacrifice that he has prescribed.

So this is a way of saying now that if all of God’s people in the consummation are in the city built like a cube, they are all now behind the veil. They’re all in the presence of God. They’re all immediately before the glory. They don’t need mediating priests anymore. As this city is described in Revelation 21 and 22, in symbol-laden language, John comments, “I saw no temple in that city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Do you see? Always in the presence of the living God. Already that vision is anticipated here in Jeremiah 3.

Verse 16: “ ‘In those days, when your numbers have increased greatly in the land,’ declares the Lord, ‘men will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ ” Well, that was a symbol of the old covenant. Don’t you see? “It will never enter their minds or be remembered.” Once the reality has come in the new heaven and the new earth, are people going to sit around and say, “Boy, I sure wish we had an ark of the covenant again”? It doesn’t make any sense.

“In fact, it will not be missed, nor will another one be made.” It would be going back to the symbol-laden structures once the reality has come in all of its fullness. “At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the Lord.” Not the temple is the throne of the Lord, still less the ark of the covenant is the throne of the Lord, but the whole city and all of God’s people will be there. Not only the Israelites, but, “All nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord.”

In other words, although this is addressed to Israel in the north, which had abandoned Jerusalem, not only Israel has come back to Jerusalem (which signifies the unified Jewish people), but also the nations of the world have gathered. Small wonder, then, that Galatians and Hebrews picture an ultimate New Jerusalem, a New Jerusalem in which the redeemed of the Lord gather and constitute God’s people. “No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts.” They will be so transformed that there will no longer be any inclination to sin.

“In those days the house of Judah will join together with the house of Israel …” There won’t be two kingdoms anymore. “… and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your forefathers.” The enemies, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, they, too, will constitute the people of God. “I myself said, ‘How gladly would I treat you like my sons and give you a desirable land, the most bountiful inheritance of any nation.’ ”

This can be looked at in so many ways. “I thought you would call me ‘Father.’ ” Sometimes you have a husband-wife kind of paradigm. Sometimes it’s a father-and-children paradigm. In the ancient world, the sons were to imitate their fathers in all kinds of ways. The daughters would imitate their mothers in all kinds of ways.

The vast majority of the sons of farmers would end up being farmers. The vast majority of the sons of bakers would end up being bakers. You were called to a whole clan existence, a tribal existence that shaped your whole identity. You are the baker’s son. You are the farmer’s son. Thus, you act the way the father does.

Do you see? “They would be my father” means if God is our Father, then we’re holy like him. We act like him. We’re identified with him. We belong to the God clan. Instead, they turned away. The adultery image is picked up again. Verses 21 and 22a describe before this time of restoration comes, horrible regrets because of the judgment that falls on the north.

“A cry is heard on the barren heights, the weeping and pleading of the people of Israel, because they have perverted their ways and have forgotten the Lord their God. ‘Return, faithless people; I will cure you of backsliding.’ ” This is God’s appeal to Israel. Then in verses 22b to 4:2 are Israel’s confession and God’s response. In other words, Jeremiah anticipates the time when Israel in substance really does repent. This is the way he imagines them speaking.

Verse 22b: “Yes, we will come to you, for you are the Lord our God. Surely the idolatrous commotion on the hills and mountains is a deception.” All of this pagan activity, all of this going off to the gods and goddesses, it was all deception. We were deluded. “Surely in the Lord our God is the salvation of Israel. From our youth shameful gods have consumed the fruits of our fathers’ labor—their flocks and herds, their sons and daughters.”

Because we have followed these gods, judgment has come and we have been impoverished, enslaved, brutalized. It turns out that these gods we worship have, in fact, consumed the fruits of our father’s labor, just taken away our inheritance. “Let us lie down in our shame.” Instead of, “Let us lie down now with the gods in spiritual adultery on the mountains,” now it’s, “Let us lie down in our shame.”

“Let our disgrace cover us. We have sinned against the Lord our God, both we and our fathers; from our youth till this day we have not obeyed the Lord our God.” God responds. Verses 1 and 2: “ ‘If you, Israel, will return, then return to me,’ declares the Lord. ‘If you put your detestable idols out of my sight and no longer go astray, and if in a truthful, just and righteous way you swear, “As surely as the Lord lives,” then the nations will be blessed by him and in him they will glory.’ ”

Let me make two comments about this declaration from God. Look at verse 2. “If in a truthful, just and righteous way you swear, ‘As surely as the Lord lives …’ ” What’s going on here? Why does this make any sort of difference? The allusion is back to a remarkable passage in Deuteronomy, chapter 6.

In Deuteronomy, chapter 6, the people of God are told that they are to swear by the Lord. We’re told, Deuteronomy 6:13: “Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name.” I don’t know what kind of childhood oaths you took on your playgrounds when you were 8 or 10, but we still used in Canada when I was growing up, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

So if you’re really trying to say, “Yeah, you really would do something” to a friend, you’d say, “Cross my heart and hope to die.” Then we had all kinds of rules added on to that. If you said that while you crossed your fingers, it didn’t count. But “Cross my heart and hope to die” is a bit like saying, “May my heart be devoured, destroyed. May my life be gone if I break my word on it.”

Of course, unless my fingers are crossed. Or, “Swear on my mother’s grave,” because you’re looking for something that is the highest thing you can swear by. In many courts in the Western world, you swear putting your hand on the Bible, because this is supposed to be a sacrosanct book.

So in ancient Israel, in a culture that is surrounded by many other religions, the people are instructed to take their oaths in the Lord’s name, because that was a way of saying, in effect, that the Lord was their highest good. The Lord was their highest value. The Lord was their God. So if someone swore, “I swear by the name of God I will do it this way,” it was a way of indicating that God himself was their God.

If, instead, they started swearing in the name of the Baals, what was that really indicating about what they valued most? Do you see? So in other words, one of the signs that this people has really returned and repented is that they now swear, “As surely as Yahweh lives, as surely as the Lord lives.” He is their highest good.

There’s the second element that must be pointed out here. Have you noticed how often the word return crops up? I haven’t picked them all up. I haven’t stressed them all, but there are several in the verses to verse 10, then verse 12 (“Return faithless Israel”), verse 14 (“Return faithless people”), verse 22 (“Return faithless people”), and chapter 4:1, (“If you will return, O Israel.”)

It’s sometimes rendered turn or return or repent. The point here is “ ‘If you will return, O Israel, return to me.’ declares the Lord.” The word is used 16 times in this passage. It’s hard to believe. It’s used 90 times in the whole book of Jeremiah. The same emphasis is found in Peter’s sermon on Pentecost.

Peter explains who Christ is, that he is genuinely the Messiah, and that he has come as God has promised and has poured out his Holy Spirit on the people. When the men and women came to believe that he really did rise from the dead, they said, “What shall we do? What shall we do?” “Repent and believe the gospel,” we’re told.

Now there is a part of us that hears the instruction to repent and it sounds sterile, or it sounds party-pooping, it sounds kill-joy-ish. You’re having fun in your own little corner of sin and then, “Okay, okay. I have to repent or else there’s judgment. Okay, I’ll repent.” Repent does not have a good odor, even amongst Christians sometimes. It’s one of those words that we’re supposed to like, but it just sounds narrow.

However, you must think of repentance as the flip side of idolatry. We briefly looked at idolatry last night. Idolatry is simply the placing of anything or anyone before God. It is pursuing some ultimate good other than what God ordains. Repentance means turning away from that and back to this God.

This, in God’s way of looking at things, is not a narrowing of things. It is not turning us toward something hopelessly beggarly. It is turning us toward our Maker, toward what we were designed for, toward the joy of the Lord. It turns us away from the rebellion and the anarchy and the sin and the self-will, toward the Lord.

God does not want a people who turn to him merely because the wheels are coming off, the enemies are coming in, it’s an economic downturn, there’s drought in the land. “Okay Lord, we repent, we confess our sins. Now please send us the rain.” He says, “No, no, no. If you return, return to me.” It’s in such a way that even in your speech, unwittingly almost you say, “As surely as the Lord lives.” That is, I become your highest good. “If in a truthful, just and righteous way you swear, ‘As surely as the Lord lives,’ then the nations will be blessed by him and in him they will glory.”

Forty billion years into eternity no one will doubt that the summum bonum, the ultimate good, is knowing God our maker and redeemer. With boundless joy and sense of fulfillment and gratitude for his grace. With an understanding of holiness and sheer delight in his glories and excellencies. We’ll see that this is what we were made for, and the notion of turning away will seem so utterly shameful, so despicable, and so stupid. We’ll wonder, we’ll marvel that we could’ve done it again and again and again. Yet, we do. We resurrect the idols. What God says is, “Return. Repent. Turn back to me.”

Thus, when the Bible asks for repentance, it is not simply saying, “Stop cheating on your income tax. Don’t use such bad language. Don’t be sleeping around. Don’t get caught up in pornography.” It’s not just saying that. It’s saying something much, much deeper. It is saying, “Turn from this self-willed way, this focus on things that take you away from me, and turn back to me, for I am your God. I am your Maker. I am your Judge, but I am also your Savior. I am your joy. I am your peace. I am your salvation. I am God.”

Then after all of this, with respect to Israel, God makes his appeal to Judah. Verses 3 and 4. This is what the Lord says to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem. Don’t forget now, Israel is already in captivity. It has not shown sign of repentance. It’s been imagined by the prophet. Now Judah is under threat precisely because it is so religiously and politically and morally and spiritually compromised.

“Break up your unplowed ground.” That is, this ground is so hardened that it is not soft. It does not receive the word of the Lord. It does not receive good seed. Break it up! There’s no real repentance there at all. Break it up. “Do not sow among thorns.” The kind of seed that is thrown down and is just pointless in many respects.

It cannot produce fruit because the thorn bushes have taken over the land. “Break up your unplowed ground. Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, circumcise your hearts …” It’s not enough simply to have an external rite. It’s a bit like saying today, “Don’t just be baptized in water, but be baptized in the Holy Spirit.”

You must be transformed, not just have the external symbols. You must be genuinely regenerated “… or my wrath will break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done—burn with no one to quench it.” Thus we have come full-cycle to the tale of two sisters. People don’t learn from history. Judah hasn’t learned from Israel, and we learn a little later in the chapter, this hard reality is precisely what is breaking Jeremiah up.

Look at verses 16 and following. “Tell this to the nations, proclaim it to Jerusalem: ‘A besieging army is coming from a distant land, raising a war cry against the cities of Judah. They surround her like men guarding a field, because she has rebelled against me,’ ” declares the Lord. ‘Your own conduct and actions have brought this upon you. This is your punishment. How bitter it is! How it pierces to the heart!’ ”

Then Jeremiah speaks. Verse 19: “Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, for I cannot keep silent. For I have heard the sound of the trumpet; I have heard the battle cry. Disaster follows disaster; the whole land lies in ruins. In an instant my tents are destroyed, my shelter in a moment. How long must I see the battle standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?”

Now what are we to do with all of this?

1. Recognize that the same point, the point about learning from history, is made by some of the moralizing ways the New Testament uses the Old.

Now the New Testament uses the Old in quite a lot of different ways, but one of the ways it does so is by learning from Old Testament stories, Old Testament history.

For example, in Hebrews 3:7–18, the writer of Hebrews says, “Don’t you remember what happens to that first generation? They were saved out of slavery in Egypt, but nevertheless, most of that first generation died like flies in the desert. They never got into the Promised Land.” Why? They started well. They were relieved from slavery, but they never actually got into the Promised Land. Why?

Because they never mingled this with genuine belief and obedience. They didn’t really trust the God who would actually save them. They didn’t persevere to the end. So, God says, through Hebrews to the Christian readers in the first century, “Don’t be like them.” It’s possible to start well and end badly.

There is an approach to Christian faith that turns away from sin in some sense, that defines release from our Egypt, but never actually enters into the Promised Land, because at the end of the day we still prefer our own isles, thank you. We don’t persevere. Genuine Christians persevere, by definition. In fact, in that section, in 3:14, God actually says, “You have been made partakers if you hold the beginning of your confidence steadfast to the end.” Christians, by definition, persevere.

That lesson is drawn in Hebrews 3 from the Old Testament account of the people of God. They did get saved from something, but they never got saved to something. They were saved out of Egypt, but they never got into the Promised Land. A similar lesson is learned in 1 Corinthians, chapter 10.

Recognize that the same point, the importance of learning from history, is made by some of the moralizing ways the New Testament uses the Old. We’re to learn from these stories ourselves. We’re not supposed to look at them and think, “Boy, were they ever thick in those days. They didn’t learn anything.” We must learn from history ourselves or we are condemned to repeat it. In that light …

2. Bad examples recorded also in the New Testament ought to speak to us today.

I’ve already said that there were some bad examples in the Old Testament that are then picked up in the New Testament and highlighted for those first-century Christian believers. In other words, the New Testament writers are trying to learn from history, from the bad examples from the Old Testament.

Likewise, in the same analogous way, we ought to look at some of the bad examples in the New Testament and think, “How do they apply to us?” One of them was read this morning in the New Testament reading: some churches lose their first love. Or, another example in Revelation 3:14–21: The Laodicean church, which is smug and satisfied, precisely because the economy is doing so well, thank you. “Things are going quite nicely. We’re pretty strong. We’re pretty rich. We’re pretty knowledgeable. We’re pretty comfortable.”

God says, “You do not realize that you are poor and naked and blind.” What are we to learn from this? What are we to learn of the place of 1 Corinthians 13. There is this Corinthian church with so many spiritual gifts, genuine spiritual gifts, pulling apart and running in all directions because they’re so busy arguing about the spiritual gifts that they’ve forgotten what Paul calls, “the most excellent way.” There are different gifts distributed differently, but there is only one most excellent way, the way of love in the people of God.

“Though I have the gift of faith and can move mountains, though I give all my goods to feed the poor, though I give my body to be burned, if I speak in tongues, the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” We’re supposed to learn that.

Or Galatians, a church that really does believe that Jesus died on the cross and rose again for their sins and all of that. Oh, yes, yes, yes, but to this they want to add some other necessary requirements to be the people of God. What is in jeopardy is the exclusive sufficiency of the people of God. Do you know one of the most dangerous things going on in the evangelical world today? It’s treating the gospel as that which is merely assumed.

“Of course I believe the gospel!” But then you focus on something beyond the gospel, a certain kind of spiritual discipline as the key to spirituality, even though the New Testament doesn’t make it the key. Or, “Yes, yes, yes, I believe the gospel, but what we must have especially is cultural analysis.” Well, God knows that we need to understand our culture. We’re supposed to be good missionaries in it, but I’ve been a teacher for enough years that I know that my students don’t learn everything I teach them.

It probably means that I’m not that good of a teacher, but most teachers and preachers recognize pretty early on that their students and hearers don’t learn everything they teach. What they tend to learn is what the teacher or preacher is most excited about. So if you are merely assuming the gospel, but what you’re really excited about is something that is added on, or something that is part of your academic interest or is part of your focus, then you pass on to the others a new center. The gospel is no longer the center.

For your students, the people to whom you witness, the people in your Bible study, what is most central is no longer the gospel. That’s what is going on in Galatians. There is this gospel that they all confess, and yet at the same time they also say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true. Christ really did die for our sins, and amen. I believe all of that, but in addition you have to be circumcised and become part of the covenant people of God and come under the law.”

You can destroy the gospel by adding something else as necessary, even as you can destroy the gospel by taking away some component bits. Do you see? We’re to learn from that and ask ourselves, “How do we do that sort of thing today?” Or, “How are we tempted to do that sort of thing today?” More broadly …

3. The way Christians are not to fall into the trap of learning nothing from history is by constantly reading and re-reading our Bibles.

All of these things are spelled out in these stories, reading and re-reading them. They become part of our world, our frame of reference. Isn’t that what the author does, for example, in Hebrews, chapter 11, when he goes through this role call of heroes of the faith, men and women?

He’s trying to show that again and again and again their faith worked out in perseverance. Therefore, we too should persevere. This is also the way typology works. There are lessons taught in the old covenant of how things work out with animals and sacrifices and priests and all of that that become a way of establishing the way we think in order to make us understand who Christ is.

If you go on the streets of Belfast and you talk to somebody who is neither a Catholic nor a Protestant but just a decent, run-of-the-mill secularist (and there are rising numbers of them; not as many here as in some parts of the UK, but there are rising numbers of them) and you ask, “What does covenant mean to you? What do you think of priests? How important is sacrifice?” these are just God-talk terms. They don’t really explain anything. They carry no resonances unless you are already a pretty religious person.

You can’t really make sense of Christ and see how important he is unless you see how all the analogous structures have already been provided by God in the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us,” Paul says. Which presupposes you know what a Passover is and what it does. It’s a sacrifice that God has himself ordained so that God’s wrath would pass over you. The sacrifice takes your place. Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us.

How do you understand Christ’s death as averting wrath in terms of Yom Kipper, the Day of Atonement unless you know what the Day of Atonement is? That Most Holy Place, the temple, with its priests and blood and all of that. You read through that and you think, “Oh boy, this is boring. Just let me get on with the good bits like the Sermon on the Mount.” Yet those are the very structures that God has put in place to teach us to remember them so that when we come to Christ himself we understand what God has done and why.

That is part and parcel of the purpose of reading the Bible again and again and again. So we do not forget. So we understand the categories. So we learn the lessons from the history that God has graciously given and thus learn the tale of two cities, the tale of two sisters. Let us bow in prayer.

We confess with shame, Lord God, how easily we turn aside from your Word thinking we know it in some superficial way but have not absorbed its lessons most probingly and deeply into our lives. Forgive us our sins. Open our eyes to the ugliness of idolatry. Give us this turning, this returning, this repentance that brings us back to you, because you are God. You are perfectly holy and wise and good. You are our Maker as well as our Judge. You do know what is best and you can be trusted.

We hear your exhortation, Lord God, so often repeated, “Return, return, return to me.” We pray that in the quietness of our hearts now your Spirit will so work within us that we too will cry heavenward, “I do return, Lord God. Have mercy upon me. Have mercy upon me, a sinner.” So heal us and heal our land and make us faithful in our small corners, as faithful as pardoned sinners can be this side of the consummation. For Jesus’ sake, amen.