Adopted by the King

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This morning, we’re going to be in Jeremiah chapter 10 and Galatians chapter 4. If you want to mark both spots in your Bible, Jeremiah chapter 10 and Galatians chapter 4. A while back, quite some time ago, I was out doing some visitation with a group of people, and we went to visit a lady at her home, and somebody in the group asked the lady, one of the questions from Evangelism Explosion, I probably asked her both of the questions that I’ve mentioned on a few occasions before.

You know, do you know, basically, do you know if you were to die tonight where you would go? And the second one being, if you were to stand before God and have him ask you, why should I let you into heaven? What would you tell him?

And those questions are sort of, I mean, no test is perfect. We can’t see into somebody’s heart and know for sure whether they’re a believer or not. We go by their profession and their fruit.

But those questions are designed to sort of give us some insight into somebody’s spiritual condition, where they stand with God as far as a relationship and what they’re basing that relationship on. But I will never forget that when that second question was asked of this lady in particular, her answer was, well, why should he let me into heaven? I would tell him that because I’m a God just like him.

And I’m not speechless very often, but folks, that’ll do it. That I, glad I was with a group because I didn’t have a response for that. And it’s a very, she was coming from a very Eastern way of looking at, looking at and dealing with God.

That a lot of Eastern philosophies and Eastern religions teach something along the lines of or something related to God is everything and everything is God and it’s all connected and we’re all part of God. That’s not the way the Bible describes God. But she was coming from that kind of background, and I thought, that is bizarre.

I have never heard an answer like that in all my years of ministry. And most of us and most of the people we know would not give an answer like that, and yet a lot of times we’re not too far from that. Now, I’m not saying that we think we’re God, but a lot of times people will change God into something that’s a little more palatable, a little more relatable, something easier to deal with, something easier to relate to than what he describes himself as.

And you need look no further than TV or movies to see where God has been redesigned in people’s imaginations as being something like a kindly old grandfather, or he’s like Santa Claus. You know, he just doles out wishes, gives you whatever you want. We have all sorts of ideas of God that have been changed to look more like us or look more like something that’s familiar and relatable and acceptable to us.

And Charla and I were talking about this in the car last night because we were listening to an interview on the radio about a particular book that’s been popular over the last several years. And Charla was asking me, well, what’s your problem with this book? I said, it’s heresy.

She wants more of a specific answer. I love my wife she doesn’t just take the easy answer she wants to know why I think that and so I said well it’s been a few years since I’ve looked at this particular book but here are a couple of my problems and the biggest one being that in order as the author says to make God more relatable they’ve changed the idea of who God is so that God is more comfortable to me as the reader I said I appreciate the idea of trying to make God more approachable and more relatable but we don’t do so at the expense of changing him into something that he never said he was. This is nothing new.

It’s nothing new. It was going on in biblical times. People were trying to make God into something relatable, when the bottom line is, yes, we want to relate to God.

We want to have a relationship with us, and God, we want to have a relationship with him, and God wants to have a relationship with us, but God is not like us. God is altogether different from us, and anytime we start to take God and try to make him more like us, we get into a false God, and we get idol, what we would call an idol, worshiping a false god. And this was going on in Jeremiah’s day, in Jeremiah chapter 10.

He starts out, and he’s really, we don’t have time this morning to go through the whole chapter, but he starts out kind of making fun of the idols and the false gods that were being worshiped by the countries around the Israelites, and that some of the Israelites had started to worship as well. Now, Jeremiah’s ministry took place right around the time that the southern kingdom was about to fall to the Babylonians and then shortly thereafter. And so for years, for hundreds of years even, you’d had kings in Israel and in Judah that had not only allowed the people to worship idols but had actually encouraged it.

Where you’ve got the people that God set up on the throne over the country were actually building the idols for people to worship. And so Jeremiah, in part of his prophecy where he confronts the idolatry in the country, confronts the idea of people worshiping these false ideas of God, he comes and begins to mock what they’re doing. And in the beginning of Jeremiah chapter 10, he talks about them cutting down trees and fastening it with gold and silver.

And if you were there right before Christmas on a Wednesday night, I talked about this. This is a passage that a lot of people say, see, you shouldn’t have Christmas trees. Okay, because that’s what Jeremiah was talking about.

They were doing the early modern German practice of Christmas trees, you know, two and a half thousand years ago. That’s clearly what he’s talking about. No, he’s talking about, if you read it in context, he’s talking about cutting down trees, carving the wood into images, into idols, fastening them up in your house or in a place of worship, hammering sheets of gold and silver to decorate them.

He’s talking about them making gods out of trees and metal and things that are inanimate. And he talks about how these idols are utterly powerless. These false gods are completely powerless.

They can’t do anything for you. Those who worship them and those who still worship the one true God, don’t be afraid because they can’t do anything to you. These false gods, he said, are inventions of people’s imagination.

They’re trees. They’re metal. They’re stone. they can’t do anything for you or to you.

But if we look starting in verse 6, he expresses a contrast between these and the true God. And he says in verse 6, for as much as there is none like unto thee, O Lord, thou art great, and thy name is great in might. He says, unlike these idols that can’t do anything, have no power, he says, your name is great, there is no one like you, even your name is mighty.

And he says in verse 7, who would not fear thee, O king of nations? If the people understood you, how could they not fear you? If the people knew who you really were, especially in contrast to this God of fertility, this God of rain, this God of sun, if they knew who you were, how could they not fear you?

And he calls God the Lord of nations. And this was important because in their day, they were facing a time where the northern kingdom of Israel had already been overrun by another country. And everybody’s probably running around wondering, where is God?

Where was God when this happened? His people were overrun. Yeah, God’s been telling you for 200 years to get your act together or this was going to happen.

And now they’re facing where the southern kingdom’s about to be overrun. And where is God? Where’s God?

God’s been telling you for 300 years to get your act together when this was going to happen. And so he calls him Lord of the nations, Lord of nations. Meaning, you know, the Babylonians aren’t in charge here.

The Assyrians aren’t in charge here. The Moabites and Edomites and the Egyptians and everybody, they’re not in charge here. God is in charge.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is in charge. Even of the Babylonians? Yeah, even of the Babylonians.

Even of all these countries that are causing them trouble, God is still in control, not only of them, but of those other countries as well. Who would not fear thee, O king of nations, for to thee doth it appertain. All of this belongs to you, for as much as among all the wise men of the nations, and in all their kingdoms, there is none like unto thee.

He says, all of this that we see is yours. All of this is your business. He says, as we look around at all the nations, and all their wise men put together, in all their kingdoms, there’s nobody like you.

They took the wisest and the strongest, and they put them all up as an example, and there’s nobody like God. God is wiser than any of us, and you know what? God is wiser than all of us combined.

God is stronger than any of us, and God is stronger than all of us combined. And we’re going to skip over verse 8 and 9, not because they’re important, but because they don’t really deal with what we’re talking about today. I encourage you to go back and read Jeremiah chapter 10 for yourself.

He’s just going back in verses 8 and 9 to mocking these idols again, and really the people who worship them as well. He goes back and forth between the false gods and the true God to give a clarification of who God is. And in verse 10, he says, but the Lord is the true God.

Now that word, the Lord, he’s speaking of one specific God. He’s speaking of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. A lot of times in the Old Testament, when you see Lord in all caps or in small caps, it’s indicating the Hebrew word Yahweh, which is as close as we can guess the pronunciation of the name of God, because the Hebrews were afraid even to pronounce it, afraid even to speak it.

So we can only guess at what the name sounded like based on the letters. They didn’t have the vowel sounds written down. But that was his name, and it indicates someone who exists in and of himself.

You know, my existence was conditional on my parents. They are the reason for my existence, and in a greater sense, my existence is conditional upon God. If he doesn’t give me the next heartbeat, y’all are going to be, six of you are going to carry me out of here, or maybe more than six, depending on how much I’ve eaten lately.

But I’m dependent on God for my heartbeat, for the next breath I take. I’m dependent on my parents to have brought me into the world. My children’s existence and continued existence is dependent on me, but God isn’t dependent on anybody.

If we all disappeared today, God would still be God. If he snapped his fingers and melted the whole universe, he would still be God. He exists in and of himself just because he is.

And so, and that was the name used by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so Jeremiah says, the Lord, Yahweh, is the true God. And people of Israel, you’ve taken in all these gods of all these other foreign countries around you.

You’ve got shrines and high places set up to them where you burn incense and you bow down and you pray and you ask them for favor and you make sacrifices. You’ve got all these gods lined up that you worship. He says, but Yahweh is the true God.

There’s only one. He’s the living God. I listened to a part of a message on the way into church this morning from Ravi Zacharias.

I love listening to him. If you ever get a chance to hear him on the radio, you ought to do it. He’s smarter than I have ever thought about being.

And he was talking about the philosopher Nietzsche, who wrote the book, who wrote years ago that God is dead. And that philosophy is being taught in our colleges today. And Ravi Zacharias makes the argument that, no, God is not dead.

He never has been dead. There’s never been and never will be a time that God is not only in existence, but that he’s in control. Jeremiah is pointing out to these people that God is alive.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is alive. Unlike those trees you cut down and carved out and covered with gold and silver, the God you’re supposed to be worshiping, he’s alive. He can hear you.

He can do something for you. and an everlasting king. He’s a king.

He’s in control. He’s in charge. And that sovereignty that he has is everlasting.

Nobody can ever take it away. And his wrath, the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation. Now, this is not a side of God that we like to talk about a lot because it’s uncomfortable.

The Bible says that God is love, and that’s true. God is love. God is mercy.

But there’s also the side of God’s character where he is the righteous judge, where he does hold us accountable. So a loving God wouldn’t hold us accountable. A loving God has to hold us accountable for the evil things that we do that hurt ourselves and hurt other people.

Would you really think he’s a merciful God if he let people like Hitler and Stalin and Timothy McVeigh, and the 9-11 hijackers, child molesters, murderers, if he let these people go free, would he really be a loving God? No, because he has to deal with the violence, with the evil that we perpetrate against each other. And you know what?

Sin also hurts us. And it has to be punished. Just like sometimes I will show grace to my children.

Other times I can’t let them go. I can’t let it go what they’re doing because they’re going to hurt themselves. And so I have to discipline them.

And the Bible shows that God is a righteous judge and he will judge sin and his wrath will be poured out on sin. And it’s not an angry, like we think of out of control, he’s beaten his kids. God is a righteous anger.

And it will be shown against sin. But you know what? Even in that we see that God is merciful from the fact that he hadn’t punished us yet.

God gives us every opportunity. God gives us every opportunity to repent and be reconciled. So it says the nation shall not be able to abide his indignation.

When we persist and say, no, I’m not going to listen. No, I’m not going to repent. I’m going to keep doing what I want.

I don’t care who it hurts or how bad it hurts them. I don’t care what. I don’t care about the consequences.

God eventually says, okay, we’ll see how you don’t care about the consequences. And he says here, the nations will not be able to abide his indignation. And they were looking at these countries around them that were the strongest on earth at that time.

And he says, the Babylonians won’t be able to stand up to God. God will just take them out. The Assyrians won’t be able to stand up to God.

There’s nobody that can abide his indignation. Thus shall ye say unto them, the gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens. He said, so they’ll need to understand that the gods that they’ve created, excuse me, the gods that they’ve created and that they’ve made with their own hands and that they’ve worshipped, these gods aren’t going to be able to save them.

These gods aren’t going to be able to change anything for them. And these gods are going to pass away just like everything else. when God eventually sets everything to right.

It says in verse 12, He hath made the earth by His power. He hath established the world by His wisdom and hath stretched out the heavens by His discretion. It says God is so powerful that just by force of His own will, He created the universe.

He made the earth. He made everything that lives in it. That tree that you carved to make your God out of, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob made that.

He stretched out the heavens by his discretion. The whole universe is his canvas. God put it there.

And so Jeremiah is pointing out to them that God is altogether different from these gods that they’ve made to be relatable to them. These gods that they want to worship because they’re more like us, they’re more understandable, they’re more comfortable, we feel better about them. God is altogether different and altogether better than these.

And we can learn a few things about the Father’s nature from what Jeremiah has to say. We’re going to go through these fairly quickly. First of all, the Father is holy.

Now, I know we hear that word holy and we think of sitting around and hearing harps and a halo and he’s just good. But that word holy has more meaning than that. Yes, it means perfect and sinless.

He’s good. He’s holy. I mean, that’s the best word to use for it.

But holy also means set apart. You know, the Bible calls us as believers holy to the Lord. I don’t know about you, but most days I don’t act very holy.

I try the best I can to live a life that pleases God, and yet I kick myself the end of most days and go, why did you say that? Why did you do that? I’ve been a Christian for 26 years, and I do not yet meet up to God’s standard of perfection.

Just laying it out there for you, being honest. I don’t. And yet the Bible calls us holy unto the Lord. It means set apart.

It doesn’t mean that we’re perfect and we sit around shining our halos all day. It means God has called us out and he says you’re separate. You’re mine.

You’re set apart for a purpose. And that doesn’t mean he loves us anymore because anybody in the world who comes to God through Jesus Christ is now holy unto the Lord. Has nothing to do with us being better than anybody else.

That word holy means set apart. It means different. So to understand that God is holy not only means that he’s perfect and that he’s sinless.

Those things are true, but it means he is altogether different. He is set apart from mankind. He’s altogether different.

We are not like God in our nature and never will be. We are of a completely different nature. And to try to get a glimpse of this, we can look at, if you have pets, if you have a dog, they’re part of the family, usually.

I know in our household they are. They’re part of the family. We love them.

We treat them in some respects like they’re part of the family, but they’re really not the same as us, are they? And I think about Charlie’s dog, Theo, because I treat my dog like he’s people. He thinks he’s people.

Charlie’s dog, Theo, when he’s bad, I call him Ted, and so he’s been so bad over the last few months, or at least gotten in trouble so many times, he now answers to Ted. You know, he thinks he’s supposed to be in where we are and eat what we eat, and sometimes he does eat what we eat when we leave the room. Okay, so he thinks he’s people.

He thinks he’s one of us. And yet I’ll come home, I’ll drive up, and he’ll be in the backyard, he’ll hear the car, and he’ll run around to the side gate, and I told Charlie, he just looks at me in amazement as I pull up in this car, and he just stands, seriously, mouth agape, and I head caught to the side, just, wow, when I pull up in this car and I get out of it, I don’t know if he thinks I’ve been swallowed by a giant green dragon instead, I don’t know what he thinks, But he looks at me in just awe sometimes. I tell her, there’s something wrong with your dog.

Your dog is weird. But I wonder what goes through their minds. I wonder if they realize, if they see us do things like walk on two legs and drive in a car and use our nifty thumbs to open things that they can’t open.

I wonder if they look at us and realize, I am completely different from you. Maybe not. Ted, probably not.

But we realize it. We are completely different. I love you.

You’re part of the family. I’ve brought you into the family, but you are not like me. We are different.

You will never grow into a person. The same thing is true with God. We can have a relationship with him, and we can know him, and we can be part of his family, but sometimes we ought to just look at him in awe and realize we will never be the same as him.

He’s holy. He’s altogether different. He’s altogether set apart.

Jeremiah says in verse 6, there is none like unto thee. There is no one who is like God. First of all, the Father is holy.

Second of all, the Father is all-powerful. It says in verse 6, Thou art great, and thy name is great in might. He says you are great.

That word carries with it connotations of being powerful, of being awesome in might. Even His name is powerful. Even His name is powerful.

And admittedly, I think we understand this. We may forget it from time to time, but we understand that God is powerful. Can you speak the universe into existence?

Anybody? Show of hands. I can’t even speak and get Siri to understand me when I ask for directions.

True story. We were out in the western part of Oklahoma a few months ago and I was looking for a particular Mennonite church. I was asking Siri for such and such Mennonite church and she starts trying to Google prostitution.

I don’t know where that, I told Charlotte, I said, if you see that on there, this is what happened. I can’t even speak Siri into telling me directions to some place, let alone speak the universe into existence. But God didn’t have to go to Lowe’s and buy shovels and hammers and a universe kit and put it all together.

God just spoke it and there it was. That is power beyond our ability even to comprehend. The Father is all-powerful.

The Father is awe-inspiring. The Father is awe-inspiring. I know we think I can talk to God anytime I pray.

I can come listen to his word at church. If we’re not careful after a while, it becomes sort of routine. Folks, I don’t want to lose my awe of God, especially like I had as a child.

The realization God can do anything. And I still believe those stories that I was taught in Sunday school, but I remember back before I’d heard them 9,600 times. Hearing the story of God parting the Red Sea and it being so real and picturing what that must have looked like and how awesome God was.

Well, Jeremiah says in verse 7, Who would not fear thee? And yeah, that word means respect. It means fear.

I’ve heard for years. Well, that just means fear of God just means a healthy respect of God. Well, that’s true.

But there’s also an element of fear. I don’t care how benevolent a power is. If you come up against a power that great, you’re going to be a little fearful of it also.

We should be awed by God, amazed by the power that he has, amazed by what he’s able to do, amazed just by who he is. I say all the time, I still don’t understand why God loved us enough to send his son. I mean, I understand the theology of it, that he sent his son because he’s good, because he’s kind, because he is loving.

He loved us just because he’s loving. But really, get me to explain why he would love us that much. I cannot come up with a satisfactory answer.

After all that mankind has done to itself, to each other, we’ve shaken our fists collectively in the face of God, that he would still love us, I cannot imagine that kind of love. And when I really think about it, I am in awe of who God is. I’m amazed when I really stop to think about who he is.

I am amazed by God, not only his power, but his love, his character, all these things about God boggle the mind. The Father is all-knowing. In verse 7, Jeremiah talked about all the wise men of all the nations and all the kingdoms. He said, you put them all together, there’s still nobody as wise as God.

There’s still nobody like unto you. Yeah. The collective wisdom of mankind doesn’t even approach the mind of God.

God is all-knowing. God sees the future. God sees the past. God sees all of it.

God knows what’s in your heart right now. I don’t tell you that to make you afraid. But if you’re afraid, maybe talk to God about that.

But I do find myself being comforted and frightened by that. I’m comforted by the thought that sometimes I go to God and I don’t even know the words to say in prayer. I don’t even know what I’m trying to convey in words.

And there are times I have to say, God, you know what’s on my heart, even though I can’t express it in words. There are other times I think, God just heard me think that. That’s going to be a problem.

You know what? God knew you were going to think that before you ever thought it. God knew you were going to think that before you were even born.

God is all-knowing. As I’ve talked about already, the Father is self-existent. He doesn’t need me.

He doesn’t need you. He doesn’t even need a universe. If it all went away today, he would still be God.

Even his name says it. When he told Moses, when Moses said, who should I tell the people of Israel? Who should I tell them sent me?

He said, you tell them I am has sent you. He didn’t say I was or I have been or I am for a little while or I will be. He said, I am.

I am that I am. There’s never been a time that God wasn’t and never will be. He always was, he is, and he always will be.

And he’s not dependent on any of us. And the Father is the king of creation. You look at verses 10 and 12, and it talks about his kingship and his charge over all the nations of the earth and how God is powerful above everybody else and how God’s got all of this under control.

There’s never been a moment where God said, oops, I didn’t expect that to happen. and the greatest catastrophes among mankind. God’s looked at and he’s been in control.

I was watching a World War II documentary this week. Charlie came in and went to bed and was watching the, well, I say watching, talking through the last five minutes of it. And we got to talking about these guys, some of them 15, 16 years old, who landed on the beaches of Normandy.

And not all of them were there because they wanted to be. Some of these guys were drafted in, as has happened in various wars. And we talked about war, we talked about the horrors of it, not that we’ve ever been there, but that we’re thankful we didn’t have to endure that, that we’re thankful for those who have fought for our country and thankful that it never came to that for us.

And then after a couple minutes, it seemed like a couple minutes of silence, talked about what’s to happen in the future. And there’s always some country that we feel threatened by. There’s always something going on in the world.

And just the fear of, what about our kids? what about our kids what’s to what’s to stop some country from attacking us and we have to send our kids off to war what’s to stop our politicians from getting together and saying they don’t like this country and we have to send our kids off to war and that’s the kind of thought that keeps me up at night even though my oldest son is 13 years away from even you know from being able to go without my consent and that’s the kind of thought that’ll keep me up at night and I stop and remember that God is in control of all this and the nations can’t make a move without God allowing it. It doesn’t mean that God causes everything, but it means we can’t take a step outside these bounds unless God allows it.

And no matter what we do, God is not caught off guard. God is the king of this whole stinking universe and he knows what’s going to happen long before it ever does. God is not caught off guard or caught by surprise.

He is the king of all of creation. And folks, we can look at many passages in the Bible that show us the same portrait of God, That he’s not some guy that we’re just comfortable with and we hang around with. He does want to have a relationship with us, but he is the holy, righteous king and judge of the universe.

That he’s worthy of all the respect, all the admiration, all the honor, all the fear that we could ever give him and more. And this presents us with a problem. You may think, where’s he going with this?

Because I’ve told you in the last couple weeks, as we go through and talk about some basic areas of Christian doctrine and teaching, that I want to bring everything back around to Jesus. I don’t want to teach theology just so you can walk out and think, well, I’m a little smarter today. I know more than my neighbors.

I want you to know Christian teaching because of how it impacts our relationship with Jesus. So here it goes. This holiness of God, this nature of God presents a problem for us.

It presents a huge problem. Because as we look through the list of all these things that God is, we are none of those things. I am not holy.

Now, God has declared me holy and said I’m set apart to him as a believer in Christ. But I’m not sinless. I don’t share God’s divine nature. I am not all-powerful.

I’m not all that awe-inspiring, despite what Charles’ dog thinks. I am not all-knowing. I wish I was.

I like to know things. But the more things I know, the more things I realize I don’t know. I am not self-existent.

And I am not the king of creation. I am none of these things. What I am, what I know my nature to be, is someone who was created by God in the image of God, only to have that image marred by sin.

I am a sinner. I’m a sinner. And I’m not alone in that in this room.

I don’t tell you that to make you feel bad. I tell you that because that’s what the Bible says. We are all in the same boat.

We are sinners. And that sin separates us from the Holy God. Our sinful nature keeps us separated from the Father.

There’s no way for us to bridge that gap. The reason for that is because God is holy. and God has to judge sin.

God has to punish sin. He can’t ignore it. He can’t condone it.

He can’t approve of it. He can’t join in it with us. He has to punish it.

And if we were to say, God, why don’t you just ignore our sin? Just let us have a relationship anyway. We’re asking him to approve of sin and to stop being who he is.

We’re asking him to no longer be a holy God. Benjamin and I stopped for a snack yesterday at a gas station. We were in town.

And I like gas station hot dogs. I’m not afraid to admit that. Somebody brought their Chihuahua dog into the gas station, and they’re standing over by the hot dogs, letting people pet it.

I’m a little bit of a Jonaphome. I’m glad I already had my hot dog. But I was so grateful when the workers said, you can have that dog in here, but it’s got to be away from the food.

I love dogs, but don’t bring your nasty, stinky dog over and have it by all the food. Some things are supposed to be pure and clean. and filth has to be kept away from it.

Amen? God is pure and clean in his nature and has to be separate from the filth of our sin. So we are kept separated from the Holy God.

There’s no way to bridge that goal. I cannot clean myself up enough that I can live up to God’s standards because if I did all the good I could do for eve