A South Australian town, some 150 km north of Adelaide on the main highway to Port Pirie, has received unwanted publicity this week with news that has shocked the whole nation. Six drums of acid were discovered in the vault of a State Bank building that was closed for business in July 1995 and since rented. They contained the remains of as many as six people. Already three men have been charged with murder and police have not ruled out the possibility of charging more suspects.
The early news report said that police had removed bags of concrete mix from the site. It looks as if an attempt was being made to remove or hide the gruesome evidence.
The police superintendent is reported as saying, "All murders are tragic but certainly this find was quite bizarre and quite unusual, but I'm sure in the fullness of time all the facts will come out."
That's strong confidence in our system of detection and justice. Humanly, of course, it doesn't always happen. And now it seems that vital DNA evidence in connection with the murder in North Queensland some 30 years ago may have been lost, making difficult the conviction of the man now charged.
However, in God's "fullness of time" all the facts will come out. Jesus told his disciples, "Whatever is covered up will be uncovered, and every secret will be made known. So then, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in broad daylight, and whatever you have whispered in private in a closed room will be shouted from the housetops" (Lk 12.2-3).
Sounds a bit scary? Paul wrote, "Do not deceive yourselves; no one makes a fool of God. People will reap exactly what they sow" (Gal. 6.7). "Your sins will find you out," as Moses warned the Israelites (Num. 32.23 KJV).
Tonight we are thinking about the king who thought he would eliminate the dangerous prospect of God's judgment by destroying the evidence - the document that bore the prophecy.
Jeremiah chapters 35 and 36 are in a curious place in the prophecy. They are placed in the section of the book relating to the time of two kings later - the reign of Zedekiah. However, these two chapters belong to the reign of Jehoiakim and chronologically follow chapter 26. The reasons for this placement are not clear.
In chapter 25 (during the fourth year of Jehoiakim's rule as in 36.1) Jeremiah called the people's attention to his prophetic ministry over the past twenty-three years. "For twenty-three years, from the thirteenth year that Josiah son of Amon was king of Judah until this very day, the Lord has spoken to me, and I have never failed to tell you what he said. But you have paid no attention. [Most of this was during the reign of that good king, Josiah, who had such a struggle to root out evil.] You would not listen or pay attention, even though the Lord has continued to send you his servants the prophets. They told you to turn from your wicked way of life and from the evil things you are doing, so that you could go on living in the land that the Lord gave you and your ancestors as a permanent possession. They told you not to worship and serve other gods and not to make the Lord angry by worshipping the idols you had made. If you had obeyed the Lord, then he would not have punished you. But the Lord himself says that you refused to listen to him. Instead, you made him angry with your idols and have brought his punishment on yourselves" (vv. 3-7). Following those words we read the threat of judgment that is now going to follow.
In chapter 36, the Lord says to Jeremiah, "Get a scroll and write on it everything that I have told you about Israel and Judah and all the nations. Write everything that I have told you from the time I first spoke to you, when Josiah was king, up to the present. Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about all the destruction that I intend to bring on them, they will turn from their evil ways. Then I will forgive their wickedness and their sins" (36.2-3). The Lord's purpose is to bring them to repentance so that they will know mercy, not judgment.
There is an important principle here. John Wesley said that we need to preach law before we preach grace. People never understand grace if we just preach grace. Perhaps one of the problems we have in the church today is that we talk about the love of God. We have a nice, sugary-sweet view of God. We have little sense of the holiness of God. We need to recapture a knowledge of the God who is, the holy God in whose sight sin is an offence. "The wages of sin is death." We need to grasp that so that we can understand the greatness of "the gift of God" which "is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." We don't understand "salvation" because we haven't grasped "damnation". But God's purpose is to bring people to repentance. God has no delight in the death of the sinner (Ezek. 18.31).
The written Word is important. The prophecies were not "sanctified" whims of the unstable - cast in the right language but not really from the Lord. They were words from God himself - to be remembered, reflected on, heeded… So often on television we hear someone talking and they say something unusual, challenging or controversial - what was that? what did he say? It is so transitory. For the Israelite people the spoken word was as binding as what was written. But here we see that it needed to be written down.
Baruch, Jeremiah's scribe, copied it all down and then went into the Temple a fast day, when the place was crowded with people from all over Judah. The people were fasting, we are told, "to gain the Lord's favour" (v. 10). We know that things are wrong. We hope God will be pleased with us if we fast. People had a lot of uneasiness about what was happening. And people in our community today have a lot of uneasiness. They may not come to church at all, or only sometimes on Good Friday and Christmas because they think things aren't as they ought to be in our world today. We ought to give God some kind of place in our life. We hope that God will be pleased with us because of this little that we are doing for him.
Well… God does want to be pleased with these, but what he is seeking is repentance rather than a fast. God looks on the heart. He wants to be merciful to them and forgive them, but he is waiting for their response.
"Sit down," they said, "and read the scroll to us." So Baruch did. After he had read it, they turned to one another in alarm, and said to Baruch, "We must report this to the king." Then they asked him, "Tell us, now, how did you come to write all this? Did Jeremiah dictate it to you?" Baruch answered, "Jeremiah dictated every word of it to me, and I wrote it down in ink on this scroll." Then they said to him, "You and Jeremiah must go and hide. Don't let anyone know where you are" (vv. 15-19).
They seem to recognise the truth of what is written. They are obliged to tell the king, but warn both Baruch and Jeremiah to go into hiding - they have no idea how the king will react. So they keep the scroll and go to tell the king. The king asks for the scroll which is brought to him and read.
"It was winter and the king was sitting in his winter palace in front of the fire. As soon as Jehudi finished reading three or four columns, the king cut them off with a small knife and threw them into the fire. He kept doing this until the entire scroll was burnt up. But neither the king nor any of his officials who heard all this was afraid or showed any sign of sorrow. [This sounds as if everyone was totally negative, but we already know that the ones who first heard Baruch read it were deeply moved and alarmed by what they heard. They knew the king needed to hear all this. And so…] Although Elnathan, Delaiah, and Gemariah begged the king not to burn the scroll, he paid no attention to them. Then he ordered Prince Jerahmeel, together with Seraiah son of Azriel and Shelemiah son of Abdeel, to arrest me and my secretary Baruch. But the Lord had hidden us" (vv. 22-26).
No repentance - not afraid, no sign of sorrow for their sins. The Word of God was given to convict them of sin, to bring them to repentance and to offer them forgiveness. The Word cannot be destroyed by burning it in a fire. In the fullness of time, judgment will come. And another scroll is taken and the prophecies are all written down again with the added warnings to the king because he has burnt the scroll (vv. 27-32).
In John 5.39-40 we hear Jesus saying to the Jewish leaders of his time, "You study the Scriptures, because you think that in them you will find eternal life. And these very Scriptures speak about me! Yet you are not willing to come to me in order to have life." We need to pay attention to the Word of the Lord so that we can come to know the Lord of the Word.
Turning to John 10.35, Jesus said to those who were arguing with him, "We know that what the scripture says is true for ever". The old Bible put it, "The scripture cannot be broken."
Or we reflect on 2 Peter 3.15b-16. Peter has been talking about the second coming of Christ - "just as our dear brother Paul wrote to you, using the wisdom that God gave him. This is what he says in all his letters when he writes on the subject. There are some difficult things in his letters which ignorant and unstable people explain falsely, as they do with other passages of the Scriptures. So they bring on their own destruction" - tampering with the Word of God, twisting it to mean what we want it to mean, instead of saying, "Lord, it does mean what it says. It is speaking to me. What I am doing is sin and I need to do something about it - to repent and turn to you, that I may be forgiven."
Consider also what we have in Revelation 22.18-19 - "I, John, solemnly warn everyone who hears the prophetic words of this book: if anyone adds anything to them, God will add to his or her punishment the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes anything away from the prophetic words of this book, God will take away from them their share of the fruit of the tree of life and of the Holy City, which are described in this book."
Those are very solemn words. I am sure the book of Revelation is even harder to understand than some of the things Paul wrote about the second coming. Yet they are not to be tampered with, not to be meddled with. They are to be taken seriously.
We all need to be disturbed by the Word of God, disturbed by the truth of God.
Here we are today. It is the Day of Pentecost - a beautiful celebration in the life of the church. And the Lord looks at us, just as again and again through the Old Testament prophets he was looking at his people Israel and saying to them, "This is the way - walk in it!"
May we each one learn to listen to the Word of the Lord that we may come to know the Lord of the Word.
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