Transcript
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Welcome to Gospel and Life. Why is the world so broken? And why are we capable of inflicting such harm, even toward those we love? People point to politics, poverty, or psychology, but none of these fully explain what we see in ourselves and in history. This month on the podcast, Tim Keller is teaching from a series exploring the question, what's wrong with us, Showing us how the Bible's teaching on sin offers the only explanation deep enough to face the truth in all its complexity, and the only hope powerful enough to transform us.
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Jeremiah 2:1 8 and 23:32. It's printed there. This is the beginning and the ending of this great chapter in the book of the prophet Jeremiah. The word of the Lord came to me. Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, Through a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest. All who devoured her were held guilty, and disaster overtook them, declares the Lord. Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob. All you clans of the house of Israel. This is what the Lord what fault did your fathers find in me that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. They did not ask, where is the Lord who brought us up out of Egypt and led us through the barren wilderness, through a land of deserts and rifts, a land of drought and darkness, a land where no one travels and no one lives. I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable. The priests did not ask, where is the Lord? Those who deal with the law did not know me. The leaders rebelled against me and the prophets prophesied by baal following worthless idols. How can you say I am not defiled? I have not run after the Baals. See how you behaved in the valley. Consider what you have done. You are a swift she camel, running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind in her, craving, in her heat. Who can restrain her? Any males that pursue her need not tire themselves at mating time. They'll find her. Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry. But you said it's no use. I love foreign gods. I must go after them. As a thief is disgraced when he is caught, so the house of Israel is disgraced. They, their kings and their officials, their priests and their prophets, they say, to the wood you are my father, and to stone you gave me birth. They have turned their backs on me and not their faces. Yet when they are in trouble, they say, come and save us. Where then are the gods you made for yourselves? Let them come if they can save you when you are in trouble. For you have as many gods as you have towns. O Judah, why do you bring charges against me? You have all rebelled against me, declared the Lord. In vain. I punish your people. They did not respond to correction. Your sword has devoured your prophets like a ravening lion. You of this generation consider the word of the Lord. Have I been a desert to Israel? Israel or a land of great darkness? Why do my people say we are free to roam? We will come to you no more does a maiden forget her jewelry Or a bride, her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me. Days without number. This is God's word. One of the reasons why we have trouble talking about sin and evil, even though we need to. There's things in our past that we feel vaguely guilty for. There's things that we see people doing to us or out in the world, and we feel moral outrage toward. And yet we've been taught by our society that to use the word sin or evil is oppressive or it's meaningless. And yet we sense something out there that we don't have the vocabulary for. Now, what we're going to do in this series started last week. We're going to go to the Bible, because the Bible gives us a far more rich vocabulary for sin. It helps us understand sin in ways that most of us in our society just don't. It's so much richer, it's so much more nuanced. Last week, for example, we saw sin is reducing God and the result is smallness of spirit. This week we're going to see that sin is replacing God and the result is addiction of spirit. This is a prophecy from Jeremiah to a nation in spiritual decline. And what we see here is he's telling us three things. He's telling us about the dynamics of what we'll call the dynamics of spiritual attraction, the dynamics of spiritual addiction, and the dynamics of spiritual restoration. And I think as we get near the end, you're going to see what I mean by what a different how this enriches our vocabulary when it comes to thinking of sin and evil and how important that is very practically. But let's get started. First of all, he shows us the dynamics of spiritual attraction. All through here, he is using remarkable sexual imagery. One verse, which I left out, you know, I was trying to say, well, I can't print the whole chapter, but we're looking in a sense at the whole chapter. And there's one verse that's very, very interesting. See, in verse four to eight, which we did print, we're told God is calling them to task for the fact they're turning to idols. They're worshiping other gods. They're not worshiping him. And in verses one to three, he uses. We'll get back to this remarkable sexual imagery of a young married couple just hopelessly in love. And in the very end, we're going to see. But in verse 20, this is what I didn't print, but I should, should have. In verse 20, there's a. There's a verse that starts this way. It goes this way. On every high hill, under every spreading chestnut, Every. Every spreading tree, you. Now we, we say, okay, that's idol worship. Because we know that on every high hill they had altars to baal. On. Under every spreading tree, there were altars to baal. Why? Well, because altars were a sign of trans. High hills were a sign of transcendence. Spreading trees were a sign of fertility. So in verse 20, you see, the sentence starts like this. Under. On every high hill and under every spreading tree. And you figure the sentence will end, you worshipped idols. That's not what it says. What it says is, on every high hill and under every spreading tree, you spread your legs. Now, I don't know what version you've got out there, but I can tell you one thing. Whatever English version, if you've got a Bible with you, you look at it and I know it doesn't. That whether it's King James or RSV or the new International version or whatever version it is, it's not going to say that. But that's what it literally says in the Hebrew. It's interesting. Generally speaking, the translators feel that we're just too sensitive or something to actually hear what God is trying to tell us. What God says is that when you worship idols, when you worship other gods, he says, on the top of every hill, under every tree, you're spreading your legs. Now, why would he use that kind of imagery? Is he just trying to, you know, get our attention? Is he just trying to, you know, is this just for shock value? No, it's for teaching value. Because this is what he's teaching all through here. Why all the way through the Bible, when God talks about worshiping him, he uses sexual imagery so often. And when he talks about worshiping anything else or worshiping any. Any worship is used very Often under the umbrella of sexual imagery. Why would God do that? Here's what he's doing. He is saying that there is an attraction going on at the spiritual level in your heart right now, every bit as powerful as the sexual attraction at the physical level. That can happen. In other words, right now, he's saying there is something going on in your soul. In the deepest recesses of your soul. You are laying down with something spiritually. You're putting yourself in the arms of something spiritually. And your spiritual relationship with that thing is every bit as powerful as a physical relationship is, and a sexual one at that. Now, for a minute, think about physical attraction. On the one hand, physical attraction is pretty overwhelming. In fact, most of us would probably say the most embarrassing moments in our lives. And most of you only. Only you yourselves know who these what these are. The most embarrassing moments in our lives were where a physical attraction kind of overwhelmed our common sense, overwhelmed our wisdom, overwhelmed our conscience. But what makes physical attraction so strong? Is it just emotional infatuation? Now, here's a place where I'm going to turn to the biologist. Because actually, Jeremiah turns to the biologist. I usually don't. Generally, I'm not going to go to a biologist and say, tell me about the sexual instinct. I don't usually like what I hear. In fact, you don't either. Most people don't. But it's intriguing. Jeremiah likens us, and it's really pretty powerful. Likens us to an animal at one point, not just to a bride, like in the very beginning of chapter two and at the very end, but here in the very middle. He says, see how you behaved in the valley. You were a swift she camel running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind in her craving, in her heat. Now, here's what the biologists are going to tell you. Why is the physical desire. Why is sexual desire so important? And it's this, collectively speaking. We are dead unless we find somebody else. We cannot reproduce ourselves. This is what the biologist would tell you. The biologist would say that unless you're Godzilla, this is true of every other species. There is something in the mail that only the male produces that has to get together with something in the female that only the female produces, or else your race is over, your species is over, you're over. And therefore, what the biologist will tell you is a big root of this incredible physical attraction is that it is, collectively speaking, male gender or female gender by itself is incomplete, and it's dead unless you literally get together. That's Certainly, obviously there's nothing emotional about animals, and yet there's. And yet the physical attraction is incredibly powerful. There's no emotional involvement from what we can tell. Oh, where does it come from? It comes from the fact that we are, biologically speaking, we're incomplete collectively. Okay, now why this powerful sexual imagery? Here's why. This passage, this text is not talking at all about Israel's sexual practices. It's not talking at all about sexual ethics. It's talking about religion. You know, it's very interesting. Down on St. Mark's Place, across from Kim's video, there's a store, it says religious sex. And it's very attention getting. It's sort of avant garde and cool to call something religious. Sex. Why? Because in our mind, religion and sex are two totally different things. They're total opposites. So put it together kind of gets to you, right? That's why they. They chose it. It's St. Mark's Place. You know, we're. We're OB. On guard. We're unusual, we're shocking. Well, God beat them to it. Jeremiah did this 2500 years ago. And here's what they're saying. There is deep in your soul a spiritual desire even more powerful than the desires that inform physical attraction. And it's this. You cannot produce your own meaning in life. You cannot by yourself produce your own worth. You cannot produce your own security. Everybody has got to have some meaning in life or else life is empty. Everybody's got to have some affirmation of your worth or else you feel worthless. Everybody's got to have some security or you can't face life. But you cannot produce it yourself anymore than you can reproduce your own species, your own life. You can't reproduce that spiritually any more than you can reproduce yourself physically all by yourself. You can't just say, all that matters to me is I like me. You're never going to get your worth that way. You can't say, I'm just going to live for my own happiness. You'll never get your meaning that way. There's got to be something else besides you that is the source of your meaning, the source of your worth. The source of your security and your drive for that. Your need for that. Your need to take hold of whatever that is. It has to be something or somebody or some person or some pursuit or some relationship or some goal or some condition or some practice. Something. You are as powerless to reproduce, to produce in your heart meaning and worth and security as you are physically able to reproduce your own life. And so, spiritually speaking, if it's not God, who's the lover of your soul? If it's not God, in whose arms you are spiritually, if it's not God, whose meaning is the source of your meaning, whose affirmation is the source of your self worth and whose power is the source of security? If it's not God, you're in bed with something spiritually, something you've given yourself to in realms so deep and so profound that God here is saying you are as every bit spiritually beholden to it as you are physically beholden. Every bit is spiritually laid out, as spread out, as vulnerable to it spiritually as you are physically. When you're having sex with someone, you're doing the very same thing spiritually that you do in bed with someone physically, same thing. You've got to have this. You are spiritually incomplete and therefore you're in bed with something. Now, let's take a minute before we move on. Can I show you how radically different this view is of soul and of spirit than what you're going to hear about or read about? If you go into Barnes and Noble and you go to the section on soul and spirit, it's getting bigger every year. There are just tons of book on soul, care of the Soul and Help for the Soul and Chicken Soup for the Soul or the Spirit, you know, care for the Spirit. And if you go and get those books down, they're all very, very different and yet they're all the same. First of all, they depict the soul as a pond, a sort of still lake. But the Bible depicts the soul as a restless, turbulent ocean. Or whenever they talk, when all these books talk about the cure of the soul or the care of the soul, what they usually they talk about getting into quiet places and they think about, think inspirational thoughts, reflect, you see, be quiet. See, the soul is that sort of thing. And the Bible says something so much more robust, so much more robust, so much more vital, so much more alive. Your soul is two empty arms. Your soul is an utterly empty heart. And you must run after things in order to fill that. I can't help it, says the soul. I must run after them. See, completely different approach, not only to your soul. Your soul doesn't just need to be petted there, there. Your soul needs love. Your soul needs rapture. Your soul needs passion. All right, but it's also giving us a completely different view. Not just of the soul, but it's a completely different view of God. If you take those books down if they ever do talk about God, many of them just don't. But if they ever do talk about that God, they talk about God in the sense of being someone who sort of gives peace, a sort of a remote, a power, a force. And God here says, I am not just a remote force. In fact, I am not just a sovereign you obey. Let me tell you what I built you for. I want to be the lover of your soul. I want to be the center of your heart. Look, he's saying, at the sex act. Look at the greatest rapturous bit of sexual love. That is just a dim hint of what closure between your soul and my soul will be. That's what I've made you for. That's what I want you to be with me. You know, I mean, a lot of people go in and they think this is great, this approach to the soul, the modern New Age spirituality. And they just say that. And it seems so cool, it seems so avant garde, you see, it seems so much more, seems so much better than the wooden, mechanical understanding people have of Christianity. But Christianity, real Christianity, look what we're seeing. Look what we're talking about, this view of the soul, this view of God. God says, I want you in my arms. Power, the dynamics of spiritual attraction. And he says, if I'm not in your arms. If you're not in my arms, you're in your arms with something. Now, the second thing we learn, and I'm going to be brief on this because a lot of you know this and what you would rather have, you'd like to know. I'm pretty good at telling you what's wrong with you. And some of you are going to say, I've heard this part before. I'd like to find out what to do about it. So let me be brief. The second thing we learn here is also the dynamics of spiritual addiction. Because what God is saying is, if you don't have me in your arms, if you're in the arms of anything else, you're in deep trouble. You're actually in an addiction cycle. Let me show you how that cycle runs. Briefly. First of all, the first part of the cycle is you promote something. Look here in verse 27, they say to Wood, you are my father and a stone, you gave me birth. And then you say, okay, you're my father, you gave me birth. Now some of you are saying, okay, what do you mean if you're not worshiping God, if he's not the center of your life, if he's not the center of your heart. If he's not your greatest joy, if you don't have that kind of intimacy with him, well, I'm turning to other gods. Well, what do you mean? Well, when you think of idolatry and false gods, you usually think of sins. See, now here's where we're trying to enrich your vocabulary. Is there anything sinful about wood? Is there anything sinful about stone? No. False gods, idols are not sins. They might lead you to sin, but they're not sins. They are good things. They're created things. You see what you have looked at, though, and you've promoted and you've put them into this top place in your life and what do you say to them? You made me. You define me. You are my father. See, when you look at somebody and say, without you, baby, what good am I? You are saying to something probably very, very good. You are my father. You are my savior. You are my maker.