Abstract
Jeremiah 33.14–16
Conspiring with the Citizens of Zion
A sermon to the preacher: Advent One speaks of the time in which we now live. Into this time the Kingdom of God has come. Christ, victorious, reigns. Yet in this time his rule is not wholly visible. Nations rage. There are profound reasons for hope, but hope is not yet vision. So we preach: ‘He comes again to judge the living and the dead.’ There are certain maladies that immediately beset us. Jeremiah alerts us to the most serious of these: fear of people and pride. He also tells us of the righteous one in whom they are overcome. The sermon unfolds in three stages. Expounded here are: Jeremiah’s captivity in Zedekiah’s court; his message of a righteous king and his city; an application to our preaching on Advent One.
Unmasking the Conspiracy Against the City: In his commission, the prophet is handed both axe and watering-can, and directed toward his domain: ‘See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’ (1:10). This (mostly) adversarial relationship to the nations is played out throughout the book. Jeremiah indicts them. He warns them of divine judgment. Why? They are uncircumcised. Hardened toward God, all alike cast off the yoke. Judah is no exception. It is uncircumcised in heart (9:25–6).
Jeremiah openly preaches judgment when Jerusalem is under siege. The outcome is predictable. He is imprisoned under the charge of political conspiracy (see 32:2 and 33:1). He had encouraged the inhabitants of Jerusalem to desert and surrender to the Chaldean army (21:8–9). The nation and her allies should accept foreign rule (27:6–11). King Zedekiah has enough when Jeremiah tells him he will be dragged off to exile and that the soldiers should stop fighting (32:3–5). To be fair, this does sound a lot like political conspiracy…
Jeremiah, however, is busy mounting evidence to prosecute God’s case. The nations conspire! They teach Israel their ways (10:1). They instruct in idolatry the very nation that should instruct them to acknowledge the
The message of Christ’s second coming confronts preachers with the same dynamic that Jeremiah faced. Tasked with speaking of catastrophic judgment at the second coming of Christ, we fear the relational backlash. Can we speak of restoration only? Can we pass in silence over the coming judgment? But Jeremiah’s bonds are eloquent. He was not arrested for prophesying a hopeful future for his nation. No one—in his day or ours—is imprisoned for such a message. What made his eschatology so inflammatory were the concrete demands it placed on the nations of his day, demands that could no longer be ignored when the divine judgment came upon them. He inveighed against preachers who treated the wound of God’s people ‘lightly’ (6:14 ESV). He feared God more than people, speaking of the future in that fear.
A City Called Righteousness: What future is this? ‘The days are surely coming…’ (v. 14). The new covenant and the coming king of promise are bound together (cf. 31:31). The days of renewal come with David’s ‘righteous Branch’ whom the
He ‘shall execute justice and righteousness in the land’ (v. 15). The coming king is gloriously righteous and just. He executes a righteousness that is neither inert nor possible to ignore. His righteousness is enacted, executed, weighty. We are not dealing with a king on the order of Zedekiah, in whom intention and execution are two entirely different things (see 34:8–21). The righteous Branch effects righteousness within the domain of the governed. He brings them under the yoke of the
He gives Jerusalem a new name (v. 16). The oracle that we are expounding now is nearly a verbatim repetition of 23:5–7. There is a significant alteration, however. In 23:7 it is the king who is called by the name: ‘The
Boasting in Christ and His City: Jesus’ first coming begins to fulfil this prophecy. He is David’s Son in whom God’s righteousness has been revealed. In him righteousness finds a firm anchor-hold in humanity. The covenant is kept on both sides! Righteous, he makes many righteous. Ruling at the Father’s right hand, he pronounces over our age this royal decree: ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’ (Matt. 5:6). At its closing, he will come again gloriously to judge, to establish righteousness forever through acts of judgment. Jeremiah’s vision of a Jerusalem at peace and secure from all its foes, so replete with God’s presence that it may be named—without any exaggeration at all—by his name…this Christ will bring to pass. Yet even now we inhabit this city among the nations of the world.
Let this righteous city stand as a warning against all human pride. Against this wondrous city we often preach on the First Sunday of Advent! This happens in seemingly opposite ways: (1) by our describing righteousness without relation to God or turning it into a purely social concern. The preacher may speak of judgment. But it is a judgment with which even the unbeliever can concur, carried out along social lines, devoid of any theological criterion. (Usually this judgment merely concurs with the dominant political discourse!) Or (2) God’s righteousness may be transformed into a religious commodity, the private concern of individual conscience. Strange bed-fellows, the two conspire together.
To the first, this may be said. The coming city is imbued with the righteousness of God. Just as it can only be described in relation to God, so it can only be consummated by God. Christ must come again. A ‘No!’ is uttered here to the human fantasy that we can bring this city into being, or secure its social benefits without God. To lose God is to lose human society. To the second, Jeremiah speaks of a city, a community, that has already been brought into being by Christ.
We preach against this city because of spiritual sickness. We suffer from the fear of people and pride. Our remedy consists in boasting. Jeremiah: ‘Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom…but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the