The Anatomy of Drift

Good morning, brothers and sisters.

Our scripture reading this morning is from Jeremiah five, verses thirty and thirty one, where we find these words.

An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.

The prophets prophesy falsely.

And the priests rule at their direction.

My people love to have it so.

But what will you do when the end comes?

Let's pray.

Holy Father, as we study these words today, and we see the tragedy of Israel hurtling towards your discipline and a complete collapse of their nation.

I pray as we examine how they got to where they got to, how did the people of God drift so far that they lost their appetite for you and are now on the precipice of ending as a nation?

How did they get there?

As we study your word, Holy Spirit, please illumine our hearts and write today a cautionary tale on our heart that we can do the same thing.

That we also have the tendency to drift.

Holy Spirit, use today's service to post a guard on our hearts and to bind our hearts anew to the living and risen Jesus.

And it's in his holy name we pray.

Amen.

Well, this morning's sermon is called The Anatomy of Drift: How the People of God Can Become a Shipwreck.

And I'm looking forward to sharing with you.

But just a personal word first.

I just want you to know how much I'm enjoying retirement.

I really am.

When I say being your pastor for 15 years was the happiest 15 years of my life, and that's not shtick.

I mean that.

It continues to be the happiest 15 years of my life.

But I am in a new phase now, and I am just living life large, and I'm just having a great time.

By the way, here's a little life tip for you.

It helps to marry your best friend.

Everything's a lot more fun when you marry your best friend, and Sandy and I have more time together, and I'm just really enjoying being with her.

I'm also enjoying being with you.

And I just wanted to thank you for being so graceful.

I was saying to the pastor just a couple of weeks ago how much I enjoy being a member of our church and not the pastor.

And you are so gracious, I don't feel any pressure, no one comes to me with problems, you're not evaluating anything, and if you did, I would send you to our pastor.

But you've given me the freedom to enjoy you as a fellow member, as a communal worshiper, and for that I'm deeply grateful.

As some of you may remember, each year I designed for myself a Bible project.

The Bible project isn't to preach on, it's not to teach, it is just to keep me close to the Lord.

And I remember saying last year that my Bible project this year is to spend the entire year in the major prophets.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, and I designed a way that I can go through those books three times in the year.

And because ironically, I have more time for the Bible now that I'm retired, I spend a lot of time in those books this year.

I say that because this sermon comes out of my own personal times with the Lord in the major prophets.

And by the way, the major prophets are dour and depressing.

They basically take you through a period of Israel's life where they rejected the Lord and they were disciplined by the Lord in a horrible, painful way.

The major prophets are dour and depressing.

They're also hopeful and uplifting because they tell us that after the discipline comes restoration.

But today I have to tell you that the sermon comes from the dour and depressing part.

I think you'll find this morning's meeting sermon depressing, sad, bad news.

But I just remind you that bad news can be quite helpful.

And specifically, as we trace the fall of Israel, how did they get into the briar paths that they find themselves in this morning?

How did they get there?

What is the path?

As we trace the fall and decline of Israel, I think we can learn how to escape their fate.

I think that we can come out from this morning with a really helpful, interspective look at our own heart.

So let's dive in.

An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.

What is this appalling and horrible thing?

Now, if you know your Bible timeline, you know that Jeremiah lived at the time where Babylon finally took over Israel.

Jerusalem fell, it was set on fire, and he was living in the last days.

As a matter of fact, he left Israel with the exiles to Egypt, and over his shoulder he could see the flames of Jerusalem.

And so, because of that, you might think an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.

What is that appalling and horrible thing?

Well, it must be the fall of Jerusalem.

By the way, there's tons of dating information in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and we can backtrace this.

We know that Jerusalem was set on fire, the temple was set on fire on August the 17th, 586 BC, which was a horrible time.

The fall of the capital city.

Most people were killed.

The people that weren't were exiled.

All of your goods confiscated.

You think you owe that house?

You don't own that house.

It's my house now, says Babylon.

The city was burned, but worst of all, the temple was burned.

God's own dwelling place.

And that was a blow to the national psyche.

Because the temple was the center of national life.

With the temple gone, the average Jew would say, like, who are we?

Like, the temple was what brought us together.

It was the focus.

And the temple was promised by God.

Now that the temple's gone, what happens to the rest of the promises of God?

Everything I thought was firm about what I knew about God is now collapsing all around me.

This would have been traumatic.

And just the scripture reveals how traumatic this could be.

For instance, in Psalm 27:4, the psalmist says, One thing I have asked of the Lord that I will seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, the temple, all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, to inquire in his temple.

Psalms 27:4

The temple is where we come together as a people to worship.

The temple is where God leads from.

And in fact, the Bible says that's where God lives.

And it's not like that was clear from the beginning.

In the opening day of the temple, when Solomon finished it and they were having their big dedication service, God came down from heaven and dwelt in the temple in a powerful way.

We read about it in 1 Kings.

And when the priest came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord.

This is God descending into the temple so that the priest could not stand to minister because of the cloud.

The presence of the glory of God, the priests couldn't take it.

They had to run out.

For the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord.

The temple is where God always promised to be.

An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.

He must be talking about the fall of Jerusalem.

What could be more horrible?

What could be more appalling?

And the timeline fits.

He lived at this time.

Would you be surprised to know that that is not what Jeremiah is referring to?

There is an appalling and horrible thing.

And it's not the fall of Jerusalem.

Let's let the prophet explain.

An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land.

What is that appalling and horrible thing?

It's this.

The prophets prophesy falsely.

That's the horrible thing.

The prophets, those called by God, those empowered by God to reveal his truth to his people, they don't do that anymore.

Worse, they don't reveal the truth, they suppress it, and they replace the truth with falsehoods.

That's the appalling thing.

And you think that's bad?

It gets worse.

The priests, the priests identified by God, who were to lead the people of God in worship under the Mosaic law to make sure that God is worshipped in the way that He specifies that we worship Him.

Yeah, they don't do that anymore.

They don't lead us in the Mosaic Law, they lead us in their own direction.

The priests lead not from the Mosaic Law, but out of their own whimsy.

This seems good today.

Let's try this.

Oh, the poor people.

The poor people who trusted in these two institutions of prophets and priests, and they've been totally let down by the prophets and the priests.

Oh, the poor people.

Friends, I wish it were that simple.

But it's even worse.

The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their own direction, not at the Mosaic law, at their own direction.

And my people love to have it so.

They want this.

They want the prophets to prophesy falsely.

They want the priests to lead, not by the Mosaic law, which can be quite troublesome for sinners.

Lead the way you want.

The appalling and horrible thing that is happening in the land is not the coming fall of Jerusalem.

It is spiritual drift.

As I spend a good deal of time in these books, I have come to the conclusion that Jeremiah is not warning of the fall of Jerusalem.

He is warning of the spiritual drift, which will lead to the fall of Jerusalem.

This is where we want to look today.

What is spiritual drift?

How does it happen?

And how do we know whether we are spiritually drifting?

By the way, Jeremiah comes late in the game.

He did not see the start of the drift.

He saw the end of the drift.

The start of the drift started 150 years earlier under the ministry of Isaiah.

Isaiah saw the drift start and immediately started warning.

And then 150 years later, the drift is still going strong.

So we're going to end up in Jeremiah today, but let's just go do some time travel.

Let's go to the beginning.

Let's go to the time Isaiah started to see the drift.

And let's get the anatomy.

What happened first, what happened second, what happened third, and we can look at this pattern and say, is that us?

So Jeremiah says, the prophets prophesy falsely.

The priests rule at their own direction.

And the people want it this way.

I'm so comfortable.

Now that we're off that sin thing and I don't have to hear about that sin thing anymore, woo-hoo! Boy, do I ever enjoy church.

Yeah, but this has consequences.

What will you do when the end comes?

When you choose these three, you choose suffering.

And what will you do then?

And when it's on you like a thief and it's too late, what will you do then?

So let's go back to Isaiah.

This is 150 years before the drift is just starting.

And God says, Go and now go right before them on a tablet and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever.

As you see this drift, chronicle it.

Write it down.

This is going to be a witness against the people and our text, our teaching text for this morning.

How does this start?

For they are a rebellious people.

Lying children.

Children unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord.

Drift does lead to catastrophe in Jeremiah's time.

But the embryonic form of it is in Isaiah's time, and it starts right here.

We decide we are going to be rebellious.

Nuts to you.

We don't care.

That's the start.

We will not be obedient.

We choose rebellion.

And rebellion always leads to an unwillingness to hear.

And now we can start to fill in our chart of the anatomy of drift.

First, to drift, you have to fall out of love with the Lord.

You have to.

You have to choose rebellion.

I will not be in love with the Lord.

And then that always results in an unwillingness to hear.

By the way, why?

Why are these two things always connected?

Well, Paul tells us for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching.

Why will people not endure sound teaching?

Oh, well, because there's a scientific experiment that has been done that it proves the Bible wrong.

No.

No.

First of all, that's never happened.

It's never gonna happen.

That is not why people cannot endure sound teaching.

Oh, well, it must be that there's this new philosophical insight that we've just found.

No one else found about.

We just found this philosophical insight, and it makes the Word of God irrelevant.

No, that has never happened.

That is never gonna happen.

That is not why people cannot endure the sound teaching.

Why can't they endure sound teaching?

Because they have itching ears, and that causes them to accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.

Not listening to the word of God is not fueled by facts, it is fueled by passion.

People spurn sound teaching because they want to feed their passions, and sound teaching gets in the way of that.

And that's what's happening in Israel during Isaiah's time.

They decide to be rebellious, and then they suddenly decide, discover they have no appetite for the Word of God.

Not interested.

It's not delicious, it's not refreshing, it's burdensome and boring.

The drift continues.

The people say to the seers, do not see, do not see our sinful condition and preach to that.

That's what seers are supposed to do.

To know their audience and apply the word in a skillful way.

Don't do that.

And they say to the prophets, do not prophesy to us what is right.

Well, that's gonna be a problem, says the seers.

Like we're supposed to see your spiritual condition.

That's the whole point.

And that's gonna be a problem.

Problem, see the prophets, because we're supposed to hear the truth from God and reveal it to you.

I mean, that's kind of the job description.

If we don't do that, what would we do?

Don't worry, we got that all figured out.

Speak to us smooth things.

Prophesy illusions.

By the way, did you know that God did not create the universe?

It created itself.

There is no creator.

Live the way you want.

Friends, that is a smooth thing, but it is an illusion.

Oh, and and guess what?

You know how life came about?

It just did.

Just some rocks bang together and then some life, and here we are.

Friends, that's a smooth thing.

But that is an illusion.

That is a sophisticated way to try to elude the truth of God.

But it is not true in itself.

We don't want you to see our condition.

We don't want you to preach which is right.

Here's where we want smooth things.

Prophesy illusions.

Um I hear you, says the prophet.

I hear you, says the seer.

But we do have a problem.

We have the word of God.

And it's not full of smooth things.

It's not full of illusions.

So I'm not quite sure what you want me to do here.

Don't worry your pretty little head.

I got it all figured out.

Leave the way.

Turn aside from the path.

Let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.

Therefore says the Holy One of Israel, because you despise his word, rebellion always leads to despising his word.

And trust in the oppression and perverseness and rely on them.

I will bring you disaster.

And now we see a little more adrift.

Starts off with, I'm not going to be in love with the Lord.

No.

No, no, no.

I'm going to rebel.

And then I'm unwilling to hear.

The Bible just keeps getting in the way.

I find it very offensive, very shocking, keeps waking up my conscience, which I'm very carefully trying to put to sleep.

Thank you very much.

But I still want to hear.

I'm still like I'm still an innate worshiper.

And if I won't hear the word of God, I need something.

Well, that's fine.

Let's go seek out some false teachers who don't see our true condition before God, who don't teach the truth, who have themselves left God, who have themselves learned the black magic of despising his word.

Friends, what happens when people choose to be rebellious and allow ourselves to fall out of love with the Lord?

We become unwilling to hear.

And then we curate a stable of reliable false teachers that won't upset our delicate consciences too much.

That's exactly what Israel is doing in Isaiah's time.

And they followed it for a hundred and fifty years.

And then Jeremiah comes on the scene.

What happened?

What happened?

A hundred and fifty years of dedicated spiritual drift.

Oh, the fire of God came down and destroyed them all.

Would you be surprised if I told you that's not what happened?

150 years of rebellion bought them a gracious offer from God to come back.

Let's do some time travel.

We've just been in with Isaiah.

He sees the root of drift.

He sees the rebellion.

He sees the lack of appetite for God's word.

He sues the accumulation of false teachers, and now 150 years have happened, and God's about to lower the boom.

No, actually, God's about to make a gracious offer.

After 150 years of rebellion, 150 years of refusing God's word, 150 years of accumulating false teachers, God says in Jeremiah 6, 150 years later, stand by the roads and look.

Ask for the ancient pass where the good way is and walk in it and find rest for your souls.

Come back.

Come back.

You've done a lot of damage in this 150 years, but there's a way back.

You are on the precipice of disaster.

I don't want that for you.

Come back.

I love you.

I want to restore you.

I want to live with you.

Stand by the roads and look.

Ask for the ancient past.

Let's get back to where we were.

Ask for the good way and walk in it.

And when you walk in it, you will find what you're looking for.

A hundred and fifty years of drift, of thumbing our nose at God, buys a gracious offer.

So how do we drift?

Will we choose to be rebellious and then we find we don't have an appetite for God's word, and therefore we have a cadre of false teachers?

My neighbor is dying, stage four cancer, and I'm witnessing to him.

And we're making good progress.

But he watches a prosperity preacher on TV, and that prosperity teacher has made my way of presenting the gospel much more difficult.

He will pay.

That preacher will pay.

He is a false teacher.

And people have him in his cadre because he makes them feel makes them feel better.

Israel did the same thing.

And what happens?

God, 150 years later, has a gracious invitation back.

Well, you can make a gracious invitation, but the question is, is how did they respond?

What did they do with that invitation?

The Lord makes the invitation, stand by the roads and look, ask for the ancient past where the good way is and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.

But they said, We will not walk in it.

You got me confused with somebody else.

I'm not interested.

God says, I set a watchman over you, saying, Pay attention to the sound of the trumpet.

We will not pay attention.

Unfortunately, a hundred and fifty years of increasing spiritual drift has so clouded their minds that a gracious offer back to everything they truly want looks like a burden.

They don't hear a gracious offer, come, let's be together again.

Let's go back to the ancient past.

Let me give you rest for your souls.

That's not what they hear.

What they hear is, so you're saying that I have to admit that I'm wrong.

So you're saying that I'm gonna have to give up my sin.

So you're saying that I'm gonna have to repent.

So you're saying that I'm gonna have to pursue God.

Their minds are so warped with 150 years of spiritual drift, they cannot see straight.

They see God's genuine, graceful offer, not as true freedom, but as slavery.

They cannot see what's really going on.

They see up as down, they see down as up, they see right as wrong, they see wrong as right.

Spiritual drift is self-blinding.

We cannot perceive the world as it really is.

And an gracious invitation from the Lord to return sounds like a threat and a return to slavery and following all those religious rules.

Can you imagine?

No, thank you.

Especially when I've got a whole cadre of false teachers telling me that things are great, never better.

We become rebellious.

We lose our appetite for the word of God.

That leaves a vacuum which we fill with false teachers.

God graciously invites us back, and we reject the invitation.

No thank you.

There's only one more step left in the anatomy of drift.

I set a watchman over you, pay attention to the trumpet.

We're not gonna pay attention.

Next verse, therefore, hear, O nations, and know, O congregation, what will happen to them.

Hear, O earth, behold, I am bringing disaster upon this people.

And notice it is God who brings disaster.

But this was not his idea.

This is the fruit of their own devices.

God has not chosen this for his people.

His people have chosen it for themselves.

When we choose to sin, we choose to suffer.

And when we choose to drift, we choose to die.

If you're on top of a tall building, you can choose to jump off or not.

That is entirely your choice.

But if you choose to jump, you do not have the choice of whether to fall or not.

You will fall.

It is your choice to jump or not to jump off a tall building.

But if you jump, you will die.

One always follows the other.

You don't have to drift.

It's your choice.

It is your genuine choice.

But if you do drift, you will die.

The consequence becomes inevitable.

We choose to rebel.

We have a strange lack of appetite for God's word, which creates a vacuum, so we fill it with false teachers.

God invites it back.

But we are so fractured, we are so wrong thinking at this point that we don't see it as an invitation back.

We see it as some sort of threat.

So we reject it.

And now the inevitable consequences are sealed into the universe in an inescapable way.

You know, Sandy and I just came back from a camping trip.

We went for four days to a really nice place called kiosk.

It's part of Algonquin Park, but it's not on the Highway 60 corridor.

You have to go up to North Bay and you get into a corner and it's isolated.

Like no cell coverage.

It's like a hundred kilometers to a town.

We had a great time.

Before I went, I downloaded onto my iPad an old 80s movie that I vaguely remembered, but I saw it on sale, so I bought it and downloaded it, watched it in our tent.

It was this one, War Games.

Mid-80s, maybe some of you old people, yeah, all the young people are saying, who what movie?

Anyways, Matthew Broderick here is a teenager and he's a computer nut and he loves playing computer games.

And he hears about a computer company who's coming out with a new game, and he wants to get the new game early.

So he hacks into their computer, or he thinks he's hacking into a computer.

And he finds a game called Global Thermonuclear War, and he starts to play it.

What he doesn't know is he's actually hacked into a Pentagon computer.

And as he thinks he's playing a computer game, the Pentagon computer is actually moving missiles around, and actually, it's in real life.

And so the rest of the movie is how do you stop this nuclear war?

And basically what they do is they get the computer to play out all the scenarios of global thermonuclear war.

US launches on Russia, Russia retaliates, the whole world is decimated.

Okay?

How about India launches on the US?

US retaliates the whole thing.

Okay?

How about Russia launches on India?

It goes through all the different combinations of global thermonuclear war, and every time it ends up with a dead planet.

And so after he's done all these simulations, the computer says, nuclear war, an interesting game.

The only winning move is not to play the game.

The only winning move is not to play the game.

Well, that's pretty of you to say that.

That's a nice way to end the sermon.

But how?

How?

Friends, our first and best task each day is to kill drift at the headwaters.

It is to start each day and feed our intimacy with Jesus, to keep the love fire burning between us and Jesus.

We must wake up every morning, the good ones and the bad ones, the mornings of sunny skies and the mornings of stormy seas.

And we must turn train ourselves to turn our eyes upon Jesus and to look full in his wonderful face.