The reading today comes from Lamentations 4. How the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed. The holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street. The precious sons of Zion worth their weight in fine gold. How they are regarded as earthen pots, the work of a potter's hands.
Even jackals offer the breast. They nurse their young but the daughter of my people has become cruel like the ostriches in the wilderness. The tongue of the nursing infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst. The children beg for food but no one gives to them. Those who once feasted on delicacies perish in the streets.
Those who were brought up in purple embrace ash heaps. For the chastisement of the daughter of my people has been greater than the punishment of Sodom which was overthrown in a moment and no hands were wrung for her. Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk. Their bodies were more ruddy than coral. The beauty of their form was like sapphire.
Now their face is blacker than soot. They are not recognised in the streets. Their skin has shrivelled on their bones. It has become as dry as wood. Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger who wasted away pierced by lack of the fruits of the field.
The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children. They became their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people. The Lord gave full vent to His wrath. He poured out His hot anger and He kindled a fire in Zion that consumed its foundations. The kings of the earth did not believe nor any of the inhabitants of the world that foe or enemy could enter the gates of Jerusalem.
This was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests who shed in the midst of her the blood of the righteous. They wandered blind through the streets. They were so defiled with blood that no one was able to touch their garments. Away, unclean, people cried at them. Away, away, do not touch.
So they became fugitives and wanderers. People said among the nations they shall stay with us no longer. The Lord Himself has scattered them. He will regard them no more. No honour was shown to the priests, no favour to the elders.
Our eyes failed ever watching vainly for help. In our watching we watched for a nation which could not save. They dogged our steps so that we could not walk in our streets. Our end drew near, our days were numbered for our end had come. Our pursuers were swifter than the eagles in the heavens.
They chased us on the mountains. They lay in wait for us in the wilderness. The breath of the nostrils, the Lord's anointed was captured in their pits of whom we said under his shadow we shall live among the nations. Rejoice and be glad O daughter of Edom, you who dwell in the land of Uz but to you also the cup shall pass. You shall become drunk and strip yourself bare.
Punishment of your iniquity O daughter of Zion is accomplished. He will keep you in exile no longer but your iniquity, O daughter of Edom, He will punish. He will uncover your sins. This is the word of the Lord. Please keep your Bible open to Lamentations 4.
Most of verses won't go up on the screen today, so keep it open in front of you. We live in a world that is in desperate need of good leadership. I don't think it's gonna take much to convince you of that. We've got wars going on in Northern Europe between Ukraine and Russia. I've got wars happening in The Middle East between Israel and Gaza and America and Iran.
There are all these tensions that seem like they could just bubble over in a moment to worldwide war. We need good leaders. We need good leadership to make the right decisions so that those sorts of things don't happen. But it's not just out there, it's also here in our own nation. Not only are our political leaders navigating these geopolitical global tensions, we're also dealing with the cost of living crisis in Australia.
That's a thing that's on a lot of Australians' hearts at the moment. And also the housing crisis. Our population is growing. We don't seem to have enough houses, and it's become more expensive than ever, and young people don't feel like they can even get their own home or have that Australian dream anymore. We've got a crisis in our own country too.
We need good leaders, leaders who can help resolve these issues and point our country in the right direction. Now when I talk about leaders and especially about politics, some of you might be, you know, take that traditional Aussie approach. You're just laid back. You don't really care. You'd rather go out for a surf later or something like that.
It'll be fine. It'll be alright, mate. But I wonder if you're actually underestimating the influence of leaders, if that's your attitude. Leaders can have wonderful effects, but also devastating effects. I already mentioned the name Adolf Hitler.
Leaders do matter. We do need to care about who's in leadership. But you also might be hearing like, yes, Ben, preach. We need to get more passionate about politics and who's in the parties and so on and so forth. And maybe this is a real, like, topic for you that gets you excited and maybe gets you down in the dumps when your leaders or your party don't get into power.
And, you know, if you get particularly emotionally disturbed when things don't go your way, then I think the Bible actually might challenge you a little bit today. The passage we're looking at might actually challenge you to go a little bit deeper and diagnose the problem that we're facing. You see, I think Lamentations will show you today that the problem isn't merely about which political party gets in, which leader gets in, but it's even deeper than that, and I'll explain that when we get into the passage. Others of you, you're just skeptical, full stop, about leaders. You've heard enough fake promises, you've seen enough lies from political leaders and those in power, and you think, yeah, I don't trust.
I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. They're in it for themselves, in it for their own power. And I think the passage today and the Bible itself, probably, there's a fair bit of agreement with you in that, but there's also a little challenge for you too in the scriptures and the passage today. Now the reason I'm talking about this is because Lamentations 4 has a particular focus on the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem. That's why the sermon today is called the painful undoing of fallen leaders.
Not just leaders who fell, but leaders who are fallen, who are what the Bible calls sinful, who are flawed. Jerusalem's pain, their undoing was in large amount due to their fallen, flawed leaders. That's what our passage is on about today. Now the reason we're looking at Lamentations 4 is because we're in this series going through this book of the Bible, which I think may be the darkest book of the Bible because we want to understand how we can find words when there are none. That's why the series is called Words When There Are None, because this book was written in the wake of a devastation which is indescribable.
The city of Jerusalem was laid to siege for eighteen months. People inside the city were starving. They became so hungry that they even cannibalised to survive. The Babylonians eventually break in and slaughtered and enslaved and took them off to a foreign nation. I mean, the situation is unimaginable.
And as we look at one of the darkest moments in biblical history, we also get a chance to learn the language of lament. That's what the book of Lamentations is. It's a series of laments, this ancient form of prayer that sufferers have used to bring their pain and their protests to God. So with that being said, let's get into our passage today. Let's take a look at chapter 4, and the chapter itself has three divisions in it.
So we're gonna break it down to three sections. And the first section, I've titled the destructive reversal of glory. The destructive reversal of glory. Now the reason reversal language is in there is because in these first 11 verses, there's this continual comparison going on where the writer, the poet, probably the prophet Jeremiah, keeps talking about Jerusalem was this, but now it's this. We had these wonderful people and now look at them.
Let me just run through the verses and explain it to you. So if you've got your Bible open, we'll just start off on verse one. Jeremiah says, how the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold has changed, the holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street. Jerusalem had plenty of gold in its heyday, had a temple, had holy precious stones within the temple, but Jeremiah is saying now it's all been broken down into rubble. It's lying everywhere.
The gold has faded. Verse two, it says, the precious sons of Zion, just remember, Zion is the hill that the temple was built on in Jerusalem, and it's used synonymously for Jerusalem in this book. So when he's mentioning Zion, you can just think Jerusalem if you want. The precious sons of Zion or Jerusalem, worth their weight and fine gold. These are image bearers.
They're worth more than gold. How they are regarded as earthen pots, the work of a potter's hands. See, clay pottery was inexpensive. It was disposable in that time. The people of Jerusalem, the sons of the city, worth more than gold, were treated like disposable clay.
Think Styrofoam cups. We used to drink coffee out of them and stuff like that. I used to bite off a chunk after I was done with it and play with it and then crush it and put in the bin. They were just disposable. They were worthless.
And that's the tragedy of this situation. These young men of the city who were precious were now treated like Styrofoam cups. They were crushed. They were broken. They were discarded.
Verse three, Jeremiah says, even jackals offer the breast, they nurse their young, but the daughter of my people has become cruel like the ostriches in the wilderness. In the book of Job, Job actually refers to ostriches. They had an association with cruelty. They lay their eggs on the ground. They don't really try to cover them.
They go off and hunt, and other animals eat them and so on. I read in one Bible dictionary that if a few of them were eaten, the ostrich would come back and crush the rest of her young. A very odd picture, but you can see what Jeremiah is trying to say. He's saying even the parents, even the mothers in this city, it's so desperate that they become cruel like this animal. They've kind of reverted into a, like, a beastly way of relating to each other.
They're no longer human, acting like animals. We see in verse four, Jeremiah elaborates on what he's saying. He's saying, the tongue of the nursing infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst. They're not feeding their babies. The children beg for food, but no one gives to them.
See, they're in such harsh conditions that compassion has been lost. Children are dying on the streets, and no one is helping them. Verse five, Jeremiah turns his attention to the royalty, the elites of the city. Those who once feasted on delicacies perish in the streets. Those who were brought up in purple embrace ash heaps.
They're in piles of rubbish, scrounging for food. This would be like the stars of Hollywood who you most admire, your most favourite actresses and actors. They're people that, you know, if you met them, you'd be, you know, nervous to meet them and get their signature. But in this devastation, these kinds of people, they've been so decimated by it. You can hardly recognise them.
They're scrounging in the rubbish for food. It's devastating. These are their own people, their royalty, who are now worse off than a homeless person. Verse six, this one's a hard verse to translate. In the ESV, it says, for the chastisement or kinda like punishment of the daughter of my people has been greater than the punishment of Sodom, which was overthrown in a moment, and no hands were wrung for her.
This is a verse that's hard to translate because the words chastisement and punishment, those Hebrew words, they have a couple of different meanings, so the context will dictate whether you choose to translate them a particular way. And then the final phrase, no hands were wrung for her, is enigmatic in the Hebrew. It's difficult to understand what Jeremiah is saying. My favourite translation of this comes from the Christian Standard Bible, which says in verse six, the punishment of my dear people is greater than that of Sodom, which was overthrown in an instant without a hand laid on it. See, what I think Jeremiah is trying to say here is that Sodom and Gomorrah, they were known for being some of the most wicked and evil cities, but their end was more merciful than Judah's was, cause at least they were destroyed in an instant.
They didn't have a hand laid on them. They were destroyed in a moment. But Judah's destruction, long and drawn out. The hands of the Babylonians were against them and sieged for eighteen months before they finally broke through. That's what Jeremiah is lamenting.
That's what he's protesting. Verse seven, he returns to thinking about the royalty. He says, her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk. Some of that's lost to us because of the ancient context of why that's a good thing, but he's just saying these people were impressive, they were attractive, but now verse eight, their face is blacker than soot, they've been exposed to the sun, they are not recognised in the streets. They're famished, famished?
Is that the word? They're starving. Their skin has shrivelled on their bones. It has become as dry as wood. Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger.
At least the victims of the sword died quickly, is what Jeremiah is saying. Who wasted away, pierced, it's an interesting metaphor for hunger, pierced by the lack of the fruits of the field. The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children. They became their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people. It's a horrifying situation.
It's this destructive reversal of a city that was once glorious and beautiful and full of gold and people and mothers and children. It's been decimated. It's been razed to the ground. They've gone through abominable things, and now they're in a foreign nation, and Jeremiah's writing this poetry for them to try and express their pain. It reminds me a little bit of the scenes that I've been reading in a book called The Insanity of God by Nick Ripken.
In it, he describes how he tried to share the love of Jesus in Somalia after government collapsed entirely in 1991, and he paints a devastating picture of the country that to me is a modern parallel of what the Judeans in Jerusalem went through in the sixth century BC. You see, clan warlords tore the country apart in a civil war that combined with drought killed around three hundred thousand people in one year. That's almost half the population of the Gold Coast. Aid convoys were looted before they reached the starving. This was a nation whose institutions, whose leaders, whose entire social order had disintegrated, and whose people were left to watch their own children starve in front of them with no one able to help.
And he writes about devastating situations in the book. He goes there to try and establish charity and relief work to try and feed the starving and so on. And as he went through some of the towns to scout what the needs were, there were mothers who were so desperate to keep their children alive, they tried to throw them into the window of the car just to get them to take their kids. There were kids that had rocket powered grenades in the city of Mogadishu, the capital city. He knew of some of the very few remaining Somali Christians.
There are about 70 left. He knew four. All four of them were killed by Islamic terrorists on their way to work one day to try and get him to stop doing work in the name of Jesus in that country. It was a country that he described as like a descent into hell. It was an unbearably dark situation, and it's a modern day parallel, I think, of what Jerusalem went through.
But here's the kicker. When it comes to Lamentations, when it comes to the Jerusalem situation itself, the destruction of Jerusalem wasn't simply a historical tragedy. This was a punishment of God. Verse 11 says, the Lord gave full vent to His wrath. He poured out His hot anger, and He kindled a fire in Zion that consumed its foundations.
How could a good God do this? How could His fury come out in this way? Well, we've talked about it in this series a bit, haven't we? That just because God is slow to anger doesn't mean that He will not eventually get angry. His justice is so complete and comprehensive, it can be devastating.
We talked about the sins of Jerusalem. This wasn't an innocent city that fell. For generations, God had been sending His prophets to warn them to turn back. One of their kings, Manasseh, he burned his own son alive as an offering to false gods. Manasseh filled the temple with pagan altars, and it talks about, in some of these books, how Manasseh filled the city with blood.
And when you look at the references, it's referring to human sacrifice. Manasseh and the religious leadership colluded together. They went the way of paganism, and they would take the poor and the innocent and those who weren't able to defend themselves and sacrifice them to false gods. And God kept warning them, if you keep going this way, I'm going to judge you. This wasn't an innocent city, this was a wicked city, and yet it's still very confronting.
If you want to explore that some more, Lamentations 2 really explores the anger of the Lord, the wrath of God, and we explored that in week two of our series. So I encourage you if you weren't there for that to go and listen to that sermon in the series as we wrestled with this a bit more there. Jeremiah is clear that this devastation is a result of God's anger against sin and evil. But there was a group that God was especially angry with, a group that should have known better, a group that should have done better. It was their leaders.
And we're gonna look at them next under the second heading, the futility of flawed leadership. So we've seen the destructive reversal of glory in verses 1 to 11, and now in verses 12 to 20, we focus in now on the futility of flawed leadership. So if you scan over these verses, you'll notice kings are mentioned, elders are mentioned, priests and prophets. These are the whole leadership hierarchy of Judah. But notice that the opening verse is not about Judah's kings, it's about the nation's kings.
Verse 12, we read, the kings of the earth did not believe nor any inhabitants of the world that foe or enemy could enter the gates of Jerusalem. You see, Jerusalem was in a place where it was very hard to take by force. And Jerusalem wasn't just any city. It sat on a ridge ringed by steep valleys on nearly every side, the kind of defensive position that ancient armies dreaded taking face on. And this was a city that was known for holding out under siege in the past.
So how did the Babylonians get in? That's what the nations are asking. They're saying, how could Jerusalem be conquered? It seems unconquerable. And the answer that Jeremiah gives in Lamentations is not the might of the Babylonians.
He doesn't say, well, they were just so strong and amazing. The answer is actually in the sin of its leaders. Jerusalem fell because God gave it over in judgement for their sins. Let's take a look at verses 13 to 20 together. I'll just run through and explain them again.
Verse 13. Here's the answer. Jeremiah says, this was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests. The prophets were meant to speak God's word to God's people, and the priests were meant to teach God's word in the book of the law, which is the first five books of our Bible, they're the books of Moses. The priests were meant to teach that to the people, to teach them how they were to live, to not commit human sacrifice, which is an abomination in the Bible, for example.
The prophets were meant to speak God's word as God inspired them to do that, and they basically built their message off those first five books of Moses anyway when they brought a message to people. But these prophets and these priests, they were colluding with the leaders of Israel, the kings that introduced pagan worship and so on, and they weren't confronting the evil. The prophets kept saying to people, it's okay. Everything will be fine. You will prosper.
Don't worry. When they should have been warning the people saying, turn away from this. The priests should have been teaching God's word instead of participating in pagan worship. That they had failed completely, and that's why Jeremiah blames them. He says at the end of verse 13 that it was for the iniquities of a priest who shed in the midst of her the blood of the righteous.
Now I don't think the prophets themselves were killing people. The priests, maybe, if they were participating in that human sacrifice, but that's what it's talking about. The blood of the righteous, if you look at the parallel passages, it's talking about the sacrifice of human beings, how they were sacrificing people to these false gods shedding their blood. That's what the prophets and the priests are being blamed for in this verse. In verse 14, Jeremiah says, they wandered blind through the streets.
They were so defiled with blood that no one was able to touch their garments. We need to understand that the priests were like the holy class of the people. They were meant to be clean ritually rather than unclean. There were all these laws around how they were meant to stay clean, by what they ate, by what they did do and didn't do, by staying away from anything polluted by death like corpses and so on. They were meant to be the clean class, the holy class, but here they are as the most defiled class, defiled with blood.
They had shed the blood of the innocent. Now they walk the streets of Jerusalem where the citizens have been slain, and they are drenched with their blood. They are unclean. So much so, verse 14 says, that no one was able to touch their garments. In fact, look at what the people said to them in verse 15.
Away, unclean, people cried at them. Away, away, do not touch. That's a bit of a riff on what the lepers had to do according to the Old Testament. Lepers were unclean and also very contagious, and they had to go around. If someone was coming near them that was not sick, they'd have to say, unclean, unclean.
But now the people of God are saying to the, perhaps, the most clean or what was supposed to be the most clean, most holy class in Judah, they're saying to them, unclean, unclean, stay away. The prophets and the priests, they had participated in this rebellion, and this is why the Lord's turned things around, and now they are the untouchables of society. So untouchable that the other nations don't want them anywhere near them. We see in the rest of verse 15, they became fugitives and wanderers. People said among the nations, they shall stay with us no longer.
Verse 16, the Lord Himself has scattered them. He will regard them no more. No honour was shown to the priests, no favour to the elders. Our eyes failed, ever watching vainly for help. In our watching, we watched for a nation which could not save.
See how the changes to the plural here, our, we, that second person plural, the people of God are chiming in here. Why are they watching for a nation that couldn't save? Why are they there hopelessly waiting in this siege? It's because of their leaders again. King Zedekiah didn't listen to Jeremiah, didn't listen to the prophets.
Instead of doing what God said, he tried to make alliances with other nations around him, like Egypt and so on. And so, it's because of bad leadership that the people are in the city, rather than trusting in God, they're waiting for another nation. They're hoping Egypt would come. They're hoping one of the other smaller nations would come and save them during the siege, and they never came. Verse 18, they dogged our steps.
Now they're talking about the Babylonians. They're like predators running after their prey. They dogged our steps that we could not walk in our streets. Our end drew near, our days were numbered, for our end had come. Our pursuers were swifter than the eagles in the heavens.
They chased us in the mountains. They lay in wait for us in the wilderness. And then verse 20 has this interesting phrase. I think it's the only time it comes up in our Bible. The breath of our nostrils.
The Lord's anointed. They're talking about the king here. The Lord's anointed is the Hebrew word Mashiach, where we get the word Messiah from. In the Old Testament, the kings were mashiach, I guess. I don't know how you'd say it, but mashiach just means to be anointed with oil.
So they were anointed with oil to be set apart as a king. So that's why he's called the anointed one. And they call him the breath of our nostrils, it seems, because they're getting, they're putting their trust in their king to be their livelihood, to be their breath. We see this elaborated on in the end of the verse where it says, of whom we said, under his shadows, we shall live among the nations. I think what's going on here is the people are expressing an idolatrous trust in their king.
Yes, their king was someone who was meant to lead them, but they're saying he's the breath of our nostril. He's everything. And the reason I think it's idolatrous is because they use language that's similar to Psalm 91, where we read, he who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow, not of the king, but of God the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust. So the people were led astray, and they put too much weight, they put too much trust in their leaders, and their leaders led them down this path that eventuated in destruction.
See, one of the things this passage is teaching us is where to put our ultimate trust. One scholar on Lamentations, he says that people had put their trust in the Davidic dynasty as well as in the temple and the prophets and priests. The Davidic dynasty refers to the line of kings because king David was promised to have a son whose reign would never end. But they failed to put their trust in God, the only one who could have saved them. So the people put their trust in the wrong place.
They put their trust in fallen and flawed human leaders. And this is where I think the passage, going back to the introduction, this is where I think the passage actually challenges those of us who are too passionate about politics. If you're passionate about politics, that's fine. But if emotionally, when your party doesn't get in or your leader doesn't get in and you are down in the dumps despairing, that might be a sign that you're putting too much trust in politics. If your person gets in and you're related more than you're related by the gospel, it might be a sign that you put too much trust in politics.
You see, the people of God here, they put too much trust in their leaders, but they hadn't diagnosed the problem, and we're not meant to just blindly trust human leaders. Why? Because every human leader is flawed. I, as a pastor, I'm a leader in this church, I'm flawed. We're all flawed.
No human leader is incapable of letting us down, and I don't think there's anyone that said it more strikingly than Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He was a Russian Soviet citizen, and he was sent to the infamous Gulag prisons because of upsetting the Russian authorities, and he spent seven years there, I think. And these Gulag prisons, they were similar to the concentration camps of the Nazis. They were designed to work people to death. So Alexander was a victim of this system.
Right? But here's what he writes about this view that we have good people over here and bad people over here, and we just need to get good people into power. He says, it's not that simple. And he writes this as a victim. He says in his book, if only it were all so simple.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Alexander writes that as someone who was victimised and oppressed in these gulag prisons, and he says that actually the line of evil doesn't just run through my oppressors' hearts, it also runs through my own. This is what the Bible calls sin. This is what the Bible is trying to draw our attention to.
The big problem is not trying to get the good people into power. The big problem is that every person is influenced by sin. Every person is corrupted by sin. The line between good and evil runs through every heart. This is the deeper problem behind bad leadership, and it's the problem that the Bible actually wants us to deal with.
And isn't this why Jesus came? Jesus didn't come to be a political messiah. The Jews thought He was going to be. They thought that He would bring them to glory and kick out the Romans, and the nations would come and serve Israel. But Jesus was a political failure.
The Jewish council, the highest council of the day, the Sanhedrin, they rejected Him and took Him to the Romans to put Him to death, and the Romans crucified Him. Why did Jesus come if He was going to be such a political failure? Because He didn't come to bring a political solution, He came to bring a deeper solution. He came to solve our sin problem. He came to deal with the sin that's in every human heart.
That's why in the letters of Peter, it says, He Himself bore our sin in His body on the tree. He bore our sin. He consciously went to the cross bearing our shame and our guilt and our sin, and that's why He died on the tree, because in the Old Testament, it says, cursed is anyone who was hung on a tree. He chose to become a curse even though He's the most innocent and pure and compassionate man that ever lived. He chose to become a curse.
He chose to undergo the punishment that sin deserves to get sin out of our hearts. You see, you put your trust in Jesus, He doesn't just pay so that you can be forgiven, He also begins to uproot sin from your heart. He puts His Spirit in you and gives you a new heart so you can begin to love God and to love others and to serve God truly. This is why Jesus came. He is the leader who got off of His throne and took the lowest place, even the place of death, to raise us up, to heal us, and to help solve the human problem.
Human leaders fail us. Human leaders failed Judah, and the consequences were absolutely devastating. The pain wasn't just physical for the people in Jerusalem, and it wasn't just limited to the Babylonians. The pain that they experienced in that city was exquisite in many forms. They were even betrayed by neighbouring allies, so to speak.
You see, I mentioned how king Zedekiah, the king just before this destruction, he had made bad alliances with Egypt and other smaller nations like Edom. And Edom didn't come to their help when the Babylonians came. They betrayed Judah, but they didn't just betray Judah. They actually profited from Judah's downfall. They actually had their territory enlarged by betraying the Jerusalemites.
And this explains a little bit about why Jeremiah says what he says next. Let's look at that under the final heading, the comfort of complete justice. So we've looked at the futility of flawed leadership just now, and now the comfort of complete justice. So Jeremiah says in verse 21, rejoice and be glad, he's being sarcastic here. Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, you who dwell in the land of Uz, but to you also the cup shall pass.
The cup in the Old Testament was an image for judgement or justice or wrath. You shall become drunk and strip yourself bare. Your iniquity, O daughter of Edom, He will punish. He will uncover your sins. Again, in Lamentations, these what they call imprecatory prayers, they keep coming up and they make us uncomfortable as Christians because we have scriptures that say things like, bless those who curse you.
What is Jeremiah doing here in this imprecatory prayer? Well, notice he's not actually cursing them or seeking vengeance, he's praying to God. He's not going out and let's hatch a plan to get these people back. He's bringing pain to God as a victim of brutal violence. He didn't just get cut off in traffic and he prays his prayer.
He's praying this in the midst of severe injustice and betrayal. And we've talked about in this series how forgiveness and imprecatory prayer can actually coexist. Actually, imprecatory prayer can actually help achieve forgiveness too. In Romans, Paul says, beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but leave it to the Lord as it is written, vengeance is Mine, says the Lord, I will repay. So Paul says, don't take vengeance, but give vengeance to the Lord.
And it's actually that that enables us to forgive under severe injustice and abuse. I could say so much more on that, but I really delved into that in the first week of the series. So if you wanna look into that form of prayer and wrestle that through, then I encourage you to go back and listen to that if you haven't already. This is why this heading is called the comfort of complete justice. Because even though the justice of God is scary, if you feel that you're guilty before God, it's also comforting if you're a victim, if you're one of the downtrodden and oppressed of our world, because God will do perfect justice, and that's why there's a bit of comfort there for Jeremiah and the Judeans.
The other reason this heading is called the comfort of complete justice is because the punishment of Judah was finished. It was complete, and that was a comfort for them. So we see, in verse 22, the final verse, Jeremiah says, the punishment of your iniquity, O daughter of Zion, is accomplished, is complete, is finished. He will keep you in exile no longer. You see that verse, that little moment there is meant to provide comfort for the people.
Yes. They've been utterly decimated, but Jeremiah is now saying, it's finished. Your punishment is over. You don't need to keep looking over your shoulder and worrying there's still more to come. And isn't that what Jesus has achieved for us?
See, we have even more than what they did back then because they still had the problem of sin. Yes. Christians still wrestle with sin now, so don't get me wrong there. But they still had the Old Testament problem where the people kept rebelling and then being judged and then being restored and rebelling and being judged and restored. So what was to stop them from just rebelling again and more judgement coming?
But Jesus broke that cycle by going to the cross and drinking the cup on behalf of sinners. Remember how He was in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He died, and He kept talking to His Father, saying, Father, if it is possible, remove this cup from Me. He's referring to the judgement He was about to endure. He was asking the Father if there's any other way to save sinners, show Me another way because this is unbearable, this thing I'm about to go through. But there was no other way.
So Jesus submitted to it. He chose to drink the whole cup down to the very last drop on behalf of sinners. And do you remember what He said towards the end of His time on the cross? He said, it is finished. See, Jesus didn't just pay for past sins.
He paid for all the sins of His people. And whatever it is that you wrestle with in your life, maybe there's something that brings up a lot of shame for you. The word of God wants to say to you, it is finished. Punishment is over. God will not punish you for what Jesus has already been punished for.
God will be perfectly just. He will not add on to Jesus' sacrifice. Your sin has been removed from you as far as the East is from the West. God doesn't remember it anymore. Jesus has paid for it.
Let Jesus relieve that burden for you today. If you've come in, maybe you sinned this morning, maybe you're worried about what you're gonna do next week. If you sin again, it is finished. Jesus paid for it all at the cross. He is the perfect leader, the leader who chose to serve us, to take the low place to serve us.
See, human leaders are all capable of failing us in devastating ways, but Jesus is the leader who served our deepest needs by drinking the bitter cup that was ours to drink. As we finish, I wanna remind us of a film that you might have watched, the Titanic. Even if it's been years, maybe you remember the captain in the film. As the ship goes down, the captain doesn't fight for a seat in a lifeboat. He doesn't push past a single passenger to save himself.
He stays on the bridge, calm, present, going down with a ship he was responsible for, determined to put himself last in order to get everyone else off the ship first. And the captain is a bit like the kind of leader Jesus is. Jesus didn't run away from the cross. King Zedekiah ran away from Jerusalem and left the people, but Jesus didn't run away. Jesus put Himself last to put us first, to secure our rescue.
I said to some of you at the beginning that are skeptical about leadership. You think every leader must be in it for themselves. I can't trust any of them. The Bible affirms that in some way because it's like, well, yeah, everyone has got sin in them. So there's a truth to that, but the pessimism is not altogether justified because there is a perfect leader.
He lives and reigns in heaven right now. His name is Jesus. You can trust in Him. He will come through on every single one of His promises. Others of us, we put too much weight in human leaders.
We think they're better than what they are sometimes. And if that's your tendency, this passage reminds us about the power of sin, about how these leaders led the people astray into idolatry and into destruction. And, you know, I think it also helps us in the church about how to relate to church leaders like pastors and our elders and so on. I think it helps us to avoid two opposite errors, idolising and scrutinising. Idolising church leaders, thinking that we're better than what we are, that we're not capable of sin.
That's actually true. Just ask my wife. We are capable of sin. You're not meant to put complete and total utter trust in us. That's reserved for Jesus.
That's reserved for God. But, also, I think it protects us from scrutinising our leaders, constantly being suspicious that they're up to no good. Remember, the people of Judah, they didn't follow some leaders who were it was very hard to figure out what they were doing wrong. They literally introduced human sacrifice into the worship. If I come in one Sunday, I'm like, let's become pagans and start sacrificing people.
Just rebuke me. Of course. That's very clear. But if I'm following the Lord and I'm serving Jesus, then I need your encouragement as well. I'm not perfect.
I'm a brother in Christ. The ultimate trust that we have is meant to be put in Jesus. He's the head of this church. He's called the chief shepherd in the New Testament. He's the ultimate pastor.
He's all of our pastor. He's my pastor. He's the one as we rebuild as a church because I just wanna acknowledge, we've had leadership hurt here in the church, and some of you don't know why our leaders left us a couple of years ago. And I'm not trying to point the finger at anyone, but I know that there's been hurt here. But as we rebuild in this time, it's not a season for us to say, okay.
Well, Ben's he should be okay. No. Ben's fallible. This is a time to put our trust in Jesus. He's the head of this church.
He's the one that we're building around. He's the one that we're following together. Human leaders are all capable of failing us in devastating ways, but Jesus is the leader who served our deepest needs by drinking the bitter cup that was ours to drink. Let's pray together. Jesus, there's no words to describe how good You are.
You are far better than a captain who went down with a sinking ship. You are far better than the best leaders of this world. You are the one who got down from Your throne in heaven, who took on the form of a servant, becoming human, becoming one of us. You are a man of sorrows who suffered much in this world, teaching us about the way to the Father, and You ultimately chose to die in our place. How can we not trust You?
Jesus, we put our whole trust in You together as Your people. We know that You will never let us down. We know that You will sometimes lead us through dark valleys, but that You are with us in those valleys. So, Jesus, we trust You. We put our faith in You.
We thank You for who You are and what You've done. And we pray, Lord, bless us as a people. Bless our church. Lead us into fruitfulness and love and faith and hope. We pray this in Your name. Amen.