Sermon Text: Jeremiah 33:14-16
Date: December 1, 2024
Event: The First Sunday in Advent, Year C
Jeremiah 33:14–16 (EHV)
Listen, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the good promises that I have spoken to the house of Israel and concerning the house of Judah.
15In those days and at that time,
I will cause a righteous Branch to grow up from David’s line.
He will establish justice and righteousness on earth.
16In those days Judah will be saved,
and Jerusalem will dwell securely.
This is what she will be called:
The Lord Our Righteousness.
The Days Are Coming
The days are coming! How many until Christmas? I’m sure you could ask most of the children and they could give you an exact number. The rest of us could probably do the math, but perhaps we don’t want to think about that just yet. There’s so much to do to prepare—planning, decorating, cooking, emotionally centering ourselves. It’s a lot. But unless the Lord returns before December 25, it will be here. That day is, in fact, coming!
This morning in worship, we are not yet getting into the Christmas season itself, but we are beginning a new church year, and we begin that year in the season of Advent. Advent is a season all about preparation which fits in more ways than one at this time of year. Amid all the preparations that happen for us to celebrate Christmas, spiritually, we are preparing our hearts for a dual purpose. We are, in part, preparing our hearts to hear that glorious Christmas gospel that the angels and shepherds will share that night in Bethlehem. But we also continue to prepare for his second coming, ensuring our hearts are ready to receive him not just as the baby in the manger but also as the returning King of kings and Lord of lords.
In some ways, we begin the new church year in a very similar way to how we ended the last church year this past Sunday. In our Gospel, we saw Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and while there is humility as he rides on a lowly colt of a donkey, it’s still a greatly different picture than what we saw in last week’s Gospel when Jesus was on trial before Pontius Pilate. Shouts of praise from the Psalms, and specifically praise to the promised Messiah, filled the air!
Our focus this morning takes us back, though, some 600 years before that first Palm Sunday. In our First Reading, we spend time with the prophet Jeremiah, who lived and worked in a dreadful time in the history of God’s people.
The Israelites had lived in the Promised Land for over 800 years, and during that period, there was a constant struggle to keep God's commands and directions. Not only did they struggle with the normal sinful natures that would lead them astray from God’s will anyway, but they also allowed people who worshiped false gods to continue to live among them and influence them. So the pull to fictional deities like Baal, Asherah, Molech, and others constantly distracted from the true God and while also incorporating pure sin in their worship practices.
God sent his prophets to them repeatedly, warning them that he would step in with chastisement using the sword of foreign powers if things did not change. That happened to the northern part of Israel before Jeremiah’s time when the nation of Assyria came and exiled most of the people and mixed in people from other nations with the Israelites who remained.
The southern part of Israel had some brighter spots. A few kings like Hezekiah and Josiah would come in and try to clean up the worship life of the nation. They would clean up and repair the temple. They would reinstitute festivals and sacrifices God had commanded, which the people had long forgotten. But things never fully turned around; the people never devoted themselves back to God reliably.
The real issue was not the faithfulness of one nation or several tribes but God’s global promise of a Savior. Just like when God intervened with the flood of Noah’s day because the promise of the Savior was on the verge of being extinguished, so God intervened here. While his actions were not as dramatic and did not require an ark, it was no less critical. The promise had to be preserved, and it wouldn’t be a pleasant road ahead for the Israelites.
At the beginning of Jeremiah 33, before our First Reading for this morning starts, God outlined what this was going to be like: The Lord, the God of Israel, says this concerning the houses of this city and the palaces of the kings of Judah … I will fill them with the corpses of men whom I have killed in my anger and my wrath. I will hide my face from this city because of all its wickedness (vv. 4-5). There’s no sugarcoating that. Things would be miserable because the people had abandoned God’s ways.
And this makes up a large percentage of the message God sent Jeremiah to share. The people responded to that message as well as you might imagine they did. They viewed Jeremiah as a liar, a blasphemer, a traitor to the nation and king. Who would say such horrible things about their own country, their own people? And yet, Jeremiah was sharing what God had told him to say. Jeremiah was just the mouthpiece; the words were God’s.
However, there is something important to remember about this downfall God promised for the nation of Judah: God set an expiration date. It wouldn’t be short—70 years—but it would end. The purpose of this was not to punish unfaithful people; the purpose was to purify, to rehabilitate an apostate nation because they had a role to carry out for the good of mankind; it was through them that the Savior of the nations would come.
So Jeremiah had the privilege of describing future days. The terrible days are coming! Babylon would come and carry the nation into exile. The difficult days are coming! A seven-decade-long exile would end all but a select few of that current generation. The trying days are coming! Even in return to their homeland, exiles would find it difficult to endure; as they took a stronger stand against the false religions around them, they would find relationships with the other nations much more difficult in the short and long term.
There’s not a ton to be excited about in these promises. These coming days sound dark and cold. But then, there are other days that Jeremiah is privileged to announce: Listen, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the good promises that I have spoken to the house of Israel and concerning the house of Judah. God would someday keep and complete the promises he made to his people. What would that look like? In those days and at that time, I will cause a righteous Branch to grow from David’s line. He will establish justice and righteousness on earth. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. This is what she will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness. The salvation days are coming! God will come and save his people, and the people, the cities, and the nations will be named to reflect the reality of their spiritual condition: The Lord Our Righteousness.
A branch would grow up from the house and line of King David—Messiah would be the descendant, the son, of David. And he would do what David and the rest of his bloodline couldn’t: bring real justice and righteousness. Justice because sins would be truly and fully paid for; righteousness, because by paying for those sins in his own body, the Messiah would put our broken relationship with God back together and make it right again.
So, this was the answer to the Israelites’ sin problem. They couldn’t make things right by suffering in exile. They couldn’t make things right by turning over a new leaf and suddenly being very faithful to God. No, they would need a Savior to rescue them from their sin, pay for their wrongdoing, and put them at peace with God. In his work, Judah would be saved, and Jerusalem would find a peaceful existence.
If we compare ourselves to the Israelites, we note there’s not much difference. Perhaps we’re not building altars to Baal and participating in pagan worship services. But aren’t we often prioritizing other things, letting matters other than God be king in our hearts? When we allow work or school, money or influence, entertainment or relaxation to become the dominant focus of our lives at the expense of God, we’re making that thing or goal our god in his place. We are no better than the Israelites visiting shrine prostitutes to worship fertility gods or sacrificing their children in the fire to Molech. It just takes different forms for us: pornography use and sex outside the bonds of marriage, neglect of family or children due to work, play, alcohol, drugs, or anything else that pulls us from our God-given responsibilities. All of these sins can become our gods.
And so, what do we do? Well, nothing. We should not be surprised if we find ourselves in a really bad situation at some point—now or later. Maybe not exile in Babylon, but perhaps something God uses to wake us up from our spiritual apathy or unfaithfulness. Why does he do that? Because the days are coming, or more to the point, the day is coming. Be it the end of our lives here through death or his return at the Last Day, there is a moment when we will have no more time left, where the clock on our time of grace here in this life will stop ticking, and then we will face judgment before our God.
Because that day is coming, Jesus rouses us from our sleepy and sinful spiritual state. He warns us that that day is coming like the day of exile was coming for Judah. But he also points us to himself and reminds us why we do not need to be afraid. All of our unfaithfulness to him, every time we have made other things our gods rather than him, all of our sins of weakness and willful sins of desire, they are all forgiven in him. The days were coming and have in fact come when the King of kings and Lord of lords took on our human flesh, lived and died in our place. By that life and death, he destroyed our sins, justified us, and made us righteous. That branch from David’s line, Jesus from Nazareth, is the long-promised Messiah, the Savior we desperately needed.
My brothers and sisters, because of Jesus, the days are coming when we won’t have to fight this battle inside of us and around us to be faithful to our God. The days are coming when he will pluck us out of this life of misery and bring us to himself in heaven. The days are coming when we will live and bask in the complete fulfillment of everything Jesus accomplished for us, when “The LORD Our Righteousness” will also be the name given to us.
Until that day when we have it in full, hold on to what we have in part. Guard the good deposit of the Holy Spirit that God placed in you. Value God’s work and promises to you above all else. Prioritize him above everything, even in (and perhaps especially in) these busy days before Christmas. The days are coming. Lift up your head! Your King will come to you! Amen.
