Good morning! It’s good to be together this morning!

Last weekend Anne and I and our daughter Dana were in North Carolina to visit our oldest son, Jesse. We had a great visit with him, and saw some of the beautiful state of North Carolina at just the right time with the leaves turning colors. Last Sunday we worshipped in a Presbyterian Church in Durham called Blacknall Presbyterian, which several of you have connections with, and had just a great time of worship. But it’s good to be back.

Anne and Dana flew home on Monday, and I then flew down to Atlanta, and drove about 30 miles east of the city. I’m only telling you this because I went to visit my Greek professor from seminary days that I’ve mentioned several times in sermons, Dr. Cullen Story. Dr. Story was already a retired professor at Princeton when I was there, but still teaching an occasional class. In the 10 years since I graduated, he and I have kept up a pretty steady correspondence of hand-written letters and an occasional phone call.

Dr. Story first caught my attention because he was a man who was both very sharp academically, but also had a deep faith in Christ which he brought to the classroom, and in meeting with students like me outside of the classroom. He and his wife moved fairly recently to a retirement village outside of Atlanta. He is very small man, pretty hunched over now at 90 years old, and I wasn’t sure when I might be near enough to pay him a visit again.

I have to tell you, if I live to be 90, I’d like to be like Dr. Story. One of the things he really wanted to talk with me about…was how God might use him now in ministry. “There’s a new housing development being built across the street from us,” he said. "Maybe I could get a Bible study going there.” He’s 90! He is as filled with passion for his walk with Christ as anyone I know. And the best thing we did, I think, was get to pray together. You learn something about prayer when you do it with someone who has been at it for 75 years or so.

I knew it was a good thing that I had gone, but I received a clear sign that our friendship had moved to another level when he told me “Dan, you can keep calling me ‘Dr. Story’ if you want…or you could just call me Cullen.” It’s the first time he’s ever said that. I felt like I’d really gotten somewhere after 13 years!

Well. We’ve been listening to the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah for 7 weeks now, and hopefully you are automatically placing him in the 6 th century BC, the low time in Israel’s history, when the capital city Jerusalem was crushed by the superpower of Babylon, the Jewish temple destroyed and the leaders and some of the people carried off into exile.

This morning I want to read just a few verses from a section full of oracles, or prophetic words, that Jeremiah addresses to other nations. Here Jeremiah speaks to the nation of Moab, which was to the east and south of Jerusalem, on the other side of the Dead Sea. This is just a small part of what God says to the nation of Moab.

Jeremiah 48:28-31, 46-47.

We need to back up for a second. In our very first week of reading Jeremiah, when we read about God calling him to be a prophet, we noted that God said “I appoint you a prophet to the nations.” Well, that’s fine. But ever since that, pretty much every word Jeremiah has spoken on God’s behalf has been not to the “nations” (those out there ), but to Israel (the Insiders). God’s people.

Jeremiah, as far as we know, never leaves Jerusalem until he is carried to Egypt at the very end. Every word that Jeremiah has spoken, condemnation or encouragement, has been spoken to Jerusalem, to Israel: warning Israel not to resist the invading armies but that God wants to use them to bring Israel back to Himself. Up to this point, we might argue that Jeremiah is a prophet to the nation…not to the nations. He is a local. He knows the area around Jerusalem, he knows the king and all the court officials, he knows his own people.

Until we hit chapter 46. Then everything changes, and chapters 46-47-48-49-50-51 contain words that God gives to Jeremiah…on behalf of the other nations. In these chapters, there is a word for Egypt. For Philistia. For Moab. For the Ammonites. For Edom. For Damascus. For Kedar. For Huzor. For Elam. For Babylon. In other words, there is a Word for each of the 10 nations surrounding Israel. From present day Egypt, up through Jordan and Syria, across Iraq and Iran and down through part of Saudi Arabia, God has something to say to these nations through Jeremiah.

Why? These are not “believing” countries, they don’t believe in Israel’s God. What good would it do to speak to them? And what would God say, anyway? We read just a few verses of one of the ten “oracles,” the word to Moab that I want you to think of as representative of this whole section. It is both fascinating and surprising to find out what God says to the nations. And if we listen well, I believe we will find ourselves addressed as well.

To do that, I’d like to hold up for you this morning 5 observations (not points, observations!). And as we go, be thinking of this question: “What does God want?”

Observation 1:
There is nothing and no one outside of God’s sovereign knowing.

God, through Jeremiah, speaks to these nations not in general, but specifically. He knows and mentions their geography, their cities, their personalities, their politics, their leaders. Israel is not the only country that God knows through and through. Jeremiah may not be a world traveler, but either God has revealed things to him or he has certainly done his homework on all 10 of these countries, or both.

The point is that there is nothing and no one outside of God’s sovereign knowing. The plan of God is big, and it stretches across the world and encompasses all sorts of people.

Eugene Peterson says

“…biblical religion is aggressively internationalist. People who participate in the community of faith find themselves in a company of men and women who have a passion for crossing boundaries – linguistic, racial, geographic, cultural – in order to demonstrate that there is no spot on earth and no person on earth that is not included in the divine plan.”

And so in practical reality, it feels good that we have ministry connections from Bethany in many parts of the world: China, Cambodia, Nepal, Burkina Faso, Portugal, India…and then especially in Kenya and Honduras as well as places in the U.S. and here in Seattle. We have friends from other countries that God has brought among us, we have people working with refugee resettlement. We have people down the block.

Next time you have coffee, go down to the Appassionato coffee shop. The owners are a couple named Farzone and Ali, who fled from Iran at the time of the revolution. Lovely people, and right in the neighborhood.

The plan of God is big, general, worldwide, international and it is little…specific, down to the characteristics of nations, cities, people, person.

What does God want?

For us to realize that “There is no spot on earth and no person on earth that is not included in the divine plan.”

For God so loved the world …he gave his only Son.

God’s message to these 10 other countries is surprisingly similar to his message in the first 45 chapters to Israel:

Observation 2:
I care too much to let you continue doing the things you are doing.

Each one hears God say “there are painful times ahead. You eventually will be knocked down and catastrophes will strike you, other countries will overwhelm you, you will be broken.” For the country of Moab in particular, God’s voice speaks against their pride and arrogance: “We have heard of the pride of Moab – he is very proud – of his loftiness, his pride, and his arrogance, and the haughtiness of his heart.”

It seems that there is a pattern with the nations that revolve in and out of this period of history in the Middle East. A nation arises, wins some battles and comes to power. Trusting first in its military might, then in its economic system, then in its political successes, it forces other nations to serve. It lifts up its own set of idols or gods. Soon the powerful country becomes filled with itself, arrogant and self-sufficient. And eventually it falls to another country. Hard. And so Assyria. And so Egypt. And so Babylon. And so, on a smaller scale, Moab. And so Israel.

Jeremiah warned Israel that God would use Babylon to bring the nation back to God, to return it to a place of humility and reliance.

Jeremiah warns Moab as well, knowing what will happen to it: “I myself know Moab’s insolence,” says the Lord, “his boasts are false, his deeds are false. Therefore I wail for Moab; I cry out for all Moab.”

What does God want?

A nation that exhibits humility, that realizes that the whole world does not revolve around it.

A people who recognize how broken we are.

A person who looks out for those nearby, who sees God and not themselves as the center of the universe.

Observation 3:
God is not pleased when nations do not follow Him.

Israel placed worship stations on the “high places,” made idols to worship which they could control instead of worshipping the living God whom they could not control or even necessarily predict. Moab followed after a god called Chemosh: “Woe to you, O Moab! The people of Chemosh have perished.”

Moab ignored God in exchange for something else. Israel, on the other hand, thought that its most favored nation status with God was irrevocable, that God was committed and indebted, and that they could therefore do whatever they pleased.

So Moab ignored God, while Israel thought they had God in their back pocket. The results are pretty similar. God sets out to convince them otherwise.

A healthy percentage of our country, and especially our state, and especially our city, if you read all the surveys…don’t believe in God. Flat out. They ignore God, something like Moab. At least that is honest, though I believe that God wants nothing more than to be known by these very people.

But I’m probably more scared for those of us who do believe in God, yet like Israel, confine him to our back pockets. We try to domesticate a God who is mysterious and powerful. We portray him in ways that won’t offend others, but are faithful to neither who God is nor to how He wants us to live. It reminds me that Jesus had the hardest time with religious folks.

What does God want?

God wants to be known and for us to follow Him…not some facsimile of Him that we create.

Observation 4:
The presence of power- political, economic, military- is not proof of God’s favor.

Time and again with these nations, God would simply utilize one to draw another to Himself. The one in power was not there because it was so good, or so close to God.

I wonder when we as a nation, the United States, will quit equating power with God’s favor? For years we have believed that our nation’s status in the world reflected God’s favor, his appreciation for who we were.

Surely we no longer believe this. Surely we are aware of how arrogant much of the world finds us to be. Surely it is a sobering thing when we read in this Old Testament about these countries who have been allowed to have power (even for hundreds of years) not because they know God but because they are simply God’s way of getting people’s attention.

There are many strong Christians who are uncomfortable with the current tying together of politics, power and faith. Specifically, with conservative politics and strong nationalism being more and more automatically linked with evangelical theology and churches. “Evangelical” has become a negative word to many in our culture…which is both sad and ironic, isn’t it? A word that means “the good news” is now linked by many with one set of conservative politics and a war. It seems to have become a package deal.

It need not be so. And please hear me clearly. I’m not supporting either a conservative or a liberal package, neither Republican nor Democrat, because they are not the hope for the world. Jesus Christ is. And to follow Jesus does not mean you have to fit into some preconceived box or package.

It is possible to be a person who follows after Jesus with everything we have, to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength and to believe that the posturing of our nation around the world is detrimental to the gospel. That is possible.

It is possible to value life and disagree with both abortion and war. It is possible to be an evangelical Christian and be appalled over what we are doing to the environment.

The proof of God’s presence is not in finding the right box to fit into nor our successful brokering of power. The proof of God’s presence is in His drawing near to us as we turn to Him. What a thing it would be for us to be able to pray as a nation: “Lord forgive us. Forgive us our arrogance, our pursuit of power, our pride.”

Observation 5:
Outward circumstances are not necessarily correlated with God’s presence.

As nations go, Babylon was invincible. Who could ever defeat them? Yet Babylon received the harshest of Jeremiah’s oracles, and indeed was defeated by Persia within 50 years.

Israel, on the other hand, was already downtrodden and defeated. They thought God had abandoned them. Yet, the Lord says “I know the plans I have for you, plans for a future and a hope.”

Proud Moab will be absolutely crushed, Jeremiah’s word says, “Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab in the latter days, says the Lord.”

One of most challenging parts of faith, I believe, is to believe that God is with us, according to his promises…in the midst of difficult circumstances. When things are difficult. But it’s part of moving on to maturity. Our faith is not for my own sake, our faith is in Christ. We believe, I hope, not for what it can do for me, but because of what Christ has done for us.

If we believed based just on what happened to us outwardly…we would vacillate on a daily basis between being staunch atheists and enthusiastic followers of Christ. It is just not the case that God is far from us when a friend is seriously ill, but near to us when we get a promotion at work. The promise of God is that “there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” God’s presence is rooted in Jesus Christ.

Albert Schweitzer lived in the first half of the twentieth century. He really was a remarkable man: first a pastor and theologian, then an accomplished musician, a philosophical writer, and later a medical doctor and missionary in Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. In talking about Jesus, he wrote this:

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

I was so struck that Jesus is revealed in the toils, in the conflicts, in the sufferings…which are lived through in His presence.

What is it that God wants?

Each time that God’s message of judgment goes out…it is for the same reason.

I want you.
I want your heart.
I want you to follow me.
I will be with you.

Every time, God’s judgment somehow points people to His salvation. Each nation that receives a message of disaster and destruction also gets these words: “But I will restore you.” For God so loved the world. He gave His only Son. That whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Let us pray.