We are in our last passage in Jeremiah for now. I say for now because we may come back later and fill in some of the blanks. As I said in the beginning of this study, I just focused on some passages from Jeremiah which is a very different practice from what we normally do walking through all parts of each book of the Bible. 

Today we come to Jeremiah 36 which contains a heavy warning about unbelief. Over my 20 years in ministry, I’ve seen many people reject the word of God or modify the word of God in very strong ways to accommodate their own desires for their lives. One of the more heartbreaking situations I’ve walked through was when a good friend of mine who was also my Sunday school teacher and my community group leader walked away from his faith and his family. We spent so many hours pleading with him and going back to what we know clearly to be true in Scripture, but his heart was so hard and his path already decided that there was no reasoning with him.

Unbelief is rampant in our culture today and the path of unbelief is what we see in our passage today with Jeremiah’s interaction with King Jehoiakim. As we walk through this passage, I want us to see 1) what unbelief is 2) the cost of unbelief and 3) the cure to unbelief.

1. What unbelief is

Now, when I say unbelief, I am NOT talking about honest intellectual doubt or a search for more evidence before someone comes to a decision. Those faith struggles are common to most people and, I would argue, they are even healthy in many cases for our spiritual growth. When I say unbelief, I mean someone has clearly heard the word of God and rejected all or part of it. Now, I’m not talking about differences in lower level opinion issues like how we baptize, how many points of Calvinism we embrace, or what interpretation of Genesis one we embrace (within certain bounds:). I’m talking about issues related to God’s will for our heart and our salvation. 

At the end of the day, unbelief is a heart issue, not an intellectual issue. King Jehoiakim had all the truth he needed at his disposal. He had the word of God being read to him directly from the prophet Jeremiah. As best I can tell, this is the first time God had told Jeremiah to write down all that God had told him up to this point in his ministry and that is exactly what Jeremiah did. He then dictated the words to his scribe, Baruch, and since Jeremiah had been banned from the temple, he told Baruch to go and read these words to the people on a day of fasting which would have meant that many people would have been there and heard. And Baruch does just this. 

Baruch then left a copy with the king’s secretary and the secretary sent it to the king and a man named Jehudi, there’s a baby name for you, read it to the king. It was winter so the king was in a particular room that had a fireplace and as Jehudi read the scroll, three or four lines at a time, and the king would cut it off and throw it in the fire. So, book burnings are not a new thing. 

It wasn’t that the king was unreligious, it was that the king wanted God’s word to say what he wanted it to say. He didn’t have a heart to conform to God’s will, he wanted God to conform to his will. It’s a good thing our leaders today all fully adhere to God’s word:)  Specifically, King Jehoiakim did not want to hear that Babylon was going to come and sack Jerusalem and that his power would be challenged. I know the timeline of Jeremiah is super confusing. I heard one community group spent their whole meeting recently trying to wrap their minds around it. At this point in Jeremiah, there have been two groups of Israelites that have been hauled off to Babylon, but the kingdom of Judah still stands and that kingdom contains Jerusalem.

God doesn’t seem to be saying repent and this won’t happen. He seems to be saying that this sacking of Jerusalem will happen, it’s good because it will bring the people to repentance, and in that repentance, God is saying that he will continue to take care of his people both during and after exile. But, King Jehoiakim will not hear this. 

Unbelief is when part or all of the word of God is clearly proclaimed and is rejected. Unbelief is not simply an intellectual problem. Unbelief is complex and involves many different parts of us. So, if the word of God is true and everything in it is good for us, why do we have a resistance to it? Think about all the factors that go into deciding what we think. There is certainly the cognitive side, but sin gives us cognitive biases which are systematic errors in thinking that distort our perception of reality. This then leads us to seek information that confirms our preexisting beliefs and desires and we tend to disregard evidence to the contrary. That's called confirmation bias. This then causes us to put up defense mechanisms which is exactly what the king is doing. 

But our cognitive functions aren’t the only functions compromised by sin. Our emotions are as well. We are influenced by our experiences in this fallen world which shape our fallen emotions, desires, fears and subjective experience. These experiences include past hurts, disappointments, abuse, or any other negative experience that can create skepticism or resistance to certain true beliefs. 

Beliefs are also tied to identity. Our beliefs provide a framework through which we understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. But, in our fallen state, we do this backwards. We decide what our identity is or what we want it to be and we seek out a belief framework to justify or accomplish that. Jehoiakim was the king and he did not want to believe anything that challenged that identity. 

Not only was his identity very likely in being the king, he valued his own personal autonomy and control. If anything is going to cause us to resist the word of God, it’s our fallen understanding of personal autonomy and control. If the king were to embrace God’s word through Jeremiah, it would seriously limit his freedom because it introduces an external control that is more powerful than he is. And it is our own sin that creates this fear of losing personal autonomy and the need to maintain a sense of personal control that contributes to unbelief even in the face of good intellectual arguments. 

I think this is precisely what Paul is getting at as he draws from all over the Psalms in Romans 3. Listen to his arguments and notice all the different ways he is saying we as humans are compromised by sin. 12  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” 13  o“Their throat is pan open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” q“The venom of asps is under their lips.” 14  r“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” 15  s“Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16  in their paths are ruin and misery, 17  and tthe way of peace they have not known.” 18  u“There is no fear of God before their eyes.” - Rom. 3:12-18

This is a doctrine we call total depravity. It doesn’t mean that we are all as bad as we could possibly be (all of us could certainly be worse), it just means that every aspect of our being is affected by sin and is going to impact how we receive the truth of God’s word. Again, look at how it affected King Jehoiakim. He burned the scrolls. The scrolls fly in the face of what he wants to be true. They create cynicism and contempt in him. Even though people tell him not to do it, he does. Maybe he thought burning them could counteract what they said. But, what we see is that the word of God confronting his depravity made him even more hard hearted. That’s the power of the word of God at work. Whether it softens our hearts or hardens them, either way we see its power being unleashed. This is why Paul says to some, the gospel is the fragrance of life and to others it is the stench of death. 

And oh how we see all of this play out today. Think about the person who grew up in an overly controlling house and maybe a hyper conservative church and who saw hypocrisy in their church and even emotional and spiritual abuse. My goodness, that person is going to likely want to find a version of God’s word that gets them out of any spiritual authority at all. This might drive them to accept certain doctrines like salvation by faith alone, but reject any doctrine that they are a part of the body of Christ and instead create a private version of the faith that can’t be found in Scripture. They may even reject the word of God wholesale because their confirmation bias is in control. 

Or think about the person who struggles with their sexual identity. Compound that with the truly hard experiences of growing up with that struggle in a fallen, cruel world. My heart truly breaks for anyone growing up with this struggle. That can often affect them at an emotional level and create skepticism and resistance to God’s word because they are going to want to find a worldview that supports their perceived identity and not the other way around. 

I hear people saying, “I don’t need doctrine, I just need to live a good life.” Well, do you know what that is? It’s a doctrine. It’s called the doctrine of self-justification which is a form of unbelief and it will not go well for anyone. Let’s see how it goes for the king.

1. The cost of unbelief

It’s hard to think about the Bible disappearing in our modern context, but the king’s actions are a way of trying to eradicate the word of God, or at least the pieces he doesn’t like. And, humanly speaking, he wasn’t totally wrong to think he could do this. And he hasn’t been the last one to try. Once I had the opportunity to visit Trinity College in Dublin Ireland where they keep the Book of Kells. In the 9th century, there was, humanly speaking, the real threat of the eradication of the Bible. The Moors were invading Europe from the South and East and the Vikings were invading from the North. So these Celtic monks dedicated their lives to preserving the Bible no matter what it took and the Book of Kells is one of those Bibles. 

Clark this week showed me an interview between Stephen Colbert and Ricky Jervais. Jervais is an atheist and Colbert is a Roman Catholic. In the interview Ricky said that he believed in science, not religion because if you were to get rid of every science book and every holy book, over time the science books would come back and the holy books would not. And I would agree with him that the science books would come back because I’m not anti-science and I would agree with him that most holy books would not come back because they are man-made. But, I would disagree with him about the Bible because if the Bible is God’s true word for humanity about him and the path for our salvation, then no human can truly eradicate it. There is a supernatural power behind it that can’t be thwarted by man. And not a supernatural power that made it and let everything go. A supernatural power that is actively engaged in our lives. 

And we see this in our passage. As far as I can tell, at this time there is only one copy of Jeremiah and the king burns it, so what happens? God has Jeremiah create a new one. I’ll give you another five dollar phrase: the infallibility of Scripture. This means that because the word of God is inspired by God, it will not fail. What is says will come to pass. And in the case of the king, in his hard hearted unrepentant state, this has massive implications both for him and Jeremiah. 

First, the implications for King Jehoiakim: Verse 29: ‘Thus says the LORD, You have burned this scroll, saying, n“Why have you written in it that the king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land, and will cut off from it man and beast?”30 Therefore thus says the LORD concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah: oHe shall have none pto sit on the throne of David, qand his dead body shall be cast out to the heat by day and the frost by night. 31 rAnd I will punish him and his offspring and his servants for their iniquity. I will bring upon them and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem and upon the people of Judah all the disaster that I have pronounced against them, but they would not hear.’”

Do you notice a key change here in what God is saying now versus what he has said up until now? There is no offer of repentance. That door has shut. His heart is too hard. This is why the Chronology of Jeremiah is so difficult. The hopeful things come before this and the harder things come after it, even if it means moving some of the chronology around. This is the hinge point of no return and Jeremiah wants to highlight that. 

God’s word will not fail and this is exactly what comes to pass in fairly short order. Jehoiakim's burning of the scrolls actually foreshadows the burning of Jerusalem. The one who is to lead God’s people and preserve the covenant with him has doomed himself, his offspring, and the people. And this is a picture of the devastating effect of our unbelief as well. 

But, a reality we will have to grapple with is that the king’s unbelief made things hard on Jeremiah as well. The king calls for the arrest of Jeremiah and Baruck. They did nothing wrong. In fact, they did exactly as God had told them and it made their lives very difficult. And it will for us as well. It feels like we live in a day where unbelief is rising and if that is the case, it will make things harder for us. But we can take comfort in the fact that it isn't outside of God’s control. In fact, God told Jeremiah back in chapter seven that this is exactly what would happen. 

And Jesus says something very similar to us. 18 d“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. 19 eIf you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because fyou are not of the world,but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. - John 15:18,19 The key is that we are not of the world. We are destined for a different world and it is for that world we strive. It is for that God we live. And it is only in that world that we will find the comfort, joy, and satisfaction we long for. 

And I would actually argue that the harder this world is on Christians, the better it is for our own faith and satisfaction in God. I know I’ve told this story before, but I have a friend who was a missionary in the 80s in communist Romania and his team had run out of food. So they split up going to different towns to look for food. My friend met a Romanian Christian in the town he went to and that Romanian helped him to find a bag of potatoes they could eat. As they were walking together, my friend asked the Romanian, “How do you do it? How do you stay faithful to God in this kind of an environment?” “The Romanian responded, “Me? How do you do it in the US? You have so many things you can turn to for comfort. Jesus is the only comfort I have in this world.”

This Romanian had found something, Someone that Jehoiakim had not. And this brings us to the cure for unbelief. 

1. The cure for unbelief

Even though we see blatant unbelief in King Jehoiakim, we do see deep belief in Jeremiah, Baruch, and Michaia. Their belief and acceptance of God’s word is a sign that a remnant of faithful individuals would live on. And even though Jehoiakim would have no ruling dynasty in his line to sit and rule earthly Israel, the line of David would go on and the True King, the Great Prophet, and The Eternal High Priest would come. And his name is Jesus. 

Let me go back for a minute to the unbelief scenarios I put forward. In each of them sin is preventing us from seeing that God’s word is good. It’s not just true, but it’s good. This world isn’t as it should be. We are going to be affected by other peoples’ sin and that includes people in the church. But, Jesus has come to give us an identity that we could never create ourselves and one that is better than anything this world has to offer. Tim Keller said often that only in Christianity do you freely receive your identity instead of achieving it. Every culture says, “this is how you can determine who you are and how well your self-worth, your self value, how well you feel about yourself.” Every culture does that. 

The problem is that every culture says different things at different times. Cultures evolve and the narratives they tell us about what our identities should be and what we should strive for change. We’re told by our culture that if we strive for the identity it values, we will feel liberated. The problem is that it actually crushes us. It suffocated us. If you do well in that pursuit, it will go to your head, you’ll have an inflated view of yourself, and you’ll make bad decisions. If you don’t do well, you’ll be crushed by not attaining the thing you think is most important. Even if you don’t believe in judgment or hell, you’ll live in constant condemnation. 

Only Christianity gives us an identity as treasured sons and daughters of our Creator. He gives us an identity of the beloved bride of Christ. He gives us an identity as one who has never sinned. And he does this through Jesus. On the cross, Jesus gave up the right of his identity as the one true perfect God-man and instead received the punishment our identity as sinners deserves. The full wrath of God. Then, he lavishes on us all that his perfect life merited. And we get a completely new identity that supersedes anything this world tells us we are. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it is true, good, and beautiful. 

Not only does Jesus accomplish what we never could, he creates a way for our unbelief to be overcome. We talked about this a lot last week. His Holy Spirit comes into our hearts and allows us to see what we can’t. In 2 Corinthians 4 Paul says that in the same way that God said in Genesis 1, let there be light, he does the same in our hearts and we can see the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. And if that’s true, then we can have assurance that our path as believers through this unbelieving world has a sure end in his kingdom. We can have a posture of humility toward unbelievers knowing that it isn’t because we are more moral, spiritual, or wise than our unbelieving friends, it is purely the grace of God that we are who we are. And we can have confidence in our own efforts to make Jesus known because we know that it is not up to us, but his Spirit who is at work in people around us. 

But, we can’t look at this and think this is only a warning for unbelievers. We all have our old-self that continues to want to go back to who we were, what we did, and how we thought before we gave our lives to Christ. We have an old self inside us that wants to burn the scrolls. We have sin in us that is susceptible to confirmation bias, past wounds, fears, shame, and competing identities that won’t take us from Christ, but will diminish the joy we have in him. We tell ourselves that our identity is in our family, our work, our house, our academics, our fashion, in our ethnicity, or in our gender. So daily, we need to remind ourselves that we don’t achieve our identity, we receive it. We receive it by faith so we don’t have to be slaves to those other things. We can never be more or less loved by God. We can never more or less his children. We can never be more or less the bride of Christ. Resting in that is not only the cure for unbelief, it is also the core of our joy in Jesus.