False Gods, Real Hope
The Christian Ambassador • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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This has been a hard week in America — and FOR America.
Perhaps you, like my family and I, watched in horror on Wednesday as a riotous mob descended upon the U.S. capitol building, pushed through police and into the very chambers where our government’s business is conducted.
Perhaps you saw the images of costumed marauders defacing and destroying what many television commentators called a sacred space, as they fought with those entrusted to maintain law and order, as they struck at the very heart of the democratic process.
Perhaps you were as sickened as we were to learn that five people died in the riot, including one capitol police officer.
For much of the past year, I have found it hard to express just how disgusted I have been at the state of political discourse in America. And each time I have thought that things could not get any worse, worse is just what they have become.
After Wednesday’s events, I wrote down some things that might resonate with some of you here today, and I want to share this passage with you:
I wish my head were a well of water and my eyes fountains of tears So I could weep day and night for casualties among my dear, dear people. At times I wish I had a wilderness hut, a backwoods cabin, Where I could get away from my people and never see them again. They’re a faithless, feckless bunch, a congregation of degenerates. “Their tongues shoot out lies like a bow shoots arrows— A mighty army of liars, the sworn enemies of truth. They advance from one evil to the next, ignorant of me.” God’s Decree. “Be wary of even longtime neighbors. Don’t even trust your grandmother! Brother schemes against brother, like old cheating Jacob. Friend against friend spreads malicious gossip. Neighbors gyp neighbors, never telling the truth. They’ve trained their tongues to tell lies, and now they can’t tell the truth. They pile wrong upon wrong, stack lie upon lie, and refuse to know me.” God’s Decree.
Actually, I didn’t write that. What you just heard was a passage from the Book of Jeremiah, as paraphrased in The Message bible.
We live in a time of great political peril. But so did Jeremiah, and he is known as the weeping prophet, in part, because he was so distressed by the state of affairs in his home, the nation of Judah, during the late 7th century B.C.
And what we’re going to see today is that the Judah of Jeremiah’s time was not so different in some respects from the United States of America of 2021. The people of Judah had their false gods, and ours are not that different from theirs. The people of Judah were desperate for hope in the midst of grave political crises, and so are we today.
We’re going to talk a little about those Judean false gods today, and our main text will come from 2 Kings, chapter 23. You’re also going to want to find the book of Jeremiah and keep a finger there.
But while you are turning there, I need to give you the historical background of the Southern Kingdom of Judah during the closing years of the 7th century B.C., when God called Jeremiah to prophesy during the reign of King Josiah.
Jeremiah prophesied for a span of about 41 years, from 626 to 586 B.C. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been conquered by the Assyrians by this time, but Judah, whose kings were of the line of David, continued to hang on as an independent nation. Jeremiah’s prophecies spanned the reigns of five kings, beginning with Josiah and ending with Zedekiah.
Now, Josiah was a good king. He is the one who brought religious reform back to the nation after his grandfather, Manasseh, Judah’s most evil king, had taken the nation deep into apostasy.
We’ll see in a moment some of the things that he did to try to bring his people back into the true worship of Yahweh, the one true God who had rescued them from Egypt and who had delivered them into the Promised Land.
But global politics continued around Judah, even in the midst of Josiah’s reforms; and the people of Judah failed to love God with all their hearts, souls, and strength; and so the God would bring the curses that He had promised would follow their unfaithfulness to Him.
Assyria, which had conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, was fading as a world power and would be crushed by Babylon at the Battle of Megiddo in 609 B.C.
Egypt tried to assert itself in the vacuum by coming to the aid of Assyria, but its army was defeated at the same battle. And Josiah was killed in this battle, having tried to come to the aid of Babylon.
Judah became a buffer state between the warring Babylonians and Egyptians, and it was placed under heavy tribute to Egypt, losing its independence.
Four years later, in 605 B.C., Egypt brought a renewed army into Syria and was quickly routed by the forces of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzer at Carchemish. Nebuchadnezzar then marched through Israel, taking city after city, but leaving the nation of Judah to be ruled by puppet kings.
He took away King Jeconiah and other political leaders and influential families, including the family of Daniel, leaving a power vacuum that would ensure his control of the nation.
But when those puppet kings tried to ally themselves with Egypt, a second wave of exiles was taken to Babylon in 597 B.C.
The final straw came in 587 B.C., when Egyptian armies began marching toward Jerusalem to help the people of this city, which was under siege by the Babylonian armies after Nebuchadnezzar had systematically defeated all of the other cities of Judah.
The armies of Babylon defeated the Egyptian armies, attacked Jerusalem and took a third wave of Jews into exile, ransacking Jerusalem and destroying the temple.
So that’s kind of the historical sweep of the period from when Josiah began to reign in Judah in 640 B.C. until the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the end of Israel’s independence in 587 B.C.
But I want to go back to Josiah’s reign and take a look at his religious reforms that I mentioned earlier. We’re going to read verses 4 through 14 of the 23rd chapter of 2 Kings.
Then the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest and the priests of the second order and the doorkeepers, to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels that were made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; and he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He did away with the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah and in the surrounding area of Jerusalem, also those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and to the moon and to the constellations and to all the host of heaven. He brought out the Asherah from the house of the Lord outside Jerusalem to the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron, and ground it to dust, and threw its dust on the graves of the common people. He also broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes which were in the house of the Lord, where the women were weaving hangings for the Asherah. Then he brought all the priests from the cities of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba; and he broke down the high places of the gates which were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on one’s left at the city gate. Nevertheless the priests of the high places did not go up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brothers. He also defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire for Molech. He did away with the horses which the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entrance of the house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathan-melech the official, which was in the precincts; and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. The altars which were on the roof, the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord, the king broke down; and he smashed them there and threw their dust into the brook Kidron. The high places which were before Jerusalem, which were on the right of the mount of destruction which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the sons of Ammon, the king defiled. He broke in pieces the sacred pillars and cut down the Asherim and filled their places with human bones.
Now, the first thing that I want you to see from this passage is the way the people of Judah had defiled the name of Yahweh, the name of God, and as you do, you will begin to see some of the false gods they worshiped.
Look at verse 4. Josiah had his priests and Levites bring out of the temple vessels that had been made for the worship of Baal and for Asherah.
Now Baal was the Canaanite god of rains, and rain was especially important in an agrarian society like that of Israel. Just as today, without rain, farmers would have no crops to harvest. Rainfall meant prosperity. Drought meant hard times.
Asherah was a female pagan deity who represented fertility. Fertility meant posterity. If women couldn’t have children, family lines would come to an end, and couples would have nobody to help care for them in their old age.
So under Manasseh, the grandfather of Josiah, the people had turned from trusting God to provide prosperity and posterity and had put their trust in false gods to provide those things. They had gone so far as to set up altars and vessels to those false gods right in the temple where God’s presence was among His people.
And right at the entrance to that temple, they had set horses and chariots — probably statues. Look at verse 11. The kings of Judah had set these horses and chariots up and “given them to the sun.”
This is a reference to sun-worship, and the sun represented justice in the pagan cultures of that region. So, the people were no longer putting their trust in God for justice but in a false sun-god.
Outside of the temple were temple prostitutes. Look at verse 7. These male cult prostitutes offered sex for money as part of the pagan religious rituals that had become part of the lives of so many in the land of Judah. This represented the worship of sexuality among God’s people.
So the false gods of Judah may have gone by different names, but we can name them in terms that make more sense to our modern ears: prosperity, posterity, justice, and sexuality.
None of these things is evil in and of itself. In fact, all of them are good. But when we put our trust in those things — or in someone who promises to provide those things for us — then we are elevating them to a status that only God should occupy.
When we, for instance, take justice into our own hands — as we saw a mob attempting to do on Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol — then we are saying that we do not trust God to exact His own justice, and we are saying that we have a better handle on justice than He does.
Placing your faith in God through His Son, Jesus Christ, means trusting that He will provide the means for us to have prosperity, the wealth that we need to survive; that He will give us posterity, a name that will survive here on earth or in Heaven, or perhaps both; that He will provide proper sexual outlets according to His will; and that He is a just God who judges with complete and perfect righteousness.
But God said through Jeremiah that the people of Judah had as many idols as they did cities, and so there are other false gods to be discovered as we look at this period of history, and the parallels with today’s world continue to hold.
In verse 5 of this passage, we see that the people burned incense to the sun and the moon and the constellations. This was what we know today as astrology, trusting the stars for revelation.
In verse 8, we see that Josiah broke down the high places — the altars — that had been built at the city gate. The gate of the city was where official business would be conducted among the elders of the city. So we can think of it as the seat of government, and the construction of an altar there suggests that the people put their trust in government, rather than in God.
In verse 10, we see a reference to Topheth, the place where the people would sacrifice babies to Moloch or Milcom. We talked about that last week. Here, the people had worshiped the convenience of life without a child, much as America celebrates the convenience of abortion.
There were other false gods among the people of Judah, but for these we’ll need to turn to the book of Jeremiah.
“I will pronounce My judgments on them concerning all their wickedness, whereby they have forsaken Me and have offered sacrifices to other gods, and worshiped the works of their own hands.
The people worshiped the work of their own hands. They put their trust in the things that they had created for themselves, rather than putting their trust in God. They had decided that they were OK on their own; they didn’t need Him.
“But now what are you doing on the road to Egypt, To drink the waters of the Nile? Or what are you doing on the road to Assyria, To drink the waters of the Euphrates?
The people put their trust in political alliances. They had turned to Egypt and to Babylon for help, instead of turning to God.
“Why do you contend with Me? You have all transgressed against Me,” declares the Lord. “In vain I have struck your sons; They accepted no chastening. Your sword has devoured your prophets Like a destroying lion. “O generation, heed the word of the Lord. Have I been a wilderness to Israel, Or a land of thick darkness? Why do My people say, ‘We are free to roam; We will no longer come to You’?
The people had worshiped the false idol of freedom, forgetting that it was Yahweh Himself who had delivered them out of bondage in Egypt, that it was God who had made them free to begin with.
“They will devour your harvest and your food; They will devour your sons and your daughters; They will devour your flocks and your herds; They will devour your vines and your fig trees; They will demolish with the sword your fortified cities in which you trust.
The people trusted their fortified cities to protect them from the judgment that God was promising to send via the armies of Babylon. They were putting their trust in their own might, forgetting that it was God who went before them in battle when they had come into the land of Canaan.
“For what purpose does frankincense come to Me from Sheba And the sweet cane from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable And your sacrifices are not pleasing to Me.”
The people were trusting in their worship practices, assuming simply because they offered the sacrifices that God had commanded that He would protect them. But they had long ago lost the faith in and love for God that were supposed to be at the heart of those sacrifices. By this point in Israel’s history, the sacrifices and the worship were mostly mechanical.
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, “Amend your ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place. “Do not trust in deceptive words, saying, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’ “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly practice justice between a man and his neighbor, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, nor walk after other gods to your own ruin, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever.
The people were trusting in the temple itself, rather than in God’s presence there. They were trusting in the name they had as God’s chosen people, rather than honoring HIS name by doing the things He had commanded — treating immigrants and orphans and widows fairly and compassionately, treating human life as sacred, and putting no other gods before Him.
In chapter 2, God says through Jeremiah that the people had forsaken Him as the source of living water and instead had dug broken cisterns that could not hold water. The things they had trusted instead of God could not possibly provide the hope that they so desperately sought.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? Do you see the parallels with our own culture? Do you see how our nation looks to the stars for answers, how it places its hopes in political parties to solve our problems, how it worships convenience and the work of its own hands, how it leans on political alliances both within its borders and around the world for security, how it relies on constitutional constructs of law and order to keep the peace and then looks away in horror when those things fail as utterly as they have in the past months?
As you watched the video of the Capitol Hill riots, did you see sprinkled among the Trump flags and the Confederate Battle flags, flags that read, “Jesus saves”?
Can you see the parallel with the people of Judah who thought that insincere worship somehow honored God? Can you see the parallel with those think that simply taking the name “Christian” somehow gives them the right to mete out justice on their own terms, that it somehow absolves them from following the command of Jesus Christ to love one another sacrificially?
Seeing those flags with Jesus’ name on them in the midst of that deadly and destructive riot sickened me. But what sickened me more was when I began to read that there were pastors among the mob, pastors who proclaimed they were proud of what took place.
And I was reminded of something else God said through Jeremiah:
‘For wicked men are found among My people, They watch like fowlers lying in wait; They set a trap, They catch men. ‘Like a cage full of birds, So their houses are full of deceit; Therefore they have become great and rich. ‘They are fat, they are sleek, They also excel in deeds of wickedness; They do not plead the cause, The cause of the orphan, that they may prosper; And they do not defend the rights of the poor.
Whether or not they have been led astray by false teachers, many Christians of all political stripes believe — and usually for different reasons — that America is in a downward spiral, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
And I must confess that I do not believe Wednesday’s events at the capitol were the end of the political upheaval in this nation. Actually, I wonder if things will not get MUCH worse.
Jeremiah knew this about the kingdom of Judah. God had told him that He would bring calamity upon His people.
We all like to think of Jeremiah 29:11 as a verse about how God intends to keep us safe, that He doesn’t intend to allow calamity to come upon us, but that’s not what it means in context.
In fact, the Hebrew word for “calamity” or “disaster” appears 91 times in the book of Jeremiah, and in nearly every instance, God is speaking of the calamity that He intends to bring upon the people of Judah.
The context of Jeremiah 29:11 is that God is promising to bring them hope and a future AFTER they have experienced the destruction of Jerusalem and 70 years of exile in Babylon.
God looks at things in the long term. His plan may very well be to allow the United States of America to fracture itself or to be attacked by enemies from the outside. His plan may very well include the destruction of all that we hold dear as Americans.
But as Christians, we are called to hold something more dear, to love someone much greater than we love our nation, our government, our Constitution, our political leaders, our comfort, or even our freedom. The greatest love we have must be for Jesus, who showed His great love for us by sacrificing Himself on a cross to save us from our sins.
Some put their trust in horses, but we Christians must put our hope in the name of God. We must put our hope and our trust in the Christ who will one day return and make all things new.
Just like the people of Judah, we live in a place where there are as many idols — as many false gods — as there are cities.
But there is only one true hope, and that is the hope we have in Jesus Christ.
This week, I encourage you to take a look at your life and see where you find YOUR hope. If it’s in some politician or some political process or in anything but Jesus Christ, I can assure you that you will be disappointed.
In the midst of the chaos and hatred, turn to He who brought order out of chaos when He said, “Let there be light.” Turn to Jesus and find the God who is love.
Whatever happens on January 20, you can be sure that there are hard times ahead. But God thinks in the long term, and He has “plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.”
But that promise is only directed to those who put their trust in Him through Jesus Christ, not to those who trust in the false gods of this world.
In the midst of the chaos and the hatred, trust in Him. He loves you.