Reading: Jer.5:14-31.

God sends the sun, the rain and the harvests!

Throughout the Bible God is shown to us as the Creator, the Maker all things. For example we read:

Is.40:28 "Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth."

Or

Ps 100:3 "Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture."

Or

Jer.33:2 “Thus says the LORD who made the earth, the LORD who formed it to establish it––the LORD is his name:"

But sadly it is possible to forget this very basic fact, or indeed to be completely ignorant of it. If we do forget it or if we have never before realised it then we will not be able to respond as the Psalmist urges in Psalm 95. There we read:

Ps.95:6 "Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!"

Such a reaction of worship is right and appropriate not simply because is – the fact that He exists - but also because of who He is – what He is like, what His character is like.

Right from the earliest chapters of the Bible, right back in the Book of Genesis, God reveals Himself to be a Personal God who is interested in having personal relationships with those he has created. The type of relationship He maintains with mankind is determined by His own moral character: God is pure and holy and that means 1). that He is completely separated from anything evil or erroneous Himself and 2). He requires moral uprightness in others.

And yet from the outset man goes wrong spoiling the relationship he was intended to enjoy with his Creator. The flood was an early indication of God's attitude of holy intolerance towards human sin. And yet God continued to evidence kindness and generosity to an undeserving race. After the end of the flood God made a promise that He would never again destroy the world with such a flood but rather He promised that:

Gen.8:22 "While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease."

And so we find a further theme developing that the LORD God so cares for His creation that all that is necessary for its survival is done:

Again then we read:

Job 5:10 "he gives rain on the earth and sends waters on the fields"

Ps.147:8, 14 "He covers the heavens with clouds; he prepares rain for the earth; he makes grass grow on the hills…He fills you with the finest of the wheat."

And these are generalized blessings that the inhabitants of the whole world enjoy as Jesus was Himself to underline when He taught His disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. While instructing His disciples Jesus told them what their Father in Heaven was like – He was good to all:

Mt.5:45 "For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

There are greater blessings than material blessings

When God had first made man – Adam and Eve – they had been placed in the most wonderful garden imaginable. It was full of every type of tree with all their many delicious fruits. Mankind needs food to eat and God provided an abundant and varied supply. Even after the human rebellion that led to Adam and Eve's exclusion from that garden of delights God continued to supply food for them to eat. And down through the running centuries He has done the same. Today we have a bewildering array of edibles spread out before us in seemingly ever increasing variety in our shops and supermarkets. Truly our God is exceedingly generous and we are right to be grateful.

But the Bible never wants us to be satisfied with such a low level of blessing. Life is far more than food and sad indeed from a Biblical standpoint is the life that is summed up by the philosophy of "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die" (Is.22:13 quoted in 1Cor.15:32). A really blessed life is one that is lived out in communion with the Living God. Jeremiah put it this way:

Jer.9:23-24 "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD."

The OT records for us how God choose a particular group of people to whom He would make Himself known – not everyone in OT times was thus in a position to enjoy the fullest of blessings. But as God worked with this people – we know them as the Jews – He was preparing them for the coming of One whereby the whole world would be blessed.

Few if any of us this morning are Jews and none of us are living in the days of the OT nevertheless we can learn from God's dealings with the Jews of those days and as we read their history we find that God wanted them to remember certain things and to learn from them. He spoke to them through some of the very ordinary and regularly repeated patterns that we still experience today. I'm talking about the alternation of the seasons; about the rain and the sunshine and the regular harvests.

We are celebrating harvest thanksgiving today and we too want to learn from this event.

Lessons from History

Because God had chosen to reveal Himself and His purposes to the Jews this particular people was treated in a unique way. Whereas the nations generally benefited from the succession of the seasons and the regularity of harvest for the Jews these blessings were to a certain extent made conditional upon their true and proper response to the LORD God. These blessings could be withheld if such responses were not forthcoming and the prophet Amos tells us that God did indeed withhold on occasion with the intention of calling the nation back to Himself! (Amos 4:7).

It was as though God was using what we might call everyday common experiences to underline spiritual lessons for His people. He did not want them to live just for the here and now but to be conscious of the greater and higher blessings of knowing God and of living in right relationship with Him.

So we read in the fifth Book of Moses these words:

Deut.11:13-17 "And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the LORD your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full. Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the LORD is giving you."

Do you see what God expected of this privileged people? He wanted them to obey Him with a wholehearted love. They were to take care not to place their trust in any other than Him alone! This message was so important that Moses was to repeat it at the end of Deuteronomy just as the people were preparing to move forward in to the Promised Land (see Deut.28:12-13).

In Israel's history however the people were not always careful how they lived and they did not always value the privileges they could have enjoyed in knowing the LORD God intimately. So we find Jeremiah called to speak to a nation that had fallen a long way from where God wanted it to be morally and spiritually. In the passage we read earlier in the service Jeremiah declares that a disciplining judgment will fall upon the nation and explains just why:

Jer.5:23-24 "But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. They do not say in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.’"

Jeremiah's mission was to preach to a wayward people who were sidelining God thinking that they could did not need to pay any serious attention to what He said. They were busy organising their lives as they wanted having convinced themselves that God was somehow indifferent and all would be well in the end.

Jeremiah came to such a people with a sharp and penetrating question:

Jer.5:31b "but what will you do when the end comes?"

It was tragic that in Jeremiah's own day his own people refused to listen to him. They preferred their own ways of living to those required of them by God who called them to live in fellowship with Himself. They didn't value such a call sufficiently – surely it was no big deal – they could tinker here and tinker there and surely God would not mind.

But God did mind and mind very much. The nation went off into exile away from the Land of Promise and all the privileges of close relationship with the LORD.

A NT Application

And what does this have to do with us? Jeremiah's question must have been a bit troubling for Israel but haven't you just been saying that God treated Israel in a special way? Do we really need to pay any attention to that question ourselves?

Well let me explain a little further. God's special dealing with the Jews was not because they were inherently better than other nations or because they merited better treatment. No, God chose them in order to prepare for the coming into the world of His Son, our Saviour. This Saviour would be a Saviour not only for the Jews but also for every nation of the world. It is true that in OT days true knowledge of Living God was limited to the Jews and to just a few others. But now since the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ the good news is that we may all enter into a true, personal relationship with the Living God.

Jesus came to do with our sin problem and it is our sin has stopped us enjoying peace with God. The Bible says that our sin cuts us off from God: this is how the Bible in Basic English translates:

Is.59:2 "But your sins have come between you and your God, and by your evil doings his face has been veiled from you, so that he will give you no answer."

When Jesus died upon the Cross of Calvary He was taking our sins upon Himself! In dying God's wrath fell on Him and has been fully met. So for those who repent of their sin and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ there is no longer anything coming between us and God!!

That is the good news of the Christian gospel and how good it is!

Have you discovered this for yourself?

Now, you may be wondering how we got here from talk about harvests and rain – we seem to have moved away from our subject. But not a bit of it! Listen to how the apostle Paul spoke to a bunch of pagans in Lystra, a town located in modern day Turkey. He wanted to tell them the good news about the Lord Jesus but the folk in the town had all kinds of wrong ideas. This is part of what Paul said to them:

Acts 14:16-17 "In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness."

Do you see? The regularity of the seasons and the regularity of the harvests were all signs of God's existence and more than that of His loving provision. Did the inhabitants of Lystra recognize those signs? Did they take heed of them? Interesting questions.

More interesting still are these questions:

Do you recognize the signs? As you see the sun and the rains, as you profit from the bountiful harvests we enjoy do you realize that there is a God in Heaven with whom you have to do?

Have you taken heed and begun to search to know this God through Jesus Christ? Have you yet come to commit your life to Christ? There is no possibility of knowing God in a personal way with your sins forgiven than by turning from your sin and putting your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me encourage you "He rewards those who seek Him" Heb.11:6.

Or do I have to leave you with those haunting words that Jeremiah spoke?

"What will you do when the end comes?"

AMEN.