Jeremiah's life, particularly his mandated celibacy, served as a powerful object lesson for the people of Judah, illustrating the impending judgment of God due to their sin and unfaithfulness. God commanded Jeremiah not to marry or have children because the days were filled with death, famine, and war, making family life a source of sorrow rather than joy. This personal sacrifice by Jeremiah was intended to convey the severity of God's judgment and the people's need for repentance, demonstrating his own belief in God's word through obedience. The sermon applies this to believers today, urging them to be willing object lessons through their obedience to God's commands, thereby prompting others to inquire about their faith and witness to the gospel.
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Thank you and good evening. It's good to see so many of you here this evening and any evening. I speak very frequently at evening services in the Toronto area and in other parts of Ontario but we get nothing like a group like this on these evening services and we appreciate your coming. Thank you so much for coming. I was reminded as we sang that beautiful song of submission and commitment that prayer only one life to offer of a telegraph of a of a of an autograph album that I had some years ago when I was just a little boy and I asked different people to write in it one of the people I wrote I asked to write in it was my mother when she was home in furlough from the mission field to Scotland where I was brought up and she wrote this little poem that you all know only one life it will soon be passed only what's done for Christ will last it left a permanent impression on my mind and as we sing a challenging hymn like that that should
be our thought for the day only one life to offer well we've had a wonderful meeting already this evening as the choir sung to us and I appreciate very much the singing of the choir. It's been a real joy to hear you singing as I sat and listened to you. Let's open our Bibles tonight again at the book of your friend and my friend, the prophet Jeremiah. This time we are going to turn to Jeremiah chapter sixteen. Jeremiah chapter sixteen. It's an unusual chapter for a message like this, but I think there are important truth and challenges contained in this particular chapter.
We're going to try to look at them to see if we can find a lesson for our day from Jeremiah's object lesson. Let's read in Jeremiah chapter sixteen beginning at verse one. The word of the Lord came also unto me saying, Thou shalt not take thee a wife, Neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. For thus, saith the Lord, concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bear them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this place, in this land, they shall die of grievous deaths.
They shall not be lamented. Neither shall they be buried. But they shall be as done upon the face of the earth. And they shall be consumed by the sword and by famine. And their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven and for the beasts of the earth. For this, saith the Lord, enter not into the house of mourning. Neither go to lament nor bemoan them. For I have taken away my peace from this people, saith the Lord, even loving kindness and mercies. Both the great and the small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried. Neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them.
Neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead. Neither shall men give them the cup of consolation, to drink for their father or for their mother. Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and to drink. For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place, in your eyes and in your days, the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride. And it shall come to pass when thou shalt show this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, What for have the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us?
Or what is our iniquity? Or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord our God? Then, shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the Lord, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law. And you have done worse than your fathers. For behold, you walk every one, after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto me. Therefore will I cast you out of this land, into a land that you know not, neither ye nor your fathers, and there shall you serve other gods, day and night, where I will not show you favor.
And the Lord is going to bless his word to us as we have read it together. Let's again bow and ask him to be with us and to guide us as we meditate upon it. Let us pray. O God our Father, we thank thee for thy word. We believe that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable. And we pray that as we ponder these scriptures written two and a half millennia ago by thy servant Jeremiah, that we may gain a great profit from them, that we may be challenged by them, and that our lives may be changed through them. Thou knowest every one of us that's here.
And we pray that thou wilt speak loudly to all of our hearts. Grant us thy blessing as we wait together. For we ask in the precious name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Under God's direction, Jeremiah used many different objects. to present God's message to his earthly people. Like the Lord Jesus, many of these objects were drawn from experiences that were frequent in life, things that were common, things that people understood and knew about.
It's a good thing to draw our illustrations from things that people know about. That's what the Lord did. That's what Jeremiah did. For example, in this passage, he drew his lessons from marriage and celibacy, from funerals and weddings, and from feasts. And he drew very important lessons from each of these subjects, very clear lessons. We're going to try to study them together, and we're going to begin with the lesson of marriage, marriage and celibacy. When I was working in Peterborough, Ontario, maybe about twenty years ago from now, I had a secretary who was happily married, as I understand, as far as I could make out.
She was a very good secretary. But she used to say this to the staff and to myself on occasions, I suspect in fun, she said, marriage is a good institution. If you like institutions. Well, marriage is a good institution. Marriage is an institution that's been given by God. Marriage was instituted by God at the very beginning of human history. And it was instituted by God for the best blessing and for the welfare of God's creatures, man and woman. God has instituted a marriage.
And through the times of the Bible, from the beginning, of the Bible to the end of the Bible. We find that marriage occurred throughout the days of Bible experience. And it has occurred since then as well, right up till the present moment. You remember the first marriage in the Bible. We read about it in Genesis chapter two. It took place in Eden. God instituted it and God performed it. He brought Eve to Adam. The last marriage of the Bible is the most wonderful marriage of all history. You can read about it in Revelation chapter nineteen. It's called the marriage of the lamb.
Because you see, at that marriage, it's not the bride that's going to be the predominant figure. It's the bridegroom. And the bridegroom then is going to be the lamb. And believe it or not, you and I, belonging to the church of Jesus Christ are going to be his bride. What a wonderful experience that's going to be. Throughout Scripture too, the marriage is used as illustrations for different aspects of spiritual living. The Lord Jesus used marriages in the course of his life, in the course of his parables.
For example, he told the parable of the marriage of the King Sam. He told the parable of the ten virgins. Marriage was used as a parable. And in the Old Testament, there are a number of marriages that stand out in importance because in these marriages we have a picture of the relationship between the Lord Jesus Christ, our heavenly bridegroom and his bride. And we have a number of very interesting Old Testament ladies who form pictures of that bride. For example, we can go even back to Eve.
And I suggest Eve because Adam is presented to us in Romans chapter five as a type, a figure of him who is to come. He was a type of the Lord. And if Adam was a type of Christ, it's obvious that Eve was a type of the bride of Christ. And then there is Rebecca. And then there is a lady called Asanaf. I'm not going to ask you to tell me who that was. Because I suspect that some of us might not know who Asanaf was. I asked my students at Bible school if anybody knows anything about Asanaf. And usually there's not a hand goes up.
Well Asanaf was Joseph's bride. Joseph's bride that he got. in Gentile territory in Egypt that was given to him there in Egypt. Then, of course, there is Ruth. And all these are beautiful pictures of the bride of Christ. In addition to these, we have other marriage relationships that are presented to us as illustrations. I guess most of you, if not all of you, have read the story of Hosea. Hosea and his wife, his unfaithful wife, Her name was Gomer. She was characterized by unfaithfulness to her husband. And the Lord took a lesson out of that.
He compared her to his own people, Israel, who were over and over again unfaithful to him. And then if you've done any reading in the book of Ezekiel recently, you remember the story of Ezekiel's wife. She became an object lesson for Ezekiel. The thing about Ezekiel's wife... is that she died the very same day that the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed and burned. And Ezekiel was commanded by the Lord not to mourn for her, not to weep in any way for her. Why was that? It was that she would be a picture, a lesson, to the people of Israel, not to mourn because of the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem.
because that was God's judgment upon the people. Well, that was a sad thing for Ezekiel, wasn't it, that he couldn't even mourn for his departed wife. Well, I think it was sadder even for Jeremiah. And we're going to look at the picture of Jeremiah's marriage or lack of it, his celibacy, because I believe we have a very important lesson here. One writer on the book of Jeremiah... has indicated that Jeremiah's life was a mirror for his message. That means the life of Jeremiah reflected to the people around him, something of the message that God gave to him.
And that's exactly what we find as we look at this chapter. Jeremiah's life story became a mirror reflecting the message that God gave to his people. We've read part of that message in this chapter, and we've read the illustration that God gave through Jeremiah to his people. So let's look at the story of Jeremiah's celibacy, his lack of marriage. You remember last evening, we saw that when we considered some of these pictures in the Bible, whether we think of the types of the Old Testament, for instance, the offerings, or the tabernacle or the feasts or whether we think of the parables whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament or whether we think of these pictures of Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Zechariah we should think of it in three ways first of all we should think of the object and then we should think of the immediate lesson for the people of the time and then thirdly we should think of the continuing lesson the relevant lesson for our type, and we can learn what it means to us.
We're going to do exactly that as we think of this. First of all, let's think of the object that Jeremiah was to present. A number of years ago, when I was practicing in a hospital in Glasgow, I was responsible for the meningitis wards of this hospital, as well as other wards in the hospital. But in the meningitis words, I was particularly responsible for cases of tuberculosis meningitis. In those days, that was quite a common condition. And it was a sad condition because prior to the introduction of the new drugs that I was privileged to use, it was almost inevitably fatal.
Probably the death rate was ninety-nine point nine percent or something in that area. Over the introduction of modern anti-tuberculous agents, it became a disease that was treatable. And I had the privilege of treating many cases of it. In fact, I wrote a thesis on these particular cases. It was treatment that was effective, but it wasn't treatment that was the easiest for the patient. Not the easiest for the physician either, but particularly for the patient. For it involved not only injections in their thighs that the nurses gave, or the drug that was given, but it involved injections in their spinal column.
It involved spinal taps. We had to put a needle into the spinal column to get cerebral spinal fluid and take some out and then replace it with the anti-tuberculous agent. Well, the lads who were in my particular ward, there were also ladies in another ward, The lads, they tended to get used to this. But I'm sure they didn't like the sight of me coming along day after day with a needle in my hand to puncture their spine. But I remember one of these lads. He had a song that he sang from time to time. It had a number of verses and then a refrain. I don't remember all, any of the verses really.
For the verses were about the hard time that the songwriter was having and this fellow expressed in these verses himself but the refrain said how would you how would you like to be me and every time he sang through a verse that was the refrain how would you how would you like to be me well I wonder if Jeremiah sang anything like that how would you like to have been Jeremiah Put yourself in Jeremiah's shoes for a little while this evening. How would you like to have been in his shoes? I think the story of Jeremiah is the story of one of the saddest and hardest life that it was possible to live.
You see, Jeremiah was given quite an ordeal for God to accomplish for him. He was given quite a task. He had a message to give to his people. A message that called attention to their sin that he constantly denounced. A message that proclaimed God's judgment that was sure and certain to fall. A message that emphasized the absolute necessity of repentance. And only was this interrupted occasionally by consolations, by the prophecy of some restoration in days to come. Well, that was a hard message to give, but Jeremiah delivered it faithfully, repeatedly, over and over again.
Through most of the chapters of this book, you'll discover that Jeremiah was at his task proclaiming this message of judgment and repentance. Jeremiah had more problems than that. Jeremiah faced the people that were hostile to him, very, very hostile. even his own people from his own town of Anathor. Once upon a time, one day we're going to make a plot to kill him. People of his own town. And people didn't like his message. So they tried various means to do away with dear Jeremiah.
They attacked him in different ways. They beat him. They imprisoned him. They put him in a cistern. or a hole in the ground, and he kept him there for a while, hanging that hole in the ground to starve to death until a good friend got him out of that hole in the ground, out of that cistern or dungeon. Well, these were some of the things that happened to Jeremiah, but it seems to me that the most unkindest cut of all, as Shakespeare would call it, we've read about in this chapter. It was the fact that God forbade him to marry.
Notice what God said. Thou shalt not take thee away. Now that just isn't simply a negative command, but it's a permanent command that God gave to him. It's in the same structure as the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. For Jeremiah, this was just as vital and real as that. Thou shalt not marry. Now put yourself into Jeremiah's shoes, faced with all these problems. He went up to Jerusalem possibly daily to proclaim this message of rebellion, of retribution and repentance to the people that were in Jerusalem.
He was subjected to mockery and insults there, beating and thrashing. And yet when he went home at night to Anathor, he had no wife to console him. Nobody to pour out his burdens to. Nobody there. And he had no children. And you see, that wasn't only a personal hardship for Jeremiah. It was a most unusual thing in society at this time. Well, it's not very usual in our society either. But it was very, very unusual in Jeremiah's society. I understand that an old proverb cursed celibacy.
People were expected to be married. This was unique in the Old Testament, a man who didn't get married. And the Old Testament frequently speaks of the advantages of having a wife. Who so findeth a wife? Says the Book of Proverbs. It's Solomon. Findeth a good thing. And I'm sure most of us husbands can reiterate that, and reverberate it here, who so findeth a wife, findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favor from the Lord. The Bible tells us that wives and children are an heritage from the Lord. Yet Jeremiah had the experience that he was deprived of both, not by his own desires, but by God's command.
How would you like to have been Jeremiah? That was a very sad thing. And you may ask yourself, well, why was that? Why was Jeremiah commanded not to take a wife? Well, I'm going to suggest to you two reasons. We've read them here in this passage. The first reason is that God told him he was living in dreadful days, and they were going to get worse rather than better. And he was going to be experiencing, and the people of Israel and Judah were going to be experiencing... the plagues and the famine and the sword, the triad of wicked evil things, of terrible things that were going to come across God's people.
And in that experiences, when the city was going to be besieged by the Babylonian armies, the people inside would not, would die, die of these various things, but they wouldn't be buried. Their bodies would be left exposed. There would be no burial. and the absence of burial was regarded as a real curse in the land of Judah. And so it wasn't a good thing to have a wife and family arising up in these circumstances. God's commands are always purposeful and good. But that wasn't the only reason why God told Jeremiah not to marry.
And that brings us to the second part of our study of this object lesson. and that is the immediate lesson that God had to present to the people at that time. God's second reason, probably the primary lesson for Jeremiah in his celibacy, was to bring a powerful message to his people. Look at verse ten, for instance, and it shall come to pass when thou shalt show this people all these words that they shall say unto thee, why has the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? Or what is our iniquity? In other words, the people would be asking Jeremiah about what he was doing.
We'll see there are one or two other things he was doing. You can imagine the people of Anathath and the people of Jerusalem who saw Jeremiah coming up to the city day after day would say to him, Jeremiah, why don't you get yourself a wife? Why don't you marry? There are some good girls around here that you could find for a wife. And Jeremiah had the opportunity to tell them exactly God's message. He had the opportunity to witness for the Lord and to proclaim God's message of rebellion, retribution, and repentance so that they could repent and turn to the Lord. That soon, if he had children, he would be without children.
If he had a wife, he would be without wife. And they would believe Jeremiah. Why? because he gave evidence that he believed the Lord. He gave evidence that he believed the Lord because he didn't marry. When to marry seemed the very best thing to do. He gave evidence to the people that he believed God and they didn't. I remember hearing about a man, a preacher whom I knew in Britain. He was a very enthusiastic preacher and a good preacher too. He was preaching in the promenade at one of the seaside resorts in the southwest of Scotland.
And he was preaching with all the enthusiasm he had. There was a man who was standing at the outside of the little circle that gathered round there. He wasn't a Christian, you just stopped to listen. And another man who was obviously a friend of his came across and saw him standing there and he said, do you believe what he's saying and the man replied no but he does he does he gave evidence that he believed and Jeremiah gave evidence that he believed the word of God by the very fact that he was willing to obey it that he was willing to obey the command of God now let's think of the continuing lesson the present lesson for us when do we learn from this well you see we too live under the shadow of approaching judgment.
The judgment of God was going to fall certainly within forty years of Jeremiah uttering this message and giving evidence of this object, probably a good bit less than that. Judgment was approaching and judgments approaching our world. We live in a world that's doomed for judgment. When the Lord Jesus comes and takes us out of this world, judgment is going to follow from the world of men and women. And those who don't belong to him, even although they don't experience the judgment of the tribulation period, will ultimately experience the judgment of the great white throne.
And we have a message to people to speak to the people of this day. A message of judgment. a message of retribution, a message of their rebellion and sin, and a message of the vital importance of repentance. And how we live will hammer down the message that we give. How we live is important because it's the means of impressing upon people that this is a true message. It's important to recognize how we live. Now you say, well, does that mean that we shouldn't get married?
Does that mean that, like Jeremiah, we should be celibate? Not at all. Not at all. God hasn't commanded it. Paul warned Timothy in the fourth chapter of his first epistle that in the latter days and later times, there would be people who would forbid marriage. And Paul warned Timothy about these people. They were wrong. That was doctrine of demons. They were seducing spirits. It's wrong to do that, as Paul warned Timothy. And you can imagine what would have happened to the church if, from the beginning of church history, for remember, the coming of the Lord was imminent, even in those days, if at that time the church had decided that it was wrong to marry.
And then how many would be in the church today? Or if even last century when the truths of the rapture and return of the Lord were rediscovered, that people said, oh, well, because of that we better not marry. It wouldn't have been tragic. It wouldn't have been carrying on of the message of the gospel through people who knew the message of the gospel. And there's no command in the New Testament prohibiting marriage. In fact, the command of the New Testament is this. Marriage is honorable in all, and they're then defiled. So we read in Hebrews chapter thirteen. And so it isn't a command not to marry, not by any means.
But what is it? It's a command. It's a lesson to us. that we should be willing to be an object lesson to the people, to the people around us. By the way we live, by the message we preach, by our insistence on the importance of this message, we should be willing to give a message to men and women so that they'll ask us, what are you doing that for? Why are you living as you live? If we lived exactly like they, we wouldn't be a message to them. But when we lived differently from the world around and people look at us and say, what's the difference between you and us?
We have an opportunity to tell them clearly and in terms that they'll understand the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The same kind of opportunity that Jeremiah had. He was willing to be an object lesson. to his own people he was willing to obey God's commands in his type and as a result he was willing even to experience celibacy are you willing to obey God's commands whatever they are are you willing to do his will whatever it costs are you willing to present to the people his message even at the expense of being mocked like Jeremiah, are you willing to give witness and warning to the men and women of your time, of my time, of the Lord Jesus, his salvation and his coming judgment?
That's the question that comes to us today. And we should be ready always to give every man an answer that asks us a reason of the hope that is within us. And that means that we should be prepared. to cause them to ask questions about how we live and why we live that way. The Bible tells us how we ought to live and we should carry out the commands of the Word of God just as Jeremiah did in his day so that people will ask us a question and when they do ask us a question we should be prepared as Jeremiah was prepared to give God's message of rebellion of repentance and of retribution.
That was Jeremiah's message. Well, so much for the first object lesson. Let's hurry to the other parts of the message. In verses five to seven, Jeremiah is told that he's not to go to the place of mourning. He's not to go to the place of mourning. He's not to enter into the house of mourning, nor to lament, nor bemoan them. For I have taken away my peace from this people, saith the Lord. In the place of mourning in those days there were certain things that were carried out, that were carried out in each case. Some things were in accordance with God's will. Others were not in accordance with God's will.
For example, at the end of verse six we read, neither shall men lament for them nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them. We are told, in the earlier books of the Bible in the Pentateuch that these were not God's will. God didn't want that. These were heathen customs and characteristics and they shouldn't have been doing it. But the next verse tells, neither shall men tear themselves. And I see the margin of my Bible has a different word here. Neither shall men break bread for them. And I believe that's what that should be most of the Good translations have, neither shall men break bread.
That's what J.M. Darby says in his translation, for them in mourning to comfort them for the dead, neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or their mother. These were things that were not dishonoring to the Lord. As a matter of fact, the bread and the cup of mourning may well have been the background to the feast that we celebrate. Every Sunday morning, the Lord's supper, the bread broken, and the cup drunk may have come from these pictures that we have here in the book of Jeremiah. So there was something that Jeremiah wasn't devoted, even although it was right, he wasn't to participate in mourning.
There was also, in verse eight, he wasn't to go to the house of feasting, to sit with him to eat and drink. And in verse nine, He wasn't to go to, there was going to be deprived of them, the voice of the bridegroom and the bride, the voice of joy and the voice of mirth. There were weddings and funerals and feasts. These weren't to take place in Jeremiah's experience. He wasn't to go to these things. Why was that? Well, for a very similar reason, God was giving a message to the people. He said, I have taken away my peace. The word peace there is. Shalom, which means not only peace, but it means well-being.
My blessing, because of their sin and departure from God, and as omens of impending judgment, God was soon going to bring to an end all the joy of marriage and all the joy of feasting. There will be no time or opportunity for burials. Great and small would die and wouldn't be buried. And people would be too overwhelmed by their tragedies to lament for others. Jeremiah, you see, was illustrating by his prophecy, illustrating his prophecy by his actions, the way he acted. People would say, well, why don't you come to this funeral? You know this person who died. Why don't you come to it? And you'd be invited to a feast.
And people would say, why don't you come to this feast? Well, that doesn't mean that we're not to go to funerals. And it doesn't mean we're not to go to feast. After all the Lord Jesus himself went to marriages. And he himself went when he was invited to feasts. So there's nothing wrong with that. The important thing that God was giving Jeremiah a command. And Jeremiah was willing to obey that command. He was willing to do it. In order to be a witness to the people around him. Now my friend, you and I have many commands in the word of God. One of the commands, for example, is a command to be baptized.
Why do we have that command? We have it because the Lord has given it to us. And we have it to present it to people as an evidence that we belong to him, that we are obeying his command, that we are doing it for his glory, that we are doing it as a witness to him, as a public testimony, that we believe in him. That's what we do it for. People may mock us and laugh at us, but we still do it. We've a command to meet together on the first day of the week to remember him. Why do we do that? We do it because he commanded it. We do it because it's his good will for us to do. We should carry it out.
And it may give us an opportunity to tell to other people what he has done for us and what he can do for them. You see, Jeremiah's object lesson were not simply for his own good, but they were for the glory of the Lord, and they were to bring a message from God to his people. May we too seek to carry out his commands for his glory and to bring God's message to the people with whom we come in contact. I trust that we'll do that, that we'll learn from the story of Jeremiah how important it is Even in spite of the possible difficulties of doing it, how important it is for us to do what God commands us to do day by day and moment by moment.
Let us pray. Oh God, our Father, we thank thee for the privilege we have had again this evening of being gathered together around thy word. We thank thee for thy word. We pray that thou wilt impress its truth upon our hearts. We thank thee for the Lord of the word, the Lord Jesus who presents himself to us in every page of this great book. Grant that we may be attracted to him as we consider this word. Help us to be obedient to thy word and to the commands expressed in it as we read it day by day and as we learn its truths. Grant us thy blessing now for the night Be with us during the night and grant that we may be kept safe from danger, that we may have a good rest and be fitted to serve thee afresh tomorrow.
May thy blessing be upon those who are passing through special times of trial.