You say, “Who would say that to another person?”
God Almighty is saying that to the land of Israel. And when you and I study Jeremiah you can see that if God were to speak from heaven today, He would say the same thing to the United States of America. “You are a bold-faced harlot. And if you don’t change, I’m going to have to judge you.”
A shameless, bold-faced harlot, isn’t that sad? It’s so sad, Beloved, because when you understand Israel’s relationship to God, Israel was the wife of God, even as the church is the bride of Jesus Christ.
He was talking to His wife. He was talking to the one who He was engaged to, the one that followed Him through the wilderness, the one who He protected, the one that He took care of. And now He calls them a harlot. And yet, in the midst of this harlotry, comes the theme of this week, Precious one.
And the theme of this week is, ―‗Return, O faithless [one and] I will heal your faithlessness….‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:22) She’s committed harlotry. She’s had many, many lovers as Ezekiel says, [“She’s lifted up her skirts to every passerby.”] (PARAPHRASE, Ezekiel 16:15)
And yet, what does the husband say to the wife?
He says, “Return to Me. Return to Me.”
His arms are open wide, and He is saying the same thing to you today.
If you’ve played the harlot with God, if you’ve turned away from God, if you’ve done your own thing, if you’ve gone after the things of the world, if you are ensnared in those things, what He is saying to you, Precious One, is this, ―‗Return, O faithless [one and] I will heal your faithlessness [I will heal it]….‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:22) You say, “But I’ve got to get it all straightened out first. And when I’m out there, and I get it straightened out, then I’ll come home.” And He is saying, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Come home.”
I just got a wonderful, wonderful e-mail.
And I can’t go into too many details, but it was an e-mail from a woman that has done Precept for a number of years. Her husband is active in the church and everything. And yet, he came to her the other day, and he said, “I have to tell you this because I feel that God is not blessing us in our marriage because I’m holding this sin in.” And then he told her of how he had been unfaithful to her. It stunned her. It shook her up. It shook her to the core.
But I will tell you this, she knows the Word of God.
And because she knows the Word of God, and because she knows the character of God, and because she knows that God did not cast off Israel because of Israel’s harlotry, and because this man is repentant, because this man is returning, as we saw in last lesson, because he is returning, because he is repentant, the faithlessness will be healed. They’re on their way.
O Precious One, this is God’s Word to you and to me all this week, and I don’t want you to forget it. It is, ―‗Return, O faithless [one and] I will heal your faithlessness….‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:22)
You say where is that? Well it’s in Jeremiah chapter 3, verse 22. ―‗Return, O faithless sons, [and] I will heal your faithlessness….‘‖
And then it says, ―‗…Behold, we come to You; for You are the LORD our God.‘‖(Jeremiah 3:22) I want us to go back and I want us to look, remember I asked you to read through Jeremiah chapter 3 and chapter 4?
And my usual thing is to start, and to go verse-by-verse, and I’m going to do that in a few minutes. But first of all, what I want to do is, I want to take what we can learn from these two chapters.
And I want you to understand, Precious One, what harlotry does.
I want you to get the impact of it. And so I’m going to show you the results of harlotry. What does it bring? And there’s seven things that I want you to see. Chapter 3, verse 1, let’s look at it, ―God says, ‗If a husband divorces his wife and she goes from him and belongs to another man, will he still return to her? Will not that land be completely polluted...?‘‖ It says, ―‗…But you are a harlot with many lovers;…‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:1)
The first thing that I want you to see is this, that harlotry pollutes the land. He is using the illustration of sleeping around to illustrate, to make His point, to show us that He is our God. He is the lover of our souls, and we are to, ―‗…Love [Him] with all of [our] heart…all of [our] soul…all [of our] mind, and…all of our strength.‘‖ (Mark 12:30) [And we love Him by keeping His commandments.] (PARAPHRASE, John 14:15) And you see over and over, and you see it in verse 13. ―‗…You have not obeyed My voice,‘ declares the LORD.‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:13)
Look at verse 2, ―‗Lift up your eyes to the bare heights and see; where have you…been violated? By the roads you have sat for them like an Arab in the desert….‘‖(Jeremiah 3:2) You even see this in in Judah’s case when his daughter Tamar is trying to get his attention. (See Genesis 38:14)
And so they would go and sit by the road, and anybody passing by could stop and have sex with that woman. And so what he is saying is you have gone and you have sat by the road. ―‗…Like an Arab in the desert…,‘‖ He says, ―‗…And you have polluted a land with your harlotry and with your wickedness.‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:2)
I want you to know that America is polluted so much that the stench of its immorality, its infidelity, its perversion, has come up in the nostrils of God.
As I said before, never has America been in such a sad moral state as America is in right now. We do not know how to blush. We flaunt our immorality. We don’t hide it anymore. We try to legislate it and make it legal. And in all of this, what we don’t realize is that we are polluting the land. And when you pollute the land, then God has to deal with you.
So we see this, ―‗…You have polluted [the] land with your harlotry and with your wickedness.‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:2) And I want you to see this is wicked. What you are doing is wicked. And if you were being immoral, I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what your profession. I don’t care what your status or your lack of status. I don’t care if you say, “Well, this is just our society, this is just what we do. This is accepted.”
It is unacceptable with God, and you are polluting the land.
You are destroying a nation through your immorality. Look at verse 9 because I want you to see it again. He says, ―‗Because of the lightness of [your] harlotry….‘‖ The lightness of your harlotry is that you just do it, and you don’t think anything about it. He says, ―‗…she polluted the land and [she] committed adultery with stones and [with] trees.‘‖(Jeremiah 3:9) What they would do is they would cut trees in the shape of phallic symbols, sexual symbols. And then they would go to these groves, and there they would worship these false gods.
Now why are we in that condition?
We are in that condition, Beloved, because we have turned our back on God. You see it in Romans chapter 1, and we’ll go into it later. But when men know God, and they turn away from that knowledge, they are going to turn to something. And so what they do is they turn away from the truth about God. And when you turn away from the truth, the absolute truth of the Word of God, then what happens is it affects your life.
Then you become immoral, you become eventually amoral, no morals whatsoever. And this is where we are. It has polluted the land. The second thing that harlotry does to a land, hang on to this one is, it brings judgment through nature. It brings judgment through nature. I want you to look at verse 3.
He says, ―‗Therefore….‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:3) When you see a “therefore,” it’s a term of conclusion. Now I want you to learn how to study the Bible. I want you to learn how to discover truth for yourself. And that’s why I want you to go to preceptsforlife.com. I want you to download our study guide. And get connected with us. We want to take you deeper. One of the ways I mark “terms of conclusion” is with three red dots in the shape of a triangle.
So when He says, ―‗Therefore [because of your harlotry because of your wickedness, therefore] the showers have been withheld, and there has been no spring rain. [And] Yet you had a harlot‘s forehead; [and] you refused to be ashamed.‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:3) I’ve been dealing with you, and I have not seen you respond at all. How is He dealing with them? ―‗Therefore [because of you] the showers have been withheld….‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:3)
Now He told them that in Deuteronomy when He gave them the blessing and the cursings, the blessings for obedience, the cursings for disobedience.
In Deuteronomy, when they got into the land, He made it very clear that one of the curses would be that the heavens would be as bronze. That it would just be dirt that would fall from the heaven. (See Deuteronomy 28:23-24) O Beloved, do you think God is trying to speak to America through the weather? We’ll talk about it more in just a minute.
PART TWO
Welcome back, Beloved.
We are looking at what harlotry does to a nation.
What it does to a people.
Now remember, and I told you this before, that Romans chapter 15 tells us that [the things that were written beforehand were written in the Old Testament were written for our instruction.] (PARAPHRASE, Romans 15:4) So as we look at Jeremiah we’ve got to know, yes, this is what God is saying to Israel. And we’ve got to see that, but also it’s written for our instruction. And you and I can take the principles and precepts that we see in Jeremiah, and we can apply them to us today because God does not change. (See Malachi 3:6)
God hates sin.
God is against injustice.
God is against unrighteousness.
God is against disobedience,
and God always has to judge it.
His character commands it. So we are looking at what does harlotry brings to a land. When God looks at Israel and calls her you are shameless bold-faced harlot. (See Ezekiel 16:30)
And He says that to her.
What does that harlot bring upon the land? Well, we saw it pollutes the land. Number two, we see that it brings judgment through nature. We saw that in verse 3, ―‗Therefore the showers have been withheld, and there [is no] spring rain….‘‖ (Jeremiah 3:3) Alright, so what I want us to do is, I want us to have an understanding that this is not an accidental thing. No, this is Almighty God. This is Father God. And if you go to Job with me, go to Job chapter 37. And you might want to get these verses down.
Now what I use, Beloved, is I use a pencil in my Bible. I’ve started doing that in the past year and it’s made a big difference because sometimes you hesitate to write it down in ink ’cause it does not erase. But the pencil erases, and if you get the right kind of a pencil it does not smudge. So Job chapter 37, and Job is the most incredible, incredible book. I can’t wait to teach it sometime. But in Job chapter 37 this is what it says in verse 10, and I’m going to lead into verse 11, ―‗From the breath of God ice is made, and the expanse of the waters is frozen.‘‖
And that’s from the breath of God.
God makes the ice. He freezes what’s up there. Verse 11, ―‗Also with moisture He [God] loads the thick cloud….‘‖ I mean, He comes and injects this moisture into this cloud. It says, ―‗…He disperses the cloud of His lightning. It changes direction, turning around by His guidance, that it may do whatever He commands it on the face of the inhabited earth. Whether for correction, or for His world, or for lovingkindness, He causes it to happen.‘‖(Job 37:10-12) And this is what you need to see and you need to understand. [Nothing is too difficult for God.]
(PARAPHRASE, Jeremiah 32:17) He is over the elements, and therefore He uses the elements as a judge. Look at Job chapter 38. In Job chapter 38, He says in verse 22, ―‗Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail,‘‖ He says, ―‗which I have reserved for the time of distress, for the day of war and battle?‘‖ (Job 38:22-23)
Do you realize, Precious One, that God in the future, it’s when ah Iran, and Russian, and others come down against Israel. It’s Ezekiel 38. Do you know how God is going to defeat them? He’s going to defeat them not through an army; He’s going to defeat them through nature. He’s going to call the elements, and He’s going to wipe them out. (See Ezekiel 38:19-23)
Well, let’s go on.
The third thing that harlotry does is found in chapter 3, verse 24. It consumes the labor of others. It consumes our children. Listen to what He says in chapter 3, verse 24, ―‗But the shameful thing…,‘‖ and He is talking about what they’ve done, ―‗…has consumed the labor of our fathers since our youth, their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters.‘‖(Jeremiah 3:24)
In other words, it destroys. You build, and you build, and you build. Look at what happened to the economy in the year 2008, 2009. What happened all of a sudden, here was the labor of the fathers, and they had put all this money into houses that they were then losing.
Do you think that this is just an anomaly?
No. God is trying to get to get the attention of America because America has played the harlot.
I know that you may not like to hear that. I know that you may prefer [the false prophets who prophecy falsely. Who say peace, peace when there is no peace?] (PARAPHRASE, Jeremiah 6:13-14) Do you want truth, or do you want a lie? Do you want truth, or do you want to be diluted? Do you want to be deceived? Well, the fourth thing that I want you to see is found in chapter 4, verse 11 and verse 12.
And what it does is brings the judgment of God. In chapter 4, in verse 11, it says, ―In that time it will be said to [those] people and to Jerusalem, ‗A scorching wind from the bare heights [of] the wilderness in the direction of the daughter of My people—not to winnow and not to cleanse, a wind to strong for this—will come at My command; now I will also pronounce judgments against them.‘‖(Jeremiah 4:11-12)
It’s going to come. The judgment is going to come on the United States of America. Look at verse 16. It says, ―‗Report it to the nations, now! Proclaim over Jerusalem, ―Besiegers come from a far country, and lift their voices against the cities of Judah.‖‘‖(Jeremiah 4:16)
When 9-11 happened, what happened? Besiegers came from a far country and it forever changed America. All of a sudden, we realized that an invader could come into our land. You see this in verse 17, ―‗―Like watchmen [on] a field they are against her round about, because she has rebelled against Me‖….‘‖ (Jeremiah 4:17) She has rebelled against Me.
The fifth thing that I want you to see is in chapter 4, verse 18, [Evil touches the heart. Your harlotry brings an evil that touches the heart.] (PARAPHRASE, Jeremiah 4:18) ―‗Your ways and your deeds [you] have brought these things to you. This is your evil. How bitter! How it has touched your heart!‘‖ (Jeremiah 4:18)
And see the heart is the command center of a man’s being. If the heart is off then this is where adultery, and fornication, and stealing, and gossip, and this is where evil comes from. If you study Solomon, what caused the kingdom to divide in the first place? It was because Solomon allowed evil to touch his heart. And because he was enticed by the idols of his wives the whole kingdom divided. (See 1 Kings 11:1-13)
O Beloved, harlotry is an awful, awful thing. It destroys the land. We are going to talk about it in the next program. And then what we are going to do is we are going to go through Jeremiah chapter 3 and 4, verse by verse.
And I’m going to show you eight things that you can do that will cause you to return to Him, and to be healed of your faithlessness.
