Welcome back to the Daily Bible Podcast! We're terribly glad you've joined us. And now, your hosts, Pastor PJ and Pastor Rod

Hey, so you just heard our brand new announcer guy that we just hired straight off the streets from the uk. Did we he's making double what, Bernard was making and he's he sounds a little bit more dignified. We'll see if he sticks. I don't know. I've grown partial to Bernard's good. He feels like a local, yeah, he feels like an older gentleman that might attend our church. I like him and I'm gonna miss him if we don't. Stick with him. This is Simon. So everybody meets Simon. Everybody say hi, Simon. Yeah. Anyways, Simon's here and Simon says there's at least one person says, one person wants me to have your voice. But that, that the he's asking and begging that we do that. And I said, you know what, bro? I can only pray so hard. I'm trying by God's grace to encourage Pastor Pge to let me have his voice and he doesn't want, okay, so who is this one person? I can't tell you. He would, he, I can't. You can. He would be mortified. Would he would, yeah. He doesn't want me to text. He doesn't. Is it Bernard? Bernard? Is Bernard's mad that he got canned? I'm just gonna tell you that well sidelined. At least if your car is keyed. I just, I can't be held responsible for his disgruntled responses. All right. Anyways, if this is your first time listening to the Daily Bible Podcast, you have no idea what's going on. No. Welcome though. We're glad that you're listening. We're glad that you're with us. You're so happy. Yeah. Hey, it's it's Tuesday and so we're back in the office. Yeah, you guys, we've mentioned this before, but. We typically as pastors, we'll take Monday off. Although I think Pastor Mark is doing Saturdays. I think he comes in on Mondays. But Pastor Rod and I are usually out on Mondays, and so Tuesday's our first day back in the office. We do a lot of meetings on Tuesdays. We've got our staff meetings. I meet with pastor Mark, I meet with Kelly our admin here. And we do podcasting on Tuesdays for the rest of the week. So Tuesday's kind of a busy administrative day for us, but it's a good day to get back in the office. Everybody get on the same page and move forward. And we're excited. And God's got a new week for us here and we're looking forward to what's what's in store. We're officially into first Peter. We're rolling forward now. We've got a new series. We only did a one week series to enter, introduce the book. So we've got a new series called A Living Hope coming up this weekend, and it's gonna be a two-parter and can't wait. This is some of the best text in the book of first Peter. Is what we get right off the bat. And so it's only downhill from here, folks. No, it's it's first Peter. So Rich, it's got so many good passages, even like we talked about on Sunday. But this is gonna be, I'm really excited about this. Some of my favorite. Passages in the book happen right off the right outta the gates with First Peter. Let's get into our DBR for today, unless you've got more googly that you wanna bring to the table. I don't, I always have lots of googly at the ready, but at as of this moment, I think it's best that I don't contribute. You know what Brief days with Les Googly makes the days with more Googling, more enjoyable for those that enjoy the googly. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Hey 18 through 22 is our text today. So we open up with another living parable here from the book of Jeremiah, and this has to do with the as the text is gonna say here, the potter and the clay. Jeremiah is gonna be told by the Lord to go to the house of the Potter, and essentially here it's a common metaphor. It's a metaphor that's picked up in the New Testament as well. It's a one that we've already seen and I believe Isaiah talked about it. And that is that it. Depicts God as the potter who has the prerogative to do what he wishes with the clay. He's able to wipe out the vessel, to start over, to recreate, to do something new. And that's what God is saying, that he has the right, he has the divine prerogative to do with the nation of Israel. That it's no one else's right to do this but his own. And he does possess that. And so God is going to. Do that. And that's what he's saying to Jeremiah here. If you jump down to verse 11, notice there's still calls for repentance here, and your point that you made the other day I think is still valid here, that these are genuine. Otherwise, I don't think they would be there when God says, behold, I'm shaping disaster against you and devising a planet against you. Return everyone from his evil way and amend your ways and your deeds. This is not Jeremiah the prophet speaking. This is God speaking through Jeremiah. He's saying, I have the right to judge and I'm going to judge, repent and return. Now, he said yesterday in yesterday's reading that he was weary of relenting so. This is potentially a call to repent, to join the faithful remnant. Not a call to repent in the sense that he's going to stop the plans for judgment that he has. Maybe this is, I will spare your life, you'll survive much like Jeremiah and the remnant was gonna survive. But this is a call to repent to the people here still, even in the midst of the threaten threatenings of judgment here, this concept of being potter and clay. We're gonna see this later in the Bible. Speaking of those whom God chooses and those whom God does not how do we wrap our minds around something like this? This is hard. I, granted, we read over it in our bibles and maybe we didn't even think twice about this analogy, but scripture uses this to talk about God's rights over humanity. It's a heavy weight to bear when we think about the fact that it feels. Like you have no choice. It feels like it doesn't matter what you do, God's gonna do what God's gonna do regardless of all of your efforts. Correct some of that thinking. Yeah we talked about this on Sunday actually in one Peter one, two one Peter one, two says that we are the elect exiles according to, and then he lists three things, the foreknowledge of God. Okay? So that's his sovereignty. That's in eternity past. He determined not just, he knew what choice would be made down the corridor of time, but he determined he planned for us what would happen in eternity Pass. And then it talks about sanctified by the spirit. That's regeneration. That is that, that, as Paul says in Ephesians one, we are. Dead in our trespasses and sins. A dead body can't bring itself to life. Life. It needs life before it can be brought to that point of faith. And that is the spirit's work. But then that third part where it says, for obedience to Jesus, to Christ and the sprinkling with his blood, that brings in our participation in this. And I made the point on Sunday, and I'll stand by it. You have a part to play in whether or not you are part of the elect. And that sounds counterintuitive because. The elect by definition, those whom God for knew and the spirit regenerates. And yet we also find that it's part of those who, that act of obedience that he talks about obedience to Christ is putting our faith in Jesus. So that's our responsibility. And that from the point of view of humanity is a real choice that has to be made by men and women to repent from their sins and choose to trust Jesus for salvation. If you don't do that, then you're not part of the elect. If you do that. Then guess what? You're part of God's elect. And so it, it is true that God is fully sovereign over this, and yet on the ground level, we are calling men and women everywhere. We are able to repent and put their trust in Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior. And that is a real call, that is a real offer. And those that respond are those that, yes, God chose an eternity pass, but that's not our job to sit there and parse out who that is and who that isn't. Our job is to go and call everyone to that. And if you're there on the other side of that going, what if I'm, what if I'm not? I would ask you, do you desire to be saved? Do you recognize your sin and the holiness of God? And are you sitting there saying I see that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins. I believe that, and I believe that has granted me forgiveness, and I believe that he rose in the dead so that I will live with him forever. Then don't make it harder than it is. We can get lost in the ivory towers of the theories of atonement and all these other things, which are good and right in their context, but for the individual soul out there, if you have decided and. He said, I wanna trust Christ for salvation rest. In that, there's rest that you can have there and you can let the sovereign part of that be God's to determine. 'cause it is his right. It is his prerogative. He is the potter and we are the clay. But that doesn't mean that we don't have, from our viewpoint and perspective, something to bring to the table in that. Yeah, sometimes it's easy to use good theology in bad ways. And this might be one of those places where we look at God's sovereign rulership in our. Description as a clay pot and look at God in a way that suggests that he's not fully good or that maybe we're suspicious of whether or not we have the stamp of election on our chest or something like that. It's important for us to read the Bible biblically. Can you say it that way to let scripture speak and not to. Not to let it get contorted or twisted, even in our own minds as we seek to understand it. The role of reading your Bible and interpreting it, man, those are difficult things to do because it's so easy to contort it and twist it when you have partial knowledge, which is why spending time in your Bible like this is so important. 'cause over the course of years, years and years, you begin to develop mastery. We're. In our forties now, and I feel like I'm starting to get it. I'm just starting to get it. And I've been in the Bible for years and I've studied it, and now I'm pursuing higher education for it, and I still feel like I'm a novice in so many ways. So if that resonates with you at all, take heart, this is part of what it is to be a Christian who's trying to follow the Lord faithfully. Yeah. Rest of chapter 18. We get some interesting developments here. There's plots against Jeremiah's life, which God told Jeremiah at the beginning of his prophecy that he would face that. And so here it comes. And Jeremiah prays some imprecatory prayers against these men and their families that are pretty intense here. He is going after them and it almost seems that it is more personally motivated than anything else here. He says, for they have dug a pit to take me and laid snares for my feet. He's not saying for they have rejected you, God, for they have turned their backs on you. He's saying They're coming after me, so God, I want you to grow after them. Him this is Jeremiah the prophet, writing these things. This is not God speaking through Jeremiah the prophet at this point. So is this right from Jeremiah to have this mentality and this mindset? I would say in so far as it's, it is in keeping with what God promised, that God promised, he would preserve him and protect him and take care of those that come against him. Beyond that, I can't go any further than that. I, I. Jeremiah was not a perfect man. I get where he is coming from on this. I understand it, but I wonder if this is a little bit of the fallen nature of Jeremiah that's coming out here in his imprecatory prayers. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because. Before this. He's oh Lord, save them, protect them. And they're coming after him. He's you know what? His second thoughts, yeah. Actually go after them actually, please defend me. Absolutely he's a prophet, but he's not perfect. Only God is perfect. And so everything that comes out of his mouth that is not, thus say it, the Lord is fair game for us to say, okay, what do we do with this? And in this case, I think he's afraid. Yeah. And he's angry because all he's ever done is cared for them. And I think he's beginning to feel a little bit of what God feels now. Yeah. Yeah chapter 19 then God says to Jeremiah, Hey, I've got another task for you. So now we've done to the potter's wheel and everything like, like that the loincloth now he's gonna take a flask. And so probably, presumably he gets this from the same potter that he's hanging out at his house and he goes out to the pot shed gate, which is where they would've taken the trash. The refuge of the city would've gone out through this gate, and it would've, it got its name because there were a lot of broken vessels. By this gate. And so God is gonna use that. And this flask that Jeremiah has to demonstrate what he's about to do to Israel and it's awful. Verse nine, it just is I just wrote next to it in my Bible. Horrors. This is the judgment of God that's coming upon the people that Jeremiah's prophesying about here. I'll leave you to read it just because you may want to fence that a little bit with your kids. It's awful. It's terrifying. It's horrific to think about what they were going to go through. And then God tells Jeremiah, take the flask and break it. And he says, so I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter's vessel so that it can never be mended. And and adding to this, probably to all of the different. Pieces of pottery on the ground there. Even if Jeremiah wanted to pick up the pieces, they would've been mixed in with all the others and unable to find them all to mend it and put it back together. So God is saying this is this is judgment that's coming full and furious against the people here. So chapter 19 is pretty sobering. Chapter 20, then we get the name of somebody who was one of Jeremiah's greatest enemies, and that is Ur the priest. I would put priest in, in scare quotes there. And he's gonna come against Jeremiah and not just in Word, he's now, Jeremiah's gonna suffer physically. He's beaten and he's put stocks and he is is left there. And then eventually he's released. And then he goes after PE and says, the Lord calls you terror on every side. And then Jeremiah goes after not just him, but all of the rebellious people and talks about Babylon over and over again. Now, and this is where we really get very plainly, this is what's gonna happen. Babylon's gonna come, people are gonna be carried to Babylon. Treasures are gonna be carried to Babylon. The Babylonians are the people that God is gonna use. In the judgment against Judah here, and PA is the one that elicits this response from the Lord through his treatment of Jeremiah. Verse seven is a challenging one. Yes. Can you speak to what you think is happening in Jeremiah's heart? Is this legitimately true? Did God deceive Jeremiah into being his prophets? What's happening here and how do we interpret it? I think this is the humanity of Jeremiah. Again, I think this is again, Jeremiah just wrestling with his situation coming off of the beating, coming off of the imprisonment in the stocks. He says in verse eight, for the Lord, the word of the Lord has become, for me, a reproach and derision all day long. It's almost Lord, I didn't understand what I was signing up for. And God had told him this, but I think the deficiency is more with Jeremiah than it is with God. So is it normal to question your calling in life or is this an aberration in Jeremiah's life and that, that's interesting because we use the word calling, broadly. Yeah. I mean if you're out making widgets and you end up in a difficult spot making widgets for a living y you may question God, is this really what you have for me? Is this really what you want me to be doing right now? I think that's pretty common for people to be there. It, let's take it into ministry. There are people that have gone into ministry, that you go through rough seasons in ministry and you're like, God, is this really what you want me to do in my life right now? And yeah, no matter where you are I think this is a common human experience because we all have our vision of what we feel like things will look like, and God has his version, which is reality of what things are actually gonna be like, and we're tempted to say God. What are you doing? The thing that we have to do at the end of it is just be willing to trust him regardless of the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Yeah. I find it fascinating that Jeremiah questions his calling when things are going poorly, and I think we're all tempted to do the same. Totally. When things are hard is when we start saying, Lord, really is this really the right thing? Is, and it really betrays this expectation. Of a soft prosperity gospel. Yep. That if we are doing what God wants us to do, then surely he's going to bless us and make our path straight as Proverbs chapter three says. But the reality is that because God loves us, he's going to take us through seasons that will strengthen us and improve us and cause us to be better and not worse. So it's perfectly fair, I think, to question am I doing the right thing? I think that's a good thing. Self-check, am I doing right? Am I sitting against God in any way? But if the answer's no, I don't think I'm sitting against God. I think I'm doing what he wants me to do, then I don't think you should look at these difficult seasons as something outta the ordinary. God does this because he loves us. In fact, the rest of Proverbs, chapter three is not. You're gonna experience unmitigated blessing, but do not despise the Lord's discipline. Yeah. And don't be wary of his reproof because he does it as a father. Delights in his son. There's always discipline because he loves his son. And the same thing is true with all of us. So Jeremiah questions his calling when he's going through rough time, you're gonna do the same. And I think the right response is what he says in verse 11. The Lord is with me. Yeah. He says, here is a dread warrior, but the Lord is with me. I can trust him. He's got my back. Like someone recently sang in a song when he literally broke his back. I think we need to trust that the Lord is with us in every season. Yeah. Yeah. You get a little bit of job in verse 14, KIS me the damn which I was born. Yeah. This is Jeremiah not in a good spot, but yeah, we, that trust is so important there. Chapter 21, then we get a new situation here. He's gonna be sent to Zia King Tiah, and the Zetia is gonna say, Hey can you entreat the Lord for us? And notice p is there again the same guy that beat him and he's Hey, can you do us a favor now? Can you go to the Lord and see if he can turn Nebu EZ Israel away? And God's response is actually, I'm gonna do the exact opposite. And what's so chilling is he says that he's going to actually fight against the Israelites. He says in verse five, I myself will fight against you without stretch. A hand in strong arm in anger and fury and great wrath down to verse 10, for I've set my face against this city for harm and not for good. Declares the Lord, it shall be given to the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire. So they're initially coming to Jeremiah saying, Hey, help us out. Go to the Lord, see if he can stop all this. And Jeremiah says, O okay. And then God says no, I'm not gonna stop it. In fact, I'm gonna fight against you. That is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. A really quick clarification. The P here in chapter 21 seems to be a different one. Oh, this is for sure. Son of Malca. Chapter 20, it's Ur, son of Immer. That is a great catch. And that's why reading the Bible carefully is so important. Yeah. It's understandable. When you're reading quickly through like we are, you're gonna, you're gonna do the same thing and we recognize that same spelling of the name. Yep. Different sun. Different sun for sure. Must have been a popular name back in the day. Thank you though. That makes way more sense. Yeah. Chapter the rest of chapter 21, and then chapter 22, deals with the Kings here. And it gets, it can get confusing because he was just talking to Zetia. But then in, in chapter 22, he's gonna be talking to multiple kings here, and he's gonna be talking to Je Jolla King. He's gonna be talking to Kaia. You've got Zetia. So just real quick, here's the progression here. Of the last handful of kings of Israel. So we have Hezekiah, who we've talked about, the Good King Manassa, his son. He's the bad dude. Amon or Amon, he only ran two years. Remember? Then you have Josiah's, the Good King. He's the last Good King After Jo. Josiah comes a series of kings. You've got, Jehovah has the second, and that there is Jo Hoya. Kim, or no, Jo Hoya. Forgive me. I forgive you. Yeah. Thank you. Jehovah's Joha is the second. You've got Je Hoya Kim, who we read about here in chapter 22. Then you've got Je Hoya Chin. Now, JE Hoya Chin and Kania are the same people. Aya Joa Chin are the same people there, so Je Hoya, Kim Kaia, or Je Chin, and then Zika is the very last one. So Jeremiah is talking to Zedekiah in chapter 21. Chapter 22. It is like we jump back a little bit and he's gonna be talking to Je Jolla Kim, and he's gonna be talking about Kaiah Jo Jolla, Kim's son, and then is gonna come Zedekiah there. So it's a little bit of a timeline curve, fluffle, and I think what's happening is that God is cataloging the sins that are coming to fruition. Yeah. In other words, God is saying I'm not acting off the handle here. I'm not acting in a way that is just. Hey, I don't like what you did. You looked at me funny. I'm coming after you. Now. This is God saying, no, I'm meticulous in the way that I count. And I'm showing you that there are generations of kings that have given me every reason to judge you the way that I'm going to judge you right now. So God is showing that he is fair. Let me correct that. God is showing that he's just, fairness and justice are not the same thing. He's just, and that's what we're seeing here in chapter 22. They have a history of this and now God's coming to call them to account. Yeah. Yeah. And. Yeah, I think that's a good summary there for for chapter 22. Let's pray and then we'll be done with another episode. God, thanks for your word and the time that we got to spend in it today. I do pray that if there's anybody that's echoing the sentiments of Jeremiah right now, questioning your hand and their circumstances your sovereignty as the potter and them being the clay and where you've brought them and the position that they're in right now. God, I pray that you'd bring them comfort even through this passage. Just even a reminder that you are sovereign and maybe it doesn't mean that everything's gonna get better overnight. In fact, often it doesn't, but they can trust you just like Jeremiah did in the meantime. And Jeremiah is such an encouragement for us in that, because again, he's gonna watch the city fall, he's gonna watch the city burn, and yet he's gonna write in limitations. Your mercies are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. And God I pray that we as a people would be willing to be there more often than not, that we would be willing to say, what Jeremiah great is your faithfulness, no matter what happens to us here on this earth. So we pray this, we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Bye. Just kidding. Thanks for reading Bibles with us like tomorrow for another edition. That was abrupt, I guess We're done of the Daily Bible podcast. Bye for real.

Well, thank you for listening to another delightful episode of the Daily Bible Podcast! We're honored to have you join us. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about our Church at compassntx.org. If you like this podcast we would love for you to leave a review, to rate, or to share this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on. We hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Cheerio!

Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said