Allen Jackson - God Is Watching Over Us - Part 1
All right, our title for these three weeks is "Discerning What is Next," and the real objective is to understand that God is watching over us. We live in an unusual season in history, and I believe God is shaking the earth, and to be honest, I think he's just begun. I think he's going to shake everything that can be shaken: every government, every institution, every point of stability, things that have been trusted and relied upon that we thought were immovable or immutable. We're seeing them change in our own culture, and I think we will see it continue to spread around the earth, but I don't want you to miss this: If the shaking becomes so severe that the mountains fall into the ocean, God is watching over us.
If the rulers of the nations gather together and declare there is no God and his Word is void, God is watching over us. It's the truth. Our stability and our security is not rooted in the US economy or the strength of the dollar or the United Nations or global cooper operation or what conventional wisdom says. God is watching over his people in the earth. There is an advantage to being God's people. It's why I'm an advocate for the church. It's why I'm an advocate for Jesus of Nazareth. It's why I think church is growing and expanding and flourishing and being healthy and vibrant. It's not only a good thing. It's a necessary thing. There is no greater security for people than to be under the watchful care of Almighty God.
And we've apologized for being God's people long enough. Being in relationship with God is a good thing. It's brought good things to me, and it brought good things to you. I'm an advocate for prudence and for planning and for delayed gratification and for wise saving and all of those things. I'm an advocate. Please do them, but don't do them to the exclusion of yielding your life to Almighty God, because if you plan flawlessly and execute your plan perfectly and then you exclude God from God's perspective, you're a fool. The people of God, he's watching over us. There is nothing in my life more important to me than being included in the people of God.
I wanna start in Jeremiah chapter 31, in verse 10: "Hear the word of the LORD, O nations; proclaim it in the distant coastlands". I'm often asked if I think the United States is included in biblical prophecy. Well, not by name. Wouldn't it be weird if Murfreesboro was mentioned as often as Jerusalem? You'd read your Bible more, wouldn't you? "Look, we're in the book"! But here's one passage that you could attribute to us, I think, without doing any injustice to the text. When it says, "Hear the Word of the LORD, O nations; proclaim it in the distant coastlands," I assure you from the worldview of an ancient, near-eastern Hebrew prophet, the USA is the distant coastlands. God has a message for us. God speaks not only to individuals or to families. God speaks to nations. Did you know that?
"'He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over his flock like a shepherd.' For the LORD will ransom Jacob and redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they". It's a passage easily read past. You can dismiss it, if you choose, as the rather poetic language of an ancient Hebrew prophet, or you could choose to believe that it's a relevant message from God for understanding our world today. I would encourage you to choose the latter of those options, but I draw your attention first to where Jeremiah began. He said, "Hear the word of the Lord".
May I ask you a question? What are you listening to? I don't mean at the moment. I know where you are and what you're listening to just now. But what is it that's filling your heart, that's driving your decision process, that's causing you joy or anxiety? What are you listening to? Is your mood shaped by the daily newsfeed from whatever delivery system you prefer? Is it shaped by your friends? What are you listening to? I don't want you to exclude all of those things, but I mean the primary voice that you give attention to in your life. I don't want you to be uninformed, with your head buried in the sand, but I would submit to you that if you're not routinely listening to the Word of God, there is absent in your life the most powerful perspective you can have, so it's really simple.
What I'm suggesting is, on a daily basis, routinely, systematically read your Bible. Not a new idea around here. We've been processing this for quite a while now, and some of you are well into it. You've already read it. Don't stop, all right? I've used a computer this past week, but I'm gonna use one next week, God willing. About 10, 15 minutes a day, you can read through your whole Bible in the course of a year. It's important. We think it's important enough we bring you a daily reading plan every week, we put up a new sermon outline, we keep it posted and up to date on the church's website. You can even get the daily passage there.
If you're more portable and you're more adept, you can download an app, we will read it to you, and if you don't like our processes, there's many other ways you can find delivery systems for the Word of God, but routinely, systematically listen to what God has to say. It will change your life. The most common, consistent characteristic of the people of God in Scripture, from the Old Testament to the New is they listen to God. Jesus said, "My sheep know my voice". Get to know the character of God from his Word. It will protect you in the season that is ahead of us.
Now, God said some other things through Jeremiah. First, he said, "Hear the word of the LORD," and then he gives us God's Word. He said four things very specifically. They're hard to miss. He said, "God will scatter Israel, Israel, the Jewish people". God said, "I'm gonna scatter them," and he did an amazing job at that, and then he said, "I will gather Israel". Just as certainly as God scattered them... not the devil, not the Romans, not an international decision. God scattered Israel. That same God said, "I will gather Israel," and then God said, "I will shepherd them. I will watch over them like a flock".
Now, I've never been tasked with shepherding a flock of sheep, but I have had in times in my life the assignment of caring for animals, and I'm telling you, there are a few things that are more inclusive apart from caring for children. You're responsible for the well-being of that animal, everything about their life from their diet, what they ingest, to their overall health, to how they process whatever you're giving them to eat, to their protection from the elements, their protection from other animals, their cleanliness, everything about them comes under that umbrella, so when I read that God says he will watch over me like a shepherd watches over the flock, there's very few things that are more inclusive in description of God's care for us, from what you eat to how you rest, to your overall health, to your protection from whatever adversary there may be. God is watching over us.
And then I particularly love verse 11. It says the Lord will ransom Jacob and redeem them. Both "to ransom" and "redeem" means someone does something on your behalf that you can't do for yourself. Will redeem them from the hand of those stronger than they. Now, that makes me smile. God says, "Their enemies may be stronger than they are, but I could care less about the strength of Israel's enemies, because my strength will bring deliverance for them". I think God would say the same thing about the challenges you face today. They may seem intimidating and powerful and threatening, but God's not threatened by them. The strength of the one who watches over us is greater than any challenge we face.
Isn't that good to know? That is a wonderful thing to know. But Jeremiah's invitation is to give God a place in our lives, a priority in our lives. It's so easy to make God a hobby. I'll tell you how to sort this out. If you spend more time with your hobby than you do with God, then the reality is you've made a God out of your hobby and a hobby out of God. Smile. God will never accept second place. It's the beginning of the Ten Commandments. He said, "You can have no other gods before me," and in American Christendom where our lives are largely secure and have been and we can find affluence and opportunity and care for ourselves and our children apart from God, we don't have to imagine ourselves dependent upon God, but for the majority of the world, God is the greatest hope and opportunity extended to them, and it's time for us in the West, and particularly in American Christendom, to awaken to that truth.
Now, I'm gonna suggest to you, based on Jeremiah's prophecy and some others that we will explore in the weeks ahead, that there are two primary agendas of God in the earth today, two things happening simultaneously, in parallel, and with two different groups of people in different ways, but, nonetheless, both happening under the authority of God's direction, under his Word, and only possible through an expression of his power in the earth, and I wanna unpack them with you in a bit of detail. The first is that God is gathering the Jewish people, just precisely what Jeremiah said he would do. Now, that presupposes that God scattered the Jewish people.
See, God gave to the Jewish people an inheritance. It begins at the very beginning of the book. Back in the book of Genesis, in the early chapters, God says to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, "I will give a plot of ground, a piece of terra firma, forever. It belongs to them. It's their inheritance. It's a part of my covenant with them, but the privilege of living in that land is determined by their relationship with me. Although that covenant is a part of my agreement with them, the privilege of being there depends upon their attitude towards me, and there are times when the people of Israel have said, 'We don't wanna cooperate with you.
We wanna be like the other nations of the world. We don't wanna be a unique people, we don't wanna be God's people, we don't wanna be encumbered with God's boundaries,'" and God says, "Fine, you can live however you choose, but not in this land," and they've been scattered to the four corners of the world. In fact, for almost two millennia, for 2,000 years, the Jewish people were scattered throughout the nations of the world. 70 CE, the Romans encircled the city of Jerusalem, they besieged it, and they broke the city, they breached its walls, they destroyed the temple. It's impossible for us to understand the magnitude of that.
For the temple in Jerusalem to be destroyed would be like all the public buildings you recognize in Washington being destroyed. It was the center of their national life. Their whole relationship with God was built upon a sacrificial system that was centered in the temple. It couldn't be offered anyplace else. The daily sacrifice is there, the annual sacrifice on the Day of Atonement. Everything about their relationship with God, their uniqueness as a people was centered in the temple, and in 70 it was destroyed. All of Judaism had to be rethought, reunderstood, reimagined, redefined.
Sixty years later, the Jews rebelled again, and this time the Romans were so angry they drove them out of the city of Jerusalem, forbade them to live there, renamed the city. They wanted to annihilate any connection between the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem. For 2,000 years the Jews were scattered through the nations of the world, and in 1948 at the end of World War II, when the horrors of the Holocaust became public, and with the intervention of Almighty God, the United Nations, in a day, gave birth to the modern nation of Israel.
Now, here's the bizarre part: The Jewish people as a unique ethnic group still existed. After 2,000 years with no homeland, with no central government, with nothing binding them together other than a faith in Almighty God and the words of Scripture, they began to come from the nations of the world, speaking dozens of languages. In all sorts of descriptions and shapes and sizes, the Jewish people began to immigrate back to the land of Israel. God said it. He said, "I scattered you and I will gather you".
How can we explain that? There's no precedent for it in human history. The people groups you meet in your Bible (the Hittites, the Canaanites, the Philistines) they're gone. They've disappeared from the record. God said, "I will scatter you and I will bring you back". How can we explain that? I would submit there's no other way than this: God is watching over them, that God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham. He said to Abraham, "I will give to this land to your descendants, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob forever. It's theirs. And if I scatter you to the distant places, I will gather you again, and I will watch over you".
We live in a very unique season of human history. I'm a student of history, and I can tell you our headlines correlate more with the prophetic passages of Scripture than any time I can think of in human history, and for the most part we're asleep. Please don't be. It's relevant to you. I mean, it will help us understand how to prepare for what's next. Israel flourished. I've got a little help today. It's just a map, but most Americans think geography is an hors d'oeuvre, so I thought a map might be helpful.
Do you know Israel? It's a tiny little nation tucked away at the end of the Mediterranean. It's a very insignificant place. If it didn't have a connection with Scripture, I doubt you'd pay any attention to it whatsoever. It doesn't have particularly dramatic landscapes. It has a coastline with the Mediterranean, but there's a lot of Mediterranean coast. There's many reasons to overlook it. It's predominantly a desert. They haven't found tremendous petroleum resources there, so there's not an economic driver from that standpoint. It's easily overlooked, and yet when it was initially chosen as an inheritance for Abraham and his descendants. It was the crossroads of the ancient world, and there was a logic to that.
If you had a message that you want to distribute to the world, there was no better location to put the messengers than in the middle of the crossroads of antiquity, but you would have thought that would have faded with the passage of time and the changes of trade routes and the the international alignments that it would emerge, but there is for some unique reason that I don't believe can be explained by anything except spiritual forces, Israel remains at the center of the world stage. Did you know that more than a half of the issues before the UN Security Council deal with the nation of Israel, tiny little Israel, insignificant Israel? How many people do you imagine live in Israel?
There's only about six million Jews in Israel, six million, and there's another million Israelis that are Arab or other ethnicities, but six million Jews live there. There's only 13 or 14 million Jews in the world. There's another six million in the United States or so, million or so scattered in other places, but it's a tiny place with a tiny population. By comparison, there's some other people groups, you know, in the Middle East. Have you heard of the Kurdish people? The Kurds these days, the military aspect of the Kurdish people, the Peshmerga, they're our allies these days in the fight against ISIS, until we betray them. How many Kurds do you imagine live in the Middle East? They live across the countries of the Middle East because when the Middle Eastern map was drawn up at the end of World War I, they didn't give the Kurdish people a nation.
They didn't pay any attention, actually, to the ethnic groups and that they were all political alliances that delivered the lines on the map. But the Kurds live in Turkey and Syria and Iraq and Iran. There's more than 24 million of them, with no nation. How many Muslims do you suppose live in the Middle East, the nations of the Middle East and North Africa? More than 300 million Muslims. The overwhelming majority, at least politically, are committed to the annihilation of Israel. This is a brutal neighborhood. Israel lives in the midst of a violent, hate-filled, anger-filled, destructive, boiling cauldron of violence, and yet they flourish, one of the most robust economies in the world.
The Jewish people were forbidden to own property in most of Europe when they were scattered throughout those nations. When they began to immigrate back to Israel at the turn of the century, they had to learn agricultural principles from their neighbors, they didn't know them. Today, Israel grows the finest fruits and vegetables for the markets of Europe. Only God could do that. The desert is blooming. It's prophetic. God said it would happen. The God who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. But their right to be in the land, I told you a moment ago, it's connected to their relationship with God. It's not arbitrary. I'm concerned, there are some passages that we'll look at this evening and in the weeks to come.
I believe there's some difficult days ahead for Israel. There's not a perfect place. Any sin you can find in America, you can find in Israel. The God told us through the prophets, he said, "I will gather them from the nations, then I will clean up their hearts," and he has begun gathering them, and you will watch God purify the hearts of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, be a remarkable thing to see. But there's some difficult days ahead for them. When God says pray for the peace of Jerusalem, I don't believe he means just pray for an absence of military conflict. I believe he's telling us to pray for the peace of the people in the land and their relationship between God and himself. It's a violent place.
God says woe to the nations of the world that take a hand against what he's declared over that place. The nations of the world ignore that. To the north of Israel is Syria and Lebanon. Lebanon is occupied by a terrorist force, Hezbollah. You may have heard of them in the news. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization recognized that way globally. They are recruited, funded, and supported with military equipment by the Iranians. They're a proxy in Lebanon with tens of thousands of missiles pointed at Israel. They are poised on the border of Israel for the purpose of the destruction of Israel. Next door in Syria, the pipeline nation to Hezbollah, are the Syrians engaged in a civil war.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been slaughtered, the Christians at the head of that list. They've used weapons of mass destruction on their own people multiple times. Iraq is occupied these days predominantly by ISIS, one of the most violent expressions of terrorism we know in the world. Adjacent to Iraq is Iran, the leading international state sponsor of terrorism. They're recognized globally as the number one. They're at the head of the list in the world of the sponsors of terrorism, and the United States is actively engaged in using our authority as the world leader in ensuring that Iran secures nuclear weapons. There's a logic flaw in that. It's inexplicable. It's inexplicable.
While we have a debate at home about whether we should limit handgun availability to common citizens, we take the most aggressive global sponsor of terrorism and do our dead-level best to see that they get nuclear weapons, and the inconsistency of those two positions doesn't break into our consciousness. While we struggle with racism and its expressions in our culture appropriately so, we have a nation on the global stage that says as soon as they can, the leaders of Iran repeatedly, for many, many years, has said as soon as they can they intend to annihilate the Jewish people from the planet. It's as racist a statement as you can make, and our government aggressively leads the way in the global stage in helping them become nuclear. It's irrational. Can only be understood with spiritual motivation.
But I think the Christians struggle on this point. We'll step back into Scripture and say, "Well, God watches over Israel. He'll protect them," and I believe that to be true, but God doesn't do it absent the people on the ground. I've been visiting Israel since I was a boy. I went the first time in 1970. I was a very small boy. And I've been back and forth many times. The past several years, we've taken tours, and I've taken hundreds thousands of people, I suppose, with me to Israel, but when I invite people to come to go to Israel, they're usually from a Christian population. They always, always, they say the same thing to me. What do you think their first question is? "Is it safe"?
Now, that same group of people, when we do this story, they say, "Oh, God's watching over Israel. They don't have to worry. Nothing will happen to them," until you invite them to go with you, and then they say to me, "Well, now, wait a minute. Is it safe"? Well, well, wait a minute, if it's safe for the Israelis, do you not think it's safe for you? Isn't the same God watching you?
We got a little inconsistency in our hearts. God is gathering the Jewish people, and he's causing them to flourish in the desert, but it takes the very best they have. There are young men and women when they graduate high school serve in the military; the women for two years, the guys for three. They don't stand on some distant reserve post. They stand on the front lines with some of the most violent expressions of hatred in our world. They are a nation in constant vigilance. I hear us talk about war fatigue in our nation. I understand, I know that it's appropriate, but Israel fails to exist if they don't stand in vigilance.
Before we go, I wanna pray that God will give you the courage to step out of the crowd, to be willing to be different because of your faith in a way that will enable you to lay up great treasure in heaven. We'll need the help of the Spirit of God to do that. Let's pray:
Father, I thank you for the privilege of having this time together, of opening your Word. I pray that you will cause it to come alive within us and that you would give us the boldness and the courage to step out of the crowd and to be bold advocates for Jesus of Nazareth. It's in his name we pray, amen.