Allen Jackson - They Soon Forgot - Part 1
I wanna continue the study we’ve been doing on leading with our faith, and the title for this session is «They Soon Forgot». I had something I felt like the Lord put on my heart, but it was hard to get it to paper. I have rewritten this more than is my normal habit, so we’re gonna kinda find out together. But our Bible reading, if you do the reading with us, and I hope you do, there’s, there’s such a value in that. We’re in the Book of Lamentations right now, and when I began reading that, it’s in a very emotional book. I just pulled the first two verses from the opening chapter of Lamentations.
Do you remember who wrote the Book of Lamentations, who it’s credited to? Jeremiah. It’s a book of laments. It’s a book of expressions of grief because Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is in disarray. There’s been tremendous loss, and the glory of Israel seems to have been set aside. And the Book of Lamentations is the grief that Jeremiah is expressing at what has beset the people of God. And it’s very clear as he writes it that he doesn’t imagine it’s the result of a foreign nation or a foreign army. It’s the hand of God. And perhaps that’s what captured my attention. It’s what I think is appropriate for us in this season of our own lives together is to understand that God is both the one who blesses and the one who judges, and you want to lead your life very mindful of those two expressions of the character of God.
But we’ll read these two verses: «How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations! She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave. Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are upon her cheeks. Among all her lovers there is none to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies». It’s a very sobering thing when the people of God ignore his expressions of mercy and grace. We shouldn’t imagine that the grace or the mercy of God are infinite. They’re not without end. If they were without end, we wouldn’t have books like the Book of Lamentations. If the grace and mercy of God were infinite, we wouldn’t have stories like the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. But they are not infinite.
There are limits to those things, and we have to lead our lives with the awareness that while we are a tremendous beneficiaries of the grace and mercy of God that he also expects of us a willingness to respond to him. In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 21, Jesus is speaking, and he’s speaking of John the Baptist here. He said, «John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him,» he’s speaking to religious leaders in Jerusalem, «John came to show you the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did».
Probably the two most public categories of people that would have been readily identified as ungodly would have been the tax collectors and the prostitutes, and he said, «The tax collectors and the prostitutes responded to God before you did». That is not a compliment. For those of you who think Jesus was always kind, he was in their business on this day. And then he said, «And even after you saw this, you didn’t repent and believe him». Jesus’s expectation of the people is that when mercy is visible, God’s people should repent and believe.
Now, I think we have to pull that idea into our own lives. God has been good to us. I believe in recent weeks, we have seen an expression of the mercy of God. I think it may have been reflected in the political realm, but I don’t think of it in terms of a political victory. What I witnessed in this election cycle was the heartland of America, the flyover country, the people that are typically overlooked that are ignored until it’s time to try to solicit votes, and it seemed to me that in the small towns and villages and communities across our nation, people gave it the public expression that we’re not going in the best direction. And you say, «Well, that was obvious».
Well, it isn’t always so obvious because we haven’t had a response like that in decades. And I believe only the grace and mercy of God could stir the hearts of people to respond. We’re very easily distracted. So my concern is that in the midst of this expression of the mercy of God that we simply don’t fold our arms and go, «Okay, we’ve chosen a new set of leaders. We’ll send them off to see if they can do better». We don’t wanna be bothered with change. We don’t want to be bothered with responsibility. I don’t believe we have that luxury as the people of God.
In Psalm 106, God is reminding the people of the responses of an earlier generation, the Exodus generation, those people that started as slaves in Egypt and found their way, ultimately, on the entry point to the Promised Land. In Psalm 106 and verse 10 it says, «God saved them from the hand of the foe; from the hand of the enemy he redeemed them. The waters covered their adversaries; and not one of them survived». What’s the psalmist talking about? The Red Sea. He said God drowned the enemies of the people. They were terrified when they saw the Egyptian army decide to come after them. And the pillar of fire and cloud moved between the Israelites and the Egyptian army through the night, and God caused the wind to blow.
The sea parted and they escaped, and then when the Egyptian army decided to follow after them, the waters collapsed, and they saw their adversaries drown. Finally, on the opposite side of the Red Sea, they were free from the influence of Egypt. In verse 12, God says, «Then they believed his promises and sang his praise». There’s Miriam’s song. Some of you will remember it. It says the women took tambourines and danced before the Lord when they saw their enemies drowned in the Red Sea. Verse 13: «But they soon forgot what God had done and did not wait for his counsel. In the desert they gave into their craving; In the wasteland they put God to the test. So he gave them what they ask for, but sent a wasting disease upon them. In the camp they grew envious of Moses and Aaron, who was consecrated to the Lord. The earth opened up and swallowed Dathan; it buried the company of Abiram. And fire blazed among their followers; a flame consumed the wicked».
Verse 13 is the pivot point. It says after all the remarkable miracles, the plagues on Egypt, and the supernatural deliverance, they plundered Egypt. They took the gold and silver of Egypt with them as they left. They walked through the Red Sea on dry ground, but it says, the psalmist said, «But they soon forgot what God had done and they didn’t wait for his counsel». I feel like we are in a very important season of our lives, and I’m concerned that we imagine someone else should do something. If the Exodus generation soon forgot, if they didn’t wait for God’s advice, if they gave into their cravings, these are the language of the psalmist, if they put God to the test.
Ultimately, they died in the wilderness. They never made it into the Promised Land. It had nothing to do with God’s ability, God’s desire, God’s will. God had told 'em he was taking 'em out of Egypt to take them into the Promised Land, but when they got to the shores of the Jordan River and they sent the spies in, the report came back and they said, «It’s an amazing place, but it’s not gonna be easy». Remember that? Twelve spies, ten of the spies said, «We don’t wanna do this».
Joshua and Caleb were two of the spies that said, «This is doable. The God who’s done all these other things for us, that’s feeding us manna, that brought us water from a rock, that parted of the Red Sea, God can complete what he’s begun. We can occupy this land». And the other people said, «We’re outgunned. They’re more sophisticated than we are. Their cities are defended too well. We don’t wanna do this». And God got angry with them, and he said, «I will give you what you’ve asked for. You’ll die in the desert».
My concern for the people of faith is that we will be reluctant to reorient our lives to do the heavy lift that is in front of us, to engage our culture, to engage our family systems, to talk to our friends, to stop winking at ungodliness. I would submit to you that we wrongly imagine politicians initiate culture. I believe politicians are a reflection of the people. So when I look at our nation, I don’t think it’s a political mess. I think it’s a spiritual mess. I think when we have open borders and multiplied millions of illegal immigrants, it’s an expression of lawlessness because we’ve cast off restraint ourselves. We don’t want to be encumbered by biblical principles. We don’t wanna be limited by those boundaries that God would bring to our lives.
We have new definitions of marriage that have been institutionalized in our legal system, but that would have never happened until the people of faith had capitulated, until we decided we weren’t going to engage any longer, that we would stand on the sidelines and it wasn’t our problem. We didn’t need to use our voice while human sexuality was redefined and pushed into our faces as a part of all the public broadcasting, and the messaging, and the entertainment industry, and what’s moral and immoral is completely redefined and turned upside down.
And we’re told that a biblical worldview of human sexuality is out of date, a little out of touch, a little old-fashioned. I read the statistics. I see the surveys. There is very little discernible difference in behaviors between people who attend church and people who don’t. We have to change. We’ve been willing to sacrifice our children. We’ve sacrificed them through abortion. We’ve sacrificed them to gender confusion and mutilation. We have allowed schools to stop teaching and begin indoctrinating. We’ve watched violence escalate to the point that for all the language around safety and security, we all understand that fundamentally we are not as safe as we once were.
I’ve been in more than 20 American cities in recent months, and in city after city, they tell us we shouldn’t go outside. We’ve diminished the dignity of work. Overwhelming percentages of people no longer… Work is no longer considered something to be held up as valuable. It’s not an expression of character. It’s to be avoided at almost all costs. All of those things fall under the umbrella of what comes from a biblical worldview, salt and light in a culture. And as much as we pray for those that are being sent to positions of authority across our nation, from cities and towns and states to Washington, D.C., and we hope they’ll enact principles and put policies in place that will reflect the biblical worldview, it will only happen in proportion to the degree that the people of God continue to use their voice, that we engage, that we live out those principles.
I think we have to grapple with the reality that evil exists. The simplest definition I would know to give you is that evil is understood as that which opposes the purposes of God. My brother and I attended Oral Roberts University, and Oral Roberts was in the habit of saying that «God’s a good God and the devil is a bad devil». As a very sophisticated college student, I thought he was too simplistic. As a less sophisticated person these days, I think he had a pretty good handle on the challenges that face us. God is good, and the devil is destructive. And evil, when you participate with it, will lead you to destruction every time.
So much of what is presented to us in our current culture is a reflection of an ungodly perspective. An ideology which does not conform to biblical principles is celebrated these days as conventional wisdom. It’s infiltrated our churches, our Christian universities. I’m not talking about secular universities. Our Christian universities very seldom any longer hold boundaries around biblical morality, biblical worldview, ideas and behaviors which are motivated by something other than the Spirit of God. If you’ll allow me, I believe it’s sourced in evil. I don’t know how to separate it from these cycles that capture us as a people.
We spend a billion dollars in 90 days on messaging. You’d be extraordinarily naive to think that those messages don’t impact you. Enormous amounts of money and effort around elections and politicians, the selection of people who have the authority to make laws and established policy. Elections in our nation are tend to be a reflection of the will of the people when they’re conducted fairly. We still live with this notion of a majority rule. The people become the directing force. The values, desires, intent of the people is to be reflected in those chosen to have authority over us. So if we find ourselves increasingly immoral, and increasingly lawless, and increasingly ungodly, we have to understand those things have flourished in the hearts of the citizens.
And I think we have to recognize this remarkable expression of mercy and grace from God when there is an inordinate number of people who respond and say, «We need another direction». God’s been good to us. And the great temptation is to think, «Well, we stood up. Now, we wanna go sit down. I’m tired. Make the noise stop. I don’t want to think about it anymore. It’s somebody else’s problem now». This notion of an exercise in self-government is a very radical concept. Historically, in nation after nation, authority has resided in the hands of a few. The general population was dismissed and disregarded. Typically, they’ve been considered to be too uneducated, lacking the sophistication or the common sense necessary to establish law and policy. The United States has been a most unique experiment. I could give you many examples, more than you’d want to sit through. I’ll give you a simple one.
In England, for many years, the king and the nobility owned all of the game in the land. Therefore, it was illegal for the common people to hunt. The game didn’t belong to them. When you read the letters and the things about the people who began to immigrate to North America, the fact that they could go into the woods and hunt was an unimagined expression of freedom. That seems foreign to us today because we’re so familiar with this notion of equality before the law, an egalitarian notion that each person is entitled to a vote. I believe Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president. One of the greatest speeches in American history was what he delivered at Gettysburg. It’s very short. Don’t be encouraged. It’s much shorter than my sermons. But I wanna read a couple of sentences. He said, «Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal».
Lincoln is the president of the United States in the midst of the Civil War, the bloodiest war in our history as a people. When he’s invited to Gettysburg, he stands up with the acknowledgment of God as a creator. It’s a very significant concept. We shouldn’t imagine we would ever accept being separated from that, that God is our Creator, that we’ve been created equal. From that principle, we’ve arrived at notions like the equality before the law, the sanctity of human life, the protection of the weak. You see, if there is no Creator God, if we set Almighty God aside, and we think human beings will be kind to one another, now we are on that slippery slope that will lead us to authoritarian domination and control. There’s a lengthy history of human civilization. What we’ve experienced in these exercises in freedom and liberty have been derived from a biblical worldview and nothing else.
Lincoln went on to say, and I quote, «The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth».
Lincoln understood that they weren’t just having a political debate, that it wasn’t about political parties, that the values that shaped the hearts of the people would determine the future. And in the midst of the suffering, and the grief, and the tremendous division, he stood. He ultimately gave his life to remind us of the values that this is a nation under God, that the imagination that there could be a new birth of freedom comes from the throne of God, not from the will of men or from political parties, that we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and that in that way, we stand united under God. We have never been a uniquely Christian nation.
I’m not arguing that we should be. I believe that biblical worldview that shaped our legal system, and our founding documents, and the vision of the founders enabled us to be a place where a diverse set of beliefs could flourish, but the values that bind us together are derived from the Word of God. And if the church of Jesus Christ doesn’t have the courage to express that in every generation and stand for those values and those principles, I assure you we will forfeit our liberty and freedom, just as certainly as the covenant people of God in Jerusalem lost their liberty and freedom, just as certainly as the Exodus generation, a group who saw more supernatural expressions of the power of God than any group of people in history and yet they came to the place and they said, «The price is too high, the challenge is too great, it’s too difficult. We don’t wanna do this anymore. We want an easier way».
I don’t believe we can afford that luxury. If we’re going to have extensions of freedom and liberty, we, the people of faith, must make choices that bring the blessings of God to our generation. I think we have to be honest. We’re gonna face some rather significant challenges. Change is very difficult. There is a tremendous power to the status quo. There is a gravitational pull of the familiar to pull us back into what’s comfortable, what’s familiar, what’s understood, and it will take effort, determination, energy, perseverance in order to initiate new ideas to help our children and young people break free from what has been taught them in our most celebrated institutions of learning for several decades now.
There’s seldom a week that goes past where I don’t talk to families who sent their children off to some university setting with high expectations and they returned having been robbed of their biblical worldview. How long will we tolerate this? How long will we fund this? How long will we sit idly by? I’m not suggesting violence, but we should stop applauding evil. It is wicked! I hear two statements repeatedly that suggest that we’re not fully awake, that we’re not fully aware. It’s as if we’re still groggy, trying to, to clear our heads from a deep sleep. The first is something along this line: «Now,» people say. We’ve been listening to this for a few days now, a few weeks. «Now I believe the legacy media will begin a more balanced reporting of the facts».
We’re gonna turn the corner now. The people have expressed an opinion. And the second thing that is repeated with equal frequency and determination is those advocating for ideas which were rejected are going to learn and adapt to embrace the ideas which were broadly supported. That requires a remarkable determination to avoid reality to hold those two ideas. It requires either a willful ignorance or a forced determination to refuse to acknowledge what is apparent before us. We’ve been on this path for decades. It hasn’t happened overnight. It hasn’t happened in a week. I’m a product of public education in this nation. I’ve had the privilege of studying at some celebrated institutions, and I can tell you, for decades, they’ve been advocating ungodly things. I can tell you that in the theology schools, they have not embraced the authority of Scripture or the uniqueness of Jesus. They would openly mock you if you talked about being saved. It’s not new, folks. Watch what’s happening around us.
I wanna take a minute to pray before we go.
Father, I thank you that you love us. I thank you that you, that in your great mercy and compassion, you have made a way for us to be at peace with the Creator of all things, that you’re not angry with us, that you are not resentful of us, that you have welcomed us into your kingdom and made peace with us through Jesus Christ. I thank you for that today. Nothing’s hidden from you, no part of our past, no thought within us, and yet you love us. May that love grow in us every day and bring a boldness and a courage within us to face the challenges before us, in Jesus’s name, amen.