Eisenach Pentecost 9
Jeremiah 23:25-29 July 17, 2016
Dear Friends in Christ,
This morning’s sermon theme is one that has been a favorite of military strategists for generations. Though we do not know who the first person to say it was, this phrase, “Know Your Enemy” goes back in principle for thousands of years. Successful generals from all nations have heeded these words and learned their enemy’s strengths and weaknesses so that they might find a way to defeat them or at the very least, not be defeated themselves.
And even though we can see the wisdom in this message and even though we can understand the basic principle behind it, it is one of those things that is easier to say than to do. It is easy to say “know your enemy” and to understand the great benefit it brings in being able to spot the enemy a mile away. We understand how easy it is to say we should know all of our enemy’s various quirks and strengths and weaknesses. We understand that it is easy to say we should know where our enemy is at all times that we would never be taken by surprise by anything that our enemy might do.
But as every generation that has ever been to war can tell you, this is much easier said than done. For our generation, if we had really known our enemy, we never would have been attacked on 9/11, or at our Embassies or at the USS Cole. For the previous generation, if they had really known their enemy, Pearl Harbor would have never occurred. For the generation before that, the sinking of the Lusitanian would have never been the start of WWI. And as we continue back in history, 20/20 hindsight makes it easy to see when people have failed to follow this maxim and truly know their enemy.And as they have all found, it is easy thing to say “know your enemy” but it is a hard thing to put it into practice.
And the reason that we are looking at this whole idea of knowing our enemy is that whether you know it or not, right now you are at war. You are at war not in the physical sense that you may be drafted or that your house may be bombed or that Northwest Indiana might be invaded, but rather you are at war in the spiritual sense that as a Child of God, as someone who calls them self a Christian, we are fighting against Satan and all those who oppose the will of God. And I don’t want you to brush this off as a small matter about our occasional battles and skirmishes which we face from time to time. This is not just a reference to the neighbor who laughs at us for being Christian or the relative that chides us for our stand on Close Communion or our belief in Church Fellowship. What I am referring to is the fact that all who bear the mark of Christ as His disciples are in an all out war with Satan. Day after day, 24-7 and 365 we are fighting for our very lives and the lives of the ones we love against an enemy who has not taken even one moment’s rest since his first victory against Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And even though it has been over 6000 years since that first fight, Satan, that old evil foe, shows no sign of letting up but in many ways appears stronger than ever.
And for you and I who do not wish to be overthrown by Satan or to have our eternal live taken from us by the deceit and trickery and lies that Satan uses so well, we need to heed the only saying and “know our enemy.” We need to know who Satan is and what Satan does. We need to know how he disguises himself and how he works to deceive and trick us. We need to know where he is hiding and where he likes to wait in ambush. We need to truly know our enemy because our very life eternal depends on it.
Our theme is one that encourages us to “KNOW YOUR ENEMY.” And as we begin to know more about Satan as the old evil foe, we first see that I. HE WORKS TO MISLEAD and secondly II. HE IS EASILY DEFEATED.
Now as we consider this first part of our message from God with the encouragement to know our enemy, and how the main goal of Satan is to deceive and mislead, we have our Lord speaking to one of His most faithful prophets, the prophet Jeremiah. And even though Jeremiah preached to people that “hearing they would not hear and seeing they would not see” he still preached the Word of God. He still went out with the hope of defeating the enemy, Satan, and winning more souls for everlasting life. Though he knew that the people were already deceived by Satan, he tried to teach them the truth.
But we find that as Jeremiah would come to the Children of Israel with the clear word of God and a sound “Thus says the Lord,” the people did not want to listen. They did not want to here Jeremiah’s message because they were more interested in the message of the false prophets who were bringing a different message. For whenever Jeremiah would say that the Lord was going to bring destruction for their sins, the false prophets would say that God was going to bring them peace because of His mercy. When Jeremiah said that the Babylonians were coming to take them captive, the false prophets said that God was going to protect them. And even when the Babylonians did come, and Jeremiah preached that the people must surrender if they wanted to live, the false prophets said to rebel or flee. At every turn, when Jeremiah would prophecy the truth, when He would tell them God’s Word, the false prophets would come speaking a message that sounded good, but was an out and out lie.
For many of the people, this was a very confusing thing. They didn’t know who was preaching the truth because they thought the false prophets were also from God. They thought that since their message was “godly” in the way it sounded, it must be true. They were torn between the two and the reason for this indecision was that they did not know their enemy. They did not understand that Satan works very hard to mislead people and to take them away from God.
God spoke right to this point when He said through Jeremiah, “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams which everyone tells his neighbor, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal.”
For those people of Israel, the deception worked. The majority of God’s people were lost because they believed Satan instead of God. They did not know their enemy and they fell for His best and most used trick. For there is one thing we must always remember about Satan and that is when something works, he keeps on using it. He deceived Eve on the basis of God’s Word and he deceived the Israelites on the basis on the Word and he will try his best to deceive you as well.
And don’t think that Satan is going to come forward in bold manner presenting to you a brand new doctrine and a whole new lifestyle. Satan is much more cunning than that. Satan is going to work on you using the Word of God that you know and love. He will come to you through false teachers who will try to tell you that since the times have changed, the Word of God has changed. They will bring message of tolerance and love and getting along which sounds so very good. They will claim that we must tolerate the behavior of others to live with whomever they want and to have sex with whatever they want. They will say that it is not loving to deny women as pastors or to forbid someone to take the Lord’s Supper. They will come forward will all kinds of “logical” arguments to convince us, all the while conveniently forgetting the basic truth of God’s Word that declares God’s stern demand for perfection and that we are to be holy because He is holy.
But if this is not bad enough, Satan is also going to work through our own sinful flesh. He is going to work on us so that our own minds and our imaginations will come up with dreams and visions and ideas that are contrary to the Word of God. For when we come up with the idea that we can skip church because we have gone so often in the past, we are not obeying God but we are following the dreams and visions of the enemy of God. When we excuse our sins by saying everybody does it, everybody breaks the speed limit, everybody cheats on their takes, everybody disobeys their parents, then we have fallen prey to the enemy and are carrying out his will and obeying his commands rather than gladly listening to what God has to say.
But my friends, this does not have to be the life of the Christ. We have not been called by God to be prey for Satan nor have we been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ to blindly go after every lie that crosses our path. God has called us to be His own that we might then live as His. We are on the side of the Lord in the battle against Satan. We are here to fight the good fight and struggle against the devils and demons of this world even as Christ fought against them and won. For in His death on the cross, the victory was sealed and Satan was defeated.
And since this is the case, since Satan was defeated, there is no reason for us to fall prey to the wiles of a loser. There is no reason for us to be taken in by someone who was defeated for all eternity. No, especially since we have in our possession the same tool, the same weapon, the same power that Christ had when He defeated Satan once and for all. For listen to what God says to Jeremiah. He says, “The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream; And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat?” says the Lord. “Is not My word like a fire?” says the Lord, “And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”
The message is that you and I have the word of God. We have the weapon that defeated Satan the first time and made salvation a possibility and it can defeat Satan in our lives to make our salvation a reality, for there is no way that we can defeat Satan on our own. There is no way we who were conceived in sin can withstand the Lord of Sin. We need more and that more is the Word that like a fire. The more is the Word that like a hammer that can crush anything in its way. We need what God has to offer us and that is the truth of our sins and the Grace of our Savior. In this we have hope and in this we have life.
But there is one problem with this, and the problem is that we need to know what that Word is. We need to know the differences between the lies and the truth, between what God has really said and what Satan is twisting to use against us. We need to study our Bibles, to join together in worship and to be willing to hear what the Word is telling us.
It is only in this way that you and I can reap the victory of Christ and see the defeat of Satan as our enemy. It is a battle that is going on every day of our lives and it is a battle for what we hold most dear, our immortal souls and where they will spend eternity. When you see life as this great struggle, you will see the need to fight hard against the enemy who is daily deceiving millions to leave life eternal for the death that is already his because of the victory of Christ. Amen.
Jeremiah 23:25-29
25 “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ 26 “How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, 27 “who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams which everyone tells his neighbor, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal. 28 “The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream; And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat?” says the Lord. 29 “Is not My word like a fire?” says the Lord, “And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?