This morning we are going to look at three basic things. In these chapters Jeremiah addresses three conditions of the people. The first is God says you are worthless. In the second you are faithless. In the third you are shameless.

What does it mean to be worthless from God’s perspective? It is a tragic indictment of people who began with such promise. The word is repeated many times in Scripture to describe what happens when people follow after worthless things. They become worthless themselves. All the weight, the substance and the value has gone away and the people have become hollow. You know what cavitation is? It is part of stream dynamics that describes the long term effect of water eating away the interior of a boulder in a stream. Over time, while the boulder looks solid from the outside it is completely a shell of rock with no core. It is eventually washed away. Whatever weight it had is gone. I see that in people sometimes. I look in their eyes and realize they are hollow. They have been hollowed out by their own deception and are simply waiting to be washed away in the current. Whatever faith, loyalty, commitment and integrity was there is gone and nothing but a shell remains.

But it is not just personal hollowness. It can be corporate as well. Isaiah says that their assemblies and their constant religious activity was meaningless and worthless. God despises them and they are empty.  Your leadership is worthless and counterfeit. They lead the flock astray and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie. In Lamentations, Jeremiah impugns prophets who no longer tell the truth or expose sin. The priests rule by their own authority with no accountability. People are busy doing religious things but have lost the reality. They may keep on doing those things out of habit or sense of tradition but the exchange has been made and they are worthless.

Why? Because they have followed worthless idols. Too often our view of idolatry and idol worship has been shaped by movies. We think about natives dancing around a fire with their eyes inflamed. There is screaming and chanting and orgies. At the end, of course, there is the sacrifice of the virgin or the stranger. That’s not how idolatry really is. It is more like Tim Keller describes in his book, “Counterfeit Gods.” “The human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them. We think idols are bad things but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs no hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.” What then is an idol? “It is anything that is more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything that you seek to give you what only God can give.” If anything in all the world is more fundamental than God to your happiness, to your meaning in life, then that thing has become an idol. You will pursue that thing with an abandon and intensity that should be reserved for God alone.

Idolatry begins with a legitimate interest that becomes an obsession and then a religion itself.

The book of 1 Kings gives us one of the best descriptions of idolatry. It is the sin of the house of Jeroboam.

Jeroboam understood the nature of people and their attraction to an easy religion. He devised a brilliant strategy to protect his interests. After the split with Judah, he was concerned about the historic ties of his people to Jerusalem, which was in the other kingdom. Jerusalem was central not only to the nation as a capital city but also as the place of worship to which people went with their tithes and offerings several times a year. It was the place that bound everyone together with a common identity. It was one thing to physically fortify the new kingdom – which he did – but there was the larger battle of capturing the loyalty and allegiance of the people. He had to move their hearts and not just their geographic boundaries.

His strategy was brilliant – and fatal.  

“Jeroboam thought to himself, “The kingdom will now likely revert to the house of David. If these people go up to offer sacrifices at the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, they will again give their allegiance to their lord, Rehoboam king of Judah. They will kill me and return to King Rehoboam.”

He puts being a man of the people over being a man of God and his desire to retain power over his responsibility to retain principle. He convinces himself that God cannot do what he said he would do when he called him prior to the death of Solomon. Remember what made Abraham a man of faith? He was fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Rom. 4:21).  

He could have built a wall between the two kingdoms. He could have put up check-points and barriers. He could have suspended all trade between the two kingdoms and made it difficult for anyone to go back and forth. Instead, understanding the binding power of religion being even more permanent than business or politics, he simply took what would draw them to Jerusalem and turned it to his advantage.

He did not outlaw religion or use force to control people or make them martyrs. He did not create a new religion. After all, Solomon had already incorporated idols and foreign gods into the worship practices of Israel. He did not need to take the risk of upsetting anyone with a new heresy. They had already been corrupted by Solomon. He did not have to reverse or challenge their thinking or beliefs. He simply took them one step further that no one even noticed. He gave them the religion they already wanted. Thomas Sowell said, “When you want to help people you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

Every year the Oscars has an award for best actor in a supporting role. Winners have been Walter Brennan (the most of any actor with three awards), Jeff Bridges, Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino. It’s not the same as best actor but close. It still has tremendous value as a boost for their career and recognition as an actor. Idolatry does not necessarily replace God in our lives. What it does is gradually move him to a supporting role – and then votes that God win the award every time.

Jeroboam did the same with true worship of God. God became best in a supporting role. There are signs of the same today in our own country. You may have been following the rise of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point. Until now, it has been essentially a political movement with religious overtones. However, recently it has been merging the Christian message with nationalism. Christianity is playing a supporting role for national identity. It is exactly what Jeroboam did. 

“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”

They are taking it a step further. Many pastors are seeing nationalism not only as a value but as a means to church growth. For example, a church in Phoenix was recently the venue for a political rally.

Inside, the service was heavy on praise and worship music. At the altar call, Brad Baker, one of Dream City’s pastors, told the crowd he dreamed of a U.S. “built on the principles of God.”

“We’re believing that God is going to turn Arizona into a Christian state, and we will be known as a Christian state around the world — that’s our goal,” Baker said to yelps and applause.

The main event, however, was the pulpit talk given by Charlie Kirk. He began with an impassioned defense of Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who had been fired days before, praising a video Carlson posted to Twitter after his show was canceled, in which he held forth the importance of truth in media.

“That is Christianity — that is the promise of Christ,” Kirk said.

Events like Dream City’s “Freedom Night” are becoming more regular at evangelical megachurches. A few weeks earlier, Kirk appeared at Awaken Church in San Marcos, California, where he listed the founding of the U.S. alongside Christ’s resurrection in a litany of the “most important events in history.” And a few weeks before that, he spoke at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, where he chastised Christians who have “gone along” with the “environmental agenda” because of “bad theology.”

His speeches satisfy the longstanding evangelical co-mingling of right-wing politics and Christian ministry, but TPUSA is also pitching a turn toward the culture war and what critics say is Christian nationalism as a way to fill the pews — and in places like Phoenix, it looks like it’s working.

Some pastors will say, ‘If I speak out on this, I will lose attendance, I will lose tithes and offerings,’” Kirk said, according to a video of the event. After initially shrugging off this prospect with a “So what?” Kirk doubled back, saying, “But that’s actually not true. Because I look around the room right now, (and) the pastors that I know that have taken the boldest stands over the last two years have actually seen their attendance grow. They need bigger buildings. Their tithes and offerings have increased.”

They have put Christ into a supporting role.

Another form of idolatry that begins with a legitimate interest that becomes an obsession and then a religion is personal fulfillment and self-realization. Finding our identity is something completely normal and healthy. We all have an interest in that. Some find it early and for some it is later in life. However, for some people personal identity and self-realization becomes an obsession that drives out the healthy interest and replaces it with a permanent and insatiable appetite for more self-knowledge that soon becomes such a fascination with self that every other relationship is sacrificed. There is nothing wrong with Myers-Briggs, Strength Finders and Enneagrams but when they become an obsession they soon put other people, God and his interests into the category of a supporting role – even if it is best actor in a supporting role.

Many other things in our lives can begin as legitimate interests: financial security, children and grandchildren, work and career, even philanthropy and doing good that can become unhealthy obsessions but they do not become idols. I have met people who have made philanthropy and doing good works as obsessions. They think if they give more time or more money then they will be happy and find meaning in life. I give and give and maybe give millions of dollars but still feel hollow on the inside. 

What is the second condition? They were faithless. It does not say they were religionless but faithless. 2 Kings 17:41 puts it this way, “Even while these people were worshiping the Lord, they were serving their idols.” There was a revival of all kinds of religion and not just a revival of true religion. God tells them more religion is not necessarily a good thing – only more worship of the true God. The rest is simply meaningless and empty activity. They wanted options and freedom to choose their religion. They did not want to serve God but to have a religion that served them and catered to their needs. They wanted to baptize their practical values. They did not want to be limited or constrained but free to roam from one god to another with an endless desire for novelty. I love what Shelby Foote says, “Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.” Even our gods must constantly change and give us variety to keep our interest and attention. Our gods must keep entertaining us – literally “distracting” us. Judah had lost the ability to be faithful to anything in their desire to be free of constraints.

Faithlessness leads to Judah’s third condition – shamelessness. “From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain, prophets and priest alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Psalm 12:8 reads, “The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men.” It’s true, isn’t it? When vileness is normalized and even admired then everything becomes more offensive and disgraceful.  Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all.” (Jeremiah 6:13-15) If you turn to Romans 1, Paul describes a similar situation – people who have lost their ability to be ashamed. There are only two options for a shameless world. The first is Genesis before the Fall when there was no need for shame. The second is Romans and Jeremiah where shame is not tolerated. We know there is bad shame – the kind that is used to raise children by humiliation.  But without good shame – literally the word comes from the word for “cover” – we create a toxic culture. A world without shame is a world without moral boundaries. Studies of Nazi methods have shown how they broke down people’s natural aversion to doing awful things and they found the last barrier is natural shame. If they could eliminate that they could make them do anything they wished. They could even make them proud of shameful behavior.  I don’t follow Dr. Joyce Brothers but she has some good things to say about this. “Rather than increasing our self-esteem, the suppression of shame does just the opposite: the lowering of our sights causes a deep discomfort. Where there is unrestrained exposure of one’s emotions and of one’s body, a parading of secrets, a wanton intrusion of curiosity, it becomes increasingly difficult to express tender feelings, feelings of respect, of awe, of idealization, of reverence. The culture of shamelessness is also the culture of irreverence, of debunking and devaluing ideals. If we run from shame we may successfully avoid humiliation but are dogged by a deep sense of anxiety instead. Maybe it is time to invite the useful aspects of shame back into our culture. Shame is, after all, ultimately related to virtue, a word that also is not used much anymore but continues to have meaning. “The only shame is to have none,” wrote the philosopher Blaise Pascal centuries ago. We ought to keep his words in mind.” 

Not every healthy interest becomes an obsession. Not every unhealthy obsession becomes an idol which turns Christ into a supporting actor. But all of us need to be careful that we do not go down that path Jeremiah describes and we, like Judah and Israel, become not only worthless but faithless and shameless when what is vile is honored and supported among men. 

The Church’s one foundation is not:

The Ten Commamdments

The Magna Carta

The Rights of Man

The Constitution

The Second Amendment

The Baptist Faith and Message

The Westminster Confession

The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord