The Purchased field

All right, let's stand. Great God in heaven, our Father, we thank you for this opportunity to be alive, to be here, for breath and strength, for healthy bodies and sound minds, for a beautiful day and a place to gather. We thank you for all these blessings, Lord. We thank you for salvation in the Lord Jesus, and we pray, Lord, that we could just faithfully walk in your ways and be fruitful in the knowledge of you and in obedience to you, Lord, that your name could be glorified. We pray that you would convict us of all evil. Help us to cleanse our hearts and make straight the paths. We pray that as individuals and as an assembly, we could live in such a way that you delight to be with us and make your name abide here with us, and that you wouldn't be ashamed of us, Lord, and in whatever ways you are ashamed, Lord, please help us and convict us and be merciful to us and show us your ways. And be with us now today, Lord. We pray for your presence here, that your spirit would guide us. We pray for Brother Walter as he shares later on. Just fill him with your spirit and give us give us good edification, and I pray for the things we want to look at here in the opening. Give us ears to hear, hearts to understand. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Last evening, I was browsing through the book of Jeremiah, and I came across a passage I was really blessed with. And just though I've read this passage before, I saw something in it I'd never seen before. A parallel between Jeremiah and what he did here and Jesus Christ. That I think is a strikingly close parallel, and I just never picked up on it before. It's in the Septuagint. It's Jeremiah 39, and if you're using a Masoretic text, it's Jeremiah 32. I'll read verses 1 to 15. The word came from the Lord to Jeremiah in the 10th year of King Zedekiah of Judah. This was the 18th year of the King Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. And the forces of the King of Babylon's army made a fortification against Jerusalem. And Jeremiah was kept in court of the prison which was in the king's house, in which King Zedekiah shut him up, saying, why do you prophesy? Saying, thus says the Lord. Behold, I give this city into the hand of the King of Babylon, and he shall take it. Zedekiah shall not escape from the hand of the Chaldeans, for he shall surely be delivered into the hands of the King of Babylon. He shall speak with him face to face and see him eye to eye. Then Zedekiah shall go to Babylon and dwell there. He's saying those are the things the Prophet Jeremiah has been saying. And King Zedekiah shut him up and said, why do you prophesy these things? Verse 6. And again, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying, behold, Hanimal the son of Shalom, your father's brother, will come to you saying, buy yourself my field in Anathoth, for you have the right to receive it as a possession. So Hanimal the son of Shalom, my father's brother, came to me in the court of the prison and said to me, buy my field in Anathoth, which is in the land of Benjamin. The right to buy it is yours, and you are the elder. So I knew this was the word of the Lord. Thus, I bought the field from Hanimal, the son of my father's brother, and weighed out 17 shekels of silver, and I wrote it in a book and sealed it, took the testimony of witnesses and weighed the money on the scales. Then I took the book of the purchase that was sealed and gave it to Beruk, the son of Neriah, son of Masiah, Masiah, in the sight of Hanimal, the son of my father's brother, and in the sight of the men who stood by and who signed the purchase deed, and in the sight of the Jews in the court of the prison. Then I charged Beruk in the sight, in their sight, saying, thus says the Lord Almighty, take this purchase deed, and the deed that was read, and put it in an earthen vessel that it may remain many days. For thus says the Lord, even fields, houses, and vineyards shall be possessed in this land. So, so I don't remember the year here, but, but this is, this is, this is in the southern kingdom. This is in, in the land of Judah, and, and, and, and, and Jeremiah has been preaching. He has been warning. He has been prophesying of the destruction that's going to come because of the sinfulness of Judah. And, and, and including in his prophecy, he has also been saying that, that he, God will, God will drive you out into all the nations. But, but then, in a, in due time, he will bring a remnant back from, from the nations where he has driven you in his fury. He will bring them back, and they shall again safely dwell here in the land, and be fruitful. and King Zedekiah and the people got tired of Jeremiah. He's, he's been preaching, and he's been warning, and he's been crying, and he's been pleading. In, in one place in Jeremiah, I think, I think it says that he was, his, his message was such a message of doom and gloom that, that the hands of the men of war were weakened. People that would sit there, and listen to him, and his, his predictions would lose heart, and get discouraged. Um, and, and, uh, and, and, and, and they got tired of him, and so they shut him up in prison. So that's where, that's where Jeremiah sits, and, and then, uh, at, at the very time that Babylon was laying siege against Jerusalem, they had surrounded this city. They were attacking it, making their way in here. It, during that very time that that was happening on the outside, here comes, uh, Jeremiah's cousin, Hannibal, and wants to sell his field to Jeremiah. Uh, because, okay, so, so in Israel, when God, when God gave the land of Israel to, to, when God gave the land of Canaan to Israel, he gave it to them, and they divided it up by families, and tribes, and so forth. And he, it was his will that the land would never be sold forever, that it would, that it would remain with those families and tribes, okay? They were not supposed to sell it, but sometimes, hard times came. Sometimes a guy accumulated a lot of debt. Sometimes he maybe, whatever, mismanaged. Maybe, whatever happened, hard times come, and a guy, and a, and a landowner had no choice but to sell his land, so that he had something to buy food, or maybe to do whatever he wanted to do. But, but if that happened, according to the law, it was supposed to be that, that the next person in kin to him, closest kin to him, would redeem that land. And he would, he would pay the current owner a sum of money to get the piece of land back into the, into the rightful family. Okay, that, that was just what was supposed to happen. Okay, now, now here's, here's this man, Hanimal, and he has this piece of, he has this field. He needs to sell it. He's in, probably in dire straits. He might need money for food. Who knows? But he comes to Jeremiah in prison, and he asks him to buy this land, because he was next, he was the next closest relative. And, and, and, uh, Jeremiah did it. He, I mean, this is a strange deal, right? It's a strange purchase. Like, the field, the field is in the land of Benjamin. It's, it's like three miles outside of Jerusalem. It's probably already in ruins. If, if the Babylonian army has been working on besieging this land, working from the outside in, if it's not in ruins, it's at least already in the Babylonians' possession. And, and this field is out there. Jeremiah's in prison. The, the city walls are being hammered on. Everything is about to crumble, and they make this deal. It's, it's kind of a strange purchase. And yet, uh, it kind of seems like a worthless purchase, almost. But, but right during this impending destruction of Jerusalem, while he's in prison, Jeremiah swings the deal. He shells out the 17 shekels of silver. He pays it to Hannibal. They write up the legal deeds, the legal descriptions, uh, in, in, in the, in the presence of witnesses. They, they sign all these things. He, he gives these, these deeds to Baruch, and he says, put them in an earthen vessel and seal it. Uh, for, seal it, put it in an earthen vessel so that it can be kept for many days. After all, there is coming a day in which people are going to come back here. And just, I think what he was saying is, don't, don't just leave these deeds where the wind and the fires and whatever can destroy them. Put them somewhere. Once this remnant comes back, um, we can maybe find this clay jar, and, and find the, find the legal description, the legal deeds in there on, on where this piece of land, or who it belongs to. Uh, now, that is a pretty big statement of faith for Jeremiah. He, he really believed in this promise. Uh, in spite of all the odds stacked against him right then and there, he believed this thing. But I also think I see a, a strikingly close parallel to, to, to Jesus and, and the ransom that he paid to purchase us. And this is, this is maybe one of my favorite subjects in, in theology. Um, like Jeremiah, Jesus came here with the message from God to the people. And he warned them of the judgment to come, as well as the promises for the faithful. Um, because the people just couldn't bear listening to what Jesus had to say, it was too much. They crucified him. And he went into Hades, in, into the, the prison of the dead. And, and there he paid the price, or paid the ransom to purchase us back, or to redeem us. See, the, the wages of sin is death. But the price that we have to pay in order to sin is death. That's the price. The day in which we eat the fruit, or the day in which we, we break the law of God, that day we will surely die. That is the wage, the wages of sin is death. And all of us have sinned. All of us have eaten that fruit. All of us are worthy of death. All of us, um, have been sold as a slave unto sin. And, and Satan, the master of death, has taken possession of mankind. He has a claim on us. Now Jesus comes, and he never sins. He, that, that, that wage of sin, he does not, he does not owe it. Uh, and, and yet he pays it. He allows himself to die. He pays that price, the price of death, for something he did not owe. And, uh, and, and he, he pays that price to redeem us, and to bring us back to the rightful owner, to the God who owned us in the first place. To redeem means to pay off, or, or to purchase back, or to recover. That's what redeem means. Now, how this transaction took place in Hades, we can imagine a lot. We can speculate a lot. We don't, we don't exactly know. There, there, there, there may have been some kind of a duel between Jesus and the devil, in which, uh, in which the devil bruised his heel, and Satan crushed his head, or the devil bruised his heel, and Jesus crushed his head. Uh, we can speculate that Jesus, how Jesus, um, freed the slaves, freed the captives, those who were held in, in, in the prison house of the devil. We can speculate that perhaps he took the keys of death and hell from Satan. Scripture doesn't give us exactly how all this happened. It gives us little glimpses here and there. What we do know is that Jesus obtained salvation. Salvation. He, in, in, in, in, in the presence of witnesses in the spiritual realm, Satan was defeated. Christ was victorious over the possession of mankind. I think we can safely say that that happened. Scripture bears that out. uh, and this is the Lord's salvation. It is salvation. It is marvelous in our eyes. But the, the best part is yet to come. Remember, remember how Jeremiah, after, after, after Jeremiah made that deal, and they, and the legal transaction was made, Jeremiah said to, to Baruch, take this, take this bead, and put it in this earthen vessel, uh, and keep it. After all, the time will come that this field will be fruitful again. and, and isn't that exactly what Christ does? Isn't that what, what our beloved brother Paul said there in second Corinthians, when he said, for God has commanded the light to shine out of darkness, and has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. This, this treasure, this, this deed, uh, this, this victory that Christ won, he, he is willing, and he wants to put that into us earthen vessels, so that it would last, so that it would produce, so that it, so that it would not just be some, some, some action that happened in the spiritual realm, but that it would, that it would return, and, and, and, and, and be fruitful to the Lord, and bring glory to his name. Right there in the prison, in Hades, in, in spite of the impending destruction that seemed to hang over mankind, Jesus saw something. even though mankind was continuously wayward, stiff-necked, rebellious, Jesus saw that there was a hope for a remnant. There was a hope that a remnant could return to Zion and be fruitful, and so he purchased the field. He, he, he left everything that he had to purchase this field, uh, because it was his prized possession, or his prized pearl, I should say. And, and because Jesus believed that at least a few, at least a few people would not just adapt to the heathen ways and be judged with the nations, but they would see the value of the promised land, they would recognize the redemption that was prayed, paid, and they would return and bear fruit to the glory of the Lord. This, this price that was paid was for all of mankind. For God so loved the world that he gave his life, right? This, this, this thing that Jesus did when he defeated Satan is he freed mankind. But it is only of profit to those who, who would return to him. It, it does no good if a person does not turn from these wicked nations and return to Zion. It's of no value to them. Hmm. What, what a glorious salvation, and how shall we escape if we neglect that salvation? Uh, you know what, I think, I think, uh, right after this in Jeremiah, after this deed was made, after this deal was made, Jeremiah prayed a prayer. And I, I think it would just be fitting for us to pray this prayer. Let's, let's all stand, and I'll just read this, this prayer that Jeremiah said. O Lord, you made heaven and earth. By your great strength and by your high and uplifted arm, there is nothing too hard for you. You grant mercy to the thousands. You repay the sins of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them. The great and mighty God, the Lord of great counsel and powerful in deeds, hmm, the great God, the almighty, the Lord of, of, of great name, your eyes are upon the ways of the sons of men. You give to everyone according to your ways. You did signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. Even to this day and in Israel and among the inhabitants of the earth, you made yourself a name as it is this day. You brought your people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and a high arm and with great visions. You gave them this land which you swore to their fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey. They went, went in and took it, but they did not listen to your voice or walk in your commandments. They did none of the things which you commanded them to do, and it caused all of these calamities to happen to them. Behold, the multitude comes against this city, and the city is given unto the hands of the Chaldeans who wage war against it with the power of sword and famine as you have spoken. Thus it has happened. Amen. You may be seated. Feel free to share any other thoughts or comments or corrections. Thank you, brother Duane. I never thought of that analogy before, but I guess it's it's true about the ransom and the field that Jeremiah bought. It's hard to identify with Jeremiah and Isaiah, some of the prophets that were filled with contempt by the by his contemporaries and they lived such a difficult life and I was thinking of the one similar to that about Daniel. Someone said once that, it was Chuck Pike, Chuck Pike said that Daniel being in the lion's den, that was kind of a type of Jesus being in the grave, right? And then he resurrected from the grave and anyway, it's a blessing to hear that. And I know last night, I don't know if anybody's had it, and Teo, but there was a tornado warning, and so my wife said, we got a call from a neighbor, hey, let's go to the to the shelter, what do you call it? Psalm shelter. And I said, I'm not going. He says, yeah. Let's just pray and sing. So we prayed and sang and it passed over, but I don't know, I mean, you know, but the Lord knows those who are his and everyone who loves the Lord, that the name of the Lord will be glorified and depart from sin. The Lord be magnified. In the beauty of holiness In the beauty of holiness In the beauty of holiness Glory to the Father of glory and mercy Rejoice O God Emmanuel Emmanuel Jehovah Glory Glory Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia O come before His presence and glorify His name O Lord Christ the Lord In the beauty of holiness In the beauty of holiness In the beauty of holiness In the beauty Glory be to Jesus Our gracious Redeemer We praise Him for He loved us and brought a great salvation O Glory Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia O come before His presence and glorify His name O worship the Lord In the beauty of holiness In the beauty of holiness In the beauty of holiness Glory to the Spirit the Holy Redeemer We praise Him with the Father and with the Son our Savior O Glory Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia Alleluia O come before His presence and glorify His name Almighty Maker of my brain Teach me the measure of my days Teach me to know how frail I am And send again unto Thy grace My days are shorter than the span of a little boy my life appears How frail at best this dying man How vain are all his hopes and fears Between this television noise and show They are the cares that drag his mind Beneath the treasures this withhold And lies can leave them all behind Only the noble poor shall ride By God I bow before Thy throne Earth's speaking treasure I resign And place my hopes on Thee alone Dying o'er age of old Filled with despair am I I am beneath the power of my King Only you are all I am Brethren brethren lead me till I find no more Brethren brethren lead me till I find no more When now the crystal fountain once the deep waters flow Let the fiery flowing river lead me on my journey through Some deliver me Thou still my strength and shield Strong deliver me Thou still my strength and shield When I tread the verge of torment Let the anxious fears pass by Bear me through the swelling current Let me save for Canaan's side Songs of praises I will ever give to Thee Songs of praises I will ever give to Thee