A Burning Book

I think one of the most interesting of the Old Testament prophets is the prophet Jeremiah. The prophet Jeremiah is compared to the Lord Jesus, for both of them were rejected by their brethren, and both were weeping creatures. Jeremiah chapter 36.

Jeremiah chapter 36. Now, I want you to get comfortable, because I'm going to read the entire chapter to you. If you'll keep in mind that the Babylonians have defeated the Egyptians and are storming their way to Judah, and they have already made a certain amount of conquest, and the king who was reigning was only at the grace of the conquerors, it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, that this word came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Take thee a scroll of a book, and write in it all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel and against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spoke unto thee, from the days of Josiah, even unto this day, which would be about twenty-three years of ministry.

It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them, that they may return every man from his evil way, that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. Then Jeremiah called Beiruth, the son of Neriah, and Beiruth wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord which he had spoken unto him upon a scroll of a book. And Jeremiah commanded Beiruth, saying, I am restrained, I cannot go into the house of the Lord.

Therefore, go and read in the scroll which thou hast written from my mouth the words of the Lord in the hearing of the people in the Lord's house upon the fast day. And also thou shalt read them in the hearing of all Judah who come out of their cities. It may be they will present their supplication before the Lord and will return every one from his evil way.

For great is the anger and the fury that the Lord hath pronounced against this people. And Beiruth, the son of Neriah, did according to all that Jeremiah the prophet commanded him, reading in the book the words of the Lord in the Lord's house. It came to pass in the fifth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, in the ninth month, that they proclaimed a fast before the Lord to all the people in Jerusalem and to all the people who came from the cities of Judah unto Jerusalem.

And then read Beiruth in the book the words of Jeremiah in the house of the Lord in the chamber of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, the scribe, in the higher court at the entrance of the new gate of the Lord's house in the hearing of all the people. When Micaiah, the son of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, had heard out of the book all the words of the Lord, then he went down into the king's house, into the scribe's chamber, and lo, all the princes sat there, even Elisha, the scribe, and Eliah, the son of Shemiah, and Elnathan, the son of Achbar, and Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, and Zedekiah, the son of Hananiah, and all the princes. And then Micaiah declared unto them all the words that he had heard when Beiruth read the book in the hearing of the people.

Therefore all the princes sent Jehudi, the son of Nethaniah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of Cushi, unto Beiruth, saying, Take in thine hand the scroll from which thou hast read in the hearing of the people, and come. And so Beiruth, the son of Neriah, took the scroll in his hand and came unto them. And they said unto him, Sit down now, and read it in our hearing.

So Beiruth read it in their hearing. Now it came to pass, when they had heard all the words, they turned in fear one to another, and said unto Beiruth, We will surely tell the king of all these words. And they asked Beiruth, saying, Tell us now, how didst thou write all these words at his mouth? And then Beiruth answered them, He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book.

Then said the princes unto Beiruth, Go, hide thou and Jeremiah, and let no man know where ye are. And they went into the king, into the court, but they laid up the scroll in the chamber of Elishema, the scribe, and told all the words in the hearing of the king. So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the scroll, and he took it out of Elishema, the scribe's chamber, and Jehudi read it in the hearing of the king, and in the hearing of all the princes who stood beside the king.

Now the king sat in the winter house in the ninth month. There was a fire on the hearth burning before him. It came to pass that when Jehudi had read three or four columns, he cut it with the penknife and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth.

Yet they were not afraid, nor tore they their garments, neither the king nor any of his servants that heard all these words. Nevertheless, El Nathan and Deliah and Gamariah had made intercession to the king that he would not burn the scroll, but he would not hear them. But the king commanded Jerimiel, the son of Hamilech, and Saraiah, the son of Azrael, and Shelemiah, the son of Abdeel, to take Baruch the scribe and Jeremiah the prophet, but the Lord hid them.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah after the king had burned the scroll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, Take thee again another scroll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned. And thou shalt say to Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Thus saith the Lord, Thou hast burned this scroll, saying, Why hast thou written in it, saying, The king of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy this land, and shall cause to cease in it man and beast. Therefore thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David, and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost.

And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity. And I will bring upon them and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem and upon the men of Judah all the evil that I have pronounced against them. But they hearkened not.

Then took Jeremiah another scroll and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote in it from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim, king of Judah, had burned in the fire. And there were added besides unto them many like words. The theme of this chapter, obviously, is the word of God.

That's the whole story, the word of God. And this is a good emphasis for us as Christians, because apart from the word of God, what do we have? We have nothing. It's the word of God that helped to give us our salvation.

He that heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me hath everlasting life. Being born again not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever. If you're saved tonight, you're saved because the word of God has revealed the son of God, and you've trusted him.

And so your salvation depends upon the word, and your spiritual growth depends upon the word. Desire the sincere milk of the word that you may grow thereby. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

I have fed you with milk and not with meat, for you weren't able to bear it, says Paul to the Corinthians. Our food is the word of God. And the word of God makes it possible for us to pray.

If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Apart from the word of God, you really can't pray. And the word of God makes possible our victory, taking the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, praying always with all prayer and supplication in the spirit.

And so the word of God, this book, is very, very important to us. Now, the tragedy is that as time passes, you and I get very accustomed to the word of God. It's one of the great tragedies of the Christian life.

We get accustomed to our blessings. Remember when first you were saved, how you studied the word of God, and you read it, and you just couldn't get enough of it. I can still see myself as a teenager walking down the street one Thursday afternoon, coming from the library, carrying a Scofield Bible.

I'd never seen one. And I found one in the library. And when I checked it out of the library, the librarian raised her eyebrows and looked at me as if to say, what in the world are you doing taking a Bible out of a library? It was a study Bible.

I'd never seen one. And I'd been saved just a short time, and I wanted to study the word of God. Isn't it easy, folks, to get accustomed to your Bible? Isn't it easy for us to come to church and say, well, now the preacher's going to preach, so I will shift gears and think about something else? We get accustomed to the word of God, and that's a tragedy.

And I think from this chapter, the Lord would want to get us excited about the word of God. This particular chapter is a caption over Jeremiah 36. There it is, the wonder of God's word.

Dear friend, when you and I lose the wonder of the word of God, our Christian life begins to decay. I can illustrate that so very simply. A child is born into a home, and of course, daddy is waiting for the day when that child says, da-da.

And he can run down to the office and say, hey, my kid is talking today. He said, da-da. Now, if father is smart, he will teach the child to say ma-ma, because then when the child wakes up at night, the child will holler ma-ma, ma-ma, and da-da can stay in bed, you see.

But we wait for the child to talk, and every day the child picks up something new, doggie, kitty, you know, until the day comes when the child is talking so much and asking so many questions. Mother says, can't you ever keep quiet? Can you imagine this? We have been waiting for this child to talk, and now it has become a very commonplace thing and a very ordinary thing, and we have gotten used to it. Or take a husband and wife.

Communication is so important in marriage. Many husbands and wives have excommunicated each other. It's so important to communicate.

And you get married and you talk about so many things, and the little things are so important, how you feel and what you want to do. Oh, it's just so important. But then as the years go along, we get accustomed to these things.

And sometimes God has to do something to make us realize how important it is to keep communication with each other. Or take friendship. You have friends that are scattered to various parts of the world.

Aren't you happy to get a letter from them? You say, my friends don't write. Well, so am I, I don't write. But I try to write them, and it's always good to hear from a friend.

We should never get accustomed to say, oh, here's a letter from her. Now, this happens to the Word of God. Oh, my dear friends, when we were first born into God's family, how exciting it was to hear God talk.

How marvelous it was to have the Word of God explained to us. And then we got a little older and grew a little bit, and now we know so much about the Bible. It doesn't excite us anymore.

Well, I want to excite you tonight, and God wants to excite you. And Jeremiah 36 gives to us four wonders of the Word. And I think if you and I will just get a hold of these wonders of the Word, the Bible will become a little more exciting to us.

And you know, when your Bible gets to be more exciting to you, the Christian life becomes more exciting. Now, I'm speaking tonight to some people who don't read their Bibles. Oh, many of you do, I know, but some don't.

Or some who do it in a very routine fashion. Well, I'd better read my Bible. But I hope that tonight all of us can go away from this meeting and say, you know, one of the most exciting things I can do is to open the Word of God and let God speak to me.

First, wonder number one, the wonder of its origin. Did that ever strike you as being very wonderful? The origin of the Word of God. Everybody who's got a half a mind to write a book does.

And this is the reason we have so many poor books. I was at a used book sale recently where they had just tens of thousands of books. I thought to myself, why were half of these even written? Nobody really needed them.

But I know how a book is written. You do some research, and you plan an outline, you sit down, you write the book, you send it to a publisher, he sends it back, you try another publisher, he sends it back, finally you find someone to publish it, and then it's put on a shelf and ignored from that point on. But not so with the Word of God.

Where did the Bible come from? Are the communists right when they say the Bible is a collection of myths and superstitions put together by men? I don't think so. Is the Bible an accident? Is the Bible something that men have put together? No. Jeremiah 36 says, look, will you consider the wonder of the origin of the Word of God? God spoke to a man, Jeremiah.

And that man spoke to his secretary, his scribe, Beirut. And he wrote it down on a scroll. And they used to read, of course, from right to left, you know, not from left to right like we do.

So he had to unroll the scroll. And he wrote on this scroll, where did the Word of God come from? It came from the lips of God. This is the Word of God.

Now, will you notice some very important facts here? Fact number one, God spoke. Jeremiah didn't invent it. God spoke.

Number two, God spoke through a man. Now, God could have sent an angel, but he didn't. Angels do not need the Word of God.

They hear God's voice in person. He didn't send an angel. He just took a man, a man who had his failings.

God spoke. God spoke through a man. God spoke words through a man, and God spoke all of the words through the man.

Now, I want to bring the changes on this. God spoke. Here we're talking about inspiration.

The Word of God did not come through men who invented something. Holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. All scripture is given by inspiration of God.

That means the Holy Spirit of God breathed upon the people, and they wrote the Word of God. But it came from God. Did you ever trace the breath of God through the Bible? Interesting.

Back in Genesis, God took some clay and made a man, and God breathed upon him the breath of life. Man became a living soul. When Jesus Christ arose from the dead, he came to his frightened disciples, and he breathed upon them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit.

Paul says that all scripture is God breathed. This book was breathed out by God through the breath of the Holy Spirit of God. And so it is the Word of God.

Not the Word of Jeremiah, but the Word of God through Jeremiah. So God spoke. We have a Bible that is inspired.

It is what God wants us to have. We believe the Bible from cover to cover, and we also believe the covers. We do not add anything to the end of our Bible.

When John got to the end of the book, he said, If any man adds to this book, I will add to him the plagues that are written therein. God spoke. God spoke through a man.

How in the world could God give us a perfect book through an imperfect man? Didn't he do that when Jesus was born? The miracle of the birth of the Bible is exactly like the miracle of the birth of Jesus Christ. Was Mary sinless? No. Surrendered? Yes.

Be it unto me according to thy word. Sinless? No. And she inquired about this.

She said, How shall this thing be? The angel said, The Holy Spirit is going to overshadow you, and the power of the Almighty is going to come upon you, and that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. The Holy Spirit of God brought the living word of God into this world through a frail Jewish girl. And the Holy Spirit of God brought the written word of God through a frail preacher like Jeremiah and the other writers.

This is why when you read your Bible, Isaiah sounds like Isaiah, not John. And Paul sounds like Paul, not Peter. And when you read the word of God carefully, you say, Aha, that's Moses.

That's his style. That's the way Moses writes. This is the way John writes.

This is the way Paul writes. You see, the character of the word of God is like the Lord Jesus. He was the perfect blending of God and man, sinless, holy, harmless, undefiled.

The written word of God came through men of God just as the light shines through these stained glass windows and picks up the character of those windows. So the Holy Spirit shines through Jeremiah and picks up his vocabulary, his characteristics, but not his sin. And so God spoke.

God spoke through man. The word of God is a miracle. That's why you can't explain it.

Young students come to me with their hang-ups about inspiration, and they say, How do you explain this thing? I say, You explain the virgin birth. I'll explain inspiration. You can't.

It's a miracle. God spoke. God spoke through a man.

I notice that God spoke words. Verse 18, Baruch answered them. He pronounced all these words.

God spoke in words, not inspired thoughts, inspired words. Over in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, Paul says, These things are revealed to us in words which the Holy Spirit spoke. This is why I don't like it when people tamper with the words of the original manuscripts of Scripture.

Now, we don't have the original autographs, obviously. If we did, we'd worship them. We thank God for the scholarship that is given to us, Hebrew Old Testaments and Greek New Testaments, and we have the word of God.

And you read some of these translations, and they tamper with words. When Paul writes justification, he means justification, not sanctification. When Paul writes adoption, he means adoption, not regeneration.

When Paul says faith, he means faith, not love. We have no right to change the word of God. God spoke in words.

I notice that verse 18 says that God spoke in all of these words. Jeremiah and Baruch believed in plenary verbal inspiration. God spoke in words, verbal inspiration.

God spoke all these words, plenary. That means that all Scripture is inspired of God. We have some preachers today who say, Now, when you read the Bible, if it speaks to you, it's inspired.

If it doesn't speak to you, it's not inspired. Heaven help us. I notice also that Jeremiah wrote about historic events, and God said, These are my words.

That means that Jeremiah believed in verbal inspiration, words, plenary inspiration, all these words. That's what that word plenary means. And he believed in inerrancy.

Jeremiah says, What I'm saying here is true. All of these 23 years of ministry, what I have said about Damascus, what I've said about Syria, what I've said about Israel, it's true. There's a big battle being waged today over whether the word of God is inerrant.

When it comes to history and science, Baruch said, He spoke the words to me. God spoke the words to him. We have to believe that what he said was true.

In fact, my Bible says this, For I esteem all of thy precepts concerning all things to be right. When the Bible talks about science, it's right. When it talks about history, it's correct.

The wonder of the origin of God's word. God speaks to a man. The man speaks to a scribe.

He writes it down, and we have the word of God, all the word of God, the inspired word of God, the inerrant word of God. No other book can make that claim. People get all excited about some prophetess's book of predictions that hits the bestseller list.

People forget most of her predictions don't come true. Here's a book that came from God, and folks don't get excited about it. Well, it's just my Bible.

Your Bible is a miracle book. The wonder of the origin of the Bible. There's a second wonder.

That's the wonder of the opposition to the Bible. Here is a king with some princes, and they oppose the word of God. Now, this to me is amazing.

Why would anybody want to oppose the word of God? Here is a book that changes people's lives. Some months ago on the front sidewalk here at the Moody Church, two men were passing out atheistic literature. Some of you will remember that Sunday morning.

We came to Sunday school, and here were these two men passing out atheistic literature. I had corresponded with this one man. We had some very gracious correspondence.

But now when someone is standing out in front of the church building where the church I pastor meets, and they're passing out lies, I have to do something about it. And so I said to him, Sir, why are you doing this? What benefit is there in opposing the Bible? Well, he says it's lies. It's not true.

I said, did you ever remember what Benjamin Franklin said to Thomas Paine? Thomas Paine wrote a book called Common Sense, in which he opposed Christianity. And Thomas Paine brought his manuscript to Benjamin Franklin. He said, I've written this book against the Bible.

You know what Franklin said? He said, Tom, we have so much trouble in this world with the Bible. What would it be like without it? I said, now if I use the thing that F.B. Meyer used, I said, now if you want to bring down to Moody Church a hundred people whose lives have been changed by believing what you believe, I'll bring another hundred whose lives have been changed by reading the Bible. I haven't seen the man since.

Say, why would a person want to oppose the Bible? This is the book that comforts people when they're in trouble. This is the book that saves people. Oh, I tell you, remember when you used to tune in the radio and listen to First Mate Bob and the crew of the Good Ship Grace years ago? Dear Paul Meyer, he was on the verge of committing suicide.

He was out there in California ready to jump in the ocean and got into a cheap hotel and found a Gideon Bible and read it and got saved. He didn't get saved by reading Common Sense by Tom Paine. Why would anybody oppose a book that is true, a book that is faithful, a book that is comforting? I'll tell you why.

It's because the heart of man is at war with God. The carnal mind is enmity with God. You know, Jehoiakim's father was a godly man, Josiah.

When Josiah was just a young man, they found the scroll of the law in the temple. Remember that? A priest came running in and said, we have found the scroll of the law in the temple. They hadn't heard this for years.

Josiah said, read to me that scroll. And they read it to him. And you know what he did? He tore his clothes.

He put on sackcloth. He repented. He called the nation to repent.

He trembled at the word of God. Here's Josiah's son who opposes the word of God. I have noticed that every dictator opposes the word of God.

You know why? The word of God sets people free. The communists oppose it. They call it the opiate of the people.

Adolf Hitler opposed it. Dictators don't like the word of God. Liars don't like the word of God.

Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. The marvel of the opposition to the Now, how do people oppose the word of God? They do several things. Number one, they hear it, but don't do it.

Here sat a group of these princes, and they heard the word of God. And they didn't say, oh, king, let's do something. Oh, king, let's repent.

Oh, king, let's obey. No. Just ignore it.

That's what's going on in Chicago today. You can walk into any bookstore and buy a Bible for a dollar. The Bible is still the best seller.

I think many people do with the Bible what they did in verse 20, put it up on the shelf. They put the scroll up on the shelf. How do people oppose the word of God? By disobeying it.

How do they oppose it? By cutting it up. We have these Bible critics who say, now, Jonah is not to be trusted. Jonah is not really a historic book.

And you can't believe that Paul really wrote the pastoral epistles, and John certainly didn't write the book of Revelation. They cut it up. I saw an ad for a book recently where a man is contending that the John who wrote the book of Revelation was John the Baptist.

It's interesting. Most people just take the word of God and ignore it. The king said, throw it in the fire.

Throw it in the fire. Destroy it. Down through the years, people have said this.

Throw it in the fire. What he didn't realize, yes, he did realize it, but he didn't care, was that in putting the word of God into the fire, he was putting himself into the fire. The way you treat your Bible is the way you treat God.

This is the word of God. The way you treat my words reflects the way you treat me. If you say, well, I heard that Worsby preaching.

He's a liar. You're calling me a liar from my words. Jeremiah, the prophet, wrote a book and the king burned it.

For 23 years, Jeremiah had been preaching faithfully, sacrificially, suffering. The king just takes his word, cuts it up, throws it in the fire. By the way, mothers and dads, be careful where you send your children to school.

Many of our so-called Christian schools today do the same thing with the word of God. It's unfortunate. They'll sit in class with some professor who will say, now, we don't believe that Daniel was really a prophet.

They just cut Daniel out. I have a book up in my library written by a very, very well-educated man who had a great standing with a certain denomination. In that book, he has two Isaiahs and no Daniel.

He just took his little pen knife and cut up the word of God. Don't send your children to schools where they're going to cut up the word of God unless they're prepared to be able to defend it. The miracle, the wonder of the origin of the word, the wonder of the opposition against the word.

Now, hear me. There are forces in the world today opposing the word of God, and these forces are inside the church. They are inside the schools and inside the seminaries and inside the denominations and fellowships.

Paul said this. Paul said, of your own selves will men arise to take disciples after them. But you know, for many Christians, if the Bible were taken away, it wouldn't make much difference.

They don't read it anyway. For many Christians, if the Bible were taken away, it wouldn't make any difference. They don't feed on it anyway.

The wonder of the opposition against the word of God. Now, real quickly, the third wonder, the wonder of the survival of the word of God. Jehoiakim said, throw it in the fire, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Burn it up. We've gotten rid of Jeremiah's prophecy. Oh, no, you haven't.

There's a verse in the Psalms, Psalm 119, verse 89, that says this. I like this. The psalmist looks up and he says, forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.

Now, it may not be settled on earth, but it's settled in heaven. How long? Forever. The word of God is eternal.

The word of God was in the mind and the heart of God before it ever came out on black and white for you and me to read. And the word got back to Jeremiah. The king burned up your scroll, and Jeremiah said, don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it. Long after his name is forgotten, long after the name Jehoiakim is at the head of two paragraphs in Unger's Bible Dictionary, Jeremiah will still be remembered. Get me another scroll.

And the same God who dictated the first dictated the second. Now, it doesn't mean that I believe in a dictation theory of inspiration. I don't.

God spoke to Jeremiah and through Jeremiah. The words that were written were the inspired word of God came from God through a man. The miracle of the survival of God's word.

Listen to me, friends. Heaven and earth shall pass away, said Jesus. But what? My word shall not pass away.

This word stands firm. It is the rock on which we stand. It's kind of interesting to read how people have opposed the word of God.

Remember Colonel Ingersoll? He's before any of our time, although some of you could have heard him. Ingersoll used to go up and down this country preaching atheism. I was in a used bookstore some weeks ago, and here was a whole section of Ingersoll's lectures, his famous lectures on the mistakes of Moses and so forth.

Ingersoll said this. In 15 years, I will have this book, the Bible, in the morgue. In 15 years, Ingersoll was in the morgue.

How many of you folks have ever in your lifetime read a single lecture by Colonel Ingersoll? May I see your hands? Isn't that interesting in a congregation this size? Nobody has. And yet you've read Jeremiah. Voltaire.

Voltaire was the great, brilliant, brilliant French writer. And Voltaire was in opposition to the Bible. Voltaire said in 100 years, the Bible will be gone.

The beautiful thing is that the Geneva Bible Society put their office in Voltaire's house. And nobody worries about Voltaire today. Oh, you have to read him in college literature, but nobody's worried about Voltaire today.

In 100 years, the Bible will be gone. The Bible's still here. We'll go back much farther than that.

The last great persecution against the Christians was perpetrated by Diocletian, the Roman emperor. He hated Christians. He persecuted them.

He wiped them out. In the year 303, he had a tremendous persecution against them. He burned copies of the scriptures, and he put up a monument that said, extinct is the name of Christians.

I can hardly believe it's extinct today. He died. Along came Constantine, who made his mistakes.

But all of a sudden, Christianity became the faith of the Roman Empire. Now, what am I saying? Down through the years, men have taken their feeble little hammers, and they've beaten away at the anvil of the word of God. And the anvil is still here, and the hammers are gone.

The wonder of the survival of God's word. Now, that says to me, if this book is going to last, and if I build my life on this book, I'm going to last. Mr. Moody's life verse, he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.

The fourth wonder of the word. The wonder of its origin. The wonder of its opposition.

Satan hates this book. The wonder of its survival. God protects this book.

The wonder of its fulfillment. I have made promises I couldn't keep. So have you.

As late as last Friday afternoon, I promised to make a hospital visit, and I stopped to make another visit, and it was so important I had to stop and spend an hour and a half in that visit to take care of some needs. I never got to the hospital. I made a promise, but I couldn't keep it.

God's never done that. There hath not failed one word of all his good promise. Has there? The word of God will never fail.

And this chapter ends with Jeremiah rewriting his word, adding to it some judgments, and saying it's going to be fulfilled. And it was fulfilled. Babylon is going to come.

Babylon did come. Jehoiakim is going to be treated like an outcast, and he was. Instead of having a great, magnificent death, he had a death that was like that.

Well, the scripture says he shall die the death of an ass. Treat him like a dead carcass of an animal. They did.

His son is not going to reign, and he didn't for three months. He was a puppet king. Wiped out.

And God's word went right on. Fulfillment after fulfillment after fulfillment. You know, it's marvelous to be able to read in this book and find out that what God says, he does.

We take this for granted. Oh, my friend, let's not lose our first love for the word of God. May the word of God not become an ordinary, everyday book to us.

Paul wrote to the Thessalonians and said, For this I give thanks, that when you receive the word of God which you heard of us, you received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth the word of God, which effectually worketh also in them that believe. You don't treat the Bible the way you treat Ladies Home Journal, or the Six O'Clock News, or the Chicago Tribune, the world's greatest newspaper. You treat this like what it really is, the word of God.

The wonder, the wonder of the word. Two questions as we close. Number one, is this word speaking judgment to you or salvation? You see, Jeremiah wrote his book to save people.

He said, It may be that they'll repent. It may be that they'll turn from their sins. God didn't give us the Bible to condemn us.

He gave us the Bible to save us. But if you reject it, it condemns you. Does the Bible condemn you tonight? Do you say, Pastor, I have no assurance of heaven.

I have no assurance of salvation. You can have from the word. Question number two.

You're a Christian. Have you lost the wonder of the word? Can you skip your Bible reading and your meditation day after day? It doesn't bother you. Can you read some devotional book as a substitute, and it doesn't worry you? Oh, my friends, in these busy summer days that are ahead of us, don't take a vacation from the word of God.

The greatest wonder in our lives is the wonder of the word, which means to me, if I receive the word with all of its wonder, God's wonders will be performed in my life and in your life. And that's the thing you want more than anything else. The wonder of the word of God.

Heavenly Father, we give thanks that this word is true and it's living and it abides forever. It came from heaven and it takes us to heaven. It brings heaven to our hearts.

Thank you for the power of the word and the purity of the word. Thank you, O God, that the youngest child can walk in its shallows and the oldest saint can swim in its depths. Thank you that it is milk and meat and bread and honey.

Thank you, O God, that it satisfies the inner appetites of our soul. Oh, forgive us, Lord, for taking this blessed miracle book for granted. Forgive us.

May someone here tonight turn to this word and believe in the God of the word and be saved. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.