Jeremiah 27:4-5 – A Common Creator

4 And command them to say to their masters, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel—thus you shall say to your masters: 5 ‘I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are on the ground, by My great power and by My outstretched arm, and have given it to whom it seemed proper to Me. Jeremiah 27:4-5, New King James Version

“For Virginians, taught rank-consciousness from birth, sensitive to the slightest slight," Stephen E. Ambrose explains in Undaunted Courage of the society that brought Meriwether Lewis to manhood, "concern about rank, status, and position was as much a part of life as breathing.”

Consider, then, by comparison how tightly those assumptions were held as God's prophet confronted them with His Word in Jeremiah 27:4-5. Enlightenment ideas, the American and French Revolutions had not come about with their relative elevation of the status of the common man. Before these winds blew through, it was even easier for those on top of the current hierarchy to assume that they deserved to be so, and to use that position to maximum, crushing advantage.

Thus, Jeremiah stands athwart these assumptions to serve as God's great, leveling wind. God identifies Himself with Israel, His chosen instrument with which to demonstrate His redemptive character and reveal His Word. This people, the least and the weakest when He began to distinguish them, were nevertheless announced as the apple of His eye. God still insistently commingles His glory with their seemingly forsaken condition.

He brought their heritage from Abram's body, by human calculations as good as dead. He defended Abram's heirs, now slaves, with plagues. By the same electing, perplexing plan He announces through Jeremiah that deserved punishment is on the horizon and that He will elevate other people's to deliver it.

Already, He is breaking the links of assumption His audience so readily forms and does not examine. Can a people, can a person, be treasured, be HIS, and still suffer, spend time on the bottom of Earth's hierarchies? Apparently so. For, as men glimpse in an instant and assume according to Peter's warning life has always been and will always be so, so it is God's insistent outreach to clear away the clutter of current cultural assumptions.

He has already told Jeremiah to do this by presenting the ambassadors of various nations with chains, forcing them to reckon with their common vulnerability. This forces re-examination, for Oswald Chambers declares rightly in The Highest Good – Thy Great Redemption, "Civilization is based on principles which imply that the passing moment is permanent."

Yet, He will delve even deeper into man's roots to tell His story for His glory. As with Paul confronting the learned Greeks on Mars Hill, God through Jeremiah will go back to His common authority over Creation, before men began to sort themselves by languages, learning, and the latest exercises of temporary, God-given power over one another.

He made the very ground current conquerors stand on, He reminds. The same hand, He connects, made animals from the same dust. The only meaningful difference, He tutors, between the amoeba and the top of the cosmopolitan elite to whom Jeremiah speaks is HIM.

The only meaningful difference is His breath, His work, His image, His blessing. While the ambassadors at court grade greatness based on comparative armed strength and diplomatic pull, God announced His greatness over the chaos of the deep. He spoke, and it was so. As was said of George Washington's dignity, so much more so of God. All kings are valets next to him.

We still need the same remediation of Creation. Genesis and its frequent refrains throughout Scripture are more than poetry as contrasting relief from the prose of men's more "practical" doings. They are the continuity on which John Piper stands in 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die, unmasking culture's great, haphazard sorting with the same elemental insistence as Jeremiah. "Christ died to save a great diversity of peoples. Every race and culture needs to be reconciled to God. As the disease of sin is global, so the remedy is global."

The chains to which Jeremiah 27 points are heavy and real. Only at Christ's bidding can they be broken. He is the only One proven strong enough to declare meaningful freedom for men. Without that dictate, we would simply make much of our comparative and temporary degrees of odious slavery.

Even in possession of God's Word, even quickened by His Spirit, we can walk by sight. We can assume that because culture's assumptions are older than we are that they will defy the abolishing and renewal of the Ancient of Days. As the nations passed by in their pretenses to glory, either imitating God or raising their collective fist in his face, we blink at the REAL Divine audacity of Psalm 86:9's assured ending. Did He really inspire that psalmist to say "all the nations you have made will come and worship before you, Lord: they will bring glory to your name." He did. He is about that work now, and it will come to pass.


Some of that leveling before a common Creator will echo in palaces, in the outworkings of statecraft. Other proofs of His common supremacy over man's assumptions will take place as you and I encounter His image in those Earth segregates as different from ourselves. Will their language, their wealth, their political status distract us from God's image imprinted upon them? Will these comparatively transitory differences obscure the chains they drag and the opportunity we have to  declare community in Christ more meaningful than all of man's combined pretenses to peace.