Jeremiah 27:6 – Likewise Subservient

6 And now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant; and the beasts of the field I have also given him to serve him. Jeremiah 27:6, New King James Version

CS Lewis connects in a letter, "if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ‘stick through’ into ours. We are," he admits, " like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up-but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know."

Jeremiah 27:6 likewise reminds of the wholeness of God's machine and our imperfect perceptions of what "sticks through." In our minds, as with the individuals to whom Jeremiah originally spoke, there is a vast difference between the showiest of age-shaping autocrats, like Nebuchadnezzar, and his subjects. We move down another strata in our minds to consider the plight of conquered people, as was to be Judah's fate. We move down still further to consider the situation of the beasts.

God's machine, as Lewis pictures it, operates in a unity we do not taking. Pretenses of class and earthly condition mean little compared to the reassertion of God's common sovereignty over all to and through Jeremiah. That King who makes so much noise and spectacle to convince himself and his world that he does as he will? He has what he has, including that bellicose, boastful spirit, because God gives it to him, even in this to accomplish God's purposes. Subjects and substance are God's to give and take away.

Reminded of this and convicted, we agree with inspired Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:16. "Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh." When offended by the lack of propriety of those in power, which is to say those who have more power than we perceive that we do, we remember God's full work in Nebuchadnezzar. In an instant, he was all but at one with those beasts over whom Jeremiah 27:6 asserts His common authority. In an instant, his earthly honors were meaningless, and he ate grass.

But God's machine was not finished. Nebuchadnezzar, a pictorial example of fallen man's baseness, is just as good an example of God's power to make comprehensively new. For that same Nebuchadnezzar, having been deprived of the reason and influence God grants, came to himself by Heaven's fiat. He is likewise a type of Spurgeon's insistence in the sermon "The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit." "Remember, there is no power in man so fallen but that the Holy Spirit can raise it up. However debased a man may be, in one instant, by the miraculous power of the Spirit, all his faculties may be cleansed and purged."

In God's machinery, in God's economy, representatives of any class from King to beast awaits His good pleasure. As God has placed prayer in the hands of those who trust Christ and would see our society, everywhere, newly with His sight, whom can be certain that our prayers for our leaders, our prayers for the most abject of our fellow subjects, might not be answered to His glory and our good?