Jeremiah 27:7 – Amid the Work of Generations

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. 7 So all nations shall serve him and his son and his son’s son, until the time of his land comes; and then many nations and great kings shall make him serve them. Jeremiah 27:6-7, New King James Version

“What children we are," concedes Lew Wallace in the novel Ben Hur, "even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.”

Jeremiah 27:7 counters that immaturity and limited perspective. It does so in the way Theodore C. Sorensen in his recollection Counselor offers perspective to anyone thinking of vying for the Presidency of the United States. Sorensen, the son of an historian, insists, "Anyone speaking in historical terms is a stabilizing force." That's the gift of God's Word to and through Jeremiah here. It is a preemptive stabilizing force.

It is the framing Word of a Father to children whose presumptive reactions He understands. Our are-we-there-yet, easily stirred hearts are no vexing novelty to Him. He knows how completely captivating our sense of entitlement is, and how ready we are to assume that anything which strikes us as both unpleasant and unfair which lasts more than momentarily, we are prone to bewail that it will last forever.

So it is that the gracious, parental, preparatory work of His Word counts off three generations. This is an eye-blink to Him for Whom a thousand years is as one day, but He condescends to the mindset of His present-bound children for whom three generations consumes all of earthly life.

He speaks this Word to cool boiling passions before they spill over against His justice. He reminds His own that, though the season in which they are being corrected seems to last long enough to eradicate them and leave their erstwhile masters with a sense of perpetual vindication, the Babylonians will also be judged.

Of course, silly Israelites, the modern believer can cluck! They deserved worse, we can pile on, puffing up our pride as we take the historian's lectern. Here baseball helps. John Thorn in Baseball in the Garden of Eden admits the limits of the printed page and its drain on empathy. "Records fail," he says, "to capture the passion of the age."

That is, looking at a verse consigning God's people to three generations of chastisement, three generations in which heathens untutored in His Word seem to be allowed to dominate them, we can completely detach from their pain and perplexity. Meanwhile, should we be faced with even a week's time in which the wicked seem to prosper, we howl as though God has capriciously vacated His throne.

The same Word from the same parental heart of God is offered to steady us. Augustine runs there in On Christian Doctrine. He finds, "a narrative of the past, a prophecy of the future, and a description of the present." Insightfully, he applies these restorative powers as they "tend to nourish and strengthen charity, and to overcome and root out lust."

Lust? What does that have to do with our tendency to, to the delight of CS Lewis's fictional demon Screwtape, view our spiritual forbearers as facing different struggles because they dressed differently? What does that have to do with our tendency to view our struggles, compared to theirs which have been resolved, as a justifiable reason for faith's contemporary collapse?

Augustine nails this word because we define it too narrowly. Yes, he who feels orphaned by purposeful history can attempt to find temporary solace in the opposite sex apart from marriage, but this is just one of lust's havens. Anything we grab hold of because God has not proven satisfying in the here and now, as not delivered on our often obscured expectations in the timeframe we demand, can serve as lust's object. To pause, to contemplate His steps across generations and faith's ultimate satisfaction in the outcome He is crafting, this is His disciplined work.