Jeremiah 27:8 – God's Sovereignty Becomes Personal

8 And it shall be, that the nation and kingdom which will not serve Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, and which will not put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, that nation I will punish,’ says the Lord, ‘with the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand. Jeremiah 27:8, New King James Version

"I don't know where the restrictions end," a guard at the monument to Mao's burial tells The New Yorker's Evan Osnos. "I just know my area."

We are accustomed to that kind of divided authority. We celebrate the impact of checks and balances in shared responsibility as a sort of collective limitation on the full impact of man's depravity. Wherever someone is given responsibility, and that responsibility limits us, we are pretty sure there is a workaround.

The overlearning of this principle among men impacts our impudence toward God. Thus we need Jeremiah 27:8. There is the impulse in us, as was Jeremiah's original audience, to bristle at the unlikelihood and unworthiness of those in whom God places authority. 

We seek to know and to evade those boundaries. The issues of our own flesh remain embedded and un-dealt with as we are preoccupied with fulfilling the law, or the Law, and debating the consequences.

We weren't quite listening when God established the pervasiveness of His authority from Creation forward, earlier in Jeremiah 27, and in many other places from Genesis forward. We can nod at that. We can, in fact, use that as ammunition in the culture war when someone else challenges OUR creation story. But we miss the way in which God proclaiming Himself the Source of all wives and all cultures puts a check on our choices.

Re-engaging, then, when an authority figure's Nebuchadnezzar tendencies chafe our entitled sensibilities, we bring upon ourselves more personal and more thorough correction. Those who will not, God says, see and submit to His sovereignty in using Nebuchadnezzar for His purposes, will be confronted with other manifestations of His power. 

Resist Nebuchadnezzar's sword, and they will know God's. Resist Nebuchadnezzar's authority, God given for a season, and they will experience famine and pestilence that not even Nebuchadnezzar could engineer.

How often, beloved, do we choose the harder path by enshrining personality preferences, either our own or our prerogative to resist God using certain types of people in our lives? Do we allow such visceral, even instinctive rebellion to turn us away from mild seasons of correction akin to the exile in which God says the Israelites transported to Babylon were actually going to prosper while being corrected, and insist upon God dealing more directly with our resistance to Him?

Blessedly, what was at least a little opaque in Jeremiah's day is made clearer in the Christian's own. We serve, beloved, the King of Kings. Revelation rejoices that He calls representatives from every tribe and tongue. Kings, imposing on Earth and perhaps storing up our political preferences and prerogatives, will bring Him treasures. We, more easily than our spiritual forbearers, can train ourselves by His grace to see His purposes in political and cultural change rather than resist it. Our Master, after all, knew and proclaimed even under duress that Pilate had port authority he had only because it was given to him from above.