I realize that you’ve probably clicked on this link expecting to read an uplifting, encouraging post about how God will use you to do great things. And yes, I am generally a very encouraging, uplifting person, so you can be forgiven for making such magnanimous expectations of me.
However, that’s not exactly what I want to talk about today.
Have you ever done anything you didn’t want to do? I know, I know. That’s a broad question. Let’s narrow the scope down a little bit.
Have you ever done something you didn’t want to do, but you didn’t realize until much later that you didn’t want to do this thing?
Sure, maybe there was a moment where you were really excited about this thing you wanted to do, but then it just went off the rails in the end and you realized it was a very, very bad idea.
I would venture a guess to say that all of us have been there. Regret is a common emotion, even if we can’t necessarily pinpoint exactly where or when the offending incident occurred. Sometimes you can get so far down the wrong road that you look up and realize you’ve taken the left turn at Albequerque when you really, really shouldn’t have.
Your first problem was that you were in Albequerque to begin with.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about the book of Jeremiah with my Sunday School class. I’ve been reading Jeremiah in my personal time, and that’s what came out in class. I have briefly touched on this book in my previous posts.
Throughout the book of Jeremiah, the namesake prophet declares to the people of Jerusalem that God is going to come down and deliver His wrath upon them. I mean, it’s not pretty. Of course they don’t believe Jeremiah, but he is faithful to deliver the message.
“Wait a second! You can’t have more than seven tiles at a time…and there’s only one Z! How did you spell Nebuchadnezzar?!” (Photo by Moritz Schmidt on Unsplash)
When I was reading in Jeremiah, a thought struck me. We always want to ask why the Hebrews didn’t listen and why they wouldn’t hear this prophet of the Lord. For starters, Jeremiah does tell us that there were other false prophets telling the people that everything was fine and that nothing would go wrong.
The other possibility is that people have been historically, notoriously good at rationalizing whatever we want to be true. In Jeremiah’s case, perhaps the people could have convinced themselves that Jeremiah was actually being paid off by Babylon to spread these crazy rumors that Babylon was going to decimate their city because God was going to allow it. After all, Jeremiah was doing a whole lot of PR for Babylon and for Scrabble’s worst nightmare, King Nebuchadnezzar.
“This message came to Jeremiah from the Lord early in the reign of Zedekiah son of Josiah, king of Judah. This is what the Lord said to me: “Make a yoke, and fasten it on your neck with leather straps. Then send messages to the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Sidon through their ambassadors who have come to see King Zedekiah in Jerusalem. Give them this message for their masters: ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: With my great strength and powerful arm I made the earth and all its people and every animal. I can give these things of mine to anyone I choose. Now I will give your countries to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who is my servant. I have put everything, even the wild animals, under his control. All the nations will serve him, his son, and his grandson until his time is up. Then many nations and great kings will conquer and rule over Babylon. So you must submit to Babylon’s king and serve him; put your neck under Babylon’s yoke! I will punish any nation that refuses to be his slave, says the Lord. I will send war, famine, and disease upon that nation until Babylon has conquered it.”
Jeremiah 27:1-8 NLT
And this isn’t an isolated incident, either. This kind of “propaganda” is all over Jeremiah! So if you really wanted to ignore Jeremiah, you could always just tell yourself and everyone you know that he’s been bought and paid for by the enemy. And we do know that the people of Jerusalem tried to kill Jeremiah more than once, so whatever the reason, there was enmity to spare.
But the whole propaganda angle flies right out the window once you get to the end of the book. In Jeremiah 50, the Lord comes down hard on Babylon.
““Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction. Babylon, the mightiest hammer in all the earth, lies broken and shattered. Babylon is desolate among the nations! Listen, Babylon, for I have set a trap for you. You are caught, for you have fought against the Lord. The Lord has opened his armory and brought out weapons to vent his fury. The terror that falls upon the Babylonians will be the work of the Sovereign Lord of Heaven’s Armies. Yes, come against her from distant lands. Break open her granaries. Crush her walls and houses into heaps of rubble. Destroy her completely, and leave nothing! Destroy even her young bulls— it will be terrible for them, too! Slaughter them all! For Babylon’s day of reckoning has come. Listen to the people who have escaped from Babylon, as they tell in Jerusalem how the Lord our God has taken vengeance against those who destroyed his Temple.”
Jeremiah 50:22-28 NLT
That’s an awfully stark contrast to what God said about Babylon earlier. In Jeremiah 27, Babylon was God’s instrument. King Nebby was described as God’s servant. Now, the Babylonians are being marked for punishment. And in v. 24, God uses Jeremiah to say that He has set a trap for Babylon.
Why would God do that? Why would God use Babylon to serve His purpose, and then discard them later?
Let’s keep reading, shall we?
““Send out a call for archers to come to Babylon. Surround the city so none can escape. Do to her as she has done to others, for she has defied the Lord, the Holy One of Israel. Her young men will fall in the streets and die. Her soldiers will all be killed,” says the Lord. “See, I am your enemy, you arrogant people,” says the Lord, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “Your day of reckoning has arrived— the day when I will punish you. O land of arrogance, you will stumble and fall, and no one will raise you up. For I will light a fire in the cities of Babylon that will burn up everything around them.””
Jeremiah 50:29-32 NLT
In this passage, God refers to Babylon as the “land of arrogance” and God specifically says that He is their enemy.
So again I pose the question: Why would God do this?
It scares us to read this and think that God would one day use us for His purpose and then the next throw us out on our heads. And it seems to provide fodder for all the people who want to call out God as a big bully or a deified tyrant. However, that description isn’t entirely fair.
You can make a comparison here to Judas in the New Testament. In the Gospels, we learn that Judas betrays Jesus for some silver, and then he kills himself as he is wracked with grief. But if it was God’s plan that Jesus be crucified so that we could have salvation, how can we blame Judas for what he did?
It’s also Entrapment when Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones make a Y2K-centric heist movie that, despite the general creepiness of it all, turned out to be a way better movie than it had any right to be.
It’s the same issue with Babylon and King Nebby. If we believe that God created us and that God knows us intimately – even perfectly – then it stands to reason that God knows how we will respond in certain situations.
God knows what we will do given certain choices.
So while it was absolutely a part of God’s plan that Judas betrayed Jesus to the Pharisees, and while it was absolutely God’s plan that Babylon would invade and conquer Jerusalem, God didn’t make them do it. God put certain choices in front of them, knowing how they would respond.
When law enforcement makes someone commit a crime, we call it entrapment. But if law enforcement just watches someone and witnesses them committing a crime, even if the police have sweetened the pot or perhaps engineered the scene to increase the likelihood of a crime, the guilty party is still guilty.
There are choices and consequences. In the broadest sense of things, we have two choices: We can choose to follow God willingly, or we can choose to ignore God and end up a part of His plan some other way.
See, people have this idea that if they don’t choose to follow God, then they aren’t part of His plan or that He’ll just leave them alone. But that’s not true. God is sovereign. He will use us to do His will and to be a part of His plan whether we have chosen it or not.
Just ask Babylon.
When Jeremiah says that King Nebby is God’s servant, he doesn’t mean that in the sense that Nebby is seeking to serve the Lord. He means that God is using Nebby to serve a purpose.
In that sense, we are all God’s servants. We get to choose if we are willing and intentional servants, or if we just fall into play somewhere without our knowledge. And the crazy thing is that God can accomplish all of this without violating that pesky little concept of our free will. We still choose our actions. God just knows what they’re going to be long before we do. Think of it as the world’s most complicated Rube Goldberg machine.
“I swear. If you pull out 15 6x6 blocks, I’m never playing another game with you again.” (Photo by Tatiana Rodriguez on Unsplash)
Especially since it is, in essence, the entire world as a Rube Goldberg machine. And yes, I realize that I’m flirting dangerously with the old “God is a clockmaker” theory that deists like Benjamin Franklin ascribed to once upon a time, but that’s not really accurate either. I do believe that God is active in our lives and the world today. But He has also already set up the dominoes.
We just get to choose if we’re going to knock them down ourselves or if we’re going to get tipped over in the process.
