Yokes On You

Jeremiah 27

In a world beset by sin and idolatry...in a country that had lost its way...and had for centuries rebelled against their God...Jeremiah had a hard message here in Chapter 27. And that message was, Babylon is going to win. Babylon, of course, was not Israel. They were not a nation that God had called into being. They did not worship God at all, they did not know Him. They were like all the other nations, lustful for power, murderous in their intent, and enamored with false gods that let them define morality any way they liked.

Babylon was going to win. If the Israelites were so determined to worship foreign gods, if they were so determined to ignore the laws and precepts of YHWH, if they were going to treat sojourners poorly, ignore the poor in their midst and even sacrifice children in fires to Molech, then the Lord was going to hand them over to Satan, for the sake of discipline, for the sake of repentance, for the sake of saving Israel, Israel would be overthrown.

Babylon would be the rod of discipline in the hands of the Lord against Israel, but not just Israel. How much did Jeremiah hate his job? Think of this…you are already hated by most of the Jewish community. You have already been persecuted by the King himself and put in stocks before your own people. Your own family has conspired to kill you. Because of your calling you have not married, you have no children or family of your own. All you have, and how precious it must have been to Jeremiah, all you have are the true words of God.

So he hated his job, as anyone would under those circumstances, but he loved his Lord more. And that was where his joy was, in the calling of receiving and speaking the true Word of the Lord in a land mired in deception.

So Jeremiah, having been through all this, receives another revelation from YHWH, the God whom he loves. And it’s not great. Make a yoke, as one would for an ox, and put it over your head.

This yoke will symbolize how Israel will be under Babylon’s power, and it will affirm that it is God’s will that Israel will be under Babylon’s power BUT NOW...what I also want you to do...is go to the emissaries of the surrounding nations who are in Jerusalem and tell them that the Lord who made the Earth and everything in it, also has the same message for them. That if they wish to survive, they too should bend the knee to Babylon. Not to Israel, the nation of the Lord, but Babylon.

The prophetic word is not about whether or not the nations will be subjugated to Babyon- they will be. The prophetic word is how badly will it go for you in that process?

Jeremiah 27:8 ““ ‘ “But if any nation or kingdom will not serve this Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will punish that nation with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence, declares the Lord, until I have consumed it by his hand.”

Jeremiah’s new task is not to just make himself unpopular in Israel, but to extend that unpopularity by warning not just the Jewish people, but all the people of the Ancient Near East, that the Lord has empowered Babylon, for His purposes, for His glory, to rule for a season. And that any prophet who says otherwise, is a false prophet only telling people what their itching ears WANT to hear.

I heard something recently that I have known to be true for a long time, but it was one of those moments where it really hit me. It was a theologian speaking and he said Martin Luther and John Calvin were men of God who knew God’s Word better than most people will ever know God’s Word, but they got some things REALLY wrong and did some terrible things that seem obviously unbiblical to us now. Luther was anti-semitic, violently so. Calvin literally had one of his theological opponents burned at the stake. And we wonder, how could they possibly have done such things? How could thinking, devout Christians with an in depth knowledge of the Word of God make such blatant errors? And the reason they did those things is because everyone around them was thinking like they were thinking, everyone around them did those kinds of things, it was very normal at that time to hate the Jews. It was very normal to kill those whom the church deemed heretical. All the civil and religious laws of Calvin’s time said it was necessary to kill people who were heretics. And the city government of Geneva said that Servetus, the individual in question ought to be killed for his views as well.

How does this jibe with the way Jesus treated those whom would have been heretics in his day? Samaritans were heretics of Jesus’ day, denying many Biblical truths. How did he treat them or talk about them? How did Jesus recommend we deal with our enemies, just generally speaking?

Calvin clearly knew Jesus’ teachings on how to treat one’s enemies. But he was so immersed in his culture of the time that taught, and had taught for centuries, that heresy was punishable by death, that it did not even occur to him to argue for mercy for Servetus. Somehow he rationalized it and made it make sense and every Christian of this day and age views that action now with absolute horror.

When everyone is in agreement that something non-biblical is OK, it is very hard to accept that truth, and incredibly easy to rationalize a different ethic than the one the Lord teaches us. We all are guilty of this at points. Let every person be a liar, and let God be the sole source of truth.

The hardest thing of all is to look at God’s Word and let it inform you, above and beyond what all the voices around you are saying, about what is true and holy and good. Everyone fails at this at some time or other, everyone. Especially when it comes to things that we have been taught since we were toddlers, that just seem apparent to us. So be wary. Because every earthly kingdom has sins and failures built into it and we need the Word of God to open our eyes to the sin that we have thoughtlessly and uncritically accepted as just being “normal” life.

Of all the prophets, of all the people of the Bible with the exception of Jesus of course, no man or woman stood as firmly committed, in the face of cultural opposition, to the Word of God for so long and at so much cost as Jeremiah did. A small handful of people heard his message, believed it, and preserved it. And when Jeremiah’s words were fulfilled and came to be, then his writings were acknowledged to be the very Word of God and they were added to the canon of Scripture, but in his lifetime Jeremiah was remarkable in his refusal to let the culture dictate to him what was right and true, in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Jeremiah 1:18–19 “And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you.””

So it is that Jeremiah spoke to all the nations, warning them about what was to come. And did he speak haughtily? Did he speak with arrogance or power or with a dominating spirit? No, he spoke while literally carrying a yoke around his neck, like a slave or an animal would. He was not set apart from God’s judgment. He was not speaking as one with a halo around his head, floating above the pain and the coming tribulation. He spoke as one who was in the thick of it, an imperfect human being like all of them, also feeling the weight, quite literally, of the judgment of God. So should we all speak when we are speaking the words of God to friends and family and neighbor.

How the diplomats to Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre and Sidon reacted to this prophecy we can only guess, but the educated reader will presume they were neither impressed nor convinced. Not that they were not concerned about Babylon’s growing power, or thought that it was impossible that Babylon might swallow them up, only that they would have no reason to trust Jeremiah nor would they have welcomed the suggestion to give up now. What nation wants to hear that it is God’s plan that they will be destroyed unless they voluntarily give up their autonomy to a foreign power?

Can you imagine going to the Ukraine and preaching on the street corners there that they should surrender to Russia or it will go very badly for them? Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, but what kind of reception will you receive?

Now we get to Hananiah, a prophet of good news. He has a very attractive Gospel that he is shopping around.

A little background. You may recall that what we call the Babylonian Exile that starts in 587 BC was not the first time that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had exiled some of the Israelites. In 597 BC he had taken Jerusalem and taken some of the people into Exile already including the then king Jehoiachin and had taken many of the vessels out of the Temple as spoils of war and taken them to Babylon.

This had just happened. The beginning of Chapter 28 tells us that in this narrative it was the beginning of the rein of Zedekiah, who was the next king right after Jehoiachin, and the final king of Israel.

So Judah has already been devastated. It has already been overthrown and its city invaded by the Babylonians. However, importantly, its walls had not been breached. Jehoiachin had surrendered to avoid the slaughter of his people and had let the Babylonians in. So Jerusalem’s wall still stood, which gave its inhabitants some hope that they still had protection against foreign powers. But a lot of their temple goods and valuables had been taken.

So some prophets in the city had begun prophesying that Babylon was going to return those stolen vessels, that the Lord would make the Babylonians give back the Temple goods.

Jeremiah, however, was saying, if you are real prophets, you should be interceding with the Lord and asking that whatever is left in the Temple would not be plundered and taken to Babylon.

Jeremiah 27:17–18 “Do not listen to them; serve the king of Babylon and live. Why should this city become a desolation? If they are prophets, and if the word of the Lord is with them, then let them intercede with the Lord of hosts, that the vessels that are left in the house of the Lord, in the house of the king of Judah, and in Jerusalem may not go to Babylon.”

And he says this because what the Lord is telling Jeremiah is that the whole Temple will be plundered and everything will be taken to Babylon BUT at some future time of His choosing, the Temple goods will be restored. So Jeremiah’s prophecy is not one of complete hopelessness or despair...it’s just not on the timeline that the people want and more ominously, it indicates that the Babylonian armies will return and it will go worse than before for Judah.

Hananiah then has a public face off with Jeremiah in the Temple, in front of the priests and the public, and Hananiah wins, so to speak. He removes the yoke from Jeremiah’s back and breaks it and proclaims, quite specifically, that within 2 years all the people and the temple goods that Neb. had taken from Jerusalem will be returned and Babylon will no longer have power over the Jewish people.

He humiliated Jeremiah, and the text says “But Jeremiah went his way.” It reminded me again of Psalm 1- the Lord knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked shall perish. Within a few months Hananiah was dead.

Where are we in this story? Where are we in this drama that played out 2,500 years ago in a tiny nation across the sea?

Think with me on this. What is Babylon?

Yes, Babylon was an ancient Empire of the Near East that destroyed Israel, for a season. But what is Babylon on a deeper level?

So what is Babylon? Those of you who were around when we walked through the Book of Revelation may remember that Babylon came up a lot.

Revelation 17:1–6 “Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.” And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.” And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I marveled greatly.”

Babylon is an Akkadian word that means “Gates of God”...indicating an entrance into God’s Kingdom or paradise. But for the Israelites the name Babel goes back to the tower of Babel, humankind’s endeavor to rival God, or make God obsolete by our combined cleverness and might to build things, to be creative and to build the kingdom of heaven here ourselves, without concern for God’s laws or precepts.

The very next verse from John’s apocalypse is revealing:

Revelation 17:7 When I saw her, I marveled greatly. But the angel said to me, “Why do you marvel? I will tell you the mystery of the woman, and of the beast with seven heads and ten horns that carries her.”

Babylon is all the systems, all the kingdoms, all the power, all the glory, all that the human race has said or done that has not been done for the glory of God but for our own glory. And when we look upon Babylon, our fallen human nature tends to marvel, not giving praise to the Creator, but giving praise to our own selves and marveling at our own power. It is the tower of Babel that continues to be built to this day.

We marvel at rockets that fly into space. We marvel at AI and the vast complexity of the computer networks we have created. We marvel at our ability to harness the elemental powers of nature, to create power by splitting atoms, to be able to transfer quantum data instantaneously across space and time. And, because some things never get old, we marvel at how high we can build our buildings. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is currently the tallest at 2,717 feet. It is indeed marvelous, until we make the system our idol, our hope, our desire.

I spoke earlier about Calvin and Luther and Christians doing unbiblical even demonic things in the name of God because their culture had blinded them. I can recall a story that went around Regent that was a cautionary tale about capitalism and the Christian faith.

Because Capitalism is something to marvel at too, isn’t it? This system of trade and investment that we have created that increases efficiency to the point that even though the planet has more people on it than at any other time in history nevertheless we produce an abundance of food and a surplus of goods all around the globe.

But Capitalism is also Babylon. To borrow from Churchill- Capitalism is the worst economic system...except for all the others. I am grateful to live in a capitalist society with the wealth and freedom that it entails. But let us not kid ourselves about the nature of Babylon. Let us be honest with ourselves. One of the primary reasons that capitalism works so very well is because it leverages one of our less admirable qualities, greed. Capitalism is completely compatible with greed, in fact it encourages it. It’s one of the reason it works so very well.

Compared to anything else we have tried, I love capitalism. Compared to the Kingdom of God, I hate it. Compare anything to the Kingdom of God, I hate it. This is the mystery that lies behind that jaw dropping verse

Luke 14:26 ““If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

Do I want my children to love me? Of course, I want them to love me. But compared to the Kingdom of Heaven? Compared to the eternal love of God? No, I want them to fix their eyes on eternal truths and eternal love that will encompass us all, such that compared to me and my sinful sad life it would be like hatred.

The Israelites of Jeremiah’s time had been marveling at Babylon. They were easily seduced by the pagan gods of old whose palaces, temples, idols, rituals of ecstasy and power, turned their eyes away from their God who had no idol to worship, whose kingdom was modest compared to Egypt or Assyria or Babylon, whose demands for purity and holiness could feel like a burden compared to pagan liberty that supposedly took away guilt and in its place put confidence and power. They are no difference from us. The outward appearance of Babylon changes, but never its basic nature.

But what is the “mystery of the woman” that the angel speaks of here to John? There are 2 mysteries. I don’t have time for a full exegesis of the Revelation passages, but here is the summary-

The first is that Babylon, all of our worldly systems that do not give glory to God- will be destroyed. Babylon is actually destroyed, in the book of Revelation, before Jesus returns, before the resurrection. And this is no small thing- an entire chapter of the book of Revelation describes Babylon’s destruction and how sad and terrifying that will be for humanity. We fear the destruction of Babylon- we make lots of movies about it, we call them post apocalyptic movies, where we depict barren wastelands where Babylon once stood.

But the second mystery is that the Lord replaces Babylon with Jerusalem for all eternity, a perfect city, a perfect system, with natural beauty and human ingenuity and creativity and with the Lamb of God at its center

Revelation 21:2–3 “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”

The Jewish people are afraid, and they want someone to reassure them that they have nothing to fear from Babylon. That Babylon will not bring death and destruction to them. That is what they want.

But Jeremiah’s message is not that. His message is that, because of their own actions, this is going to happen. Death and destruction ARE coming. But the message from the Lord through Jeremiah is not one of hopelessness. He says, Babylon will be overthrown, just as all the other nations, including Israel, was overthrown. The people WILL return to the land, the Temple will be rebuilt and restored and its vessels put back in their proper places. But you have to pass through the flames first. You will need to suffer first and be strangers and aliens in a foreign land first.

Babylon in Revelation 18 and Isaiah 21