God's Sovereignty

Sorry this is a day late...here are some thoughts on the readings from March 22.


Reading through Jeremiah can be a bit depressing. There's a lot of death and destruction and poor Jeremiah has to tell the people of Israel several times over how they messed up and how God is going to punish them for it. A small part of today's passage that stood out to me was in verse 9:

I will summon all the peoples of the north and my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon,” declares the Lord...

The Babylonians were going to come and take the Israelites into captivity and I think we can all agree that having your country being taken over and then being forced into exile is not really what any of us would want. The interesting part to me, however, is where God says "my servant Nebuchadnezzar..." I imagine it would be really easy for the people of Israel to be afraid of the powerful Babylonian empire and maybe even angry at God for allowing another nation to come and conquer them. They would see the death and destruction and wonder why God would do this and for how long (although God does say pretty explicitly here in this chapter that they will be in captivity for 70 years because of their disobedience...) and yet here we see that God has full control over the seemingly overwhelming force that is Babylon. To God, Nebuchadnezzar, despite all his worldly power and force, is His servant that He is using for His purposes and in fact, God says in verse 12 that "when the seventy years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of Babylon and his nation...and will make it desolate forever."

It's rarely our natural first reaction to hit a rough patch in our lives and think about how God is sovereign and thank Him for these rough times. However, I'm reminded here that God truly is sovereign and is in control of everything. He doesn't miss even the smallest detail and is bigger than any fear in our lives.