The Divine Boomerang: God's Sovereignty Over the Instruments of Wrath Text: Jeremiah 25:12-14
Introduction: The Unblinking Sovereignty of God
We live in an age that is terrified of absolute sovereignty. Our democratic sensibilities, our therapeutic platitudes, our deep-seated commitment to the autonomous self, all rise up in rebellion against the idea of a God who actually governs. We are comfortable with a God who suggests, who invites, who cheers from the sidelines. But a God who ordains, who decrees, who uses evil empires as His chastening rod and then breaks that same rod over His knee, this is a God who makes modern man profoundly uncomfortable. And that is precisely the point.
The prophet Jeremiah ministered in a time of political chaos and spiritual rot. Judah was a faithless bride, chasing after every pagan idol, and God had determined to bring judgment. And the instrument of that judgment was to be Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. God Himself calls this pagan tyrant "My servant" (Jer. 25:9). This is a staggering claim. The pagan sledgehammer that was about to smash Jerusalem to rubble was being swung by the very hand of Yahweh. God was not wringing His hands in heaven, lamenting the unfortunate geopolitical situation. He was directing it, down to the last detail.
But this presents a problem for the tidy, moralistic bookkeepers of our day. If God is using Babylon, does that not make Him complicit in their wickedness? Does this not let Babylon off the hook? Our passage today answers with a thunderous no. God's sovereignty is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for the wicked instruments He employs. God can and does use the sinful intentions of men to accomplish His righteous purposes, without Himself being the author of sin. And when those purposes are accomplished, He then turns and judges those very men for the sinful intentions that drove them. This is the divine boomerang. God throws the stick, it does its work, and it comes back to strike the one who was, in his own mind, throwing it. This passage is a potent corrective to all our sentimental notions of a limited, manageable deity. It presents us with the God of the Bible: sovereign, just, and utterly in control of the history He is writing.
The Text
‘Then it will be when seventy years are fulfilled, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,’ declares Yahweh, ‘for their iniquity, even the land of the Chaldeans; and I will make it an everlasting desolation. I will bring upon that land all My words which I have spoken against it, all that is written in this book which Jeremiah has prophesied against all the nations. For many nations and great kings will make slaves of them, even them; and I will repay them according to their deeds and according to the work of their hands.’
(Jeremiah 25:12-14 LSB)
The Divine Timetable (v. 12)
We begin with God's perfect and precise timing.
"‘Then it will be when seventy years are fulfilled, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,’ declares Yahweh, ‘for their iniquity, even the land of the Chaldeans; and I will make it an everlasting desolation." (Jeremiah 25:12)
God sets the terms. He sets the duration. The exile of Judah is not an open-ended affair. It is a seventy-year sentence. This number is not arbitrary. It corresponds to the seventy years of Sabbaths that the land was owed, which Israel had profaned (2 Chron. 36:21). God is a meticulous bookkeeper, and He always balances the accounts. This specific timetable demonstrates that history is not a random series of events; it is a story with a plot, an author, and a schedule. God is never early, and He is never late.
But the central point here is the pivot. After the seventy years are up, the instrument of wrath becomes the object of wrath. "I will punish the king of Babylon." Why? "For their iniquity." Babylon was not a righteous agent, reluctantly carrying out a divine task. They were a proud, brutal, idolatrous empire, driven by greed and lust for power. God used their sinful ambition to chastise His people, but He never approved of their sin. Think of it this way: a father can use a branch from a poisonous tree to discipline his son. When the discipline is over, he doesn't plant the branch in a place of honor. He throws it into the fire. Babylon's pride was in their own strength, but they were merely a tool in the hands of the Almighty. Their sin was in not recognizing this, and in glorying in their own wickedness. Assyria made the same mistake a century earlier: "Shall the axe boast itself against him who chops with it?" (Isaiah 10:15).
The punishment is severe: "an everlasting desolation." This is covenantal language. When a nation sets itself up as a rival to God, as Babylon did with its towering ziggurats and its claims to divine kingship, God does not merely defeat it. He undoes it. He returns it to a state of tohu wa-bohu, the formless waste we read about in Genesis 1. The ruins of ancient Babylon stand today as a silent, dusty testimony to the fact that God keeps His promises. Every tinpot dictator, every arrogant empire, every Christ-defying globalist project is on the same trajectory. They have an appointment with desolation.
The Power of the Prophetic Word (v. 13)
Next, God reveals the mechanism of this judgment: His own spoken Word.
"I will bring upon that land all My words which I have spoken against it, all that is written in this book which Jeremiah has prophesied against all the nations." (Jeremiah 25:13 LSB)
Notice the agency here. It is God's "words" that are brought upon the land. In the biblical worldview, God's prophetic word is not a prediction of what might happen. It is a decree that makes things happen. It is creative and destructive. The same Word that said "Let there be light" is the Word that pronounces judgment. When God speaks a curse against a nation, that word is a spiritual reality, an active agent sent to accomplish its purpose. It is like a targeted, divinely guided missile. Isaiah tells us, "So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please" (Isaiah 55:11).
This is why the written Scripture is so potent and so central. Jeremiah's prophecies were not just his own theological musings. They were written down, preserved in a book, because they were God's legal indictment. This book was the official court summons for Babylon and the surrounding nations. They were being served notice. The modern world treats the Bible as a collection of quaint religious ideas. But God treats it as His law book, His covenant lawsuit, and His declaration of war. What is written in this book is what governs reality. Everything else is just noise.
This verse also broadens the scope. This isn't just about Babylon. Jeremiah has prophesied "against all the nations." God is the God of the whole earth. He is not a tribal deity. Every king, every president, every parliament, every nation stands accountable before Him. There are no neutral zones. There are no secular spaces where God's writ does not run. All the nations are either in covenant with Him through His Son, or they are under His judgment. There is no third option.
The Justice of Divine Retribution (v. 14)
Finally, the principle of God's justice is laid bare. It is a justice of perfect, symmetrical reciprocity.
"For many nations and great kings will make slaves of them, even them; and I will repay them according to their deeds and according to the work of their hands." (Jeremiah 25:14 LSB)
Here is the divine irony in its most distilled form. Babylon, the great enslaver, will itself be enslaved. The Medes and the Persians, along with other nations, will rise up and do to Babylon what Babylon did to others. The punishment fits the crime, not just in severity, but in kind. This is the principle of lex talionis, an eye for an eye. What you do to others will be done to you. This is not petty revenge; it is the moral structure of the universe that God has woven into the fabric of reality.
God says, "I will repay them." He is the one ensuring this moral calculus works out. The Medes and Persians, in their turn, were driven by their own ambitions. But behind their political maneuvering, God was settling His account with Babylon. He repays them "according to their deeds and according to the work of their hands." This is the foundation of all true justice. Men are judged for what they have actually done. This stands in stark contrast to the modern counterfeit of "social justice," which is nothing more than institutionalized envy and resentment, judging men not for their deeds but for their group identity, their success, or their skin color.
God's justice is not a blind, impersonal force. It is the careful, considered, and personal work of a righteous Judge. He sees everything. He forgets nothing. And He repays in full. The arrogance of Babylon, their cruelty to their captives, their contempt for Yahweh, all of it was recorded, and the bill came due right on schedule.
Conclusion: The Sledgehammer and the Cross
So what are we to do with a passage like this? First, we are to stand in awe of the God who rules the nations. Our God is not a nervous bystander to history. He is its author. He raises up empires and He casts them down. This should fill us with a profound sense of stability and hope, especially when the world appears to be spiraling into chaos. The chaos is orchestrated. The madness has a purpose. God is working all things after the counsel of His own will.
Second, we must recognize that the principle of judgment remains. God used Babylon as a sledgehammer to judge Judah's covenant unfaithfulness. Then He judged the sledgehammer for its own pride and cruelty. This pattern did not end with the fall of Babylon. God judges nations today. He judges them for their idolatry, for their sexual rebellion, for their shedding of innocent blood through abortion. And He repays them according to their deeds. We should not be surprised when we see the consequences of our national sins playing out in our streets and in our halls of power. God is not mocked.
But finally, and most importantly, we must see how this points us to the cross. The principle that God repays "according to their deeds" is an iron law of the universe. A price must be paid for iniquity. For Babylon, that price was everlasting desolation. For us, that price was paid by another. God's own Son, Jesus Christ, stood in the place of His people. All the curses, all the judgments, all the righteous wrath of God against our sin was brought upon His head. God repaid our deeds, the work of our sinful hands, upon Him.
On the cross, God used the wicked instrument of Rome, and the sinful intentions of the Jewish leaders, to accomplish the greatest good in all of history, the salvation of His people. And then, in A.D. 70, when the seventy years from the ministry of Christ were fulfilled, God turned and brought an everlasting desolation upon that Christ-rejecting generation and their temple. The pattern holds. God is sovereign, God is just, and in Christ, God is a Savior. Therefore, our only sane response is to flee from the coming wrath, abandon all trust in the Babylons of this world, and take refuge in the one who took the judgment for us.