The Kindness of the Barbarians Text: Jeremiah 39:11-14
Introduction: God's Surprising Instruments
We come now to one of the great ironies of Holy Scripture. For forty years, the prophet Jeremiah has been a faithful spokesman for the living God. He has preached the unvarnished truth to kings, priests, and the common man. He has warned of God's coming judgment, pleaded for repentance, and endured for his troubles nothing but scorn, imprisonment, beatings, and threats of death. His own people, the covenant people of God, treated him as a traitor and an enemy. They threw him in a cistern to die in the mud. They put him in stocks for public ridicule. They wanted him silenced, and they wanted him dead.
And now, the judgment he foretold has arrived. The Babylonian hordes have breached the walls of Jerusalem. The city is burning, the king has been captured, and his sons have been slaughtered before his eyes. The temple of God is being plundered and put to the torch. Everything the apostate leadership of Judah trusted in, their political alliances, their hollow religious rituals, their city walls, has utterly failed them. And in the midst of this cataclysm, what becomes of the prophet of God? He is delivered. And by whom? By the very instruments of God's wrath, the pagan invaders. The king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, a man who does not know Jehovah, shows more honor and care for God's prophet than did the kings of Judah who sat in the city of David.
This is a profound lesson in the sovereignty of God. Our God is not a tribal deity, limited in His power to the borders of Israel. He is the king of all the earth, and the hearts of all kings, pagan or otherwise, are in His hand, and He turns them wherever He wishes, like channels of water (Proverbs 21:1). God can make a Cyrus of Persia his anointed shepherd to rebuild His temple, and He can make a Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon a protector for His prophet. This should be a great comfort to us. When our own culture and even our own churches become hostile to the truth, God is not short of options. He can raise up deliverance from the most unexpected quarters. He can make the barbarians behave more kindly than the bishops. He is never cornered, He is never without a plan, and His faithfulness to His servants does not depend on the faithfulness of the institutions that ought to be protecting them.
The Text
Now Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon gave a command about Jeremiah through Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard, saying, "Take him and set your eyes to look after him and do nothing harmful to him, but rather deal with him just as he speaks to you." So Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard sent word, along with Nebushazban the Rab-saris and Nergal-sar-ezer the Rab-mag and all the leading officers of the king of Babylon; they even sent and took Jeremiah out of the court of the guard and gave him over to Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, to take him home. So he stayed among the people.
(Jeremiah 39:11-14 LSB)
The King's Command (v. 11-12)
The first thing we see is the startling specificity of the command from the highest authority in the invading empire.
"Now Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon gave a command about Jeremiah through Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard, saying, 'Take him and set your eyes to look after him and do nothing harmful to him, but rather deal with him just as he speaks to you.'" (Jeremiah 39:11-12)
In the midst of a brutal military conquest, with a capital city in flames and thousands of prisoners to be processed, the king of the most powerful empire on earth takes the time to issue a specific, personal directive concerning one man: Jeremiah. How did Nebuchadnezzar even know who Jeremiah was? The text doesn't say explicitly, but it's not hard to surmise. Jeremiah's consistent message for years had been, "Do not resist Babylon. Surrender. God has given this kingdom into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar." Jewish defectors and Babylonian intelligence would have certainly carried this news to the king. From a purely political and military standpoint, Jeremiah was the best friend Babylon had inside Jerusalem's walls.
But we must not stop at a merely political analysis. This is the hand of God. God, who had appointed Jeremiah as a prophet to the nations (Jer. 1:5), now moves the heart of the most powerful man in the world to ensure his prophet's safety. The command is emphatic: "set your eyes to look after him." This is more than just "don't kill him." It is a command for proactive care and protection. He is to be treated as a VIP. "Do nothing harmful to him." And then, the most remarkable part: "deal with him just as he speaks to you." Jeremiah is given a blank check. Whatever he wants, he gets. This is a complete reversal of his circumstances. The man who was recently at the bottom of a muddy cistern, left to die by his own people, is now being offered carte blanche by his conquerors.
This demonstrates a crucial principle. When you are faithful to God's word, you may be abandoned by men, but you will never be abandoned by God. God had promised Jeremiah, "They will fight against you, but they will not overcome you, for I am with you to deliver you" (Jer. 1:19). That promise was made at the beginning of his ministry, and now, at the very end, in the darkest hour of Judah's history, God is making good on it, using the unlikeliest of instruments.
The Command Executed (v. 13-14a)
What the king commands, his officers perform. The text goes out of its way to list the names and titles of these important Babylonian officials.
"So Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard sent word, along with Nebushazban the Rab-saris and Nergal-sar-ezer the Rab-mag and all the leading officers of the king of Babylon; they even sent and took Jeremiah out of the court of the guard..." (Jeremiah 39:13-14a)
This is not a low-level errand delegated to a common soldier. This is a high-level extraction. The captain of the guard, the chief eunuch (Rab-saris), the chief magician (Rab-mag), and all the top brass are involved. This is the Babylonian A-team. Their mission is to find and secure one man. They find him where his own people had left him: in prison. King Zedekiah had kept him in the court of the guard, partly to protect him from the princes who wanted him dead, but also to silence his inconvenient prophecies. He was a prisoner of Judah when the Babylonians arrived.
And so the pagan conquerors march into the prison of the conquered king and liberate the prophet of God. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife. The men of Judah imprisoned the truth-teller. The men of Babylon set him free. This is what happens when a nation rejects the Word of the Lord. It becomes inverted. It calls good evil and evil good. It locks up the righteous and honors the wicked. And in the end, it finds that even the pagans have a clearer sense of justice than they do.
We should not miss the application for our own day. When the visible church begins to imprison the prophets, when it makes peace with the world and declares war on the faithful men who call for repentance, do not be surprised when God uses outsiders and "barbarians" to shame the household of faith. God's honor is at stake, and He will vindicate His servants, one way or another.
A New Home Among the Remnant (v. 14b)
Jeremiah's deliverance is not into a vacuum. He is not simply released and told to fend for himself. He is entrusted to a godly and trustworthy man.
"...and gave him over to Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, to take him home. So he stayed among the people." (Jeremiah 39:14b)
Gedaliah is a significant figure. His grandfather, Shaphan, was the scribe who read the discovered Book of the Law to King Josiah, an act which sparked the last great revival in Judah (2 Kings 22). His father, Ahikam, was one of the men who protected Jeremiah from the death penalty years earlier under King Jehoiakim (Jer. 26:24). This is a family with a multi-generational legacy of faithfulness to God's Word and God's prophet. The Babylonians, in their political wisdom, appoint Gedaliah as the new governor over the remnant left in the land. And their first act is to place Jeremiah into his care.
So Jeremiah is taken "home." After years of being a public spectacle, a man of strife and contention, he is given a place of rest and safety. And notice the final phrase: "So he stayed among the people." He did not use his newfound favor with the Babylonians to get a cushy retirement package in Babylon. He was not offered a position as a court advisor or given a villa on the Euphrates. He stayed. He remained with the poor remnant, the humble people left behind in the devastated land of Judah. His heart was with his people, even in their ruin. He was a true patriot, which is why he was willing to tell them the hard truth. Loving your country doesn't mean lying about its sins. It means loving it enough to warn it of the consequences.
God's Providential Care
This entire episode is a case study in the meticulous, sovereign, and often ironic providence of God. Jeremiah's message made him a traitor in the eyes of Judah's leaders but a person of interest to Babylon's leaders. The very words that got him thrown in the dungeon by his countrymen were the words that secured his release and protection from his enemies.
God's economy is very different from man's. In the kingdom of God, the way up is down. To be exalted, you must humble yourself. To be first, you must be last. To save your life, you must lose it. Jeremiah lost everything for the sake of the Word he was given. He lost his reputation, his freedom, and nearly his life. He was, in the eyes of the world, a complete failure. His forty-year ministry ended with the total destruction of the city and temple he loved. And yet, in that destruction, he was the one man who was delivered. The kings who ignored him were disgraced and killed. The false prophets who promised peace were exposed as frauds. The people who scorned him were dragged off in chains. And Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, was cared for by the enemy.
This is a picture of the gospel. The world looks at the cross and sees the ultimate defeat. A bloody, broken man, abandoned by his friends, cursed by his own nation, executed by the pagan authorities. A total failure. But we who have been given eyes to see know that the cross was the moment of ultimate victory. It was there that Christ disarmed the principalities and powers, making a public spectacle of them. It was through that apparent weakness that God's power was perfected for our salvation.
The lesson for us is one of radical trust. We are called to be faithful to the Word of God, regardless of the consequences. Our job is obedience. The results are God's business. He may deliver us through conventional means, or He may deliver us by making our sworn enemies into our personal bodyguards. He may deliver us in this life, or He may deliver us through death into the next. It does not matter. What matters is that we, like Jeremiah, hold fast to the truth we have been given. For in the end, when all the proud kingdoms of men have crumbled into dust, the Word of the Lord and those who stood upon it will be all that remains.