“1 This is how Jerusalem was taken: 1 In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army and laid siege to it. 2 And on the ninth day of the fourth month of Zedekiah’s eleventh year, the city wall was broken through. 3 Then all the officials of the king of Babylon came and took seats in the Middle Gate: Nergal-Sharezer of Samgar, Nebo-Sarsekim a chief officer, Nergal-Sharezer a high official and all the other officials of the king of Babylon. 4 When Zedekiah king of Judah and all the soldiers saw them, they fled; they left the city at night by way of the king’s garden, through the gate between the two walls, and headed toward the Arabah.
5 But the Babylonian army pursued them and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho. They captured him and took him to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon at Riblah in the land of Hamath, where he pronounced sentence on him. 6 There at Riblah the king of Babylon slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes and also killed all the nobles of Judah. 7 Then he put out Zedekiah’s eyes and bound him with bronze shackles to take him to Babylon.
8 The Babylonians set fire to the royal palace and the houses of the people and broke down the walls of Jerusalem. 9 Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard carried into exile to Babylon the people who remained in the city, along with those who had gone over to him, and the rest of the people. 10 But Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard left behind in the land of Judah some of the poor people, who owned nothing; and at that time he gave them vineyards and fields.
11 Now Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had given these orders about Jeremiah through Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard: 12 “Take him and look after him; don’t harm him but do for him whatever he asks.” 13 So Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard, Nebushazban a chief officer, Nergal-Sharezer a high official and all the other officers of the king of Babylon 14 sent and had Jeremiah taken out of the courtyard of the guard. They turned him over to Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, to take him back to his home. So he remained among his own people.
15 While Jeremiah had been confined in the courtyard of the guard, the word of the Lord came to him: 16 “Go and tell Ebed-Melech the Cushite, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: I am about to fulfill my words against this city through disaster, not prosperity. At that time, they will be fulfilled before your eyes. 17 But I will rescue you on that day, declares the Lord; you will not be handed over to those you fear. 18 I will save you; you will not fall by the sword but will escape with your life, because you trust in me, declares the Lord.’”
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“This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit.” “Look, Lord, and consider: whom have You ever treated like this? Should women eat their offspring, the children they have cared for? Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord? Young and old lie together in the dust of the streets;
my young men and young women have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of Your anger; You have slaughtered them without pity.” So read the words of Jeremiah at the fall of Jerusalem.
Those words are of Jeremiah are from the book of Lamentations. If you want to read about the horror and shock of the fall of Jerusalem, read that book. Many Jews turned to it to try to make sense of the Holocaust.
Tonight’s study is something different. This is another of Jeremiah’s accounts of the fall of Jerusalem. In Lamentations he focused on the emotional impact of the calamity as well as the questions it raises about God. Here in this chapter, he focused on the stupid inevitability of it all.
I use the phrase “stupid inevitability” because the people, the kings, the priests, and the prophets had chance after chance after chance to avert this disaster. This is, after all, the twenty-first sermon in this series. We’ve had twenty sermons with an undercurrent of “wake up people!” They wouldn’t wake up and they didn’t. Their stupid behavior made what we read here inevitable.
You’ve probably seen something similar in the life of a loved one. You can see where their behavior is taking them. You know what’s coming. You wonder, “how can they be so stupid?” Hopefully our study in this book has caused each of us to ask that question about ourselves. There is a stupid inevitability to the way of unrepentant sin.
The people should have listened to what God said. God will do what He says He will do. God and His word can and must be trusted. That’s true about judgment. That’s true about salvation. That’s the claim of this sermon: God and His word can and must be trusted.
We will study this in two points. First: the fate of the city and the king. Second: the fate of the prophet and the Cushite. We see the fate of the city and the king in verses 1-10 and the fate of the prophet the Cushite in verses 11-18.
First: the fate of the city and the king. Last week we studied the king’s last, last, last, last opportunity to save his city. The Lord is slow to anger, but even that which is slow does at last arrive. This is the arrival of the Lord’s wrath upon Jerusalem; verse 1, “This is how Jerusalem was taken: In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army and laid siege to it.”
That phrase “whole army” was meant to strike terror into every heart. Babylon was a war machine. The prophet Joel said, “Before them the earth shakes, the heavens tremble, the sun and moon are darkened, and the stars no longer shine.” Nations today are just starting to come to terms with the rise of China, a nation that can field an army larger than our entire nation’s population. We need to remember if that if we lived in Jeremiah’s day, a war machine like Babylon’s would cause us to tremble.
Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem and that siege lasted a year and a half. At the end of the siege, the people were starving. That’s what lay behind the cannibalism. “Should women eat their offspring, the children they have cared for?”
The goal of a siege was to starve the population to the point that they could no longer effectively defend themselves; then, the invaders would break through the wall; that’s what’s behind verse 2, “on the ninth day of the fourth month of Zedekiah’s eleventh year, the city wall was broken through.”
The Babylonian officials set up shop at the city gate. This, as we saw last week, was where the king had his office hours. The message to the population of Jerusalem was that Babylon was now in charge; that is the terrifying reality behind verse 3, “all the officials of the king of Babylon came and took seats in the Middle Gate.”
King Zedekiah saw them and fled; verse 4, “When Zedekiah king of Judah and all the soldiers saw them, they fled; they left the city at night by way of the king’s garden, through the gate between the two walls, and headed toward the Arabah.” The Babylonians broke through Jerusalem’s walls in the north. The king and his men fled to the south, most likely through a secret exit in the walls they had made for just such an occasion.
Calvin sees the shame of it all, “here is set before us a sad spectacle: men in no way trained up for war were left in the city, women also and children were left there, while the men of war fled…” The king was the leader of Jerusalem. He was the leader of it before its walls were breached and he was the leader of it after its walls were breached. As we saw him do last week, Zedekiah sacrificed his people because he was too afraid to do otherwise.
Jeremiah had repeatedly told the king that he could never escape this way. It wasn’t just Babylon that would hunt him down. God would hunt him down. The picture here is of a man who has received warning after and was then suddenly and certainly struck with judgment because God had ordained it. There is warning after warning and suddenly it is too late. That is often how it goes. The New Testament says the same of the final judgment, ‘While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.’ The message is do what God says now while you can do it. As Paul told the Corinthians, “I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.”
There is an inevitability to this capture of Zedekiah; anyone who has been reading Jeremiah knows that it will and must occur—Babylon is his destiny; verse 5, “But the Babylonian army pursued them and overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho. They captured him and took him to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon at Riblah in the land of Hamath, where he pronounced sentence on him.” Riblah was an important military and administrative headquarters. It’s likely that Nebuchadnezzar was there while his army was besieging Jerusalem.
What we have here at Riblah is a suzerain and his vassal, a great king and his servant king. We’ve studied covenants at length. Covenants are serious agreements. The covenant partners take oaths of judgment upon themselves to prove they will not break the covenant.
Zedekiah broke the covenant. He had promised to be a loyal vassal to Nebuchadnezzar. Zedekiah went back on that agreement and swung around behind Egypt. Zedekiah was brought to Riblah to receive judgment for breaking the covenant; that’s verse 6, “There at Riblah the king of Babylon slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes and also killed all the nobles of Judah. Then he put out Zedekiah’s eyes and bound him with bronze shackles to take him to Babylon.”
If that seems severe to you, that’s what Nebuchadnezzar intended. Suzerains made an example of vassals who betrayed them to warn others. They were intentionally cruel to make a point. The Babylonians made Zedekiah watch as his sons were slaughtered and then they gouged out his eyes so that sight would be burned in his brain. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “The brutal death of his sons is the last thing he sees, the last thing he will ever see, the thing he will see as long as he lives.” We don’t know anything else about Zedekiah except that he died in Babylon; some scholars think he died soon after this event.
Zedekiah is a warning to any sensitive reader. He is a man who built his house upon the sand and so it fell in a great crash, as Jesus memorably put it. As Calvin put it, “Zedekiah then is here set before us as an example so that we may know that as soon as God announces any calamity we ought to tremble and to humble ourselves under His mighty hand for He holds us on every side completely shut up so that if hiding places and refuges be open before us they can yet avail us nothing.”
You read Nebuchadnezzar’s treatment of Zedekiah in terms of contrast. Zedekiah broke covenant with Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadnezzar’s response was swift and merciless. Israel broke covenant with the Lord whose response was long suffering with offer after offer of mercy.
This blinding of Zedekiah is the only lurid detail in this text. This whole account is understated; look at verse 8, “The Babylonians set fire to the royal palace and the houses of the people and broke down the walls of Jerusalem.” It takes 5 chapters for Jeremiah to describe that in the book of Lamentations. This account isn’t about the gore or the grief. Its simplicity says, “of course this happened. God said it would.” God and His word can and must be trusted.
The Babylonians burned the city walls down. We don’t grasp the importance of city walls because our cities don’t have them. An ancient city without walls had no protection. It wasn’t worthy to be called a city. The modern equivalent of this degradation would be a town losing its post office, gas stations, parks, pool, and businesses. That’s hardly even worth calling a city. That’s the message about Jerusalem. It was now a city in name only.
The Babylonians took everyone and everything which could benefit them and left the rest to fend for themselves in a failed state. They left the poorest of the poor to take over the fields and vineyards.
That’s a political way of looking at it and it’s accurate. Here’s what Jesus add to that account from the beatitudes: it looks like the meek are inheriting the earth. The wealthy and influential were taken away to Babylon and the meek inherited the earth. Jesus was saying that’s often how it goes; “how hard it is for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of heaven.”
Being prosperous and influential can be a gift. It can also be a snare around your neck. As Calvin puts it, “often God shows His care for us when He suffers us not to rise high but keeps us in an obscure and humble condition.” Whatever you think it is that’s keeping you from success, however you define that, might be what God is using to keep you from judgment. That’s worth considering. “How hard it is for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of heaven.”
To this point our study has covered very public matters—the judgment upon a king, the destruction of a city. Now we transition to two personal stories occurring in the midst of this public catastrophe. That’s our second point: the fate of the prophet and the Cushite.
Jeremiah was obviously aware of the king of Babylon. Now we see that the king of Babylon was aware of Jeremiah; verse 11, ‘Now Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had given these orders about Jeremiah through Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard: “Take him and look after him; don’t harm him but do for him whatever he asks.”’
Nebuchadnezzar likely knew about Jeremiah from the exiles who came years before. He would have asked them what was going on in this city—any king laying siege to a city would. He had likely heard about the prophet’s unpopular prophecy calling for surrender to Babylon. He also thought that any show of kindness and mercy would only ingratiate himself to his new subjects.
By his kindness to Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar was doing the Lord’s will without knowing it. He was fulfilling what we studied last week without knowing it, “the man whose walk is blameless will be kept safe.” We saw last week that being kept safe lay on the other side of the pit. Now we see that safe lay on the other side of the destruction of the city. We saw that it lay on the other side of death for Jesus. Those who are kept safe do walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but they fear no evil for God is with them. Jeremiah could testify to that. Jesus could testify to that. Can you? “The man whose walk is blameless will be kept safe.”
Nebuchadnezzar rescued Jeremiah from the courtyard of the guard. That’s ironic and we are to notice it. The king of Judah had confined Jeremiah. The king of Babylon released him. The people of the world treated the prophet better than the people of the Lord did. That story is repeated throughout Scripture.
We are also to notice the irony of what Jeremiah did upon being released; verse 14, “he remained among his own people.” The prophet remained among the people. Who didn’t remain among his own people? The king didn’t. This continues the contrast between Jeremiah and Zedekiah we saw last week. It also gives us a picture of what an ideal prophet, priest, and king would look like. He would never leave us and never forsake us. He would suffer with us. He would suffer for us. That’s Jesus.
The contrast from last week continues with the Cushite. In some ways this sermon is the second part of what we studied last week. We see the pit for Zedekiah. We see salvation for Jeremiah and the Cushite. We are calling Ebed-Melech “the Cushite “because that’s how he’s referred to—Ebed-Melech, the Cushite.
These few verses are a step back in time before the fall of Jerusalem. It’s likely that Ebed-Melech made enemies with the officials who put Jeremiah in that cistern to die; that’s probably what’s going on with the Lord’s promise in verse 17, ‘“I will rescue you on that day,” declares the Lord; “you will not be handed over to those you fear.”’ A foreigner like Ebed-Melech was particularly vulnerable and even more so in a siege situation. He assumed he was going to die—either by the hands of those Jewish powerbrokers who tried to kill Jeremiah last week or by the hand of the Babylonians.
God sent Jeremiah to Ebed-Melech with good news of salvation; verse 18, “I will save you; you will not fall by the sword but will escape with your life, because you trust in me.” Ebed-Melech stands in a long tradition of Gentiles like Rahab, Ruth, and Naaman who trusted in the Lord and were saved. The occasion of it was different for each of them, but it was genuine faith in each instance that brought about genuine salvation.
Ebed-Melech was saved because he trusted in the Lord. Jeremiah was saved because he trusted in the Lord. Zedekiah was not saved because he did not trust in the Lord. You can’t miss that in this chapter: those who trust in the Lord, whether Jew or Gentile, will be saved; those who don’t, whether churched or unchurched, whether peasant or king, won’t.
God knew how to sort through the people of the city. He did so based on faith. That’s how He will sort through humanity at the final judgment. He saves those who trust in Him. If you don’t trust in Him, you won’t be saved even if you are the king. That’s Zedekiah’s story. If you do trust in Him, you will be saved. That’s Jeremiah’s story. That’s Ebed-Melech’s story.
This judgment is coming. God said it is just as certainly as He said judgment would fall on Zedekiah’s Jerusalem. If you find that hard to believe, read Lamentations. Read more about the fall of Jerusalem. This is the sort of thing God does to unrepentant sinners. They rejected the salvation offered through the prophet Jeremiah. Don’t reject the salvation offered through Jesus. Amen.