Jeremiah 27: 9 So do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your fortune-tellers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon.’
Times are much different now than the years Jeremiah was a prophet. We see the nation of Isreal captured and enslaved by Babylon under the evil King Nebuchadnezzar.
A false prophet in Israel is trying to tell the people: “Don’t worry this evil king will be dead soon! God is going to rescue us!” Only we see, that is not true.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that God gives all leaders, evil and good, in our world their authority as He did in Jeremiah’s day
5 “It is I who by my great power and my outstretched arm have made the earth, with the men and animals that are on the earth, and I give it to whomever it seems right to me. 6 Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and I have given him also the beasts of the field to serve him.
The question as to why God gives authority to certain people in a lot of cases may never be clear to us. God’s people in Jeremiah’s time had fallen so far from God, oppression was the only way to get them back on path.
These verses have me reflecting today, is there any difficult or unfair leader in my life that is meant to grow my faith? Perhaps I have been looking at a difficult situation backwards instead “skywards”.
