Chapter 51 Chapter 51

If you ever have the chance to study the documents of Scripture as history rather than as theological works (and I recommend it, by the way!), you’ll come across the term “Pseudoprophecy”.

This word means, simply, “Fake prophecy,” and it’s that situation where prophecies are so strongly predictive of events that actually happened that generally, historians forget about all other evidence and say “Well, it must really have been written before that date. Because, you know, real predictions can’t happen.”

This is one of those times. Babylon was the world superpower, and yet here’s Jeremiah, a callow kid from the backwaters of Judah, now telling everyone that Babylon would be defeated. I mean, really, where does he get off?

That’s not all, either – not only does he predict that Babylon will be defeated, he says that it will be by Persia!

Now let’s put this in perspective. Persia (Iran, today, although taking in a few parts of surrounding countries) was on the up and up, but it was certainly not a world power yet. By contrast, Babylon was in the boom times. Nobody considered that there was going to be any shift in power. It would be like suggesting that America would be captured by Canada, or that New Zealand would take over the world.

As we know, unlikely though it was, it happened. God brought disaster onto the arrogant Babylonians – but He also used their greed to bring Judah to repentance.

Ultimately, though, God didn’t want to allow His people to be overrun by those who chose not to follow Him. So it was that eventually God would bring Judah home.

There’s an interesting little piece of narrative down the bottom of this chapter. Jeremiah gives the text of his “doom on Babylon” to one of the King’s officials, and he’s required to read it in Babylon! On the streets! Just imagine, walking down the street and seeing a chap there (presumably a very foreign sounding chap, at that!) telling everyone that “Doom is coming on Babylon!”

You wouldn’t know what to do or say. After all, isn’t one guy on a stree corner shouting harmless?

Well, it turns out that when that one person is of God, it’s a game changer.