That Word Above All Earthly Powers

The unique and enduring authority of the Word of God

“See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” (Jeremiah 1:10)

---

When God called Jeremiah and appointed him “a prophet to the nations” (v. 5), His call was met with great trepidation: “Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth’” (v. 6). Like Moses before him, Jeremiah felt the enormous weight of creaturely inadequacy crushing him with the force of a mountain. Who was he, a creature of the dust, to stand and declare the oracles of the Almighty? Yet Providence would not be swayed: “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the LORD” (vv. 7–8). Here, then, was the end of the matter; all had been heard: God had spoken and Jeremiah’s future was settled. 

But God was not sending Jeremiah out unarmed. He was not, as the men of Saul’s day, being sent out to face the enemy with tinpot weapons fashioned from farming equipment (1 Sam. 13:20–22). No, Jeremiah was going out to confront the world with the King of heaven upholding his tongue. The very Word of Yahweh — a Word that burns like fire and strikes like a “hammer that breaks the rock in pieces” (Jer. 23:29) — was to be his instrument: 

“Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the LORD said to me, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (vv. 9–10). 

We should not miss the unique and incredible authority Yahweh has invested in His Word: authority over nations and over kingdoms; authority to pluck up and to break down; authority to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. The Word of the everlasting God, even when delivered through the lips of a youth from Benjamin, has power to tear down kings and remake the world.

Commenting on this verse, Calvin noted that the Word of God has power to “reduce the world to order,” that is, to expose the pretence of human pomp, to lay low every falsely exalted tyrant, and to put each person, no matter their perceived importance, in their rightful place. No earthly ruler, in other words, can keep up appearances when confronted by the Word of God. No display of hypocrisy, however grandiose, can survive the penetrating power of the prophetic Word: It is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, and pierces to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Heb. 4:12). No creature is hidden from His sight.

What this means on a practical level is that when your math teacher attempts to beat you over the head with an idealogical cudgel, claiming against all things sane and reasonable that there is something in the number of 73 different genders and that men can breastfeed, you can, as one young man did, utter a strong and prophetic, “NO.”

You can do this because you have the force of reality on your side. Unlike the wicked, your opposition to lunacy isn’t founded upon raw assertion. It isn’t built upon a pathetic appeal to the way you wish things to be. You aren’t simply scattering syllables upon the wind. Rather, when you open your mouth and utter the unchanging truths revealed in the Word of God, you are speaking with the very grain of existence. You are speaking in accord with the same Word that fashioned Orion’s belt and hung the Pleiades in the heavens. And thus, insofar as your words are a faithful transmission of His, you can be confident that the Creator of heaven and earth will lend authority to your own speech. The God whose voice shook the earth from Sinai will ensure that His Word will not return empty, but accomplish all that He purposes (Isa. 55:11).

Christians today need to recover a sense of this — a sense of the kingdom-destroying, nation-usurping, world-creating authority of the Word of God. Reformation began once with a recovery of this principle. Perhaps it will happen again.

May God make it so, for His glory and our good.

That word above all earthly powers,

No thanks to them, abideth;

The Spirit and the gifts are ours

Through Him who with us sideth:

Let goods and kindred go,

This mortal life also;

The body they may kill:

God’s truth abideth still,

His Kingdom is forever.

- Luther, A Mighty Fortress is Our God