People are funny, even intriguing to psychoanalyze. It is difficult to figure them out sometimes. They will say the most inexplicable things when they have a mind not to accept something. A case in point is the king of Judah, whose name was Zedekiah. He was the last king of that nation. God sent Jeremiah to prophesy to the people of Jerusalem and to tell them that their time was up and that the nation had been given over to the invading armies of the king of Babylon. But he refused to hear this message. He thought that somehow the prophet was in control of the message to be delivered and that he could give a different message if he decided that he wanted to do so. And so he was determined to put some pressure on the prophet to get him to change the content of his message. He thought that a little jail time might do the trick.

The Babylonian armies surrounded the city and the Israelites were holed up inside the city walls, hoping that they would eventually go away and leave them alone. But they stubbornly waited outside. The siege went on and on, and the people got hungrier and hungrier over time. And instead of the prophet Jeremiah giving the people a word of encouragement, urging them to fight on and hold out, he said the fight was lost and that they should surrender to the enemy because God was no longer on their side. He was now fighting for the Babylonians. So Zedekiah in his frustration and resistance against the will of God, threw Jeremiah the prophet behind bars, saying to him:

Why do you prophesy and say, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it and Zedekiah king of Judah shall not escape from the hand of the Chaldeans, but shall surely be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon, and shall speak with him face to face, and see him eye to eye; then he shall lead Zedekiah to Babylon, and there he shall be until I visit him,” says the Lord, “though you fight with the Chaldeans, you shall not succeed”? (Jeremiah 32:3-5)

His question assumes that Jeremiah was in control of the proclamation rather than God. It also assumes that Jeremiah, if he could only be persuaded to do so, could change the divine Word and put God’s stamp of approval on the king’s plan to fight the invaders. Zedekiah could quote the words of the prophet with exactitude. He knew them precisely. It was not a matter of his misunderstanding his words or failing to comprehend them. It was simply that he could not accept them. He did not believe them, and would not ever believe them. They could not be true, or so he thought. Why did he take this approach to the prophet’s words?

On account of the fact that he would not accept God’s decision on the matter. Jerusalem was out of chances. All hope was lost. She was going into captivity. Zedekiah’s days as king were also at their end. He was to become a slave instead of a monarch. Such a judgment as this is hard to listen to, no doubt. So he refused to listen to it. Of course, we also know that the prophetic utterance played out in time precisely as the Word of God was spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah, and as you might expect, things went far worse for the king because he rebelled against the Word of the Lord and attempted first to resist the army of Nebuchadnezzar and then tried to flee with his family from the city. None of this worked out particularly well for Zedekiah, as you also might expect, even as Jeremiah reported in the final chapter of his book (chapter 52). 

This is a sad commentary on human resistance to the will of God as revealed in God’s Word. We can, like young Saul of old, “kick against the goads” (Acts 9:5) and resist the Word of the Lord with all of our human might, but change it we cannot. Sometimes God’s Word is hard to hear. It goes against us and our hopes and dreams for the future. But none of this matters. God’s Word is utterly irresistible. We may believe that it is unfair or that it could not be so, but it is always our will against His, our word against His Word. And mere men do not ever win in a test of wits or wills against the Almighty, let alone a contest of strength. God will always prevail, and prevail mightily. It did not serve Zedekiah well to attempt it, and it will not serve us well to do likewise.

Young Saul became over time the Apostle Paul, who had learned the hard way the lesson of the futility of resistance; he eventually came to say with other faithful saints, “The will of the Lord be done” (Acts 21:14; Matt. 6:10; 26:42). It does no good at all to resist God’s will. It is best to accept God’s judgment in every matter. As Paul so insightfully explained, “the mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be” (Romans 8:7). This is the key to human resistance. The mind of the flesh will have its way, one way or another, even if things turn out extremely badly, as indeed they did in the case of the young king of Judah in the days of Jeremiah. Wisdom ought to teach us better! As Gamaliel warned his esteemed colleagues in the Jewish Sanhedrin, if one is not careful, he may be found to be “fighting against God” (Acts 5:39), and that is an unwinnable war! Better to say, “The will of the Lord be done.”