IS AMERICA GOD'S holy hammer to break nations to pieces? It is often tempting to think so. Maybe too tempting. Such thoughts can lead to pride. Jeremiah foretells the fall of Babylon, which, interest ing, is modern-day Iraq (Jeremiah 51). For thousands of years that land has been both conqueror and conquered. Sometimes it was God's tool to punish sinful Judah, sometimes it was itself the object of God's wrath. Who knows what history will say about our own land 3,000 years from now. Perhaps it will say something similar.

The point of this passage is not that a nation is great, but that God is great. God uses the nations for His purposes: "It is he who made the earth by his power" (v. 15), not we ourselves. The hammer and the Creator are not one in the same. The hammer does not become divine simply because God uses it.

Compared to God, "every man is stupid and without knowledge" (v. 17). Whatever we do as individuals or as a nation we should do humbly, praying that we serve as God's tools and not as the tools of an idolater who creates idols in his own image or in the image of earthly kings.