Jeremiah 51:51
We are confounded, because we have heard reproach: shame hath covered our faces: for strangers are come into the sanctuaries of the LORD’s house. We are confounded, because we have heard reproach: shame hath covered our faces: for strangers are come into the sanctuaries of the LORD’s house.
The verse voices the confounded shame, reproach and grief of God's people when heathen strangers entered and profaned the holy apartments of the Lord's house. It belongs to the time when Jerusalem lay desolate and the people were dispersed in captivity, when God forsook His sanctuary as He had forsaken Shiloh and delivered it into the enemy's hand because of their wickedness. It stands within Jeremiah's message of impending judgment upon ancient Babylon when its iniquity was full, a gracious warning that was slighted, fulfilled when the city fell suddenly to the Medes and Persians under Cyrus and then sank gradually into utter desolation without inhabitant. Ancient Babylon is a type of the great mystical Babylon of the latter days, so that its humbling portrays the final and complete overthrow of all that God calls Babylon and the punishment of all sinners in the day of the Lord. Its unheeded warning and doom therefore warn all cities and peoples who forget and defy God, showing that pagan persecution and the churches' rejection of present truth leave men fallen, while those who heed escape.
Words and Historical Setting
The plural sanctuaries denotes the holy places belonging to the Lord's house. It means the different apartments of the temple.
Confusion and covering shame fell upon God's people because they heard reproach. That grief and distress came when strangers and heathen came into those sanctuaries and profaned them. In that context Babylon stands exposed as a spoiler marked by cruelty and thirst for blood.
The lament belongs to the time when Jerusalem's sanctuary lay desolate and the people were dispersed in captivity. Heathen entering and profaning the sanctuary in its destruction fulfilled earlier predictions of that desolation. That fulfillment came when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, plundered the temple, carried away its sacred vessels and riches, burned the temple and the city, broke down the walls, and carried the people captive. By this God forsook his sanctuary at Jerusalem as he had forsaken the tabernacle at Shiloh, but with tenfold heavier judgment. He delivered his strength and glory into the enemy's hand because of the wickedness of his people.
Prophecy and Fulfillment
Jeremiah 50 and 51 together form the divine message sent through Jeremiah to ancient Babylon when it had filled the cup of its iniquity, a message of impending judgment and gracious warning and proffered mercy that was slighted and went unheeded. That prophesied destruction is the final result of Babylon's pride and exaltation of itself.
The prophecy does not mean that Babylon was utterly destroyed at the moment the Persians overthrew it, but points to its eventual destruction. That destruction came gradually until the city lay desolate, fulfilling the prophecy literally. Its judgment ends with Babylon made desolate and uninhabited.
The same prophecy describes the sudden fall of both the ancient city of Babylon and its empire, which came while Belshazzar and his lords felt secure. It concerns Babylon and its downfall and the events surrounding its capture by the Medes and Persians under Cyrus, including the circumstances of the city's sudden defeat. These were predictions uttered many years before the fall, belonging to the great burden of prophecy against Babylon, fulfilled in the fall of the head of gold when the silver empire takes its place in succession onward to the end. Jeremiah gave this prophecy of the fall more than fifty years before the event, and its fulfillment was the capture of Babylon by the army of Cyrus.
God had numbered Babylon's kingdom and finished it, weighed it in the balances and found it wanting, divided it and given it to the Medes and Persians. This was fulfilled under Belshazzar the idolatrous blasphemer when he drank from the gold and silver vessels plundered from the holy temple at Jerusalem to Babylon's gods of gold and of wood and of stone. Before that night ended Babylon was taken on every quarter with the cry that Babylon is fallen, is fallen. No might or scheme or power or wealth can save a city or nation that sows within herself the seeds of error and confusion and destruction and death, for God's truth stands while Babylon's perverted principles of self-exaltation fail.
The prophecy foretells utter desolation, that Babylon should become heaps without inhabitant and sink and not rise from the evil to be brought upon her. The roll was read by Seraiah by the Euphrates, who tied a stone to it and cast it into the river as a sign of that sinking. It stands fulfilled in the buried cities by the Euphrates, mounds of more than twenty centuries whose stones and sculptured slabs and inscriptions and bricks and jewelry and pottery and sarcophagi and winged lions and bulls are dug up and carried to London and Philadelphia, with the Bible as guide-book to find them. Those ruins by the Euphrates bear witness to the truth of prophecy and are cited among the prophecies that foretold the doom of Babylon.
Type and Present Warning
Jeremiah 51 stands within the prophecies against the nations, especially Babylon, and Babylon in Jeremiah's time is a type of the great, mystical Babylon of the latter days. That ancient city and its empire fell suddenly while Belshazzar and his lords felt secure, and its fate when humbled by the Medes and Persians portrays by sudden transition from type to antitype the destruction of modern Babylon at the end of the world. Antitypical Babylon is the great apostate system ruling over the nations, and the same prophecy portrays the day of the Lord in which modern Babylon and all sinners shall be punished.
The ruin foretold could not possibly be fulfilled simply in the destruction of Babylon of the Chaldees. It describes the final and complete overthrow of all that God calls Babylon in the earth, the downfall of the whole world and the ruin of the nations, and in particular the fall of Babylon the Great.
The shame and grief of God's people when strangers enter and profane the Lord's sanctuaries is testimony to paganism's persecution of those loyal to God. The chapter's testimony that Babylon would not be healed shows that the churches' rejection of the Advent message left them in a fallen condition. Those who received that message recognized their condition and broke free from the sects.
Jeremiah's warnings about Babylon, with its unheeded warning and doom, are lessons for cities and people who forget and defy God. The shame and distress of God's people at hearing reproach and seeing foreigners profane the sanctuaries belongs to that warning of judgment and of the consequences of unheeded calls to repentance. That warning applies beyond ancient Babylon to modern cities such as San Francisco, New York, and Chicago.