- Name 50 of 70An Everlasting King
- HebrewMelekh olam
- In plain wordsThe King whose reign has no beginning and no end
- Where to find itJeremiah 10:10, in the last years of Judah's kings
An everlasting king is how Jeremiah describes the LORD in Jeremiah 10:10. The name means a King whose reign has no starting line and no finish line. Jeremiah wrote it while the royal family of Judah was falling apart in front of him, and he set it beside two other titles: But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king
(Jeremiah 10:10).
Five kings in one prophet's lifetime
Jeremiah had a front row seat to the end of an era. The opening verses of his book say God's word came to him in the days of King Josiah and kept coming until Jerusalem was taken captive (Jeremiah 1:2 to 3). In those years five kings sat on the throne of Judah. Here is what happened to them.
Josiah was the good one. He cleaned idols out of the land and led the people back to God's law. Then he marched out to fight Pharaoh Necho of Egypt and was killed at Megiddo (2 Kings 23:29). He was only about thirty-nine years old (2 Kings 22:1). The Bible says Jeremiah lamented for Josiah
(2 Chronicles 35:25). To lament is to grieve out loud, often in a sad song.
Jehoahaz, his son, reigned three months. Pharaoh removed him and took him to Egypt, where he died (2 Kings 23:31 to 34).
Jehoiakim, another son, ruled eleven years and treated God's word with contempt. When a scroll of Jeremiah's messages was read to him, he cut it apart with a small knife, a few columns at a time, and fed it to the fire in his winter room (Jeremiah 36:23).
Jehoiachin reigned three months before he was taken to Babylon (2 Kings 24:8 to 15).
Zedekiah, the last, reigned eleven years. When Babylon broke through Jerusalem's walls, he tried to escape and was caught. And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried him to Babylon
(2 Kings 25:7).
That is the background for this name. Jeremiah watched every human throne in his world wobble and fall. Against that, he wrote that one King never leaves His seat.
The three titles in Jeremiah 10:10
The verse sits right after Jeremiah's description of handmade idols, wood covered in silver and gold, dressed in blue and purple cloth. The very first word, but, sets up the contrast:
But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation.
Jeremiah 10:10
The Hebrew gives three short phrases in a row. Each one answers the idols.
- Elohim emet, the true God. Emet means truth, something firm and reliable. The idols are a lie.
- Elohim chayyim, the living God. Chayyim comes from the Hebrew word for life. The idols are dead wood.
- Melekh olam, an everlasting King. Melekh means king. Olam is a word for time stretching so far that you cannot see its edge, long ago or far ahead. The idols, Jeremiah says a few verses later,
shall perish
(Jeremiah 10:15).
The second half of the verse is serious. Wrath is strong anger at what is wrong, and indignation means much the same. To abide it is to stand up under it. That sounds frightening, but think about what it means. A king who dies can never finish setting things right. Only a King who outlasts every tyrant can make sure that no wrong goes unanswered in the end.
A song first sung at the Red Sea
Jeremiah was not the first to say it. Centuries earlier, the same truth was sung on the shore of the Red Sea, right after Pharaoh's army was swallowed by the water. The most powerful king on earth had just lost everything, and Moses and the people sang:
The LORD shall reign for ever and ever.
Exodus 15:18
A psalm picked up the same words. Psalm 10:16 joins the very same pair of Hebrew words Jeremiah used, melekh olam, and adds a word that means "and on and on":
The LORD is King for ever and ever: the heathen are perished out of his land.
Psalm 10:16
And when Jerusalem lay in ruins, the book of Lamentations still held on to it:
Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.
Lamentations 5:19
Remainest means you stay. Everything else in that city had been knocked down. God had not moved.
One more empty throne: Isaiah's year
About a century before Jeremiah, the prophet Isaiah learned the same lesson. King Uzziah had ruled Judah for fifty-two years (2 Chronicles 26:3). Many people had never known another king. When he died, the nation must have felt shaky. Isaiah wrote:
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.
Isaiah 6:1
The throne in Jerusalem was empty. The throne in heaven was not.
Living under a King who does not change
Almost everyone has someone who holds their world together: a parent, a grandparent, a coach, a pastor, a boss, a leader they trusted. Then that person moves away, gets sick, retires, or lets them down. The throne in their life is suddenly empty. This name is for that day. The people we lean on are gifts, but they are not forever. God is.
It is also for days when the person in charge is a Jehoiakim. Maybe you live under someone harsh or unfair. Remember how that story ended. Jehoiakim burned the scroll, but Jeremiah simply wrote it out again, with more added (Jeremiah 36:32). The king is long gone. The words are still being read.
And if you are young, here is something worth knowing early. The people and trends that look permanent right now will not be. The King who was there before them will be there after them. The psalm says it plainly: Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help
(Psalm 146:3).
- Think of one person you lean on heavily, and thank God for them, while telling Him you trust Him most.
- Read Jeremiah 10:1 to 16 in one sitting and notice every contrast between the idols and the LORD.
- Ask yourself what you are building that will still matter in a hundred years.
An Everlasting King is name 50 of the 70 in the book. Just three verses earlier, Jeremiah called God the King of Nations. Next comes a title that joins king and judge with a third role: Our Lawgiver. Related pages: El Olam, the everlasting God and the Hebrew names of God.
