Lamentations 2:1–5
How the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud!
He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel;
he has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.
The Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the habitations of Jacob;
in his wrath he has broken down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah;
he has brought down to the ground in dishonor the kingdom and its rulers.
He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel;
he has withdrawn from them his right hand in the face of the enemy;
he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.
He has bent his bow like an enemy, with his right hand set like a foe;
and he has killed all who were delightful in our eyes in the tent of the daughter of Zion;
he has poured out his fury like fire.
The Lord has become like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel;
he has swallowed up all its palaces; he has laid in ruins its strongholds,
and he has multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation. (ESV)

Jeremiah 50:17–20
“Israel is a hunted sheep driven away by lions. First the king of Assyria devoured him, and now at last Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon has gnawed his bones. Therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing punishment on the king of Babylon and his land, as I punished the king of Assyria. I will restore Israel to his pasture, and he shall feed on Carmel and in Bashan, and his desire shall be satisfied on the hills of Ephraim and in Gilead. In those days and in that time, declares the LORD, iniquity shall be sought in Israel, and there shall be none, and sin in Judah, and none shall be found, for I will pardon those whom I leave as a remnant. (ESV)

Daniel 2:20–21
Daniel answered and said:
“Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding; (ESV)

Who is responsible for the debacle in Kabul? Who is it that has made America the laughingstock of the world and made her friends doubt her willingness to stay the course when the going gets rough?
It would be easy – too easy – to point the finger at Joe Biden and change the (D) after his name to (F). He, after all is the one who, following the lead of his predecessor, pulled the plug and walked away from America’s 20-year commitment to transforming Afghanistan from a backwater conglomeration of warring tribesmen into a semblance of a 21st Century nation-state. And it’s fair, I won’t say it’s not true, to say Mr. Biden has blown it and made America look like a feeble old woman instead of a confident warrior empire.

But I want to step back and look at the world through God-eyes, through the lens of scripture to see and know the truth. And here’s the deal: Joe Biden is the man responsible for the collapse of American power and influence in Central Asia, and perhaps the rest of the world. Joe is the man, but this man is but a tool in the hand of God as he works his will and way in the flow of human history. How do I know this to be true? The bible tells me so!

If we look at the history of Abraham’s posterity as recorded by the prophets, we see that it was the rare time that they took the worship of Abraham’s God seriously. Through most of their history they were professing devotees of God while the worshipped the gods of their neighbors and lived lives indistinguishable from the lives of – well to be honest – indistinguishable from the lives lived by Americans today.
God’s prophets kept warning them that their manner of living put them beyond the reach of God’s mercy and grace. They would make jabs at doing it right, but the bright lights of Vegas kept pulling them back to the depravity of their neighbors. Like them, they killed their unwanted children as expressions of personal freedom. Like them, they neighed after their neighbors’ wives like stallions in the paddock. (The expression of their desires are a little to graphic in scripture to be repeated here.) And they did it all while claiming to love God and to worship him. They would go to their happy-clappy “worship” services, offer their sacrifices (which they ate after giving the priests their portion), and hit the hay with their neighbors’ wives and husbands.

So, God, as Sovereign over all, first sent the Assyrians and then the Babylonians to strip the land bare, to slaughter these children of Abraham – man, woman, and child – and to send those left alive into exile as war refugees and slaves.
And that brings us to the question: Who was responsible for the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC and the Southern Kingdom of Judah in 586 BC? We can say it was Assyria for the North and Babylon for the South and we wouldn’t be wrong. Jeremiah said God would hold Assyria and Babylon responsible for the slaughter and devastation – and he did. Assyria fell to the Babylonian Empire and Babylon was consumed by the Medes and the Persians never to be seen or heard of again (except as eschatological analogy in the Revelation). But to stop there is to stop too soon. Assyria and Babylon were but tools in the hand of God to accomplish his purpose and to do his will.

Let me insert a cautionary here before I continue on. Babylon, in 586 BC was the most powerful nation in its area of influence. It had no rivals who could stand before it. Fifty years later, Babylon was no more. In 539 BC Cyrus attacked, and in 538 BC Babylon collapsed overnight. (See Daniel 5) Let us take fair warning. If and when God determines our nation as depraved and defiant as were those ancient kingdoms, we may fall into insignificance just as easily as did they.

So, back to Afghanistan and the American clown-show there. Who is responsible? First of all, I blame George Bush for not reading history before he decided it would be a good idea to overthrow the Afghan government and pour our soldiers into the Graveyard of Empires. Seriously, George? The Soviets had given up just 12 years earlier. Then his generals and military advisors, from Rumsfeld, to McChrystal, to Petraeus, to Allen, to Milley, and the thousands of other false prophets who keep saying we could win if we just tried a little harder. There’s enough blame to go around. Obama did poorly and Trump equally bad. But poor ol’ Joe gets to be the one who administers the coup de grace to American pride and American power in the region. But none of these men, regardless their competence or incompetence, bear ultimate responsibility for this disaster.
This is God’s doing! God is the one who sets up kings and takes them down. He, it is, who shapes the course of human history over years and decades and centuries and millennia. God has a purpose – we can see it in its broadest strokes in the bible – in his dealings with humanity. He is drawing us to a conclusion little different from the fall of Jerusalem and the collapse of Babylon. See Daniel 2! There is a coming kingdom that will grind to dust all earthly powers and empires. The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord, and he will reign forever and ever, amen.

So, what should you and I be doing? Throwing bricks at Biden? Maybe, but more importantly we should be searching the scripture and looking closely at everything that is happening in the world around us as we look for the tracings of God’s hand in human events.