China’s calls to open Hormuz show the limits of its ties to Iran, experts say

Isaiah 19 is an oracle against Egypt, but its broader function in the prophetic corpus is to demonstrate God's sovereign stirring of internal and regional conflict among the great powers of the ancient Near East. The oracle's near horizon was the fragmentation of Egypt's political order; its far horizon points to the pattern by which God confounds the confederacies and coalitions of nations.

The principle embedded in this oracle — that the Lord stirs enmity within and between the powers of a region — is precisely what the prophets present as God's tool for exposing the vanity of human alliances that exclude Him.

The Middle East today presents the same structural reality Isaiah described: great powers pressing against one another, alliances cracking, and no single coalition able to impose order. China's inability to straightforwardly confront Iran — its own partner — while simultaneously protecting Gulf energy routes exemplifies the 'kingdom against kingdom' confusion Isaiah identified as the Lord's doing.

No geopolitical alignment, however carefully constructed in Beijing or Riyadh, operates outside the sovereignty of the One who stirs the nations.

Jeremiah 25 is one of Scripture's most expansive oracles of universal judgment, in which the LORD declares that His cup of wrath will pass to 'all the nations' in succession — not merely Judah's immediate neighbors but 'all the kingdoms of the world' (v. 26).

The 'clamor' (rá'ash — noise, tumult, commotion) to the ends of the earth is the sound of nations in conflict and judgment.

Jeremiah's original audience heard this as the announcement of Babylonian conquest sweeping through the ancient Near East; the passage's theological horizon, however, is explicitly universal — the LORD as judge of all flesh, not merely one region.

The conflict grinding through the Persian Gulf — involving Iran, the Arab states, China, and the energy arteries of the entire global economy — is precisely the kind of multi-nation entanglement Jeremiah's oracle envisions: the clamor of nations reaching to 'the ends of the earth.' The Strait of Hormuz is not a local waterway dispute; it is a chokepoint whose closure reverberates through every economy on the planet.

The herald's word to the Church: these rumblings among the nations are not merely geopolitical turbulence — they are the backdrop against which the Lord conducts His ongoing indictment of nations that refuse His counsel.

Proverbs 14:34 states a covenantal-wisdom principle that transcends Israel's particular situation: the moral character of a nation's policies determines its ultimate trajectory. 'Righteousness' here (tsedaqah) carries the full weight of just, upright dealing in every sphere — judicial, commercial, diplomatic.

The negative counterpart — 'sin is a reproach' — addresses the shame and eventual degradation that comes to any people whose national conduct is built on exploitation, deception, or the suppression of justice. This applies to nations outside Israel's covenant as a general wisdom principle embedded in creation order.

Iran's blockade of a globally critical waterway, and China's complicity-through-silence in enabling Iran's conduct while protecting its own oil imports, both represent the kind of national self-interest that Scripture names as ultimately self-defeating. A foreign policy built on transactional dishonesty — saying 'ceasefire' while refusing to name the aggressor — is the diplomatic face of what Proverbs calls reproach.

Nations that build their security on carefully worded half-truths rather than righteous dealing find, as this article shows, that such strategies erode the very partnerships they were meant to protect.