God Is Good - Pt 2

“For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. (Jeremiah 29:10-14, ESV). Today we will dig a bit deeper into this wonderful passage. If indeed this is a word for Israel, what can it mean for me? If we read on in the Scriptures we find that this promise was fulfilled. Those in exile returned, and the nation of Israel was restored for a time. God made a promise through the prophets, and that promise came true. But that’s not the end of the story, either. There is something to the out-of-context prescriptions that so many make using this verse. God is a God of redemption, after all, and He wants to redeem people and put them on a path of wholeness, just as He wanted the nation of Israel to be redeemed and whole again. As John Calvin says about this passage, the prophet is speaking not just of historical redemption, for that period in time, but also of “future redemption.” For the Israelites, God listened to their prayers when they sought Him with all their heart, and in His time, He brought them out of exile. But how does any of this apply to us today? Can we still take heart in such a beautiful promise, even though it was spoken to people long ago, people in a far different situation than ours? First and foremost, we are all in this together. This verse does not apply to isolated individuals or to a broad community. It applies to both, together, functioning as one. The image painted here is one of individuals in community, like the Body of Christ which Paul talks about. Here we see a particular group of people, worshiping God together, hoping for a future redemption. Stanley Grenz and John Franke explain just how a community “turns the gaze of its members toward the future.” The future in Jeremiah is one that is bright, one that everyone in the community through prayer and worship seeks as their collective future hope. Many of us want to desperately know the plan that God has for each one of us as individuals, but let the prophet Jeremiah remind us that it’s not all about us, and it might not look like what we think. Even more important than our daily decisions is the future hope of the Kingdom of God foretold by the prophets and fulfilled in the reign of our now and coming King. In this way, the promise of Jeremiah 29:11 is bigger than any one of us and far better. Tomorrow I will be more specific about my own recent journey. Today, recognize we are not there yet. We are merely on the path. It is a path designed by our heavenly Father for our good that ends in ultimate victory! Take heart if it seems you have been defeated. It is but a momentary and fleeting illusion. God is good! And, He works together for our good all things!