Plans? What Plans?

Scripture Passage that caught my attention today: Jeremiah 29:4-7 Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Observation: These verses (along with a note in verse 10 that it will be 70 years before the Lord comes to rescue them) precede the much more popular Jeremiah 29:11 “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

Application: Americans, myself naturally included, are sometimes so self-centered and narrowly focused in how we read Scriptures. I’ve probably heard Jeremiah 29:11 quoted 100+ times in various contexts. People read and quote that verse as such a promise of how much God is involved in their lives and how much good is before them. “Fiddle-sticks” as my dad would say. That’s not true…or at least not an accurate understanding of the context of the verse. These people are in exile. And they are going to remain in exile for the foreseeable future. For most of them there will be no coming back. There past life is, well, past. What they remember will, for all intensive purposes, only be experienced again through memory. Yes, there are plans…very good plans…but they are very long-range plans. There’s still a lot of water to go under the bridge until then and, in fact, they will likely be caught up in the current and long gone by the time “then” comes.

So now what?

Jeremiah puts it this way: Build. Live. Plant. Eat. Marry. Multiply. Do not decrease. Seek the common good for this God-forsaken place and people. Pray for their well-being and, in so doing, find your own well-being.

Basically, Jeremiah tells them to grow where they have been un-ceremonially transplanted, even though it was against their will!

So those were really God’s plans. God planned for them to get busy with life where they were and not to spend inordinate amounts of energy (or even any energy) looking back.

Centuries later Jesus once said that no one who puts hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. The gift of God is before us. Not as in “way” before us but as in “right” before us. To put it in Jesus’ terms again, “the kingdom of God is at hand.” It just might not look exactly like God’s kingdom because we don’t always recognize God’s kingdom even when it’s right before our very eyes.

Prayer: Lord, help us to embrace the opportunities before us even now rather than to place all our eggs in some future basket of opportunity whose time has not yet come. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

(Readings today included: Jeremiah 28-30 and 1 John 3)