a post for fellow Christians (though all humans are invited)
For thus says the LORD, 'When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place. 'For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you,' declares the LORD, 'and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you,' declares the LORD, 'and I will bring you back to the place from where I sent you into exile.'
Jeremiah 29:10-14
I often hear people quoting verse eleven (I know the plans that I have for you,' etc.) as a promise to Christians, to encourage me or someone to keep at it, that things won't always be like they are, but it wasn't written as a promise to us. I'm not saying God hasn't given or promised to give us these things, I am saying that wasn't what Jeremiah was thinking about when he put pen to paper (or whatever medium he used). When God directed Jeremiah to write that down and send it as a message to the Jewish elders in the Babylonian captivity, it was a promise that God would not leave them in chains and as slaves, and that He would redeem them from their political ruin as a nation. And He did it, just as He promised. And then five hundred (or thereabouts) years later, He sent Jesus to redeem them of their spiritual ruin.
Read it again. It's a description of our salvation. We were in darkness, but God's Holy Spirit quickened us and gave us the ability to understand just how lost and hopeless we were. Christ died and rose again to bring our souls to life so that we could call upon Him and seek Him with all our hearts. If we are Christians, then God has already listened to us, and we have already sought Him and found Him, when we sought with all our hearts, in that moment of incredible, unbelieveable, God-given desperation. He made Himself to be found by us and known by us, and has redeemed our spiritual ruin and set a path before us. He has already given us all the future and hope we will ever need, in Jesus. He is gathering His people from all the nations, to choose for Himself a Bride, a Church, a Body that will carry out His Word and His loving Will back into the nations He calls us from.
Then, it was a promise. Now, it is a reminder.
Galen