A Promise of a Generally Pleasant Life? Jeremiah 29:11--Twisters Series, Part 2

            I imagine we are all pretty careful about making promises. We want to be people of our word, so if we make a promise, we want to make sure we can follow through on it. But have you ever faced a situation when someone took your words to be a promise even though you really didn’t mean them that way? It can be really awkward when another person thinks you failed to come through on a promise, when all the while you’re thinking that you never made them a promise in the first place!

            In those situations, we want people to give us the benefit of the doubt. We like for them to show us a little grace rather than accuse us of breaking a promise—especially since the misunderstanding may be largely their fault!

            Well, in our spiritual lives, we should take a similar kind of care and caution when we encounter a promise in the Bible. The Bible contains many promises, yet not all of them can be applied directly to us. That fact often goes overlooked, however, and instead people often think that every promise in the Bible has somehow been made to them. Its not uncommon to find people who are upset with God because they think that He has failed to come through on a promise, when in reality they have simply applied to themselves a promise that was never meant for them in the first place.

            Today, we’re going to take a look at a promise that is frequently misused and misunderstood. Its found in Jeremiah 29:11. I suspect you’re rather familiar with it; it states, “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.”

            Those are beautiful words. Its not surprising that everyone who reads them would be drawn to them, but how we handle them next is where the problem comes in.

A Common Interpretation

            People often rush to apply these words to their own lives today, and in doing so, it has become very common for people to take these words to mean that God has promised me that I will have a generally pleasant life. On the basis of these words, I can expect to have generally good health and a stable job—or if I do happen to lose my job, I can expect God to have another job lined up right away that actually pays more than my previous job and makes me happier, too. I can expect God to bless me with 2.5 kids (or whatever the national average is today), and I can expect my kids to be decently athletic and good-looking so that they will be somewhat popular at school.

            In short, a lot of people, in America at least, take these words to be a promise that God will allow us to live the American Dream—things will always get a little better for us as the days go by, and good times will be coming my way around every corner. But is this an appropriate way to handle this statement from God? To whom were these words actually spoken, and why did God speak them?

A Trip Back in Time

            To answer those questions, let me take you on a little trip back in time. Imagine yourself as a Jewish person from the kingdom of Judah living in the year 597 B. C. At that point in time, you’re actually not living in your homeland around Jerusalem, but rather you’re living in the kingdom of Babylon (which covered roughly the same territory as modern-day Iraq).

            You see, you and several thousand of your Jewish countrymen had been taken captive in war by King Nebuchadnezzar and forcibly relocated to his kingdom. Now, you are likely struggling to understand what’s going on. How could God have allowed your nation to be defeated? He had said through His prophets that He had great plans for the Jewish people and for Jerusalem, but now the people were under the thumb of a foreign king who worshipped idols, and Jerusalem was under his control. As you’re trying to sort all of that out, some of your countrymen in Babylon are saying that God told them not to worry. They were saying your exile wouldn’t last long—God was going to crush the Babylonians and send you home again soon.

            Well, Jeremiah, a true prophet of God, was still living in Jerusalem at this time, and he got word of the messages that some of the Jews in Babylon were preaching in the name of the Lord. He knew their messages were false, and so he penned a letter to the exiles in Babylon to clear the air and to offer some encouragement. That letter is recorded here in Jeremiah 29, and it contains the promise of verse 11. Let’s read this letter from the beginning and continue just a few verses past the promise of v. 11 [READ vv. 4-14].

The Correct Interpretation

            Now that we’ve read this promise in its context, we’ve got it in the proper setting to understand it. Perhaps the most important detail to notice is that when God spoke those words in v. 11, He was speaking to this group of exiles as a whole. This doesn’t come through very well in English, but the word “you” in v. 11 is plural in the original Hebrew.

            This is one of the tricky parts about studying the Bible in English. Our word “you” can be either singular or plural depending on the context, but we often forget that, and in our desire to personalize everything we read in the Bible, we often treat the word “you” as a singular, when in fact it is plural in the original languages.

            So God was saying, “I know the plans I have for you all—for all of you as a whole, as representatives of my chosen people.” It would be like God telling us today that He has great plans for the United States. That would be very encouraging to hear, but it wouldn’t necessarily tell me what’s in store for me as an individual, or for my family.

            So it was for these Jewish exiles. Jeremiah 29:11 was not a promise about how their individual lives were going to play out. In fact, since the exile was going to last 70 years, most of the adults who first heard Jeremiah 29:11 would die before it was fulfilled.

            Based on the context, then, the correct interpretation of Jeremiah 29:11 is that God was re-affirming His promise to re-establish the Jewish people in Jerusalem. Despite the depressing outlook at that moment for God’s chosen people, His plans for them were not thwarted, and Jeremiah 29:11 was His guarantee that His plans for the nation would be fulfilled.

Now, if that’s the correct interpretation of this promise, how have we so often gone wrong in interpreting it? Let me address two errors that we have made.

Interpretive Errors

1. Failing to take note of the original recipients of a promise

            As we read the Bible, we must keep in mind that God has made many different promises to many different people for many different reasons. Some of those reasons—and thus some of those promises—may not apply directly to us today. It is a big mistake, then, for us to read a promise in Scripture and apply it directly to ourselves without considering the people who first received the promise and why God made that promise to them.

            And yet, this is one of the ways that people today commonly mishandle the Bible. In our modern culture, where we are all infatuated with me, myself, and I, we like to think that even the Bible is all about me. We are sometimes told to think of the Bible as God’s love letter to me—never mind the fact that God actually chose to write the Bible to people who lived thousands of years ago!

            But why should I let that stop me from making every statement in Scripture about me? My friends, God had his reasons for giving His Holy Word to the Jewish people of Old Testament times, and to Christians living in the first century in places like Israel, Corinth, Rome, Ephesus, and Thessalonica. Now, can I still learn from those words? You bet your life that I can! Is the truth of those words still relevant for me today? You better believe it is! But as we study that truth, we must remember that our wise God chose to give it first to them, then to us.

            And yet, the temptation remains for us to make the Bible all about me. This week, I found a website where you can order a copy of the Bible that has your name inserted into the text in 7,000 different places. Now, reading the Bible in such a personal way would be okay in some passages, because there are promises in Scripture that we can apply directly to ourselves—particularly in the New Testament. But I guarantee that many of those 7,000 places probably commit the very error that we’re talking about here.

            Now, why am I making such a big deal out of this? Simply because of the potential for terrible harm in your life when you use the Bible this way. Consider a couple who may be struggling to have children. They read the Scriptures together for encouragement, and suppose they read these words that God spoke to Abraham about Sarah in Genesis 17:16: "I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her."

            What if this couple reads those words, and decides to claim that promise for themselves, as though God had given to them? What if they now believe they have a sure-fire promise from God that they will have a child—and yet it never happens? My friends, I imagine we all know people who are bitter toward God right now, all because they feel that God failed to come through on a promise that He never truly made to them.

            One pastor, writing about Jeremiah 29:11, put it very well: “We have no right to hold God hostage to a promise that we have misunderstood.” Yet so many people do, and their lives are harmed because of it.

A second interpretive error that we make with this verse is…

2. Taking a statement out of context

            Many people have never read the verses that surround Jeremiah 29:11. They have only heard it all by itself. But when we treat the words in that way, we suddenly have big gaps in our understanding. What did God mean by the word “welfare?” What did He mean by the phrase “a future and a hope?” When we take a statement out of context, we no longer have the resources of the context to help us answer questions like that.

            Instead, since we’ve also applied this promise directly to ourselves, we end up filling in the gaps in our understanding with details from the context of our own lives. What does “welfare” look like to me today? Well, it looks like generally good health and a steady job and 2.5 kids and the whole American dream!

            And so, by making these two interpretive errors, we end up reading Jeremiah 29:11 as a statement in which we think God is promising us a generally pleasant life in this world. What should learn today from our mistake? First, whenever we read a promise in Scripture, we should take careful note of the original recipients of that promise. God may have given them a promise that He has not extended to us. Normally, we can determine whether or not that’s the case by carefully examining the context of the promise—which is the second lesson we should learn.

            I realize that with my sermon today, I may have just pulled the rug out from under a verse that may be one of your favorites. Jeremiah 29:11 is a beautiful statement of God’s commitment to be faithful to His promises. You may need to look at it a bit differently than you used to, and yet I don’t want today to be a downer for you, so let me remind you of some other beautiful promises in Scripture that can stir our souls.

            These promises, of course, were not first spoken to us, either, but their original setting was such that it allows us to apply these promises very directly to ourselves today. Here a just a few of these promises for your encouragement:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life (John 5:24).”

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also (John 14:1-3).”

“So we do not lost heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens (2 Corinthians 4:16-5:1).”

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (2 Peter 1:3-5).”

Sounding the Warning Siren About Twisted Scriptures--Twisters Series Part 1

            Around here, we know all about the devastating power of tornados, or “twisters” as they are occasionally called. Many of you lived here when Greensburg was nearly wiped off the map by a powerful tornado. Vernon and Shirley had their own close encounter with a tornado this Summer, and we still praise God that they are okay.

            Tornados can bring unimaginable havoc and ruin into your life. Likewise, twisted Scriptures have a similar power to hurt you. When the Bible is misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misapplied, the results can ravage your well-being in every way—spiritually, emotionally, and in some cases, even physically.

            Some misunderstandings of Scripture may leave you relatively unscathed. They are like the funnel cloud that forms but perhaps never even touches the ground. But other twisted Scriptures may have eternal consequences. They are like the EF-5 that destroys everything in its path and leaves the landscape permanently changed.

            Today, we’re beginning a series that will take us to some passages of Scripture that are commonly misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misapplied. We may end up talking about a couple of your favorite verses, and if that’s the case, I’ll ask you to simply be patient with me and hear me out. But before we take a look at some specific verses, today I’d like to deal with a few general questions that will set the stage for the rest of this series to play out.

Why are twisted Scriptures so dangerous?

            Remember that, as I said a moment ago, not all twisted Scriptures are created equal—they don’t all have the same potential to wreak havoc in your life. For example, if you get two Bible characters confused with each other while you’re reading through a genealogy in 1 Chronicles, that’s probably not going to be a very big deal. But other misunderstandings could have terrible consequences.

            Why do they have such power? Its because of the high trust that we give to Scripture. As Christians, we correctly believe that the Bible is a message from God, and therefore, it is true. In general, then, our thinking is, “If the Bible says it, that’s good enough for me! I choose to believe it.”

            We are strongly inclined to believe whatever we think the Bible teaches. Perhaps you can see the subtle danger that lurks just under the surface of our trust. What happens if we get an idea in our heads that is actually wrong, but we’re convinced that the Bible teaches it? Well, we are very likely going to believe it, and when we do, we become vulnerable to its destructive power in our lives.

            Twisted Scriptures are so dangerous because they’re like a Trojan Horse that Satan uses to smuggle lies into our minds. Since we think these lies are actually truths from the Bible, we welcome them into our minds. And once we have, they can begin to destroy us.

We should acknowledge, though, that not all misunderstandings of Scripture necessarily come from Satan. So what are the possible sources of misunderstanding?

Sources of Misunderstanding

1. Human mistakes and errors

            Sometimes, as we try to interpret the Bible, we simply make an honest mistake and get it wrong—like the child who thought God’s name was “Howard” because he thought The Lord’s Prayer said, “Howard be thy name.” There’s no malicious intent behind an innocent mistake like that—we can simply chalk that up to being human.

            A long-time professor of Greek at Dallas Theological Seminary liked to tell the story of a pastor who misunderstood Matthew 26:27. That passage is a record of The Last Supper, and in the King James translation which the pastor used, v. 27 says, “Drink ye all of it.” Now, as you read through that passage, its clear that Jesus was telling the disciples that each one of them should drink some of the wine from the cup that He was going to pass around, but this pastor understood it as a command that all of the wine should be consumed.

            This misunderstanding created a problem for the pastor. He served in a denomination that used real wine during Communion, and even though he had a rather small church, their tradition called for a full pitcher of wine to be prepared for the observance. So each Sunday, after the congregation left, this pastor would drink all the leftover wine and get drunk—all because he misunderstood this statement in Scripture!

            So sometimes, despite our best intentions and our best efforts, we simply make a mistake and get it wrong. But other times, there’s more to it than that. Sometimes, we encounter distortions of Scripture that are much more deliberate.

2. Human deception and distortion

            Since the Bible occupies such a place of honor and influence in our world, people often want to use it to justify their own thoughts or to gain power over other people. And so, they come to the Bible with a particular agenda, then distort the teaching of Scripture to match their agenda. Thus, these distortions are much more intentional than mere mistakes or errors.

            Let me read a quote from a man who believed that he found support in the Bible for his personal hatred of Jewish people: “My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them…. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was his fight for the world against the Jewish poison!”

            Who was this man who called himself a Christian and called Jesus his Lord and Savior? It was Adolf Hitler, perhaps the last person that you might expect to hear quoting stories from the Bible! Yet Hitler made these kinds of appeals to the Bible throughout his rise to power. Its possible that he never could have gained power in a historically Christian country like Germany without making appeals to the Bible.

            A little closer to home and to our own day, we see other people using the Bible in an effort to advance a particular agenda. The gay rights movement in our country would be one such example. From the time that the Bible began to be written, Jews and Christians have interpreted its commands to be saying that homosexual behavior is sinful. But in just the last few decades, people from within the gay rights movement have told us that they’ve suddenly discovered we’ve been wrong all along. Its almost impossible to see their efforts as anything but an attempt to make the Bible say what they want it to say.

            Now, I suspect that some people who have distorted the teaching of the Bible have done so with their eyes wide open. They knew full well that they were simply using the Bible as a tool to try to achieve their own ends. But others who have twisted Scripture were very likely deceived themselves by an even more sinister personality.

3. Satanic deception and distortion

            At first, it may seem surprising to us that Satan would want to have anything to do with the Bible. We might think he would melt in its presence the way that the Wicked Witch of the West melted when she was doused by water. But in fact, it may not be inaccurate to say that the Bible is actually Satan’s favorite book—not because he agrees with its teachings, but because he can do so much damage by distorting it.

            Fortunately for us, we get a pretty clear picture of Satan’s strategy for distorting Scripture by looking at his temptation of Eve in Genesis 3. We can learn some lessons from that conversation that will help us be on guard against Satan’s schemes. So what is the first step of his strategy?

A. Satan wants to get us confused about the content of God’s Word

            Look at Satan’s first question to Eve [READ Gen 3:1]. Now that was a whopper of a distortion, because its almost the opposite of what God actually said. Here’s the actual command that God gave to Adam in 2:16: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

            So Satan’s first statement grossly distorted the Word of God. Eve didn’t really take that bait, but notice that in her reply, she didn’t get God’s Word quite right, either [READ 3:2-3]. Notice how Eve added the words “neither shall you touch it,” which God had never said. Now, we don’t know precisely why Eve said that. Some people have speculated that Adam may have added those words to God’s command to simply encourage Eve to avoid the tree altogether.

            So Satan deliberately twisted God’s Word, but in her reply, Eve didn’t get it quite right either. Who knows what kind of difference that small distortion made in her mind? Perhaps she thought, “You know, that does sound kind of restrictive. Why can’t we at least touch the tree?” When Satan told her next that God was essentially depriving them of something good, perhaps this misunderstanding put her in a frame of mind where she was more willing to consider that thought.

            The important thing to recognize is that at this point, the conversation between Satan and Eve was now revolving around a misrepresentation of God’s Word rather than its exact teaching. When we find ourselves on that playing field, we are on Satan’s turf.

            Satan cannot topple the truth of God’s Word when it is properly understood and applied. What he wants to do instead is create what we call in logic a “straw man.” He wants to set up a weaker imitation of God’s Word and attack that rather than deal with the unfiltered truth of Scripture. This observation just underscores once again why twisted Scriptures are so dangerous. It is much easier for Satan to attack us when we have a misunderstanding of Scripture.

So once Satan has us confused about the content of God’s Word, then he goes in for the kill.

B. Satan wants to convince us that God’s Word is not true

            Now that Satan had created some confusion for Eve regarding the content of God’s Word, he then took the step of making an outright denial of its truth [READ vv. 4-5]. There is no “beating around the bush” in that statement. Satan openly accused God of lying by saying that God’s Word is not true.

            When Satan is trying to tempt us, he knows better than to make that suggestion right out of the gate. He knows that we’re confident that God’s Word is true, so he’s not going to get very far if he calls it a lie right out of the gate. That’s why the first step in his strategy is so crucial, and that is where we must fight the battle against him. If Satan can get us to buy into a misinterpretation of Scripture, we become easy pickings for him to knock off.

            One clear example of Satan’s two-step strategy today would be in his attacks on the Bible’s teaching about leadership and submission between husband and wife. Many people today think the Bible’s teaching on family roles is old fashioned and out of date, or even sexist and demeaning to women. But when you press further, what you find is that so many people are rejecting not the Bible’s real teaching on the matter, but a distortion of it. They think of leadership in terms that the Bible actually rejects, and they think of submission in terms that the Bible never actually calls for.

            But Satan knows that the real picture of love and respect between a husband and wife is so beautiful and so powerful that he can’t defeat it when its clearly understood. He has to distort it before he attacks it, because that is his only hope for victory.

            Now that we are privy to Satan’s schemes, we are ready to prepare ourselves to withstand them. We are ready to clear up some common misunderstandings of Scripture that Satan has successfully used to attack people time and time again.

            Along the way, I hope to teach you also about how to spot twisted Scriptures—whether they stem simply from a human mistake, or whether they come from something more sinister, like an intentional deception or a Satanic distortion. As you learn how to spot these errors, you’ll also be learning how to avoid making the same errors yourself as you study the Bible. All in all, I hope that you’ll become more confident in your ability to understand God’s Word and in your skill to interpret it correctly.