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).”