Out of Context

This is probably on of the most misused verses in today's American Christianity - Stop Taking Jeremiah 29:11 Out of Context by Thomas Turner at Relevant

It’s written on graduation cards, quoted to encourage a person who can’t seem to find God’s well and doled out like a doctor explaining a prescription: Take Jeremiah 29:11 a few times, with a full glass of water, and call me in the morning. I think you’ll feel better.

“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” Jeremiah 29:11 tells us—possibly one of our most beloved, yet most misunderstood, verses in the entire Bible.

Sure, it might make a person feel better, but this verse as we often prescribe it is being taken completely out of context. It doesn’t mean what people think it means. It’s time to back up and see what the author of Jeremiah is actually saying.

When it comes to reading the Bible, we can sometimes be so familiar with the words on the page that we read them, but we don’t really understand them. We see the words and hear the words, but we don’t make any sense out of them. Familiarity can breed laziness, and so many of our misunderstandings about the scriptures happen because we are too familiar with the passage to look it with fresh eyes. If we would come to the Word of God with fresh eyes more often, we would realize that some of our most common interpretations of Scripture passed down to us don’t make much sense when viewed within the context of the passage.

Like any author worth his salt, the writer in Jeremiah begins by stating the subject of the passage: “This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon ... “ (Jeremiah 29:4).

This verse, quoted to countless individuals who are struggling with vocation or discerning God’s will, is not written to individuals at all. This passage is written to a whole group of people—an entire nation. For all the grammarians out there, the “you” in Jeremiah 29:11 isn’t singular, it’s plural. And you don’t have to be a Hebrew scholar to realize that “one” versus “many” is a big difference.

And the verse just before it is perhaps even scarier. For in Jeremiah 29:10, God lays down the specifics on this promise: that He will fulfill it “after seventy years are completed for Babylon.” In other words, yes, God says, I will redeem you—after 70 years in exile. This is certainly a far cry from our expectation of this verse in what God’s plans to prosper us really mean. He did have a future and a hope for them—but it would look far different than the Israelites ever expected.

So what? Some of you may be thinking. Even when the verse is taken out of context, it still offers value, right? God does know the plans of individual people, so it’s just as well to keep prescribing Jeremiah 29 for those seeking God’s plan for their life, right? Well, yes and no.

We need to let the Bible speak to us, not allow our own personal bent to speak into the Scriptures. If Jeremiah 29 is speaking to the nation of Israel, and not just one person, then we should start with the truth in the Scriptures. Context matters—God speaks at a particular moment in time, to a particular people group, for a reason.

What this means is that God has plans for a whole group of people, namely the nation of Israel. And 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 are a bunch of people, worshiping God together, hoping for a future redemption.

The theologians Stanley Grenz and John Franke explain in their book Beyond Foundationalism 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 decision about which college to attend, which city to move to or what job offer to take 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.

Does Jeremiah 29:11 Apply To Us?

 From Stand To Reason

The Most Misunderstood Verse

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. - Jeremiah 29:11 ESV

Jeremiah 29:11 is one of those "promise box" verses that people love to  quote as a promise of present blessing. Hey people, context is everything! That verse is in a letter from the Prophet Jeremiah to the exiles in Babylon. It is a promise of God being with them in exile, and blessings for their descendants, with an ultimate fulfillment in the coming of Christ's kingdom. It is a text about outliving your life, passing on a legacy, and seeking the welfare of others. It is NOT a promise of a problem and pain free life NOW. It is probably one of the most misunderstood verses in contemporary American Christianity.

I think Jared Wilson is right in his comments on that text in the post quoted below. It's long, but well worth the read.

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon . . .-- Jeremiah 29:4

Exile -- which is the ongoing state of the Church today as it was for Israel then -- presupposes that we are in Babylon, not Jerusalem. And one of the major mistakes the Church has made is expecting Babylon to act like Jerusalem, to be like Jerusalem, to even recognize Jerusalem as something ideal to be. We see this in the way Christians keep trying to convince non-Christians that America is really a Christian nation and needs to start acting like it again. 

The reality is that we should not expect Babylon to start acting like Jerusalem. Our calling instead is to live like Jerusalem within Babylon. What does this look like? The prophetic words are helpful:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 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. 
-- Jeremiah 29:5-6

First of all, does this give in any way the sense of "just passing through"? Does it look temporary?

Does this give the sense of living, as some say, like "the world is not our home"?

There is a sense in which the world is not our home, of course. But there's a sense in which it is. When we say things like "This world is not my home," we should not mean that this world is not the place God has called us to live out his kingdom. Here we are. Where else are we going to live? And in fact, the eschatological forecast of the new heavens and the new earth show us that this world is our home, albeit the transformed version of it that is coming. 

When we say "This world is not my home" we ought to simply mean the way of the world that is passing away - the sinful system of the world, the corruption, the injustice.

Therefore: Suburbia may be your home, but consumerism should not be. And America may be your home, but nationalism should not be. Your house may be your home, but Christ should be your security. We ought at all times to remember that even the good gifts God gives us are not eternal.