During my morning Bible study, the first Bible verse to come up was Jeremiah 29:11 and for a brief moment there, I kind of inwardly groaned. Ever since that verse was so overly quoted and shoved at Katlynn over the years, I have had a lot harder time taking it in to be honest. It was kind of tossed at me when I had cancer as well. After all of that it kind of left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
However, today when I was looking at it, wanting to just quickly read it and move on, I thought of something else. I thought about that time when I was teaching the Bible study on the five love languages at church a couple of years ago. I wanted everyone to open their Bibles and really take in John 3:16; instead, everyone just opened their mouths and ‘recited’ it by rote. In that moment, I think I really could FEEL the Holy Spirit inside of me. There was this feeling of profound sadness and ache to hear Jesus’s gift to all of us reduced to the tone and emotion of a school child reciting a lesson. I cannot even describe to you the depth of this feeling, but the echos of it linger in my soul to this day.
How tragic is it that we should read a verse so many times, that the value of it’s words becomes reduced to the sum of its parts? My friends, it should not be so. May we never be so arrogant as to think that we have gleaned everything there is to glean from a single bit of God’s Word.
With this thought in my mind, I decided to dive deeper into the context of the surrounding verses. My eyes fell on verse 10.
‘“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. ‘ -Jeremiah 29:10 NASB1995
‘For thus says the Lord, ‘When seventy years….’ Wait, seventy years?! What do you mean 70 years?! That’s longer than a lot of people live today! I’m not sure how long people were living in those days, but looking at it through the lens of today, if Jeremiah was talking to a 16 year old young person and said this to them, that would make them 86 years old at the end of the 70 years! And I don’t know about you, but after all of that time, I’m not sure that I would care anymore, because I would be bound for heaven! This revelation totally changed the context of verse 11 for me.
“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.” -Jeremiah 29:11 NASB1995
Basically Jeremiah just relays this prophecy to this people, telling them that They are absolutely not likely to make it out of captivity alive and people are grabbing the very next verse to throw at cancer patients like it’s so kind of life line?! Somehow, I just don’t find this idea very comforting. It sounds a lot more like a punishment. Like, oh by the way, you people have screwed up and you are not likely to make it out of this alive, but it’s ok, I have a plan. Where is a person supposed tot go with this line of thinking? I mean, really.
However, the gold in this passage really comes from the next two verses.
“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.” -Jeremiah 29:12-13 NASB1995
It turns out that this passage really has NOTHING to do with offering the hope of earthly healing to those battling cancer. But rather, it offers God’s promises to all those who seek Him. In this passage we receive the assurance that no matter the outside circumstances, God has a plan. He also offers us the comfort that regardless of what is happening and how long it takes, in Him we have a future. He promises in these passages that when we call upon Him and pray to Him, He WILL listen. He will always There to hear us when we call. And that when we seek Him with ALL of our hearts, we will find Him.
We may not be promised earthly healing in this passage, but that’s ok. Because God is offering us so much more than that. He is offering us Himself. His time. His heart. His hope. And a future together, forever, with Him.
And that, my friends, is how I learned that we can never get complacent with what we think we know. If we just recite God’s Word by rote or skim past the verses that we are used to seeing on billbords or bumper stickers, we can miss the real, gritty, beautiul depth that will show us more of who God is and what He is saying to us. May we NEVER stop seeking and searching for the Lord with ALL of our hearts.
Images created by Mel Seeley in collaboration with Google Gemini and ChatGPT
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