Today I would like to talk about something that is very near and dear to my heart and something that I believe many people today miss this entirely. Many of you know what verse I am talking about when I say the God knows the plans He has for you, plan to give you a future and a hope. This is Jeremiah 29:11, right? Now what I could do is rhyme off a devotional about how this verse is saying that God has plans for you that will give you a future and a hope. However, I can't because that is not what this verse is saying. It hurts me to say this, but I need to because we cannot be talking verses out of context because in a sense we are adding to the Bible in our own minds and what we think the Bible says. It is very important that we do not take verses out of context when we refer to verses for comfort or council. I hear this verse referenced all the time and frankly what people usually say has nothing to do with what Jeremiah was saying.
I encourage you to read this book, or at the very least the chapter in its entirety before you make any judgment on what the verse is actually saying. See Jeremiah is talking about Judah when it was taken into exile by Babylon for 70 years. The restoration of the exiles to Judah would not be completed until God's 70 years of judgment was finished (Jer. 25:11-12). It was at that time when God would fulfill His promise to restore the exiles to Judah. This 70 Exile was all part of God's master plan and His plan to give Judah a future and hope. This judgment caused Judah to seek God wholeheartedly. Finally when they had turned back to God they were restored from Exile and returned to their land. The entire purpose of the Exile was to force Israel back to their God (Deut. 30:1-10).
Now this verse is in the context of the Babylonian Captivity just as a Canadian map is in the context of Canada. When this map is pulled out of it's context (Canada), it is no longer applies to me. When I come to the states I do not use a Canadian map because the Context is now America. So when we pull verse like this which is in the context of being written to Judah during the Exile we cannot literally apply it to our future career. However, we are still able to seek out the meaning behind how God was working in Judah and apply the principle to our lives that God may cause us to go through rough patches in order to rely on Him. So yes this verse may be used for council, but it may not be used to literally apply to our life by saying God has a plans for us that are not of disaster and we will not experience any disaster like bankruptcy or anything like this because God loves us and gives us a hope. Yes, God loves us, but no this does not mean we will never experience disaster and hardship. In fact the Exile of Judah at the time was a disaster in itself but God had a bigger plan in mind.
My goal was to really stress the importance of context so that we may fully understand what the Bible says and what the author was saying to whom he was writing and how it applies to us today.
In Christ.
J
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Very true. Sometimes we take scripture out of context and rely on our own interpretations rather than taking scripture as a whole and understanding it the way God intended it to be understood. Sometimes it can be really hard to read and figure out what God is saying when we immediately draw our own interpretations from scripture. It's so important to put everything into context or we can completely miss what God is really trying to say.
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