Jeremiah 29:1-14

02/15/12 Jeremiah 29:1-14 GUMC Youth

Have you ever heard this passage before, specifically verse eleven which reads, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope." If you haven't heard it, or at least if you don't remember that you have heard it, I guarantee that you will one day, if only when you graduate from high school. If you get a chance to go to an open house for a senior, keep your eyes open for it because it shows up everywhere. Jeremiah 29:11 is a verse that shows up every time someone graduates from something and it has been the favorite verse of a bunch of people I have met.

Why might people like the verse so much? I think because it is such a strong message of hope, such a profound declaration that God actually loves us, that God will take care of us, even when things seem hard and that, even if it looks like things aren't going well, we can trust that God's plans are for our good, not our harm. For many people, it is one of the most amazing declarations of hope in the Bible.

So, why did God say this to his people? Did Israel graduate from high school? Did God mean it for his people the same way we often mean it for our friends and family or inside greeting cards? Tonight, we are talking about the Exile of Israel, that is, the time when the Israelites were taken captive by the Babylonians and taken from their land, and I chose this passage because it is probably the single most quoted passage about the Exile that people have no idea is about the Exile. So, since we've been talking about the hugely important, overarching stories that have shaped the whole history of Israel, which means that they have shaped us, too, I wanted to finish up by spending some time trying to understand the Exile and what we can learn about God from it.

You need to understand, first of all, that God was warning people that they might be taken into Exile some day from the very beginning. You can find all kinds of passages in the first few books of the Bible where God is effectively saying, "Look, I have taken you from Egypt and brought you into the land that I promised to your fathers. Don't ever forget how you got here. You didn't free yourselves, I freed you. You didn't win this land for yourselves, I delivered it into your hands. I am the God who takes the way humans do things and turns them upside down. If you forget that you are my people and you turn away from me, I will bring about an exile where you will have to serve your enemies."

The Exile shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. It wasn't as if God sprang on the people the moment they first made a mistake. Remember what we talked about last week about the whole prophetic tradition? God had been sending prophets to the people for over a hundred years who all told the people that they needed to remember God and be faithful, that their identity was bound up with their relationship with God, that they couldn't abandon God without ceasing to be who they were, who they were meant to be. Each and every one of them warned the people of what was heading their way if they didn't change their behavior. Also, we need to realize that it wasn't as though the prophets were adding all kinds of rules for the people; they were simply reminding the people of what God had already told them years ago and pointing out in some concrete ways how they needed to change.

To make matters worse, before the Exile happened, the nation of Israel had split into two, a Northern Kingdom and a Southern Kingdom and when we talk about the Exile, we are usually talking about the exile of the Southern Kingdom. Over a hundred years before the Southern Kingdom went into exile, the Northern Kingdom was defeated by Assyria and they went into exile. The Southern Kingdom should have known better. They had seen firsthand how the people of Israel could be defeated, and yet they didn't listen. Now, we shouldn't be too hard on them. After all, I don't know if we would have done any better if we were in their situation. After all, the people in the South probably didn't think that the defeat of the people in the North had anything to say to them. After all, from their point of view, the Northern Kingdom had abandoned God so of course God let them be defeated; it would be different with God's true people. It is always easy to feel superior to someone else until the same thing happens to you.

So, the Babylonians who defeated the Southern Kingdom took the people, especially their leaders and their educated people, and took them to Babylon. This caused a serious problem for the people. God had told them over and over again that they were only supposed to worship God, in the sense of making their sacrifices, at the Temple in Jerusalem. Now they were far away from Jerusalem and couldn't make their sacrifices there if they wanted to. What are the people to do? Do they make their sacrifices in Babylon? That might make a bit of sense, but does it really help to respond to God's judgment because the people broke his laws by breaking more of his laws? The people didn't think so, so they tried to find some other way of following God.

Their answer was to develop the synagogue system. The people looked at their lives and their history and they realized that there were two parts to what God had called them to do. He told them to make sacrifices in a particular way and at a particular place and also to follow his law. Now, why were the people in exile? Not because they were making mistakes with their sacrifices. In general, they did what they were supposed to do. The problem, as the prophets pointed out, was that the people were not following God's laws. So, what is the solution? The people realized that they couldn't sacrifice in Jerusalem if they were living in Babylon, so the sacrifices were out. However, there was no reason why they couldn't obey the law. It might be the case that, by being very careful about obeying the law, they might stick out a bit; after all, Jewish people weren't supposed to dress like the Babylonians or eat the same food as the Babylonians. Do you remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego? The whole reason they were thrown into the fiery furnace was because they refused to live like the Babylonians. The same is true for why Daniel was thrown into the lion's den. Both of those stories come from this Exile we are talking about.

So, if the people got in trouble for doing the sacrifices right but abandoning the law, they responded by saying, "Even though we can't make sacrifices anymore, we are going to be careful and follow every little law, so this kind of mess never happens again." This whole trend survived, even after the people got to go back to Israel and the people who really focused on the law were around when Jesus walked the earth; they were the Pharisees. In fact, we live in a world where the modern Israelites cannot sacrifice like they have been commanded so, as you might expect, this desire to follow the law carefully is still around today. Today, the people who are called Hasidic Jews are the modern descendants of this desire to carefully observe every part of the law.

The bigger issue, however, is that the Israelites realized that they were not meant to live anywhere else but where God had given them to live. They had originally thought that this would mean that God would simply not allow them to be defeated, but this didn't happen. All kinds of people were asking "Where is God in the midst of all of this? How could God have let this happen?" They were supposed to live in that particular place. How were they supposed to be who they were meant to be so long as they were forced to live somewhere else?

This kind of frustration is clear in one of the more controversial passages in the Bible, Psalm 137. "By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, 'Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!' O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!"

Not exactly a happy song, is it? Whether what they are saying here is a good thing or not, whether you agree with it or not, whether you even like it or not, can you at least understand the kind of anguish of soul that the people were going through? Their whole world had been turned upside down. Their anger is understandable. It feels as though God has abandoned them. All of a sudden, the warnings of the prophets seem to be all too clear. When they look back over the years of their lives, it starts to seem amazing that the people could have missed God's clear warnings. What, if anything, could they have done to prevent this?

And yet, the word of comfort, the reminder that God loves his people came from a singularly unexpected source: one of the prophets. Jeremiah was a prophet who relentlessly warned the people about what might very well happen if they didn't return to God and now it has happened. If Jeremiah was like we all too often are, we would expect him to say things like, "I told you so, but you didn't listen to me, did you? How do you like it now?" And yet, that is not at all what he says. Instead, he is transformed from being a vehicle for the judgment and warning of God to being a vehicle for the blessings and comfort of God. And yet, this isn't a contradiction, it is a window into the heart of God.

What we see in this transformation is not that God or Jeremiah changed their minds, but that when God said that he was primarily concerned about the people and that he didn't want the people to die but wanted them to turn from their evil ways, he actually meant it. The point of the Exile was not to destroy the people, but to remind them of who they were and whose they were. The last thing God wanted was any harm for the people, but when they refused to listen to words, it was worth the difficult times of the Exile in order to get the people back to who they were supposed to be.

What did this Jeremiah, who had spent so much time telling people that they needed to get their acts together or else they would go into exile, have to say when they actually went into exile? "Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they 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. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

Why would God give this advice to his people? In the following verses we read that there were other people, who were either calling themselves prophets are were being called prophets by others, who were saying that God was going to bring the people back anytime now. We get the idea that these people were saying either that God would realize what a terrible mistake he had made in allowing his people to go into exile and make everything right or else he would raise up a great leader who would deliver them. Jeremiah's words, as often as we hear them in encouraging situations, were once again not the words that the people wanted to hear. "What?" you can imagine the people saying, "We are supposed to build houses and settle down with families, put down roots and get involved in the community of Babylonians? Why should we do that? Isn't it not showing faith that God will deliver us?" And yet, Jeremiah was saying that the people needed to get used to the fact that they were going to be in Babylon for a while.

So what do we learn from this? We learn a hard truth and a welcome truth. The hard truth is that sometimes, when we make mistakes, we have to live with the consequences. Sometimes when we finally figure things out, when we finally actually do what is right, we don't have to suffer any consequences for what we have done, but sometimes those consequences still come. The people who never listened to God until the consequences came wanted to be faithful, but they didn't care about being faithful in order to be faithful, which is what God wanted, they only wanted to be faithful so they could get out of trouble. What is amazing is that, in order for the lesson to really be learned that we cannot treat our relationship with God like dirt, not even God could reduce the time the people were going to be in captivity. Anything less than the seventy years and the lesson would not be learned.

The welcome truth is that, in spite of the fact that it seemed to be a giving up of hope to settle down and build houses in Babylon, in spite of the fact that the people were being punished by God for what they had done, God had not abandoned them. He says, "For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope." What God told those people and what he is telling us is that, during those times when it doesn't seem like things are going right, when it seems that the only real option you have is not the one you want, God has not abandoned you. God's plans for you are for your welfare and not for harm, for a future with hope.

What we find is that what the passage really means isn't anything less than what we thought it meant by looking at all those cards, it means so much more. It means that our God cares for us more than we can possibly imagine, that how things seem to us isn't always what they really are. It means when all hope seems lost we can say, "God, I don't know what's going on, but I know that through whatever I have to face, your plans are for my good. You are the God who brings good that we could never expect out of the evil we face; make the good that I cannot see come out of this situation." God loved his people with a love that would not let them go, even when he was in the middle of correcting them. The Exile was not a sign that God had abandoned his people but a sign that he would not allow even their sin to separate them from him. How much more will God's love bind us, for whom Christ has died, to him? Let us pray.

AMEN