Tuesday, August 13, 2019
This blog post is, like many of my theological insights, completely spontaneous. I was re-reading Jeremiah 29, the passage that my pastor preached on this past Sunday, and I got an additional insight. Unlike most exegeses of Jeremiah 29, this one does not include Jeremiah 29:11, in which the Lord tells the exiled Israelites: “For I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” This exclusion wasn’t on purpose. My brain just took a different turn.
Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had taken many of the Israelites into exile/captivity. All they wanted was to go home (see Psalm 137: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”). However, through the prophet Jeremiah, God tells them to get ready to stay for seventy years; to plan to settle down and get comfortable (Jer. 29:5-10):
“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper….This is what the LORD says: ‘When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.'”
(Photo credit: http://treasureboxmy.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-babylonian-captivity-exile-2.html)
Unfortunately, the people did not want to hear this message. In fact, a man named Shemaiah from Nehelaim accused Jeremiah of being a false prophet. Surely the Lord would not want us to endure exile! He will come and save us, just like He saved us in Egypt!
(Author’s Note: How long were y’all in Egypt, again? *insert quirky, motivational message about waiting on God through our circumstances*).
Shemaiah then asked Zephaniah to punish Jeremiah, like they had been punishing all of the prophets who spoke unfavorable prophecies:
“The LORD has appointed you priest in place of Jehoiada to be in charge of the house of the LORD, you should put any maniac who acts like a prophet into the stocks and neck-irons. So why have you not reprimanded Jeremiah from Anathoth, who poses as a prophet among you? He has sent this message to us in Babylon: It will be a long time. Therefore, build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce” (29:27-28).
(Invoking the Lord’s name to do something the Lord did NOT command you to do? Hmm…this should end well…)
Re-reading this passage could not have come at a better time for me. Even though I have no plans to move, a thought that keeps running through my mind is that I don’t want to learn how to drive or buy a car because such a major purchase implies that I am ready to settle down somewhere and stay; I wanted to always allow for the possibility of packing up and leaving without too many personal items. It’s an irrational thought, because I have nowhere to go, yet I think it quite often.
I am not in exile. I am in a town where I spent most of my childhood before going away (not that far away) for college and seminary. But I can relate to the Israelites. There is a stigma attached to many places in the United States, and, like the Israelites, I just want to go home. But I have nowhere that I could call home. At least not anymore.
So I have to take to heart the words of Jeremiah to be content where I am, whether on a national or local level. To make my mom’s old apartment into a home of which I can be proud and where I can be the domestic hostess I’ve always dreamt of being; to participate in the social life of my community instead of always running off to “the best old place of all”; and, especially, to seek the welfare of my city (and country) through prayer, civic engagement, and political participation.
God has a purpose for us where He has put us. Acts 17:26 states, “From one man [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.”
The English Revised Version states: “God began by making one man, and from him he made all the different people who live everywhere in the world. He decided exactly when and where they would live.”
Salvation = Soul + Person 