Opinion

Stuck in an Impossible Situation Part 5

Friday, August 18, 2017

God had a message for his people in Babylonian captivity. He wanted them to know that he was faithful. In Jeremiah 24:6-7 God told Jeremiah “For I will set mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them again to this land: and I will build them, and not pull them down; and I will plant them, and not pluck them up. And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the LORD: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.” There is a ray of hope in these words. It is this: God does not forget his children even when they sin. That’s the good news.

The Jews had been taught from birth that God dwells in the temple in Jerusalem. If you want to find God, they said, go to the temple and worship him there. Now they were hundreds of miles from home, in a pagan land, separated from their own past, knowing most of them would never return to Jerusalem, and even if they did, the temple was no more. And into that despair God speaks a word of hope. I was with you in Jerusalem. I sent you into exile. I am with you now. God says to his hurting children, "I have not left you, not for a moment. I said I would punish you, and I did. But I have not forsaken my own people, and I never will."

Strange as it may seem, the Jews ultimately were in Babylon because that's where they needed to be. Their rebellion was so deep that they had to be removed from Judah in order for that sin to be broken. Only radical surgery could remove the cancer of idolatry. We might say that their exile to Babylon, terrible as it seemed, was really a severe mercy from the Lord. There was no other way to get their attention. It is as if God was saying, "You think I hate you, but I don't. I have a wonderful plan for you, and that wonderful plan begins in Babylon." It didn't seem so wonderful at that moment, but it was. It is better to be in the will of God in Babylon than to be out of the will of God in Jerusalem.

At last we return to the question I asked at the beginning of this study. What do you do when you don't like the circumstances of your life and it seems as if those circumstances aren't going to change anytime soon? The answer is that God doesn't look at your circumstances the same way you do. You don't like where you are, and you wish you were somewhere else doing something else. And you may be in a bad place in part because of your own foolish choices. And God says, "You are where you are because I put you there." We can thank God that he gives us what we need when we need it. We serve a wonderful Lord. God loves you and so does First Baptist Church.

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