Why Did God Allow? Pt. 1

Pundits, financial forecasters, life coaches, even fortune tellers all promise a peek at what lies ahead. We listen because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. But Pastor Nick Gatzke takes a closer look at one of the most quoted and most misunderstood, promises about the future from Jeremiah 29:11.

Today we continue in our series called Rethinking Your Favorite Bible Verse. We’ve been having fun going through a number of the big hitters. Today we talk about a verse that is commonly heard at high school graduations. When the unknown future lies ahead. When opportunity awaits and encouragement is needed. I mean, life is filled with question marks. Is there any rhyme or reason to them? What’s gonna happen to me next? I don’t know. But I sure wish that I did. Many an 18-year-old Christian student has found strength in the promise of Jeremiah 29:11. “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

Or maybe we think about this on the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, not the optimistic open door of opportunity, but the other side. The season of life when it feels like the walls are closing in, that season of life of severe medical diagnosis, or when we look at our children and see them in the midst of rebellion, or when it feels like our marriage is on the rocks. I mean, Jeremiah 29:11 is there. “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

This is one of the favorite Bible verses. If I were to take a poll, and there’ve been plenty of polls, done. Jeremiah 29:11 finishes in the top three almost all the time. And you can see why. I love this verse. You probably, if you know this verse, you love it. We all need encouragement. We all need hope in a life that is filled with unknowns. It is so wonderful to know that there is somebody who does know. And at that one, God himself actually wants to bless you. But when and how do we experience this blessing?

Does this verse apply to all of us or to only some of us? Would you cite this verse to the family of a police officer in Dallas who lost his life this week or the patient with terminal cancer or the one whose children are dying of hunger in a third world  country. What does welfare and future and hope look like for them? Let’s dig a little bit deeper shall we? I want to ask you to grab a Bible I hear some pages turning if you haven’t yet grab a Bible open with me to the book of Jeremiah, chapter 29, and I do wanna encourage you to open because we’re gonna be bouncing around a little bit. And what we’re gonna do over the next number of minutes together is I wanna walk you through this passage in its broader context because it really does have tremendous application for us and great encouragement for us. But it might not be the type of encouragement that you think, might not even be the type of encouragement you want, but nevertheless, God’s promise has some important implications for us. And the first reality that we see in this text is we see, and we all know from personal experience that it is incredibly difficult to believe in God’s best for us when the situation is dire, isn’t it? When things are looking dark. to say, I know that God loves me and has welfare for me and a future for me. That’s a tough reality. Jeremiah the prophet was referred to as the weeping prophet. He was sent to prophesy to God’s people in the kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel in a season of history when they were in protracted rebellion. These people would hear God’s word, they would hear his law again and again and again and again and again and again, they would turn away and rebel and they would worship foreign gods, pagan gods. They would worship idols. And so Jeremiah comes and his remit or his command is very simply to tell them to turn again and when they don’t turn, proclaim judgment upon them. How would you like that for your job description?

We see this judgment proclaimed a number of different times, but flip back a couple pages with me to chapter 25. You can see one example of it. It’s a resounding theme. Jeremiah 25:8. He prophesies to the people of Israel on behalf of the Lord, and this is what he says. He says, therefore, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the Lord, and for Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all these surrounding nations. I will devote them to destruction and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation.

Moreover, I will banish from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the grinding of the millstones and the light of the lamp. The whole land shall become ruin and waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.” Judgment is upon them. And by the time you fast forward to chapter 29, the judgment has already come, and it’s  about to come again. The nation of Babylon had conquered much of the known world. It was going from nation to nation and overcoming it, and true to form, when it came to the land of Judah, the land of the Israelites, They killed, and they raped, and they pillaged, and they gouged out the eyes of the King, and they took the best and the brightest of the land, and they carried them off as slaves to a foreign land, to the land of Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar had his way. He would leave some of these behind in Judah, in Jerusalem, and the expectation for them was allegiance. Nevertheless, the people continued in their paganism. They remained in Judah, some of them, and that expectation of allegiance was very real, and it was enforced. And so when a new king came upon the throne of Judah, King Zedekiah, he broke fealty with Nebuchadnezzar, and as a result, what happened in judgment was about to happen again. as the armies of Babylon were knocking at the door and the gates were shaking. So the first thing that we notice about this promise of God in Jeremiah chapter 29, this promise is not about standing in the optimistic open doors to our future. You don’t often look at the high school student and say, how was Babylonian captivity for the last four years? I know for some of them it might’ve felt that way, but in all actuality, this original promise of God, that he knows a plan, that he has a plan for them, that he has plans for their welfare and not for evil, that he has to give them a future and a hope. Jeremiah is writing to a people who have been carried off to a foreign land, who’ve had their friends and their neighbors slaughtered, who are in a very real way thinking that their nation, their ethnic people group will be wiped from the face of the earth. When the situation is at its worst, the people of God needed to hear something of hope, and they did hear just that. God was not done with them yet.

The application, more broadly speaking, is related to us taking the long view in this life. I mean, you and I live in such an instantaneous society that it’s easy to forget that God often works out his plans over the course of many, many years, decades, even hundreds of years, to come to fruition. Some of us have friends that live in other parts of the country. Maybe they live locally, and if you haven’t talked to that friend for two or three months, it’s a natural inclination now for us to say, well, maybe they’re not my friend anymore. Maybe they found somebody else to invest their time and their affections in. For some of us, an eight-year presidency feels like a lifetime.

And according to The Economist magazine, for those people in our, in first world countries around the world who get divorced, the average length of marriage for these wealthy countries is only 13.6 years. In typical fashion for impatient Americans, the average goes down to eight years. But God works his plans out over much longer periods of time than our impatience will allow for. Here in Jeremiah 29, if you look, just one verse before this favorite verse of 29, 11, in 29:10, Jeremiah is writing to those who are in exile, and this is what he says.

“For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.” 70 years, a month, a year, a decade is nothing for the one who has eternal purposes in mind. And what are they supposed to do? The application for them is the same as the application for us, and that is patience.

Patience met with seeking the Lord where we are found. When the circumstances look dire, this is the call for those who are his. It applies to Israel, and in this way, it applies to us as well. But there’s another interesting reality that we see here with regard to God’s word to these exiled people. And the temptation is this temptation to engage or to enjoy the false promises of others. You know how when you hear something said to you, often enough, you tend to believe it? Especially when it’s something you want to hear. If you want something to come true and somebody says to you, it’s coming true, it’s coming true, it’s coming true, sooner or later, you’re gonna say, yeah, maybe it is coming true.

If a father says to his son, son you are the best player on your basketball team, just keep shooting. Even though the boy’s only shooting 15 % from the field. Father says that to his son and sooner or later the son is going to believe it to be true. Why? Because he wants it to be true. He wants to be the best basketball player on his team and so sooner or later he’s going to start shooting even more and keep shooting even more and keep shooting even more. I mean he’s not going to have any friends, but he wanted to be that and his dad told him that he was repeatedly. So he believed it. If your pastor tells you that God wants you to be rich, each and every person here today, God wants you to be rich. If he tells you that, if I tell you that, and then try to do some weird theological gymnastics to make the Bible say that, a lot of people will believe me, why? Because you do want to be rich. An American scientist once visited the offices of the great Nobel Prize winning physicist, Niels Bohr. This was in Copenhagen, Denmark. And he was amazed to find that over Bohr’s desk was a horseshoe, and it was securely nailed to the wall in the open end up of a proved manner so that it would catch all the good luck and not let any of it spill out. The American said with a nervous laugh, surely you don’t believe that the horseshoe will bring you good luck, do you, professor?

I mean, after all, as a scientist, and the professor interrupted and said, no, no, I believe no such thing, my good friend, not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck, whether you believe in it or not. For people who are carried off into a foreign land and enslaved, what is the one thing they want to hear more than anything else? That they will be set free and allowed to go home. That’s what they want to hear.

And hence we see in Jeremiah chapter 28, look with me, a false prophet named Hananiah arose to tell the people exactly what they wanted to hear. In chapter 28, verse two, it speaks of this Hananiah who stands up and speaks on behalf of God. He says, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the King of Babylon. Within two years, I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, which Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, took away from this place and carried to Babylon. I will also bring back to this place Jeconiah, the son of Jehoiakim, the King of Judah, and all the exiles from Judah who went to Babylon, declares the Lord, for I will break the yoke of the King of Babylon.”

So God says, you will be in exile for 70 years through the prophet Jeremiah. Hananiah stands up and says, don’t worry guys, you’re only gonna be in exile for two years. He tells them exactly what they wanna hear. My point is this, when you encounter difficulties in your life, there will be no shortage of false prophets to tell you exactly what you want to hear. And it’s a great danger for the people of God, especially when times are tough. Some of them will come to you and they will say things like, when you focus on being a blessing to others, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.

Some of them will say things like God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny he has laid out for us. Some of them will say things like it is your right to be healed from the disease that you have. You just need to pray harder. You just need to have more faith. God always wants the best for you, and that best, whatever the best is, is defined by you. The list goes on. And some of them will come from famous TV personalities who are false teachers, and some will innocently come from friends who just want to encourage you. But God never promises these things.

He may well heal you. He may well give you financial prosperity. He may well give us abundant blessing. And we should ask for these things, but this isn’t the substance of his promise. So what does he tell them to do in exile, enslaved, when the days are darkest? He tells them to cast off the false teachers, to not pay any attention to them, and actually to embrace the plight that they have, as opposed to simply trying to overcome it. Look with me at chapter 29, verses seven to nine. We see this. Again, Jeremiah writing a letter to those who are in Babylon, in exile. Verse seven says, “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. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: do not let the prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name. I did not send them, declares the Lord.” So so far we have three key components the first We see is exercising patience in God’s plan the second we see is embracing our plight of difficulty as opposed to simply trying to overcome it and by Embracing it we mean seeking it leads to the third seeking faithful obedience to God in the middle of the most difficult seasons, as opposed to listening to the false teachers, the false prophets, the false voices that would say, there’s an easy way out. Now, how do you know if somebody’s a false prophet or a false teacher? Because you evaluate their promises against God’s promises. That’s how you know he makes himself known and clear in his word.

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** This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.