For I know the thoughts that I think toward You, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29: 11, NKJV
Dear Lord, we are so grateful that nothing can interrupt Your plans for our lives, if we remain within that plan. Amen
We will continue where we left off yesterday; considering God’s plans for our lives. Let us look at this text in its context. God’s people were in captivity. Because of their sins they had been taken captive to Babylon. The message from God to His people was rather unusual: Do not resist the captivity. Build houses and plant vineyards. Get married and have sons and daughters. Let your sons and daughters get married and have children of their own. Instead of decreasing, increase. Pray for the city where you are living as captives, seek its peace and prosperity. Pray to God on its behalf. If your city prospers, so will you. This was not the normal message for God to send to His people in captivity.
The reason God could send such a message to Israel was because God was in control; He always is, and always will be. It was their refusal to turn from their sinful ways that had brought upon them seventy years of captivity. Yet even as captives they could have the assurance that they would be “hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed;” “perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed-” (2 Corinthians 4: 8,9). How comes? Because all along God had the prosperity of His people in mind.
From the beginning God’s thoughts for His creatures have ever been thoughts of “peace…to give [them] a future and a hope.” Even before sin entered the world, God had made an emergency rescue plan. And when the “fullness of time” came, that plan was put into effect. Christ came to this world, and received the wages of sin on our behalf, to give us “a future and a hope.”
So by the time we came to blind Bartimaeus, the plan was in effect. Christ, the incarnate God, was walking the streets of Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, restoring the outcasts of society, opening the prison gates of sin and setting the captives free. Women, children, and slaves, could be an integral part of the household of faith. He was making the thoughts of God toward humanity, evident. Human beings could see, through the ministry of Jesus, that God had not sent “His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved” (John 3: 17). He was revealing to humanity, God’s “thoughts of peace” toward them.
Whenever you feel downtrodden, just remember the thoughts God has toward you; and lift your head up high. In Him you have “a future and a hope.”