God's Redemptive Plan in the Midst of Trial

Jeremiah 29:7b: “Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

This was a rather incredible directive by the LORD to the people of Judah, namely that they were to pray for the prosperity of their captors (the Babylonians) who were destroying the land of Judah and taking many of its inhabitants away into captivity.

Part of this mandate for these Israelites to pray for the prosperity of the Babylonians involved the LORD’s fair and just discipline of His chosen people for their abject rebellion against His sovereignty (see 30:11b). God in His ineffable glory and holiness would not permit the chronic disobedience of these Israelites to go unpunished. As with all sin, there was a consequential payment for such disobedience against the Lord. There was no way that these wayward people could avoid the judgment that was before them.

Still, in the midst of this Divine sentence, the people were called to act in faith that the LORD ultimately would redeem His people from their misery in captivity and restore them to the place that been promised to them since the days of their forefather Abraham (see Genesis 12). Part of this faith necessitated these Israelites surrendering to the yoke of bondage and praying for their captives’ success. Yes, I did say “their captives’ success.” God promised that those who responded with surrender to capture and enslavement would fulfill God’s ultimate purpose of redemption and restoration. In the immediate future, the conditions were likely to be abysmal; but, God promised that He would save them out of the land of exile and restore peace and security to them (30:10).

For the ones who were unwilling to submit to such harsh stipulations and would rather fight for their supposed freedom, the Lord declared that He would send “sword, famine, and plague and would make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth” (29:18). It was not that the LORD was averse to His people enjoying the blessedness of freedom (for in reality, the LORD never wanted bondage to be in the equation); rather, the LORD had to bring the wickedness of His people to account, and He determined that the best execution of justice would come at the hands of the invading Babylonians.

Still, God in His infinite mercy decreed that His temporal judgments would eventually draw the descendants of these exiles to the LORD, thus breaking the repetitive cycle of wickedness that had been passed from one generation to the next. Even in the midst of enacting judgment, God was working out His redemptive purposes for future generations to come.

This is a tremendous word for us today. As we reflect upon our sinful ways and the consequences that we have experienced (or are experiencing) for our wickedness, we must be willing to submit ourselves to the will of God and permit Him to orchestrate His restorative plan in our lives, even if that plan of redemption involves temporal pain and frustration. We must see that our immediate struggles may be designed by our loving Lord to mature us and strengthen our resolve to follow Him faithfully.

God does not always promise that He will remove the fallout that comes from our sinful practices; still, what He does promise is ultimate deliverance from the deserved eternal condemnation for our sinful ways, if we simply would submit ourselves to the yoke of His will and permit Him to work out His redemptive plan in us. What we have to be willing to do is wait for Him to work out His sovereign purposes . . . in His timing. To continue to fight against God’s plan of redemption is to invite hardship, disappointment, and ultimately destruction. We must not perpetuate our disloyalty by thinking that we are capable of rescuing ourselves from our despicable plot. Let’s surrender ourselves to the One True Lord and permit Him to refine us so that once we are “tried and purified, we can come forth as gold” (Job 23:10).