Ask Pastor Mike Live

Matt: How can we know when a promise is meant for specific people at a specific time, or is it an eternal truth such as Jeremiah chapter 29, verse 11? That is one example where a lot of people quote that, but is that something that we can claim for ourselves?

Mike Fabarez: Well, maybe just quoting that passage, or the reference at least, maybe you say you don't know what that passage is, but as soon as I quote it, I'll bet you've heard it. Matt, you asked this question, and I know that many of our listeners have heard this verse. Listen to what it says.

"For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare, not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." Okay, let's just look at that verse, which I'm sure you've heard before. Probably, if you've been to a Christian bookstore, you've seen it on a plaque or something that you put on your wall or a bookmark that you put in your Bible. You say, "Oh, that's a great verse. It's a very positive verse, and it looks like a great promise of God."

You're going to read that verse because it's such a positive verse and you're going to say, "I know the plans I have for you." You're going to say, "I hope that 'you' is me." It's a second-person pronoun. I hope that pronoun is me. Well, here is this context. You think Jeremiah. When was that written? Jeremiah is the prophet in the Old Testament.

Sometimes, if you were to know this or look it up, you'd say he's called the weeping prophet. Why is he the weeping prophet? Because he's the guy who wrote Lamentations. Why is he lamenting? Well, it's because the Babylonians had come through Israel or Judah, the southern part of Israel, and destroyed these folks in 586 BC. The temple got destroyed and he loved Israel, he loved God and the temple, and he was weeping over it all. It was a terrible time for Israel.

But in Jeremiah chapter 29, there was a promise that God was going to bring them back into the land when all this took place. It was going to happen 70 years later. Though Babylon was going to destroy the southern nation of Israel, 70 years later, after that generation was going to die off, there was going to be a whole group of people that were going to come back and reestablish Israel and Judah.

There would be another temple built, and everything would come back around. At the tail end of that, the promise of that restoration, here that verse comes: "For I know the plans I have for you." Who are we talking about? We're talking about Judah there. "Declares the Lord, plans for welfare, plans for good, not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."

So, yes, Matt, you're asking a great question. When you read that verse, and oftentimes I've seen it in Christian bookstores—not the bookstore we have at our church, but I've seen it with an American flag in the background—and we say, "Well, I'd like to be in the 'you.' Maybe the 'you' is us, the good old USA, and God's making a promise to us." Well, really he's making a promise to Judah, the southern two tribes of Israel, in the sixth century BC.

Even though Zedekiah was going to have his eyes gouged out, they were going to come back 70 years later under Zerubbabel to build a temple. Ezra and Nehemiah were going to make sure this all happened under God's providence, of course. God was going to make sure it happened, but they were going to be the leaders during that time, and there would be a new temple built.

Through that remnant, bringing them back into the land, God was going to bring ultimately the promises of all the prophets, culminating in the Son of God being born in Bethlehem and living and fulfilling all righteousness and dying on the cross. Ultimately, in His second coming, He'll fulfill the ultimate promises of a kingdom that is going to be established that we're all still waiting for.

That was going to be, at least in the near field, the early part of Jeremiah 29. That was the return to the land that they were getting kicked out of. So, no, it's not about America. It's not about us. It's not about even someone who's reading that thinking, "Well, I lost the job, so I'm going to quote this verse about God giving me a job back."

But in saying all that, just because I learn a little bit about Old Testament history and Israel, or in this case Judah and the Babylonian captivity, doesn't mean I'm going to be a guy who goes around raining on everybody's parade. I'm not going to say, "Nana nana nana, this isn't about you, so take all those plaques and throw them in the trash." I wouldn't buy the plaque, and I'm not going to put it up and say, "God bless America," and read the plaque.

But I am going to say there's a principle here that I can draw from this text in my daily Bible study. Is there any eternal principle I can draw? Of course there is. I'm not going to be some naysayer who goes around, as it says in the New Testament to the Corinthians as Paul says, where knowledge puffs up, but love edifies. We ought to seek to love, and I want to edify Christians with the principle that's found in Jeremiah 29:11.

What's the principle? God makes a promise with God's covenant people, of which I'm a part of here, as the new covenant people. I'm a Gentile grafted into the promise of God in saving me through the Jewish Messiah. Even though I know I'm part of the church and that's a unique program, I'm someone that God has a plan for.

It's not a plan to bring me into a particular piece of real estate, but it is a plan that God is going to ultimately bring me into His eternal kingdom. I'm going to be saved ultimately from this terrible body that has all these passions waging war against my soul. I'm going to be brought into a place where there's going to be a world in which righteousness dwells, as it says in 2 Peter chapter three.

As it's put in Psalm 16, verse 11, in the presence of God there's going to be fullness of joy. That's the ultimate plan where I'm going to be brought, not just back into the promised land of Judah like they were in the sixth or fifth century BC, but into the place where I'm going to have the fullness of God's presence brought down to earth as it says in Revelation 21. That's the plan that relates to me ultimately.

So the "you," I can stretch that in some elastic way to say, yeah, I'm a part of that plan. The plan that God has for me is a plan for good and it's not for evil, and He is giving me a future and a hope. It's just not the future and hope that was in the near field of the promise there in Jeremiah 29:11. So, Matt, I hope you can see my answer to this question is yes and no.

That promise isn't specifically given to me as a Jew in the sixth century BC about leaving Judah and having to march away into the Mesopotamian area under the Babylonian army. I don't have a promise that my kids are going to march back one day under Nehemiah or Ezra and help build the temple back under Zerubbabel. No, that's not the specific promise for me.

But now I live 2,600 years later in America. I do know that there is a promise that God makes for me. As a Gentile, I'm going to be saved by the Jewish Messiah. The promise for me is I don't have to live in this sin-laden world, and I'm not going to have to live forever in this sin-laden body. God has a plan for me; I'm going to live in a place where Christ is going to rule and reign on this earth. I'm going to rule and reign with Him.

So I do have a plan for welfare and not for evil, for good not for evil, and I do have a future and a hope. I just need to know what that future and hope is, and it's a little different than it was in Jeremiah 29:11. I'm going to read that verse, I may even write it down or memorize it and get excited about it, but I have to define it as it does apply to me.

There is a principle there that's good. Matt, here's the problem. I find people—here's how I like to say it because I was at one time a first-year Bible student. There's a lot of first-year Bible students that get pretty uppity about interpreting scripture. As soon as they find out there is an original context for the application of that passage, they immediately go around fire-hosing everybody's quotations of scripture.

They say, "That doesn't apply to you, that doesn't apply to you, that doesn't apply to you." All of a sudden they think they're all that because they know the original context of a passage, and they miss all the joy of applying a text in a way that does apply to us because they've extracted a principle and now they can apply it properly. So, Matt, the answer's yes and no in the sense of: does Jeremiah 29:11 apply to us?

The principle does apply to us, but the exact initial, original application was different and it was tied to the context. The authorial intent—and we are all about that: historical, grammatical, verbal interpretation of a text—I've got to know what it is so that I can rightly extract the principle and then figure out what the application is so I don't misapply the text.

I can apply it accurately in a way that can still allow me to buy the plaque in the bookstore. What I don't want to do is to try and say this applies to the United States of America in the 21st century. No, it applies to Christians who are still a part of the covenant people of God in the sense that we are the new covenant people of God in the church age. It doesn't apply to our government here today, but it does apply to me as a part of the church because God has laid His promises upon us.

That was a wordy way to respond, but I hope that helps. My name's Mike Fabarez. You're listening to Ask Pastor Mike Live. The phone number if you want to talk to me—maybe you want to talk to me about that—is 1-877-913-5357. Pick up your phone and give me a call: 1-877-913-5357. I'm here for you for another 30 or 35 minutes.

Give me a call at 1-877-913-5357. Whatever is on your mind. A lot is going on in this world. Maybe you saw the big funeral there in Arizona. I was flying back from Idaho, and because I was flying on American Airlines, I had to stop there in Phoenix. A lot of people were boarding my plane from that funeral, the Kirk funeral there in Phoenix. It actually delayed my flight, so I was flying in when a lot of people were coming back from that funeral to get back to Orange County where I was flying home.

What a strange cultural moment to have so many within our government—not just speaking generally about, as Dr. Mohler said, civic religion—but really specific Christian definitions. My friend Frank Turek spoke of substitutionary atonement, of how we are saved by Christ dying in our place. It was an amazing moment this weekend.

While we had a variety of speakers there speaking at that funeral—I wasn't a part of it, I was busy speaking six times up in Idaho at a different event—the idea of our country having their attention turned to these kinds of events here recently certainly makes us think. As ambassadors of Christ, we better be ready to have people that are starting to think about eternal things: heaven, hell, the afterlife, our mortality, the fragility of life.

We ought to be ready to step up and have the answers Christ says we're supposed to have, as though God were making His appeal through us. Be reconciled to God. That is what matters. That's the whole point. The church doesn't change its mission, and we never have. We're casting the net all the time. We're fishers of men to say to people—men and women and children—you need to put your trust in Jesus Christ and know we have an answer for you.

We need to turn people to Christ. It's not about politics, it's not about just cultural issues, it's not about money, it's not about anything other than making sure you are right with your creator because before you know it, your time's going to be up. You may not know if that's going to be in a car accident today or a stroke or a heart attack or whatever it might be. Our lives are a vapor; you're here today and gone tomorrow. Make sure you're right with the living God.