until we get to Babylon, we can't see the cross

The Word for today:
Jeremiah 29

mark this: Jeremiah 29:10-14
For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform my good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. 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. Then you will call upon me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek me and find me, when you search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive.

Quoted above is the context that surrounds Jeremiah 29:11, one of the most famous verses of the Old Testament. Many have made Jeremiah 29:11 their life's verse:
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.

We embroider, frame, and hang such verses on our walls. I can't think of a finer way to embed a Bible verse in our hearts--and, hopefully, in the hearts of our children. May we embroider, frame, and hang more such verses every year!  Then may we find those verses in the Bible and consider their context.

The shining promise of 29:11 is embedded in the context of the very bleakest years in the history of Israel, the period of the seventy-year exile to Babylon:
For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform my good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. (29:10)

Just a few weeks ago, I heard the sermon of a local pastor who conveyed the crushing despair of Israel as the Temple was burned and the nation was deported to Babylon. He said that to recall the bleak days just after 9-11-2001, and then to multiply those feelings a hundredfold, would begin to approximate Israel's desolation. Psalm 74, he taught us, was an expression of their despondency:
They burned your sanctuary to the ground;
they defiled the dwelling place of your Name.
They said in their hearts, "We will crush them completely!"
They burned every place where God was worshiped in the land.
We are given no miraculous signs;
no prophets are left,
and none of us knows how long this will be.  (Psalms 74:7-9)

Furthermore, we are startled and even troubled when we learn, from context, that the heart which thinks thoughts of peace and not of evil toward them; and the hand which will give them a future and a hope--are the very heart and hand which caused them to be carried away to Babylon in the first place:
I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive. (29:14)

***

I hope we don't take down our framed embroideries of Jeremiah 29:11, or throw away the bracelets on which we've had it inscribed.

What I hope we'll do is consider the context--
that when we are carried away, each to his own Babylon, it is because his thoughts toward us are thoughts of peace and not of evil;
that when we are carried away, each to her own Babylon, it is in order to give us a future and a hope.

Because until we arrive in Babylon, we are unable to see that the worst-looking thing in our lives is often the very thing God uses for his redemptive purposes.

For until we get to Babylon, we can't see the cross.

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