Information technology has get increasingly popular in recent years for teachers of the Bible (myself included) to disparage people who apply Jeremiah 29:11-xiii to their lives. "You lot're not paying attention to the context!," they loudly protest ( … as I have). This post will explore whether such disparagement is advisable, and conclude that often information technology is not. I hope to model something about how to translate the Bible at the same time.

Jeremiah 29:11-13 are favorite verses for many people:

For I know the plans I take for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and non for evil, to give you a futurity and a promise. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you lot. Y'all will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your eye (Jeremiah 29:11-13 ESV).

People love these verses because they observe encouragement in the thought that God has skillful intentions for them even in the midst of suffering. They are heartened when they read that God hears their prayers. They are strengthened with the thought that when they seek the Lord with all their heart they will find the Lord.

Simply teachers of the Bible sometimes signal out that the immediate literary context pertains to God'due south promise to bring back the people of Israel from Babylon after 70 years in exile (Jeremiah 29:10). Thus, these verses use just to the exiled Israelites living in the sixth century B.C. — not to u.s.a., or so information technology is claimed. "Pay attention to the context!" is the reminder they offering, and, truthfully, a reminder that all of us need to hear.

Merely I recollect that there is a chip more to consider in biblical estimation. The dissenters are correct that the literary context (the verses surrounding these verses) connects the reader to a particular historical context, that is, return from the Babylonian exile. It can be terribly frustrating (maddening, really) to listen to people interpret the Bible who glibly ignore literary and historical contexts. But are those two contexts (the literary and historical contexts) the merely 2 contexts you lot need to pay attention to when reading Scripture?

No, in that location is another context that is crucial if you lot want to read the Bible well. That context is the canonical context, or, labeled differently, the whole-Bible context. The whole-Bible context is the context you work with to identify patterns and themes that run through (you guessed it…) the whole Bible and pay attention to whether such themes are as well nowadays in the verses you are trying to interpret. If whole-Bible themes run through the verses to which you are attending, and so it is proper — even necessary — to phone call out such patterns and themes — not equally the master meaning of the verses, merely as a proper broadening of the significant that connects specific verses to the overall narrative and pedagogy of the whole Bible.

Are in that location such whole-Bible patterns and themes that appear in these verses from Jeremiah 29? Yep. At that place are at least four.

  1. God makes promises that are good, and intends to fulfill them (verse 11) (compare 1 Kings 8:56; Psalm 105:8-x; Jeremiah 32:42; Luke 24:49; Rom xi:29).
  2. God listens to his people when they pray (verse 12) (compare ii Chronicles 7:12-16; Psalm 34:fifteen; Matthew 7:11; James 5:14-18).
  3. God allows his people to find him when they seek him (poesy xiii) (compare Deuteronomy iv:29-31; one Chronicles 16:11-17; Isaiah 51:1-3; 55:half dozen; Matthew 7:7).
  4. God repeatedly rescues his people out of exile (verse xiv) (compare Exodus 2:23; Psalm 144:11; Ezekiel 34:10-22; Colossians 1:thirteen; one Peter ane:one).

Any fourth dimension we fail to pay attending to the literary and historical contexts of Jeremiah 29:11-13, we deserve the wrist-slap nosotros've been getting from teachers who complain that nosotros accept been misinterpreting these verses. Nevertheless, information technology turns out that the main ideas plant in these verses are consistent with the canonical (whole-Bible) context. Consequently, these verses practise communicate words of encouragement that God's people can draw upon for encouragement in their daily lives, non considering the verses offer such encouragement directly, merely because they do so in conversation with patterns and themes that form their fashion throughout the whole Bible.[one]

Notes

[i] Now, if people take this passage to mean that they individually will prosper (say, materially or vocationally), and then that is a different kind of mistake altogether. I have left that consequence out of today's post to make the indicate about the need to pay attending to the broader canonical context of the Bible.

This post and other resources are available at Kindle Afresh: The Web log and Website of Kenneth Berding.