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Born for Victory - Jeremiah 29:1-14

The American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson lived a dark and difficult life; plagued with ill health for most of his life, he was given his first preaching job only to be forced out of it due to tuberculosis. In 1829 he moved to Old North Church in Boston as pastor, and married Ellen Tucker. Things were just starting to go right.

Two years after that, his wife died of tuberculosis. Soon after that, he once again lost his church position, this time due to theological controversy. He really knew what it was to suffer. His biographer wrote about him that "A doom seemed to hover over his family and his life. But under the surface, dark as it was at the moment, a purpose was taking form in his mind. He knew he was born for victory."

And it's in the context of one of these dark and difficult and doomed times in the life of the people of Israel that we see Jeremiah writing to encourage the people in exile, the people who are oppressed and isolated and suffered; and Jeremiah is trying to remind them that, like Emerson, and like us, they had been born for victory.

God makes it very clear, through Jeremiah, that this exile and this suffering was no surprise to Him; God writes to the people 'whom I have caused to be carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon'. You see, all the people were thinking that Nebuchadnezzar had carried them away to Babylon. But they were wrong: God is saying 'I did this. I made it happen.' And God reminds them in verse 11 that all of what's going in is included in His eternal purpose. In the Message, it reads 'I know what I'm doing; I have plans for you - plans to prosper you, not to abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.' In spite of all the suffering and the isolation and the oppression, God went before His people. This is no random suffering; it's part of the plan, it's all part of that destiny, that being born for victory.

And as Christians and members of the new Israel, we too are born for victory. We too can know that God knows what he's doing, and that He has plans to prosper us. But being born for victory doesn't mean that everything's going to be fine. God had to remind the Israelites that He had plans for them precisely because things didn't appear to be going fine. We so often give this verse, verse 11, as an encouragement to people that everything is going to be fine, but in reality, it's a prophecy that despite the hardship, despite the suffering, despite the isolation which will inevitably come, God was there before it.

When Jesus called people to follow him he didn't tell them everything was going to be fine. No, he told them to take up their cross and die daily. He was talking not just metaphorically but, for about a hundred million of Christians around the world in the past twenty centuries, he was talking prophetically. They did have to take up his cross and die with Him. But the real miracle is that he took up the cross and lead the way for us. As well as God being before the sufferings of those born for victory, God also goes through them with us.

In verse 5 through to verse 9 of our Jeremiah passage, God tells the people that they need to settle down in exile, that they're in this for the long haul. It's going to be seventy years. There's no quick way out of this. Get used to it. And there may be some of you here - there almost certainly are - who are going through some degree of suffering, perhaps some suffering that we can't even begin to imagine. Perhaps you can't imagine that this was what God wanted and purposed for you, and I'm not going to tell you that God is going to deliver you quickly from it.

What I can tell you is in the next few verses, there's this wonderful declaration - God says 'I am going to be in it with you; you can call on Me, and I will hear you; you'll look for Me, and you'll find Me.'

And it's a mystery, but sometimes God seems to work suffering and isolation into our lives so that we will really call on Him, and really look for Him, and there in the midst of our sufferings we will find Him.

In another letter to the church in the midst of suffering, many hundreds of years later, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 that "we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves." This is a man who knew suffering. But why, Paul? "So that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead." Paul trusted God not just despite his suffering, but because of it, and because He knew that God was in it. Paul writes later in the letter, in chapter 4, "we are persecuted, but we're not abandoned."

A friend of mine tells the story of a student at Oxford who came to Christ at a Soul Survivor conference. She'd gone with a Christian friend to get away from a family situation at home where her parents had just decided to divorce, and the whole stability of her life was falling apart. And there, in a meeting, someone she'd never met came up to her and said 'The Lord says that when you go back home, the problem won't go away; your parents will divorce. But I'm going back with you.' And there and then she became a Christian. Not despite her suffering, but because she found God already in the midst of it.

And there may be suffering, for those of us born for victory - Christ said 'in this world you will have suffering', and he was prophecying there times in the life of each believer where we might feel that we are persecuted and abandoned - but he also said 'fear not, for I have overcome the world'. We know that whatever our suffering, Christ went there first, and He promises to stand at our side all through it.

God was before our suffering, and God is in it.

For most people, that would be enough. God promises the exiles that He was sovereign over their suffering; He promises them that when they seek Him through it they will find Him; but there's more. With God, there's always so much more.

Here God is speaking not just about the Israelites' exile to Babylon, but He's talking about a wider return - from all the nations and places where I have banished you. God is not just talking about deliverance, and getting you out of trouble and suffering; here God is speaking of a day when He is going to put everything right. He's talking about the great return from exile when all of our suffering and all of our isolation will end.

In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, in Luke 16, Abraham says "in his life Lazarus received only bad things, but now in heaven he is comforted." And in this world, we may only receive bad things. But we are promised that one day, and one day soon, we will be ultimately comforted.

But for us, we know that in our sufferings, God was before them; He goes with us in them; and He will ultimately deliver us from them - because we are His people, a people born for victory. Amen.