Jeremiah 29:3 – Living Bibles

The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon, to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, saying Jeremiah 29:3, New King James Version

In Matt Carter's Charles Spurgeon biography Steal Away Home, Spurgeon speaks to the living legacy he inherited. He reflects that one of his inspirations, John Bunyan, has absorbed the Bible enough that “it is as though he is a living Bible. You can prick him anywhere, and he bleeds scripture.“

So, even within its pages, the Bible pauses to remind us that he comes to us through the experience of living men. To use Steven Covey's framework from Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, Jeremiah has spent decades in the category that deals with matters both Urgent and Important. The destiny of his people, and of his God's reputation, is in a crowded hour. Yet, inspired, he pauses in Jeremiah 29:3 to tell us that his message of national and indeed eternal importance is being carried by men.

So later did our Savior intertwine His pure Message with the lives of those who would carry it out. Facing His Passion, a time even more fraught than the exile of which Jeremiah wrote, Christ would neither be rushed nor banished to a clinical distance from which individual human lives no longer mattered. His mortality already weighing on His great heart, He announced that the woman who anointed His feet was anointing Him for His burial, and that HER story would be told wherever His was carried.

Even closer to the hour of His awful trial, Christ invited fallible humans INTO His confidence rather than increasing His disciplined distance. He asked Peter, Andrew, James, and John to pray with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. He would entrust to these firsthand knowledge of His pleading prayer before His Father, and they would faithfully convey its poignancy so that the Church included this scene in all four Gospels.

Shrink we, then, from the list of names among whom God has placed us when we have an especial sense of the import of the days He bought for us? Thereby, except for limited stretches of seclusion with Him, religious pride lurks in the guise of spirituality.

No less than the Babylonian exiles would receive Jeremiah's message through hazards undergone by named men, and by their faithful hands, so we have received a Gospel intact by God's use of people. Any umbrage that they are interrupters of spiritual business is overwrought.

Likewise, believer, we carry forward that Gospel message to those feeling the estrangement of exile. Our time in God's Word and in prayer, disciplines and privileges both, is our centering in Jerusalem. We travel from here to Babylon, to a people far-flung, and more readily impressed and depressed by the forces of the world. We traverse miles, and philosophies, to reach our audience, but we do so, as in Jeremiah 29:3, under the watchful eye of the Author of the Word.

Not only, beloved, are the verses we carry His concern, but every step over which we carry them is in His care. They are recorded in His book, if not in detail in the Bible itself. Remember, Jesus envisioned the trek homeward of His audience in the days of His flesh.

He was moved with compassion, caring that these emissaries, well-fed spiritually, would drop for physical need. Would He care for the disseminating journey of those entrusted with His very Spirit in any last detail?

Whatever we encounter, messengers, it has been preordained along with the certainty that our steps are tallied as good works. Whatever we encounter, royal heralds, it is but texture to engross others, likewise vulnerable, in the next chapter of the story of His works on Earth. Even the most extreme scorn we might face carrying His message of grace, beloved, is prepared against.

Christ's and forerunner David showed His compassion for His messengers' particulars when David gave them time to grow back their beards and regain suitable clothing before they returned. The worst contingency prepared for by the assurance of his vindication, we bask in His detailed attention, going into the unknown only as reckoned by temporary human myopia.

We run, then, with a message. The hazards and distance are real, but incidental. Our theme in Glory will be the faithfulness of the One Who sent us on our journey, and the readiness of the hearts to which He sent us to receive.