Contemplative Bible Reading

Jeremiah 29:7 (New International Version)

Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

The prophet Jeremiah is writing to the Jews who are exiled in Babylon. This is an awful condition. They had been conquered, captured, and transplanted to the other side of the world to a strange culture. People there did everything differently; people there routinely violated the laws that God had given His people.

And given all this, God through Jeremiah instructs them to pray for the prosperity of Babylon. Sorry, this doesn’t make any sense. If anything, God should have wanted the evil Babylonians to perish and the Jews to rise up in revolt and dethrone their captors. Right? Isn’t that the way it should have been?

God has His own ways and His own sense of time. At the right time, God did punish the captors in His way at His time. For now at least, God tells His people to ask that the captors prosper. The reason was simple – God intended for His people to survive their exile and return to their land. God knew that a prosperous captivity was the means to his intent.

God still has His own time and His own ways. I doubt that I understand much of them, but I pray that I will at least understand that God has them. I pray that the place where I live prospers. Prosperity has its evil temptations; that is certain. Prosperity also has its blessings for me, my family, and all those around me.