Summary
God's "I Will": Plans, Exile, and the Promise Fulfilled in Christ
We are people who make plans—weddings, vacations, graduations, careers—and we like it when those plans unfold exactly as we envisioned. But every life eventually meets the disruption of plans we did not choose. The year 2020 made this lesson vivid for millions, but the experience itself is as old as the people of God. Beneath every changing circumstance, another plan is always in motion: the Lord's.
When Israel was carried into Babylon, they too began making plans—plans of return, plans of resistance, plans shaped by their own desires rather than by God's word. False prophets fed those hopes with comforting lies. Through Jeremiah, however, the Lord told the exiles something they did not want to hear: stay. Build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children, and seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you. Live where you are planted, even in exile, because that is my plan right now "I Will".
Then comes the promise that anchors everything: "When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope". Notice the repeated "I will." Israel could not deliver themselves—not from Egypt, not from Babylon, not from sin. The rescue is God's doing, on God's timing, according to God's faithfulness. This is the distinction between God's active will, which is always good, and his permissive will, by which he allows even the consequences of our rebellion to serve his redeeming purposes (compare Romans 8:28).
The seventy-year promise to Israel pointed forward to a deeper deliverance. In Jeremiah 31:31–34 the Lord pledges a new covenant—one written not on stone but on the heart, in which sins are forgiven and remembered no more. That covenant was sealed in the blood of Christ. "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons". The exile that matters most—our exile from God under sin—is ended in Jesus, and the Spirit of his Son cries out in our hearts, "Abba, Father."
This reframes our own captivity. Every person is born in bondage to sin, unable to free themselves any more than Israel could march out of Babylon by force of will. But God says, "When you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you... and I will restore your fortunes and gather you". Even the seeking is his gift; "we love because he first loved us". The Spirit forms hearts new, draws sinners to the Father, and applies the forgiveness won at the cross.
So when our plans collapse and our circumstances feel like exile, the Christian's confidence does not rest on getting life "back to normal." It rests on the Lord's repeated "I will"—I will visit you, I will fulfill my promise, I will hear you, I will be found, I will restore. Those promises are already answered "Yes" in Christ. Live faithfully where God has planted you, pray for the place he has set you, and trust the future he has secured: forgiveness now, and at the appointed time, gathering into his eternal presence.
Video citations
- "I Will" — If you would please open your Bibles to the Prophet Jeremiah, that is Jeremiah chapter 29. Did any of you begin 2020 with any plans made? Whether it was a plan for a vacation or a plan for a surgery…