God knows

"For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope."- Jeremiah 29:11, nasb

In times of difficulty or disaster, nothing is more comforting than to learn that there is someone who knows how to get you out of your problem. To hear a doctor say, "Yes, this is serious but we have a solution," or to hear a financial advisor say, "There is a way that we can work through this," or to hear someone say, "I know you are lost. Don’t worry. I know how to get us out of here," relieves your distress. It is when you find yourself overwhelmed and you don’t know how to resolve your problems that you get sweaty palms, your heart beats rapidly, and sleep eludes you.

Years ago God’s people found themselves in the kind of "there-is-no-way-out-of-the-box-canyon" dilemma that causes panic. It was during a period of world chaos during the reign of King Uzziah, when Egypt, Syria and Babylon all wanted to control little Israel, trapped in the midst of the three super powers.

God saw their tears and felt their frustration. He responded saying, "For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope" (Jeremiah 29:11, nasb). Stop and remind yourself who it was who said, "I know..." The words resound with authority, "I know!" This is not the voice of a fortune-teller reading tarot cards, or a trickster at a circus pretending to read your palm. It was God who said, "I know." It was He who just happened to be the One who spoke the Word that brought our world into existence. It was He who determined our genetic code at conception. It is also He who knows what tomorrow holds.

God says that His plans are for your welfare and not destruction, to give you a future and a hope. "Just a minute," you may be thinking, "how can God bring any order out of this chaos?" Don’t worry; that’s His problem, not yours. If God has a plan (and He does), then His plans has to be better than yours because He knows the end from the beginning, whereas your vision is very limited.

Our problem is that we don’t see the whole plan. Just like a visitor who watched a craftsman weave a tapestry and saw only a maze of colored threads until he walked around and saw the "right’ side. Like the visitor, we tend to see things from beneath, while God sees from above.

If God’s plan is going to work for you, you’ve got to trust Him completely and without reservation. Following that great promise, God said, "Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart" (Jeremiah 29:12, 13, nasb). That’s the answer.

God’s plan is usually different from ours, but it works when human logic and insights fail. - Resource Reading: Jeremiah 29:10