Third Sunday in Advent
Jeremiah 1:4-19, Luke 1:26-45
“God’s 20/20 Foresight”
We have all heard the proverb that says, “Hindsight is always 20-20.” I don’t know of another proverb that says anything similarly pithy and witty about foresight. An obvious reason, I suppose, is that foresight isn’t anything like 20/20. In my experience, it’s more like 20/2000 or something worse.
In God’s case, however, foresight is definitely 20/20. Did you notice that both lessons today – the one from Jeremiah and the one from Luke – both of them are about men who got a 20/20 look into their futures?
God did gave them an overview of their lives – directly to Jeremiah, and to John the Baptist through the prophecy his father Zachariah sang in the Temple when his tongue was loosed when he endorsed naming his newborn son John. While John the Baptist was just a baby, and when Jeremiah was probably in his teens, God provides an accurate outline of what their futures will hold, what they will do in God’s service, and the kinds of trials they will face in His service.
When we look in Scripture, we don’t see a lot of this. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the time God never gives this kind of preview to his children. There are two conclusions we might draw from that fact. A wrong conclusion would be this: that God has a wonderful plan for only a few of his children – people like Moses or Abraham or Jeremiah, or the Virgin Mary, or John the Baptist. God has a clear and precise plan for THEIR lives, while the REST of us kind of MUDDLE THROUGH somehow.
The TRUE conclusion goes like this: We have a destiny just as sure as Jeremiah or John the Baptist, but they get to see a preview of that destiny, while ordinarily we don’t. God knows our future just as much as he knows Jeremiah’s or John’s. He has plans FOR US just as much as he ever did for Jeremiah or John. But, he doesn’t show them to us. I believe the Bible teaches this, and I want to show you a couple of reasons why. I want to point to a few particulars in the 20/20 foreviews God gives to Jeremiah and John the Baptist and ALSO point out where the Scripture says the same thing is true for you and me.
Let’s begin with something which makes SOME people uncomfortable, though why it should is a mystery to me. God’s plan for Jeremiah and for John the Baptist PREDATES the birth of either of them. Remember, to Jeremiah God said this: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I ordained you a prophet to the nations.”
We have already looked at the Angel Gabriel’s comments to Zacharias about John, and at the time Gabriel makes these statements, John has not even been conceived in Elizabeth’s womb. So, even before John is a twinkle in his father’s eye, God knows him, knows his mission, and gives him a name.
Do you suppose this kind of thing is true about you or me? King David seemed to think so, when he wrote one of the most favorite songs in the Book of Psalms. In Psalm 139, David says this:
My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.
David compares his life to a tale that God has written down in a book, including every day of David’s life. There they are – in God’s book – when none of them had yet come to pass.
Someone might way, “Well, okay. But that’s just another one of those special people.” And, yes, David is special. But when God puts this song in Israel’s hymnbook, so that it becomes the song of worship and praise for all God’s people, the point is that what David says about himself here is true for all who sing this song. God knows you and me just as he knew David. He saw who we were before we were even formed in our mothers’ wombs. And all our days were written in God’s book, the days fashioned for each one of us, when as yet there were none of them.
And, what about those days? God told Jeremiah and John the Baptist some things about the days they would have. The mission he had from God was spelled out for Jeremiah, and also for John, with some specificity. In Jeremiah’s case, God even told him he would face opposition and persecution, and that Jeremiah would prevail over all of it. Does God ever tell you and me anything about our days?
Well, certainly not in the same detail that we find God using when he tells Jeremiah or John or the Virgin Mary. But that doesn’t mean we know nothing about God’s plans for our lives. We find, for example, things like these words from the Apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter 2:
8For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9not of works, lest anyone should boast. 10For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. 7:40.
There you are – in the pages of the New Testament – if you are saved by faith. When you believed the gospel you received God’s gift, the forgiveness of your sins and your rebirth in Christ Jesus. And because you are a new creation in Christ, you are – as Paul says here – God’s handiwork. And he prepared you and me for good works, and EVEN THOSE GOOD WORKS God had prepared before hand that we should walk in them.
Our days, like Jeremiah’s and John’s, are there in God’s book before any of them had come to pass, before any of us awoke to life in our mother’s wombs. And whether those days are a great many, or a very few, God knows them all, and though we may not know many details – or ANY details – of the days yet ahead of us, we know something about them if we are Christians. We know that God has prepared good works for us to walk in.
What else do we know? Jeremiah and John had what I would call a destiny. It’s not simply the case that God could foresee this or that event in John’s life or Jeremiah’s life. We have weather forecasters who try to foresee whether or not it’s going to rain or snow. Every government on earth has an intelligence service dedicated to peering into the future, to identify the outlines of an event before it happens. But God is not simply a super-duper forecaster. The Bible tells us that He is the Author of History. Isaiah 46 contains these words from the Lord:
For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, 10Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things that are not yet done, Saying, "My counsel shall stand, And I will do all My pleasure,’ … Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it.
God had a purpose for Jeremiah, and for John, and for Jesus and Mary and the Apostles, and today he has a purpose for you and for me. Jeremiah’s destiny included his office of prophet to the nations. John’s destiny was to fulfill the promise of a prophet who would prepare a people for the coming of the Messiah. Certainly, the details of my destiny or your destiny are not spelled out in Scripture, but the overall destiny of every one of us is spelled out, and it is far, far greater than anything ever said about Jeremiah or John the Baptist.
And what is that destiny? Well, the New Testament says that our destiny includes things like this:
“28And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. 29For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”
Those were Paul’s words in Romans 8. The Apostle John says something similar in his first general epistle, in chapter 3:
2Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
Again, Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians in Chapter 4 says this: “... though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day. 17 For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory;”
That, Christians, is our destiny – to be like Christ, to share his glory, to rule and reign in an eternal Kingdom with him. And Jesus says that this destiny is even greater than the destiny of John the Baptist. Matthew’s gospel in chapter 11 records Jesus to say this: "Assuredly, I say to you, among those born of women there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist; but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”
Christians many times tie themselves in knots over what they suppose they do not know. There’s a whole raft of books out there in bookstore that supposedly show you how to determine what God’s will for your life is. Almost all of it comes down to sanctified reading of tea leaves, and it is all so silly at one level. Someone once said that God deliberately does not show us the details of our lives because we wouldn’t believe it anyway, and there’s likely a lot of truth in that. What God HAS shown us, however, is the end of our existence. And, so long as we keep our heart fixed on that, it is not so difficult a matter to live, to choose, to plan and to act today, this week, this month.
On July 4, 1952, a young woman named Florence Chadwick waded into the water off Catalina Island. She was attempting to swim from the island to the California coast. She had already swum the English Channel in both directions, so there was no real question that she was able to make this distance as well.
That day, the water was numbingly cold, and the fog was so thick she could hardly see the boats that coasted slowly beside her. Several times sharks had to be driven away with rifle fire. After more than 15 hours she asked to be taken out of the water. Her trainer urged her to swim on. He knew that they must be very close to the California shore. But when Florence looked, all she saw was fog. And, so she quit. . . only one-mile from her goal.
Later she said, "I’m not excusing myself, but if I could have seen the land I might have made it." It wasn’t the cold or fear or exhaustion that caused Florence Chadwick to fail. It was the fog.
Friends, we are swimming in a fog. God told Jeremiah and John some of the details of the lives they were going to live, but for most of us, he’s left things deliberately foggy – foggy, that is, about the details of what lies ahead. But he has told us what lies beyond the fog, the destination toward which we move, the destiny he has planned for each one of us, and all the days that eventually lead us to that destiny.
Two months after her failure, Florence Chadwick walked off the same beach into the same channel and swam the distance, setting a new speed record, because she could see the land. We may not see our destination with our eyes, but the Bible assures us it is out there, waiting for us to arrive.
In this season of preparation, God grant that we may truthfully say what Paul said of his own life and the days remaining in it: I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. ... forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
