God plays a long game

Pastor Mark Jeske

Try as we might, we can’t see into the future. We can guess, plot probabilities, and make predictions, but our ideas could be totally wrong.

So can our analysis of what is going on around us and what God is up to. The few Israelites left in Judah after the Babylonian army ruined and plundered the land would have thought that all was lost. They would have concluded that God was powerless or that he had lost his love for and loyalty to the Israelite people or that the Israelite nation would now cease to exist. They might have feared that worship of the true God would cease on earth. And they would have been wrong on all counts.

In fact, the captivity was part of God’s plan for healing and restoration of his people: “The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah” (2 Chronicles 36:21). It was a 70-year time-out. God permitted the Jews to return, and in the fullness of time, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, was born in the very land God had promised to Abraham two millennia earlier. God plays a long game. Cut him a lot of slack. Not all bad news is truly a defeat. He can turn even disasters like the Babylonian captivity inside out and make them bless his people.

Don’t you wonder what he’s up to in your life?

Devotion used by permission of Time of Grace®. For more information, visit timeofgrace.org