Hey guys, welcome to your relatable. I am super excited about today's episode. We are doing a most misused about Jeremiah 2911.

If you have not heard my previous most misused episode, what we do is we take a verse that is used a lot and is often misapplied or misinterpreted to mean something that the context tells us it doesn't actually mean and in so doing it waters it down.

So we go through the context of verses like this and we ask ourselves not what do we want this to mean or what does this mean to me and my specific situation, but what does this actually mean and what we always find is that the true meaning according to the context of not just the chapter in book but the entirety of the biblical canon is always so much better than the superficial applications of the verse that are so often decontextualized.

So Jeremiah 2911, for I know the plans I have for you to clear is the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil to give you a future and a hope. So that indeed is a very hopeful and a very positive verse and it should be read like that.

However, like I said, there are so often superficial applications of this verse that often manifest itself like this. God is going to spare me from suffering. He's not going to let anything bad happen to me because of Jeremiah 2911. God is going to ensure that my dreams come true.

He's going to make sure that I get into the college that I want to get into. He's going to make sure that a lot of people like me or that I will find my soulmate. He'll make sure that I don't have to go through anything super hard.

This is also used in the same way that Psalm 374 is delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. If you're interested in the correct interpretation according to the Bible of that verse, I have a most misused on Psalm 374 that you can listen to Jeremiah 2911 Psalm 374.

These are verses that I call magic eight ball verses. So a verse that someone flips open to and says, OK, this is God speaking to me about my specific situation. This is the answer that he is giving to me about my specific desire. It fills us with a kind of affirmation of what God can do for us and what we believe he will do for us.

It's also used as kind of this blessing verse or an affirmation of what we're doing. So if we have material blessings in our life. So if we've made a lot of money off of something, we take that as an affirmation of what we're doing as God approval of what we are doing.

And we take something like Jeremiah 2911 to me. OK, well, if God is giving me prosperity right now, that that must mean he likes what I am doing. And we will talk about why these interpretations and applications of this verse simply are not correct.

But in order to talk about this, we do have to back up just a little bit and ask ourselves, why is it important to get these things right and who am I? Like, why do I get to say what verses actually mean? Well, I don't.

I am not the arbiter of what verses actually mean. So what we do when we read the Bible is there is a systematic way to read the Bible. And it's true that there are people who have a variety of interpretations of things.

But the truth is there's only one interpretation to the Bible. There may be a variety of applications. There might be a variety of ways to study a verse. But the systematic way that we study the Bible is that we look at a verse and we say, OK, what is the context of this? Not just the context of this chapter in the context of this particular book in the Bible, but the context of the biblical canon, the context of history.

This is why I love the ESV study Bible, which actually provides you with all of this context and the John the Gart, their study Bible. There are a lot of good study Bibles, but those are two that I trust that I think are just really, really good in their scholarship.

So that is one way that we can know the historical context and the biblical context of a particular verse. And we also need to know the authorship.

So who wrote this? Why is he writing this to whom is he writing? And again, a study Bible is really, really helpful in giving you that information.

The real meaning of verses based on the context, based on the author, based on the purpose of the verse always has significance to us because the Bible is about Jesus and about his glory.

And his glory is our good. And the Bible tells us how to live in such a way that we can glorify God. So when I say that's when we look at a verse, we don't say, what do I want this to mean? I'm not saying the Bible isn't for us. Of course it is by the grace of God.

We have his written word that there are many people in the world today and many people throughout history that didn't have access to his written word. But we, by his sovereignty and according to his grace, have the privilege of being able to read his written word.

And the Bible, the biblical canon is about Jesus. Everything points to the gospel. The gospel is the scarlet thread. It is the driving force behind the biblical text in every single verse that we read.

We should be looking for the glory of God. We should be looking for the characteristics of God. We should be looking for how this betters our understanding of who he is, who the Messiah is, and why God sent him and what the gospel is.

And then of course what that means for our lives. So we ask ourselves. And does this ask me to repent of a particular sin? What does this say about God's character that should shift my perspective of what I think about.

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