You know Jeremiah 29:11. But did you know it was written to exiles who had just been told to settle in for seventy years?
11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,” says the LORD, “thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:11, World English Bible
The story around it
Picture the people who first heard these words. They had seen their king taken away. They had been marched from their homes to Babylon, the capital of the empire that had conquered them. Every one of them was asking the same question: how long?
Back in Jerusalem a prophet named Hananiah had an answer everyone wanted. In the temple, in front of the crowd, he took the wooden bar Jeremiah wore on his neck as a sign of Babylon’s rule, and broke it. “Within two full years”, he promised, it would all be over.
Jeremiah had to say what nobody wanted to hear: “The LORD has not sent you, but you make this people trust in a lie.” Before the year was out, Hananiah was dead.
Then comes the letter. Not two years. Seventy. Long enough that many who heard it read aloud would never see home again. And it is to them that God says he thinks thoughts of peace, “to give you hope and a future”.
Drawn from the Bible itself.
The moment
The speaker is God, and his words reach the exiles in a letter. Jeremiah wrote it in Jerusalem and sent it to Babylon, addressed to the elders, the priests, the prophets and “all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive”.
Imagine it being read aloud to them. They are waiting to hear that they can go home. The letter begins with almost the opposite: “Build houses and dwell in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit.” Marry. Have children. Pray for the city that holds you captive, “for in its peace you will have peace”. Settle in. This will take a long time.
What stands around it
The verse before it sets the time: “After seventy years are accomplished for Babylon, I will visit you”. The verses after it promise that the people will call and pray and be heard, and that God will bring them back.
What happened next
Not everyone in Babylon welcomed the letter. A man named Shemaiah wrote back to the priests in Jerusalem, asking why no one had silenced Jeremiah, who had told the exiles, “The captivity is long.” A psalm from those years remembers how it felt: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
As far as the Bible tells, Jeremiah never saw the return. He lived through the fall of Jerusalem, and afterward the survivors, who had refused his warning not to go down to Egypt, took him there with them. The last the Bible shows of him is in Egypt, still speaking God’s word to people who told him they would not listen.
King Jehoiachin, called Jeconiah in the letter, spent thirty-seven years as a captive. Then a new king of Babylon released him from prison, “spoke kindly to him”, took away his prison clothes, and gave him a place at his table for the rest of his life.
And the letter went on being read. In the first year of King Darius, the book of Daniel tells, Daniel found in Jeremiah’s words the number of the years, seventy, and turned to God “to seek by prayer and petitions, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes.” It is what the letter had said the exiles would do: call, pray, seek.
Then, in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, a proclamation went out that the exiles could go up to Jerusalem and build. The Bible says plainly why it came: “that the LORD’s word by Jeremiah’s mouth might be accomplished”.
How people have read it
For Jewish readers this is first of all a promise kept. The exile did end, and the people did come home.
Christians have read it in more than one way. Many take it personally: the God who had plans for the exiles has plans for each of his children. Others point out that the promise was made to a whole people, at one moment in their history, and that it took seventy years to come true. They read it as a window into the character of God, who does not forget his people even when the waiting is long.
The two readings do not have to fight. The first is at its truest when it remembers the second: the hope is certain, and it may not be quick.
Who has argued over it
In May 1887 the London preacher Charles Spurgeon took this verse back to Babylon. The captivity itself, he told his hearers, all seventy years of it, came from the same God who thinks thoughts of peace. He put it in one line: God’s thoughts towards them are good, though their trials may be grievous.
In our own time the verse has traveled far from Babylon. At the National Day of Prayer in 2018, Mike Pence, then Vice President of the United States, said it had hung over the mantel of his home for nearly twenty years. He called it a Bible verse that speaks of a promise our little family has claimed and Americans have cherished through the generations.
Other Christians ask the verse to slow down. The author Randy Alcorn has written that the promise to bring Israel home after seventy years of exile was not made to readers today, and that it is not a promise of quick prosperity. He still holds that its underlying principles apply to believers now.
Between a family mantel and a people in exile lies the whole question of this verse: who the promise was for, and how long it took to keep.
Background from outside the Bible. The sources are listed below.
What the context adds
The hope is real, and it is slow. Seventy years is a lifetime. The promise is given to a people in exile, and it comes with an instruction to live faithfully where they are in the meantime.
What it means for you
Maybe you are living somewhere you did not choose: an illness, a loss, a marriage that ended, a season that will not lift. It is natural to want the voice that says two years. This chapter asks you to be careful with that voice, and to listen for a truer one.
The truer voice does not promise that tomorrow will fix everything. It says that the God who let his people go into a long exile was still thinking of them there, and that his thoughts toward them were peace. And it describes the kind of seeking he answers: “You shall seek me and find me, when you search for me with all your heart.”
So seek him where you are, not only once you get out. Plant something. Pray for your neighbors, even the ones you did not choose. Tell God honestly how long it feels. You do not have to pretend the wait is short to believe that his thoughts toward his people are good.
If you do not share this faith, the letter still holds something wise: a way to live well in a hard place without pretending it is not hard.
Other verses that say it too
For the vision is yet for the appointed time, and it hurries toward the end, and won’t prove false. Though it takes time, wait for it, because it will surely come. It won’t delay.
Habakkuk 2:3. Habakkuk, who also saw Babylon coming, was told to keep waiting for God’s answer: “Though it takes time, wait for it, because it will surely come.” Slow and sure, like the seventy years.
For the Lord will not cast off forever. For though he causes grief, yet he will have compassion according to the multitude of his loving kindnesses.
Lamentations 3:31-32. A lament over fallen Jerusalem holds on to the same hope: “For the Lord will not cast off forever.” The grief is not denied, and neither is the compassion that follows it.
These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and embraced them from afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.
Hebrews 11:13. Many who first heard the letter would not live to see home. Hebrews says the same of Abraham and his family: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and embraced them from afar”.
Why we say this
Bible passages this page rests on, in the World English Bible:
Written with the help of an AI model. Scripture quotations are checked against the World English Bible. Approved by HisFullGlory. Not reviewed by a theological reader.
