So I finally sat down and read the full chapter around that famous Jeremiah passage.
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
I’m trying to sort out how we decide which promises apply directly to our lives right now and not allow us to just sit idly around waiting for the Lord to deliver but maybe I’m just misunderstanding.
What does Jeremiah 29:11 mean? What is it trying to tell us?
Jeremiah 29:11 was a letter from God to the Jewish exiles in Babylon (more on that here). They were going to be stuck there for seventy years, and he was telling them he hadn’t forgotten them and would eventually bring them home.
God also told them to build houses, plant gardens, get married and pray for the city they were living in. Settle in and get on with life there.
So the promise came with a command to live faithfully in the meantime.
Seventy years in Babylon, that’s who it was written to! God being faithful over the long haul… the hope looks like patient obedience over time. Keeps me from reading my own situation into it.
I read it as a promise to Israel in exile. The English word prosper throws people off since it sounds like personal success, and that’s where a lot of the mix-up comes from. The Hebrew is shalom, more like welfare for the whole community.
The “you” is plural too. God was talking to a people he had sent into exile as discipline, and they were going to be there a long time. The verse says he hadn’t walked off on them and there was still a future ahead. The hard years were part of that future.
The plural ‘you’ detail is what got me. Once I saw the promise was addressed to a community, I stopped reading it as something about my own situation.
The shalom angle fits that too. If God is disciplining a people together, what he promises them is the welfare of the whole group.
Verse 7 backs up the shalom reading with “seek the peace of the city” because “in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”
Same here with the plural “you.” Humbling to realize I’d been reading a letter to exiles like it was a note stuck on my fridge.
The part right before it stuck with me too… Build houses, plant gardens. That sounds a lot like the answer to my whole “don’t sit around waiting” worry.
Once you realize the whole passage is addressing a specific historical situation, everything shifts. Context matters, and that affects how we apply it today.
Every promise in Scripture has an if/then attached to it, and walking in His ways is how we step into what He’s planned.
He knows what’s best for His kids even when it doesn’t look like what we would choose.
The spirit of the promise applies to believers now too, God’s character doesn’t change over time.
I’ve never run into anyone using this verse to claim immediate deliverance from their circumstances though. Not once.
God’s plan and promise to us is salvation through Christ and eternity with Him.
But people twist this verse into some prosperity guarantee, which is frustrating when Scripture is full of faithful believers who went through heartbreak and suffering.
Read the surrounding verses and that promise lands differently. What comes before and after tells you who God was speaking to and what he was promising them and keeps you from pulling the verse out and making it say something it never meant.
Whenever I dig into a passage like this one, I grab three or 4 verses on either side. At least.
Seventy years in Babylon or a hard season in our own lives, God holds on to his people.
Yes the original audience faced a long exile… but trust in God means we’re never abandoned. The hope remains.
Promises that may only indirectly apply to us, like this one, end up on posters, while the promises made to the church get largely ignored… Like Jesus telling us that in this world we would have trouble, but take heart, he has overcome the world.
Read chapter 28 alongside it. A prophet named Hananiah is telling everyone the exile will be over in 2 years, and 29:8-9 warns against prophets who say what people want to hear.
The actual message was to settle in because it’s going to be a while. These words don’t transfer to us word for word. Paul says all God’s promises are yes in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20).
Verses 16-19. The ones who stayed in Jerusalem are told to expect sword and famine, along with plague (ties back to the good and bad figs in chapter 24).
If we lift verse 11 out as a promise for us, we’d also have to explain why we don’t claim verse 17. Nobody does. The better first question for any promise is who it was spoken to and on what terms… Then you can look at what it shows us about God that carries over to us.
God has a plan and he’s in control, without the promise of pain-free living. I’ve been trying to let go of the ‘prosperity gospel’ reading of this verse.
His blessings often play out over the long haul, sometimes even into eternity.