For I Know the Plans

Jeremiah 29:11

Of all the verses in all the Bible, Jeremiah 29:11 is the one we reach for when somebody we love is about to step into the unknown. It is on the coffee mug, the graduation card, the cross-stitch above the kitchen sink, the bookmark tucked in a teenager’s backpack, and the wallpaper on a phone.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. – Jeremiah 29:11

We hand it over the way you’d hand someone a fortune cookie: big things ahead. God has a wonderful plan for your life. The new job, the right spouse, the house with the porch, and the dog in the yard. Prosper. Future. Hope. It reads like a horoscope written by Someone who happens to like you.

And then you turn back a few verses, just eight of them, and the mug goes quiet in your hand.

Because this is a letter. Verse 1 says so plainly.

These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. – Jeremiah 29:1

A letter has a sender and an address. The sender is a weeping prophet in a burning city. The address is Babylon.

So picture the people holding it. They are not graduates with the whole world before them. They are prisoners of war. They have watched Jerusalem fall. The temple is desecrated, the king is in chains, and the craftsmen and the soldiers and the elders have been marched four hundred miles across the desert to sit down by the rivers of a country that worships gods of wood and stone. These are the people God addresses: To all the exiles. Read the verse again with their faces in front of you and tell me it still sounds like a fortune cookie.

And there was a man among them with a smooth voice. Back in the previous chapter, you met him, Hananiah, a prophet with excellent news. The LORD, he announced, would snap the yoke of Babylon clean off the neck of the nations. How long? Two years. Hang on, don’t bother unpacking, keep the suitcases by the door. You’ll be home before the figs ripen twice.

Thus says the LORD: Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within two years. – Jeremiah 28:11

It was a lie. A warm, encouraging, deeply marketable lie, and the people probably loved it, because it is always easier to sell a short Babylon than a long one. Jeremiah’s letter was written to take that lie away from them. And he does it with the cruelest-sounding kindness in the Old Testament.

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters… multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. – Jeremiah 29:5–7

Build houses. Plant gardens. Marry off your children in Babylon. Pray for Babylon. You do not say that to a man whose ride home is coming on Tuesday. You say it to a man who is staying. And then God tells him exactly how long he will be staying.

For thus says the LORD: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. – Jeremiah 29:10

Seventy years.

Sit with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the whole thing. The old men weeping in verse 1 would be buried in Babylonian soil. Most of the people who first unfolded that letter would die in exile. The “future and a hope” of verse 11 was being promised to people who would not live to see it. The plans for welfare ran straight through a lifetime of captivity, and out the far side, into a homecoming their grandchildren would walk into, long after the hands that held the letter had gone to dust.

So what does the verse actually promise? Not the porch. Not the promotion. Something far heavier, and far better. Let the words come apart in your hands.

“I know the plans.” He knows them. You don’t. The exiles didn’t. From inside Babylon, the plan did not look like welfare; it looked like abandonment. It looked like a God who had lost, or left, or forgotten. But His knowledge of His plan is not the least bit diminished by your ignorance of it. He is reading the last page while you are stranded, weeping, somewhere in the middle of chapter one. The comfort was not that they could see the plan, but that He could.

“plans for welfare and not for evil.” The word under “welfare” is shalom, and it does not mean ease, and it does not mean comfort, and it most certainly does not mean your best life now. It means wholeness. A settled, God-given well-being that the loss of everything cannot finally reach. Notice the promise does not cancel the seventy years. It holds the seventy years inside something larger than themselves. God did not promise to spare them from Babylon. He promised that Babylon was not evil done to them but welfare being worked in them, by a hand they could not see.

“a future and a hope.” The Hebrew is acharit and tikvah, something close to “a latter end and a hope.” An afterward. That is the hinge of the whole verse. The promise is not that there is no Babylon. The promise is that Babylon is not the last word of the sentence. There is an afterward. The LORD has written one, and it is good, and nothing in the seventy years can erase it.

Do you see what has happened? The verse we shrank down to fit on a mug is bigger than the mug. Far bigger. The cross-stitch version promises you a smooth road. Jeremiah promises you a faithful God on a hard one. And that is a sturdier thing to own, by a long way. The smooth-road promise shatters the first time the diagnosis comes back wrong, the first time the marriage doesn’t, the first time the porch never gets built, and the dream quietly dies in the yard. It cannot survive a single real Babylon. But the actual promise, the one written to people who had lost everything, still holds. It was built for Babylon. It only works in Babylon.

And here is where the letter reaches forward across the centuries and finds us. We are exiles too. Peter says it without flinching: sojourners and exiles, foreigners passing through a country that is not finally our home (1 Peter 2:11). Our return from exile is not a flight back to any earthly Jerusalem. It is resurrection. And the saints who went before us understood the shape of it exactly:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

Hebrews 11:13

They died not having received it. And they died in faith. That is the Jeremiah pattern stretched to its full length. The seventy years were a shadow of a longer exile, and the homecoming to Jerusalem was a shadow of a better homecoming. The thing both shadows pointed to was Christ. God’s plans for welfare and not for evil were not finally secured on a graduation stage. They were secured on a Roman cross, where the evil we had earned fell on the Son, so that the welfare we could never earn could fall on us. He took the “not for evil” by absorbing the evil. He purchased the “future and a hope” by having His own afterward torn away for three days in a borrowed grave, and then walking out of it.

So keep the verse on the mug, by all means. Just know what you are drinking. It is not a promise that you will be spared from Babylon. Plenty of saints holier than you have died in theirs. It is a promise that the LORD knows the plans when you cannot, that He is bent toward your welfare and not your harm even when the evidence in front of you says otherwise, and that there is an afterward, a latter end and a hope, that no captivity, no diagnosis, no grave can cancel, because it was bought with the blood of His Son and sealed by an empty tomb.

Settle in, then. Plant your gardens. Pray for the city. Raise your children in a strange land and do not despair of the years. He knows the plans. He has always known them. And the afterward He has written for everyone hidden in Christ is better than the porch, better than the promotion, better than two short years, better than anything we would have dared to cross-stitch for ourselves.

Yes, Lord. And amen.