The sign is pine, about a foot across, with the words burned into it over a sunrise. For I know the plans I have for you. It was written to people who had just lost a war, inside a letter telling them to settle down in the country that had taken them, and the good part of it was dated seventy years out.
I had said the sign version out loud plenty of times before a man in the adult class I teach asked me who the letter was written to. I did not know, and I had been handing out the inside of that sentence for years without once opening the envelope. I read the whole chapter that week, and what stayed with me was not the sentence.
Hananiah promised two years
A little before that letter, a prophet named Hananiah stood up in the temple and told everyone the crisis was nearly over. The vessels taken to Babylon would come home, the yoke of the king of Babylon was already broken, and the captured king of Judah would be brought back, all of it “within two full years,” in Jeremiah 28:3.
Jeremiah told him what he thought of that.
Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hananiah the prophet, Hear now, Hananiah; The Lord hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie.
Jeremiah 28:15 (KJV)
Hananiah died that year. The next chapter is Jeremiah’s letter to the people who had been carried off, with the famous verse inside it, written by the man who had just called Hananiah a liar for promising a short wait.
Build houses and plant gardens
Jeremiah addresses it to the elders, the priests, the prophets, and “all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon,” in Jeremiah 29:1. The next verse names them more closely: the king, the queen mother, the officials, and the craftsmen and the smiths. Those are prisoners of war, living in the city of the men who had marched them out of their own. Jerusalem was still standing when they read this. It would burn about seven years later.
The first thing God tells them is this.
Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.
Jeremiah 29:5-7 (KJV)
Gardens take years. They were to marry off the children they had and expect grandchildren in Babylon, and to pray for the city that had done this to them, because their own peace was inside its peace now. Those are instructions for building a life where they least wanted one.
The very next verse is the warning about prophets who say otherwise. Further down, at verse nineteen, the letter says plainly why they are there: because they had not listened to his words. That reason is given to that nation about that covenant, and it is the part of the chapter that does not travel. Then comes the timetable.
For thus saith the Lord, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place.
Jeremiah 29:10 (KJV)
Seventy years, counted from the first deportation a few years before this letter. Most of the people holding it would be buried in Babylon. The promise was kept, and the ones who walked back through the gate were the children and grandchildren the letter had told them to have.
An expected end
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
Jeremiah 29:11 (KJV)
An expected end. The wording on the sign is usually the New International Version, which has plans to prosper you and hope and a future.
Behind an expected end the Hebrew has two nouns, and the King James margin admits it: end and expectation. The sign narrows the other phrase in the same verse. Where the Hebrew says thoughts of peace, and the King James keeps it, the sign says plans to prosper you, and prosper is the word that turns a promise about a nation coming home into a forecast about your year, as a wristband does to Philippians 4:13.
Whose promise was it
A promise God made to somebody else does not transfer by copying the terms, and this one was made to a crowd. Every you in verse eleven is a plural in the Hebrew, and so is every you in the timetable above it, which is why the King James can write build ye houses and the modern versions cannot show you the difference.
The plans are for a nation, and nobody reading this is going home to Jerusalem in seventy years. What transfers is the character of the God who made it, and the picture of him in this chapter is specific and strange: he is a God who tells people to plant fruit trees in a country they hate, who refuses to shorten the wait by a single year to make them feel better, and who keeps his word on a schedule that outlives the people he gave it to.
Somebody will point out that the New Testament does this constantly, and it does. But Paul usually shows his working. In Galatians he names the promise, says it was made to Abraham, and builds a step through Christ before handing it to anybody. He is not perfectly consistent, and in 2 Corinthians 6 he hands a congregation a promise made about Solomon with no step shown at all. The Galatians way is the one that can be checked, and the sign does neither.
That God is worth more than the forecast. Jeremiah’s next chapter promises them a city built again on its own ruins, and songs, and children, in Jeremiah 30:18-20. The shape of it came true, late and smaller than the words sound.
What the letter told them to do in the meantime still transfers. Build houses. Plant gardens. Marry, in the city you did not choose. They planted, and somebody they never met ate the fruit.