Daily Faith Walk

This verse gets stitched onto graduation cards and framed above desks, usually on its own, usually without the sentence before it or the ten after it. Jeremiah didn't write it to someone starting a new job. He wrote it to people who had lost their homes, their temple, and any sense of when, or whether, things would get better. Read on either side of verse 11 and the promise gets harder, and truer. Quick answer Jeremiah 29:11 is part of a letter Jeremiah sent to Israelites deported to Babylon, telling them God had not abandoned them even though their exile would last seventy years, not seventy days. The promise is not that their circumstances would improve quickly, but that God knew them intimately, intended good rather than harm for them, and had a future for them beyond the exile. That promise came bound to an instruction: build lives where they were, seek the city's peace, and seek God himself with their whole heart. The verse is a promise of God's character and long pur...