The Meaning of Jeremiah 29:11

I have been plugging right along through the Old Testament. I've enjoyed the way that Reading God's Story organizes the prophets, interspersing them between the sections of the historical books written about their day. It has helped me to get a better sense of which prophet prophesied when and where, to which kingdom and during which king's reign. For instance, the writings of Jonah, Amos, and Hosea followed 2 Kings 14-15, which describe the reigns of Amaziah-Ahaz in Judah and Jehoash-Pekah in Israel, the period of time when these three prophets were active. I printed out this timeline of the kings and prophets of Israel and Judah and kept it beside me as I read. It was enormously helpful.

I am now reading Jeremiah, known as the weeping prophet. And today my reading reminded me of why it's important to read the Old Testament in a lectio continua style - to read continuously across a book. I arrived at a verse that is much quoted - 29:11. In fact, if you type "Jeremiah" into Google, "Jeremiah 29 11" comes up as the second option. If you polled most Christians about Jeremiah, it would certainly be the most popular verse in the book, and for many Christians, the only verse they are familiar with from Jeremiah.

"'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 quote it here in the NIV since that's probably the best known version of this verse.)

This verse is often quoted as "God's promise to me, myself and I " - God has plans for me, good plans that will lead me into my future. Now, I like that idea as much as the next person, and I believe that it is still a description of God's intentions for us today.* However, having just read this verse in the context of the historical books and all the accounts of the prophets, having read Jeremiah's dire warnings of destruction and his unheeded calls for a last-minute repentance, and having seen the people of Israel come to such a terrible end, the wrenching sorrow of their unfaithfulness to God, their awful uprooting from the land they loved, and their being cast away to an unknown and pagan land... this verse means more. It means more than "God loves me and wants me to be happy." The astounding, mind-boggling, staggering message of these words is that the end of the world has not come for Israel. God is extending an olive branch to them. God is reaffirming his commitment to his covenant with Israel, even when they have turned their backs on him so thoroughly that judgment finally came upon them in all its fury and fire. God tells them here that they have a future, at the very moment when they surely believed any hopeful future had been snuffed out. This is a word to a prodigal son. It is a word of grace. Anyone who says the Old Testament is just a message of doom and gloom, of law and judgment, has not read it.

Turning a verse like this into a bumper sticker saps it of its force. It removes the devastation and suffering and hopelessness behind this verse and sanitizes it into just another saccharine saying. If you want to know its meaning, you must know the story out of which it arises. And that is how I feel about the Old Testament too - if you want to know what Jesus means, you have to know the story out of which he arises. And that will be the subject of an upcoming guest post on a friend's blog! Once I get it written and posted, I'll post a link to it.

the weeping prophet

*though what qualifies as "prosperity" might be vastly different from what we might expect based on the American dream or whatever it is that we think we need these days in order to be happy. I am reading a biography of missionary Amy Carmichael right now, and the shape of her life was very good according to God's plans for her, yet most of us would shrink away from the very high challenge that she believed was part and parcel of following Jesus.