Context

Sunday, my day of Bible reading catch-up, found me tackling chapters 7 - 15 in Jeremiah. Maybe it was the culmination of 8 chapters of doom and gloom, and the memory that six chapters of doom preceded it, but for the first time I thought “where does the hope of verse 29:11 come in? Probably one of the most quoted and published “comfort verses”, this verse falls after 28 chapters of God telling his people that he would judge them, bring disaster on them, and break them so they could not be repaired. Twenty-eight chapters and suddenly a verse, not isolated, but in a paragraph:

¹⁰ This is what the LORD says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. ¹¹For 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. ¹² Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. ¹³ You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ¹⁴ I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity.^[a] I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

A few thoughts strike me:

1) If I were in Jerusalem and I've been hearing 28 chapters worth of doom and gloom - I'm not sure how I would feel about the phrase "¹¹For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you,"

Everything in me would be saying - what? I've just HEARD you tell me all your plans that you have to HARM me and now you're telling me it will "prosper" me?

In fact, in the context of all that came before, this verse is not comforting UNTIL you consider the paragraph that surrounds it.

2) In the surrounding paragraph we see that 1) God did not abandon his people but rather he goes to them and brings them back. 2) This happens after the people call on God and seek him out 3) God again repeats that when he is sought, he will be found and he will bring them back.

3) The ESV translates verse 11 as “plans for wholeness and not for evil”. I prefer this translation because it points towards the greater context – wholeness developing through suffering, growth from brokenness. It also makes it more difficult to manipulate the verse for a prosperity gospel. “Wholeness” doesn’t mean riches, wealth, or even success – it is deeper than all of this. This translation too reminds me of Paul’s summary of suffering in Romans 5:3 - 5

4) Considering the context of suffering, this verse can only ever be comforting to the Christian who desires his continued sanctification for the glory of God and his ultimate unification with him.

5) The comfort waiting for the Christian in this verse is well summarized by Jeremiah Burroughs in Chapter 3.9 of The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment:

”in all the afflictions, all the evils that befall [a Christian], he can see love, and can enjoy the sweetness of love in his afflictions as well as in his mercies. The truth is that the afflictions of God's people come from the same eternal love that Jesus Christ came from. Jerome said, 'He is a happy man who is beaten when the stroke is a stroke of love.' All God's strokes are strokes of love and mercy, all God's ways are mercy and truth, to those that fear him and love him (Psalm 25:10). The ways of God, the ways of affliction, as well as the ways of prosperity, are mercy and love to him. Grace gives a man an eye, a piercing eye to pierce the counsel of God, those eternal counsels of God for good to him, even in his afflictions; he can see the love of God in every affliction as well as in prosperity.”

This ultimate comfort is not as warm and fuzzy as the greeting card version of an isolated verse written in French script – but it is more enduring. In the end it actually helps us see through present and future sufferings better as we look past them, past our own time and dimension, and see God’s time and God’s vision of wholeness. We benefit not only from the verses that come before chapter 29 – but from knowing the story that comes after – the preservation of the Jews by Esther, the king himself paying for the rebuilding of the temple, the return of the Jews, the recommitment of the people to follow God – and most poignantly the promise and realization of an ultimate rescue through Christ.