Plans to Prosper You

Adapted from Chapter 6, "Plans to Prosper You," of What Horse?

It is on the graduation card. It is on the mug. It is on the throw pillow on a friend's couch and the social media post in your feed and the poster behind the cash register at the Christian bookstore. It is preached at confirmations, quoted at weddings, written into wedding programs, read at funerals, embroidered on baby blankets. 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. Jeremiah 29:11. It is, by a wide margin, the most quoted verse in modern American Christianity.

And most of us have heard it, given it, received it, posted it ourselves, without ever reading the verses around it.

Most of us, when we do read the verses around it, get a small uncomfortable feeling that nothing we have ever done with this verse quite matches what the verse is doing in its own letter.

This piece is for the Lutheran reader who has had that uncomfortable feeling and wondered what to do with it. The argument is not that the verse is fake, or that the promise is empty, or that we should stop sharing it on graduation cards. The argument is that the verse is doing something different in its own context from what we have made it do in ours — and that the something different is sturdier, more honest, and finally more hopeful than the use to which we have put it.

The popular use of Jeremiah 29:11 treats the verse as a kind of personal letter from God to the individual American Christian about his individual American life.

The setting in which it is most often deployed is the moment of transition or anxiety: graduations (you are leaving home, but God has plans for you), new jobs (you are uncertain about the move, but God has plans for you), illnesses (the diagnosis is hard, but God has plans for you), engagements and weddings (the future is unknown, but God has plans for you), funerals (a loved one has died, but God still has plans for the family). The verse is the universal antidote to uncertainty. It promises that whatever is currently dark will give way to good — that the Speaker has plans, that the plans are for prosperity and not harm, that the future is bright.

The verse comes in several translations, but the NIV's plans to prosper you is by far the most quoted phrase in American Christianity. The word prosper carries the freight: success, comfort, material well-being, the things any American would hope for. The verse, in popular use, is essentially a divine promise of upward mobility. God has good things in store for you. The future is good. Trust him.

Charitably, the impulse behind the misuse is sound. People facing hard transitions and uncertain futures genuinely need God's promises. The friend who writes Jeremiah 29:11 on the graduation card is not being malicious; she is trying to encourage. The pastor who preaches it at a funeral is reaching for comfort in a moment that needs comfort. The mother who embroiders it on the baby blanket is praying over her child's life. The instinct to find in Scripture words of God's faithfulness for the people we love is exactly the instinct Christians ought to have.

The mistake is not the impulse. The mistake is in which promise the verse turns out actually to be.

The verse is in a letter. Jeremiah wrote the letter from Jerusalem to a specific group of people in a specific terrible situation. The opening of the chapter tells us who:

The original audience is the exiles in Babylon. They are not high school graduates with their lives ahead of them. They are survivors of a national catastrophe, deported in chains by a foreign empire, watching from a thousand miles away as their nation is dismantled. They have lost their homes. Many have lost family members in the siege. Before the letter is delivered they will watch the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple. The audience for this letter is a community in collective trauma.

And the letter does not say what the graduation card says.

The Lord's first word through Jeremiah is not I have plans to prosper you. It is: settle in. Build houses. Marry. Have children. Plant gardens. Pray for Babylon. The exiles are being told that they are not leaving. They are being told to make a life — and a multi-generational life — in the very place that has just destroyed their country.

Then comes the timeline:

Seventy years. Not seventy weeks. Not seven years. Not next year, not next decade. Seventy years. The exiles reading this letter are being told that the return will happen, but not in their lifetimes. The middle-aged among them will die in Babylon. Their children, born in exile, will know Jerusalem only by stories. Their grandchildren, perhaps, will see the return. The verse is a multi-generational promise, and the original recipients are being told, plainly, that they will not personally see its fulfillment.

And then verse 11.

Read the verse in its place. The you is plural — you the exiles, you the people, the children of Israel under judgment. The plans are the plans of God for his covenant people across the long arc of exile and return. The welfare is not personal prosperity in this generation; it is the eventual restoration of the nation, decades after the death of most of those reading the letter. The future and hope is the promise that the covenant will be kept, that God has not abandoned his people, that Babylon is not the end of the story.

The verses that follow press the point home.

The promise is to a scattered, exiled, traumatized covenant people that they will be gathered, restored, brought back. This is the welfare. This is the future and hope. It happens after the seventy years. It happens through the long faithful endurance of the exiles in Babylon. It happens because God is faithful to his covenant — not because the individual exile has had a particularly good year.

The verse is not a graduation card. It is a hard pastoral letter from a prophet to a people in exile, telling them that the catastrophe is real, the wait is long, and God will still be God on the other side of it.

It would be a small thing to write all this just to correct a Bible reference. Jeremiah 29:11 on a graduation card is not the problem. The verse on the card is the doorway into the problem.

The problem is what the misreading displaces.

When we make Jeremiah 29:11 a private promise of personal prosperity, we have done several things — none of them small.

We have read the Bible as personal mail. The verse, in popular use, becomes a direct message from God to me about my life. But the verse is not addressed to me. It is addressed to a community of exiles in the sixth century before Christ. There is a real sense in which we can take it for ourselves — Scripture is for us, and the God who promised to be faithful to his covenant people then is the same God who is faithful to his Church now — but only after we have heard it for what it is. The framework skips that step. It treats the Bible as a book of timeless personal greeting-card sentiments, and it loses the actual story of God working with his people across history.

We have flattened a long providential promise into a short personal one. The verse, in its letter, promises that God will be faithful across seventy years and the lifetimes of most of those reading the letter. The verse, on the graduation card, promises that my next four years will go well. The two promises are not the same. The first is sturdier — it is anchored in God's covenant faithfulness across generations, regardless of what happens in any one of them. The second is brittle — it can be tested by any disappointment, any failure, any unexpected hardship in the immediate term. We have traded a sturdy promise for a brittle one and called it encouragement.

We have skipped the call to faithful endurance. The verse comes in a letter that says settle in, build houses, marry, pray for your captor, wait seventy years. The popular use of the verse skips all of this. It promises the welfare without the exile. It promises the future and hope without the patience and prayer and multi-generational faithfulness it took to get there. The framework gives the reader the candy and hides the call. The original recipients of this letter could not separate the two. They had to do the hard things in order to be the people to whom the welfare would eventually come.

We have hidden the theology of the cross under a theology of glory. The Lutheran tradition has talked about this distinction since Luther's Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. A theology of glory expects God to be present in visible blessing and success. A theology of the cross expects God to be present in the hard, the hidden, the painful, the not-yet-resolved. Jeremiah 29:11, rightly read, is a theology-of-the-cross verse. God's plans for welfare go through seventy years of exile. The way to the future and hope goes through the hard waiting. The graduation card converts this into a theology-of-glory verse: God has good plans for you, meaning your life is going to be good. The conversion is small in language and enormous in pastoral consequence. When the life is not good — when the diagnosis comes, when the marriage fails, when the child is lost — the theology-of-glory reading collapses. The theology-of-the-cross reading does not. It was never about my circumstances going well; it was about God being God across whatever circumstances come.

And we have lost Christ as the deeper future and hope. The exiles did return from Babylon under Cyrus of Persia in 538 BC, as Jeremiah had promised. But that return was not the end of God's plans for his people. The deeper exile — the exile from God, from righteousness, from life — was not solved by the return to Jerusalem. It was solved by the One who took on Israel's exile and bore it in his body on the cross, and who rose to bring his people not just back from Babylon but back from death. The future and hope of Jeremiah 29:11, read in the light of the whole canon, is finally Christological. The Christian who claims this verse rightly is claiming Christ, not next semester's grades.

We have made the verse a promise of our prosperity. God made it a promise of his faithfulness.

The catechism teaches us to pray that God's will be done — including the parts of his will that are hard, hidden, costly, or slow. The promise is not that the petitioner's circumstances will be easy. The promise is that God will keep us steadfast in His Word and faith unto our end. This is what the exiles in Babylon needed. This is what every Christian in every hard providence has needed. It is what Jeremiah 29:11, rightly read, was actually promising all along.

God has plans for his people. They are good plans. They include seventy years of exile, the cross of Christ, and the long faithful endurance of every saint between Pentecost and the Last Day. They are sturdier than the promise on the graduation card. They are also more honest, more pastoral, and finally more hopeful — because they rest on God's character rather than on our circumstances.