The Jeremiad: The People, Babylon and Cyrus the Persian (Jeremiah 29:10-11)

“10 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. 11For 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 29:10-11

Whereas Jeremiah 29:11 is an oft-quoted scripture heralded to inspire messages of a “future and a hope,”many hearers—and expositors alike—do not consider that such promises to the people proceeded ‘after seventy years’ of suffering. In a similar fashion, the Jeremiad—the complaints, protestations, prophesying, sermons and lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah recorded in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations—were not simply directed towards the Babylonians for its future invasion and subjugation of the people. (It first involved prophecy against his own people.)

For the entirety of the 52 chapters of the Book of Jeremiah was first directed to the wrongs of the people that led to ‘seventy years of [Babylonian] captivity,’ which Jeremiah was prosecuted, persecuted and imprisoned for speaking. (And this came at the hands of the people and false prophets who “healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, peace, peace when there was no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14). These were also those who comforted the people saying that they should not suffer or be subjugated believing that God was with them in spite of Jeremiah’s declarations, which were proven to be true.)

All the same—then and only then—in his final prophecies against Babylon and its eventual demise at the hands of the Medes and Persians (Darius and Cyrus the Great) was the promise of an “expected end” fulfilled. In prophetic fashion, the people were first required to suffer before they would succeed.