5. Or worse still, the response might have been: “Let’s fight then—let’s take on King Nebuchadnezzar—because we know that our victory is assured in two years’ time”. It does not say “seek the welfare of cities”; it says “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile”. We don’t have that certainty. Why? Jeremiah 29:4-7 J. Waite There is an encouraging tone in this Divine message to the captives in Babylon that must have been strikingly fitted to call forth every better element of thought and feeling within them. Yet alongside this message of doom, there is also a prophecy of future hope. Jeremiah 29 – Letter to the Captives A. That’s why Jesus gives no balance or corrective when he says to store up treasure in heaven; he knows where we naturally store our treasures. Jeremiah 29:11 is no different. There may be current sociological or strategic reasons for focusing on reaching cities. - which it is to the interest of us all most earnestly to seek to heal. However, the key thing is that God will be behind it all. All parts of the social system are so linked together by a law of mutual dependence and influence that the well-being of one is, in a measure, the well-being of all. "Build ye houses, and dwell in them," etc. In being carried beyond the bounds of Israel these captives were not passing beyond the domain of Israel's God. It is a specific corrective to a false and over-realized hope, peddled by the false prophets like Hananiah. We see this even more clearly when we read Jeremiah from beginning to end, rather than just jumping in at this chapter out of context. Is it a world that our Father's hand has made and filled with the tokens of his beneficence, and that has been trodden by the feet of the great Redeemer, and shall we throw over it the shadow of our discontent or fear (Nehemiah 8:10; Ecclesiastes 9:7; 1 Timothy 4:4, 5)? After the judgement, there will be salvation and restoration: Jeremiah is speaking of a new exodus (out of exile and back to Jerusalem) which will make the first exodus seem hardly worth talking about. We should stand ready for Christ’s return at any moment; we should not be found sleeping. It means that for us the biggest reminder we need is that this city is not our home. All through the book, Jeremiah isn’t speaking the word of God into a vacuum: there are always these other voices with their false messages at every point. The judgment of God is falling.” In chapter 29, he wrote to exiles who had already been deported to Babylon, giving the same message, but in the middle of it we find this remarkable verse of comfort and hope (v. 11). "The eye cannot say to the hand," etc. (1-4) A letter from Jerusalem to the captives in Babylon. We don’t need any encouragement to make ourselves more at home in Babylon. ; "Whether one member suffer," etc. Prayer (2 Chronicles 7:13, 14; Psalm 106:23; Exodus 32:10). The welfare or prosperity of Babylon is a means to an end of preserving God’s people. JEREMIAH 29. We are all personally affected for good or ill by the political order and the general tone of the moral life around us. With that in mind, we can now turn to chapter 29. The Prophet Jeremiah wrote the book between 630 and 580 BC announcing God’s judgments upon Judah, a tribe of Israel.