Jeremiah 29:11 Meaning

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith Jehovah, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end.

Jeremiah 29:11 (ASV)

God is telling His people what He is thinking toward them, and it is peace and a future and a reason to hope. He had not given up on them, even with everything around them falling apart.

The setting changes how this lands. God spoke it to people in exile, carried off far from home, with seventy years of waiting still in front of them. He was promising them that His heart toward them stayed good across all of it, the whole long stretch of waiting included.

That makes the verse better than the version people frame on a wall. The wall keeps the part about a hope and a future and quietly drops the seventy years. Read whole, it is a promise about who God is toward you across a long, hard stretch, and that He stays with you the whole way through it.