As we look around at our own country, we can’t help but feel like exiles.

We live in a land where most people seem willing to casually discard the dear freedoms that our forefathers fought and died to preserve.  In fact, the only freedoms that seem to mean much in our culture are the freedoms to (a) have sex without responsibility, (b) kill our own children, and (c) steal from others by force, i.e., collect taxes from others under threat of incarceration, to  buy free stuff for ourselves.

But God wrote a letter to His people in exile.  In Jeremiah 29, God sent a message to the Israelites in Babylon, telling them about his plans for their future:

1. I have a plan for you.
2. The plan is exile.  YIKES!  The exile will last 70 years.  (Bible scholars will be interested to see how this prophecy would be fulfilled to the very day, as detailed in the notes below.)
3. Build houses, plant gardens, and eat of the produce.
4. Marry off your children, and increase in number.  (The next generation of Christians must avoid the mistake of having small families.)
5. Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

Check out this video:

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Notes on the 70-year Babylonian Captivity
by Chuck Missler (taken from Jeremiah, the Patriotic Prophet)

Among his many prophecies, Jeremiah predicted that the duration of the Babylonian captivity would be precisely 70 years.

(In fact, it was when the captive Daniel was reading Jeremiah’s prophetic writings that he undertook serious prayer, which was then interrupted by the Angel Gabriel who gave him the famed Seventy Week Prophecy. Jesus later highlighted this very passage as the key to end-time prophecy. )

The reason the judgment of the captivity was to be exactly 70 years is highlighted in 2 Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36:20, 21):

And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign of the kingdom of Persia:

To fulfil the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years.

Apparently, for 490 years they had failed to keep the sabbath of the land; the Lord was saying, in effect, “You owe me 70!”

The “servitude of the nation” began with the first siege of Nebuchadnezzar in 606 B.C. and ended with the release of the Jewish captives when Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 B.C.

This 70-year period is not to be confused with a similar 70-year period, called “the desolations of Jerusalem,” which began with the third siege of Nebuchadnezzar. Each was fulfilled to the very day.

It is instructive to note the remarkable precision of the Scriptures: The city of Jerusalem was invaded on the tenth day of the tenth month, Tebeth, in the ninth year of Zedekiah in 589 B.C. (And for 25 centuries this day has been observed as a fast by Jews in every land.)

Scripture clearly indicates that this era closed on “the four and twentieth day of the ninth month, [Kislev] even from the day that the foundation of the LORD’S temple was laid,” which was in 520 B.C. This is an interval of precisely 25,200 days, or seventy 360-day years.