Turn now everyone from his evil way and from the evil of your deeds, and dwell on the land which the Lord has given to you and your forefathers forever and ever (NASB).
Applications for us? We should love the Lord with all our hearts (and minds), and that means making sure English translations get it right. The English translations make it appear that God did not know what He was talking about because Israel did not own the land for many, many centuries following the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
This whole land will be a desolation and a horror, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon seventy years. 'Then it will be when seventy years are completed I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation,' declares the Lord, 'for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans; and I will make it an everlasting desolation (NASB).
Again, this Greek (in the LXX) and Hebrew passage has been mistranslated—using everlasting rather than lasting, but there is another extremely important lesson. God said the exile from the land would be 70 years—mentioned explicitly twice in this passage! Those Christians who think that 1948 is the fulfillment of this passage are very, very wrong! The Jews did return to the land 70 years later, and God knew exactly what He was talking about! In fact, we can read about the return in the books of Nehemiah and Ezra.
Lessons? God fulfilled His promise of a return to Israel over 2,000 years ago, and Christians should not be thinking that Jews can be saved differently from non-Jews (Gentiles). Jews and Gentiles both must look to their only Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, to His blood shed on Calvary's Cross for sin-forgiveness, and to His perfect Robe of Righteousness to be placed over our shoulders by faith for eternal life to be possible for us in heaven!