Jeremiah 11:17
For the LORD of hosts, that planted thee, hath pronounced evil against thee, for the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done against themselves to provoke me to anger in offering incense unto Baal. For the LORD of hosts, that planted thee, hath pronounced evil against thee, for the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done against themselves to provoke me to anger in offering incense unto Baal.
The LORD of hosts who planted Israel and Judah planted them as a green olive tree. That planted tree is not a literal tree but a symbol for Israel, for the adopted family of Abraham to whom the covenants of promise belong, and for the true church, whose meaning may be expressed through other symbols. To pronounce evil against what He planted is to pronounce judgment, meaning the breaking off of the olive-tree branches and the coming judgment by Babylon. It stands as one of God's faithful warnings of the consequences of turning from His instruction.
The judgment was provoked by the people's own evil, their idolatry in offering incense to Baal and turning to Baal worship, which angered God. That same evil was breaking and not continuing in the covenant God made with them when He brought them out of Egypt, through unbelief and turning from the Lord as a whole. God justly found fault with them for this and declared they had forfeited the blessings of that covenant. The breaking off makes place for a second and better covenant established upon better promises. In Jeremiah's time the first covenant had grown old and was ready to vanish away before he foretold the new covenant made at Christ's ministry and death, by which those broken off may be grafted in again with the Gentiles until the tree stands complete as the twelve tribes of the Israel of God, so the church continues as Gentiles are grafted in.
The verse predicts Israel's breaking off when the people as a whole turned from the Lord, fulfilled when every tribe as a tribe turned away, though individual Jews were not all rejected. In its setting among Jeremiah 3 through 21, read with Jeremiah 9 and 10, it sounds as an awful denunciation of sin joined with sorrow over transgression and a touching appeal to return to God, which the mass of the people met with no response.