Jeremiah;- Hope for the house of David (ch33)

In the first half of ch33, the word of the Lord was giving Jeremiah reassurances about the restoration of the land. In the rest of the chapter, he turns to the house of David.

Vv14-17. “The days are coming when I will fulfil the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah (both kingdoms again). That is “I will cause a righteous branch to spring forth for David, and he will execute justice and righteousness in the land”. In those days Jerusalem will dwell securely, and will be called by the name “The Lord is our righteousness”. As Christians, we understand this kind of prophecy as a reference to Christ. It has not been fulfilled in any other way. Isaiah ch11 talks about the “root of Jesse” and the “shoot from the stump of Jesse”. Zechariah ch6 v12 identifies “The Branch” as the king who will build the temple, though the immediate intention there seems to be to express hope for the prospects of the prince-governor Zerubbabel.

Vv17-18 “David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, and the Levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to burn cereal offerings, and to make sacrifices for ever.”
Neither promise of continuity has been kept literally. They have been kept only in the sense that Christ is both king and perpetual priest (see Hebrews). Also, according to Revelation ch5 v10, we as a body attached to him are “kings and priests” .

Vv19-22 remind us that God is the Creator, to underline the faithfulness and security of his promise. He “has a covenant with day and night”, which ensures that they appear at the appropriate time. If any outside force can break that covenant, then, and only then, can his covenant with David be broken. Putting it another way, just as the host of stars and the sands of the sea cannot be counted, so God will multiply the descendants of David and the Levitical priests in the same way. Perhaps we should refer this to the “multitude which no man could number” in Revelation ch7 v9.

Vv23-26. The Lord invites Jeremiah to notice that “these people” are saying that the Lord has rejected the two families that he has chosen. There is ambiguity here. He could mean the two families of Israel and Judah, as in the first part of the chapter, or he could still be talking about David and Levi. This “saying” is not a quotation from Jeremiah himself, but there could have been other prophets of judgement who were angry enough (at their own rejection by the people) to take pessimism to the final extremity. They may be pictured in Song of Solomon ch5 v7, where (I believe) Israel’s claim to be the wife of the Lord is being denied and she is being given a verbal beating by these prophets of complete rejection. The Lord answers this “saying” with another version of the “covenant with day and night” argument.

Ch34 vv1-5
In the next chapter, there is a personal message to the current king Zedekiah, which belongs to the same theme. On the one hand, he repeats the warning that the city is given into the hands of the king of Babylon, and that Zedekiah himself will not escape, but will be taken into exile to Babylon. On the other hand, there is the comfort that he will not die by the sword (which the Israelites regarded as a particularly shameful death). Furthermore, he will receive a proper funeral. For example, spices will be burned and there will be the usual lamentations. It was, again, particularly shameful for a man to die anonymously and without being buried properly, without the elaborate rituals of the standard funeral ceremony and without being recognised by his people. Jeremiah had already predicted both fates (death by the sword and without burial) for the bulk of the inhabitants of Jerusalem (ch19 v7).

These promises are almost the last comforting words to be found in Jeremiah. From this point, it all goes downhill.