The Unbreakable Grammar of Grace Text: Jeremiah 31:35-37
Introduction: The Cosmic Guarantee
We live in an age of profound instability. Our politicians make promises they have no intention of keeping, our institutions crumble, and the cultural ground beneath our feet shifts like sand. People are anxious, and for good reason. They are looking for something solid, something permanent, something that will not wash away in the next ideological tide. They are, whether they know it or not, looking for a covenant keeper. They are looking for a God whose promises are more reliable than the sunrise.
The modern evangelical world, in its own way, has contributed to this instability. It has become enamored with a theology of rupture and discontinuity. It has driven a wedge between the Old Testament and the New, between Israel and the Church, creating a God who seems to have a Plan A that failed and a Plan B that is a temporary stopgap until He can get back to Plan A. This is a theology that produces dispensational charts that look like a schematic for a very complicated, and frequently failing, piece of machinery. It presents God's promises as conditional, His people as disposable, and His ultimate victory as something perpetually delayed.
Into this confusion, the prophet Jeremiah speaks a word of absolute, cosmic certainty. This passage is not a sentimental platitude; it is a divine oath, grounded in the very fabric of the created order. God takes His people, in the midst of their sin and failure, and He points them to the sun, the moon, the stars, and the roaring sea. He says, in effect, "My promise to you is as fixed and unalterable as the laws of physics. My covenant with you is woven into the grammar of reality itself."
This is not a promise made to one ethnic group in isolation. This is a promise made in the context of the New Covenant (Jer. 31:31-34), a covenant that would burst the wineskins of ethnic Israel and flood the nations of the earth. This is a promise to the true Israel, the Israel of God, which is the Church of Jesus Christ. What God is giving us here is nothing less than the bedrock of our assurance, the foundation of our mission, and the guarantee of our ultimate, global victory. He is telling us that His purpose in history is as unstoppable as the tides.
The Text
Thus says Yahweh, Who gives the sun for light by day And the statutes for the moon and the stars for light by night, Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar; Yahweh of hosts is His name:
"If these statutes are removed From before Me," declares Yahweh, "Then the seed of Israel also will cease From being a nation before Me forever."
Thus says Yahweh, "If the heavens above can be measured And the foundations of the earth searched out below, Then I will also reject all the seed of Israel For all that they have done," declares Yahweh.
(Jeremiah 31:35-37 LSB)
The God of Fixed Orders (v. 35)
We begin with the foundation of the promise, which is the character of the one making it.
"Thus says Yahweh, Who gives the sun for light by day And the statutes for the moon and the stars for light by night, Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar; Yahweh of hosts is His name:" (Jeremiah 31:35)
God does not begin with the promise itself, but with His resume. He identifies Himself as the sovereign Lord of creation. He is the one who "gives" the sun. The sun is not its own master; it is a servant, a celestial lamp hung in the sky on Day Four, on a divine schedule. He is the one who establishes the "statutes" for the moon and stars. The word here is for a fixed, decreed ordinance. The orbits of the planets, the phases of the moon, the rising of the constellations, these are not happy accidents. They are governed by law, by the decree of a king. This is the foundation of all science. Because God is a God of order, the universe is orderly and therefore intelligible.
He is also the God of untamed power. He "stirs up the sea so that its waves roar." The sea in ancient thought was a symbol of chaos and raw, destructive power. But God does not fear it; He plays with it. He is the one who whips it into a frenzy and the one who tells it where its proud waves must stop. He is in complete control of both the predictable order and the apparent chaos.
And then He signs His name to this resume: "Yahweh of hosts is His name." This is not just "the Lord." Yahweh is the personal, covenant-keeping name of God. And "of hosts" means of armies. He is the Lord of the armies of heaven, the angelic commanders, and the armies of earth. He is the commander-in-chief of all reality. This is the God who is speaking. He is not a tribal deity making a provincial promise. He is the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos, the general of all celestial and terrestrial forces. When this God makes a promise, He is putting the full weight of His creative and military power behind it.
The Covenantal Analogy (v. 36)
Having established His credentials, God now makes a staggering comparison.
"If these statutes are removed From before Me," declares Yahweh, "Then the seed of Israel also will cease From being a nation before Me forever." (Jeremiah 31:36 LSB)
This is a divine "if/then" statement, a logical argument from the Creator of logic. The "if" clause presents an impossibility. "If these statutes," these fixed ordinances of the sun, moon, and stars, "are removed from before Me." In other words, if the fundamental laws of celestial mechanics fail, if the sun decides to not rise, if the moon wanders out of its orbit, if the very structure of the physical universe comes undone. The "then" clause is the consequence. Only then, under those impossible conditions, "will the seed of Israel also will cease from being a nation before Me forever."
The continued existence of God's people is as certain as the laws of nature. God's covenant faithfulness is the metaphysical glue that holds the universe together. His promise to His people is not less certain than gravity; it is the very foundation upon which things like gravity operate.
Now, we must ask the crucial question: who is this "seed of Israel"? Our dispensationalist friends want to limit this to ethnic, unbelieving Jews. But that makes a hash of the entire New Testament. The New Testament is explicit: the true seed of Abraham, the true Israel, is not defined by ethnic lineage but by faith in the Messiah. "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly... but he is a Jew who is one inwardly" (Romans 2:28-29). "And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:29). The "Israel of God" is the Church (Galatians 6:16). This promise, made in the context of the New Covenant, is a promise to the Church of Jesus Christ, made up of believing Jews and Gentiles, one new man in Christ.
This means that the Church will never cease to be a nation before God. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. Empires will rise and fall, ideologies will come and go, but the Church of Jesus Christ will endure as a visible, corporate nation before God forever. This is not a promise of a secret rapture out of a failed world; it is a promise of enduring, visible presence and victory in history.
The Immeasurable Guarantee (v. 37)
As if the first analogy were not enough, God provides a second, equally powerful one, to drive the point home.
"Thus says Yahweh, 'If the heavens above can be measured And the foundations of the earth searched out below, Then I will also reject all the seed of Israel For all that they have done,' declares Yahweh." (Jeremiah 31:37 LSB)
Here again, God sets up an impossible condition. "If the heavens above can be measured." Can you take a tape measure to the Andromeda galaxy? Can you chart the outer limits of a universe that is still expanding? "And the foundations of the earth searched out below." Can you plumb the depths of the earth's core? Modern science, for all its prowess, has barely scratched the surface. God is speaking of total, exhaustive comprehension of His creation.
Only if man can achieve this god-like knowledge, this total mastery over the cosmos, "Then I will also reject all the seed of Israel." And notice the reason He gives: "for all that they have done." God is not ignorant of our sin. He is not making this promise because Israel was so faithful. He is making it in spite of their unfaithfulness. He sees all their sin, their rebellion, their idolatry, "all that they have done," and He says that even this colossal mountain of sin is not enough to make Him break His oath.
His covenant is not based on our performance, but on His promise. His grace is bigger than our sin. The security of the people of God does not rest on our ability to hold on to Him, but on His unbreakable grip on us. This is a direct refutation of any theology that makes our eternal security dependent on our own efforts. If you are part of the seed of Israel, a believer in Jesus Christ, you are more secure than the foundations of the earth.
Conclusion: The Unflinching Hope
So what does this mean for us, here and now? It means everything. It means our salvation is secure. It means the Church is indestructible. And it means our mission is guaranteed to succeed.
This passage is the ultimate foundation for a robust, optimistic, postmillennial eschatology. God has promised that the "seed of Israel," the Church, will remain a nation before Him forever. He has not promised a cowering, defeated remnant, but a triumphant, global kingdom. The Great Commission is not a hopeless suggestion; it is a divine mandate backed by the same power that holds the stars in their courses.
The knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. Why? Because Yahweh of hosts has sworn by the stability of His own creation that it will be so. He has tied the success of His redemptive plan to the very laws of nature. To believe that the Church will ultimately fail in its mission is to believe that the sun might not rise tomorrow. To believe that God will reject His people is to believe that you can measure the heavens with a yardstick.
Therefore, we do not labor in uncertainty. We do not preach the gospel with our fingers crossed. We do not build Christian culture hoping it might last a few years before the antichrist kicks it all over. We build on the solid rock of God's unbreakable, cosmic, covenant promise. We work, we preach, we build, we sing, and we fight, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain. The God who commands the armies of heaven and the waves of the sea has given us His word. And His word is the most stable thing in the universe.