Jeremiah 33:25, commentary and pictures

From chapter 20 onward the prophecies of Jeremiah are not placed in chronological order. Chapter 33 belongs in sequence after chapter 32 in the story of Jeremiah's experiences in Judah, amid false prophets, utter repudiation of God's law and principles of righteousness, and persecutions of the prophet, kept to show the awful enormity of sin and its sure consequences. It belongs near the last of Jeremiah's work in Judah, chronologically after chapters 34 and 37 and before chapter 38.

The verse affirms the certainty of God's covenant and appointed order, that God has established the regular order of day and night and appointed the ordinances governing heaven and earth, and this enduring order is the pledge of His covenant faithfulness. The sun, moon, and stars continue in their appointed order as His servants. It displays God's almighty, Godlike, omnipotent creative power to make His covenant with day and night and to appoint the ordinances of heaven and earth, which only the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, who lived before the first day was spoken into existence, possesses.

The verse is part of a prophecy that points to the same time as Ezekiel's promises of Israel's gathering, renewal, and restoration to the land. It is one of the Messianic prophecies that look through the restoration from Babylon to the more glorious restoration under Christ Jesus. Its promised restoration and gathering is a covenant promise whose full scope includes all the seed counted as God's people, not merely natural descendants living in one historical period. It is accomplished through Jesus and includes the resurrection at His second coming, and it belongs to those who are children of promise and justified by faith. Its promises connect with the future heavenly Jerusalem and with the preserved personal and collective identity of Israel.

The verse stands among the Old Testament prophecies that describe the desolation of the earth during the millennium, when the earth will be desolate while the immortal subjects of the kingdom have ascended with their Lord to the eternal city and reign with Him in the judgment of the wicked for a thousand years. It takes that same creating God to make the Sabbath day to mark the weekly cycles of time and to proclaim His almightiness in the creation of the worlds and His love in the re-creation or redemption of man, proving that Christ who made the Sabbath is Lord also of the Sabbath.