“Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD.”
Jeremiah 31:35-37, KJV
The load-bearing word in these three verses is the word if. God reaches into the created order, the sun, the moon, the stars, the roaring sea, and He says: as long as these persist, I will not cast you off. The hinge is not my faithfulness. The hinge is not my worthiness. The hinge is the fixed order of creation itself. God stakes His covenant not on what man can do but on what God has already done and cannot be undone.
The word if here does not introduce a condition for me to meet. It introduces an impossibility God dares anyone to attempt. Measure heaven. Search out the foundations of the earth. If you can do that, then, and only then, will He cast off His people. The impossibility is the point. God is swearing by what He alone has made and what He alone sustains.
Jeremiah has been called the weeping prophet, and rightly so. He preached into the collapse. He watched Jerusalem fall. He watched the Temple burn. He watched the people of God led away in chains to Babylon. Everything that looked permanent was gone, the land, the city, the priesthood, the throne of David. The visible scaffolding of the covenant lay in rubble.
Chapter 31 sits inside what scholars call The Book of Consolation, chapters 30 through 33, which is remarkable because Jeremiah spends most of his ministry preaching judgment. But God turns him here to preach hope. Not thin hope, not wishful hope. The most theologically dense hope in the entire Hebrew prophetic tradition. Chapter 31 contains the promise of the new covenant in verses 31 through 34, the passage the writer of Hebrews quotes at length, the passage that underpins every Lord’s Supper, the passage that declares God will write His law on my heart, not on tablets of stone.
Then, immediately after that promise, God delivers these three verses. He knows what the people are thinking. They are in exile. The city is ash. The king is dead or captive. And the question beneath the surface of every Jewish heart is this: has God cast us off? Is the covenant over?
And God answers not with sentiment, not with reassurance, but with cosmology. He points to the sky. He points to the sea. He says: I ordered all of that, and as long as it stands, you stand before me.
Matthew Henry observes that God here confirms His promises to Israel “by the stability and constancy of the course of nature.” God is not simply comparing His faithfulness to nature’s regularity. He is declaring that both rest on the same Author, the same will, the same Word. The ordinances of the moon and stars do not run on their own momentum. They run because God speaks them forward every morning. And the covenant runs on exactly the same speaking.
Now look at the specific construction in verse 35. God is described as the one who “divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar.” That phrase is not decorative. The roaring sea in the Hebrew prophetic imagination represents chaos, the unformed, the threat. God does not merely calm the sea, He divides it. He sets its ordinances. The same God who set the bounds of chaos in creation is the God who sets the bounds of His covenant with me. Chaos does not have the final word over my standing before Him. He divided the sea, and He has divided for me a place in His mercy.
Look then at verse 37 with full attention. God says: if heaven above can be measured, by human hands, human instruments, human comprehension, if the foundations of the earth can be searched out, then He will cast off His people. He is saying: the condition for rejecting me is the condition that requires man to become God. No measurement human hands can take will ever exhaust the heavens. No probe will reach the foundations of the earth. The impossibility is not rhetorical flair. It is the theological statement that my rejection would require the undoing of the created order itself.
Spurgeon returns again and again to this principle: the covenant of God is not made with man’s performance as its foundation. God has already done too much to let us go. He gave His Son. These Jeremiah verses are the guarantee beneath the new covenant promise. They say: the promise of 31:31-34 will not fail, because the cosmos that God made will not fail.
My standing before God is not being reviewed. It is not conditional on my performance yesterday or my consistency this week. My standing is as fixed as the ordinances of the sun. I did not set those ordinances. I cannot unmake them. And I did not set the covenant God made in Christ, and I cannot unmake that either.
The exile period always feels like rejection. Every dark season the enemy whispers: God has cast you off. The city is ash. The scaffolding is down. Look at the evidence. And these three verses are God’s answer, hard, structural, cosmological. If you want evidence that He has cast me off, then first measure the heavens. Search out the foundations beneath. Come back when you have done that, and we will talk.
No one can do that. The heavens are not measured. The foundations are not searched out. Therefore I stand.
Devotional Close
E.M. Bounds wrote: “The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees.” But the reason morning prayer is possible at all is what Jeremiah 31:35-37 declares. I come to my knees not to establish my covenant with God but because the covenant is already established, and the one who established it also set the morning itself in its orbit. The sun that woke me this morning was the same sun God cited as the surety of my standing before Him.