Jeremiah 33:20-26

If ye can break My covenant of the day, and My covenant of the night. .. Then may also My covenant be broken with David My servant.

God’s great day-and-night engine, as a witness against skepticism

“Day and night in their season” are God’s perpetual challenge to unbelief, His sublime witnesses to the perpetuity of His Church. The doubters in Jeremiah’s time saw, or thought they saw in the captivity of Israel already accomplished, and that of Judah foretold as nigh at hand, the complete breakdown of all God’s plans and promises as to His people and His Church. They said: “The two families (Judah and Israel) which the Lord did choose, Tie hath even cast them off.” “There’s an end of all our fine expectations! Prophecy breaks down! God can’t keep His contract! Religion is a failure! We told you so!” But what does God say to them in reply? “Thus saith the Lord If My covenant of day and night stand not, if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth; then will I also cast away the seed of Jacob, and of David My servant,” &c. Thus God reminds the sceptic and the doubter that His covenant with His Church is as firm as that with day and night. We of to-day are in the midst of a sceptical age, and some good people are alarmed at the growth of doubt, and at coldness and troubles in the churches. They firmly believe in the truth of Christianity, but they seem to have lost something of their faith in its conquering power. “What does God mean by His covenant of day and night”? It was equal to saying: “If you can stop the daily rotation I have given to this earth, then you may stay the onward rolling wheels of My Messiah’s chariot from the conquest of the world!” That’s what God meant, and He has thus far made good His word. Judah, like Israel, for her sins, went into captivity. But unlike Israel, Judah was brought back to do God’s work for ages longer; and perhaps for more work in the future than we now understand. The Church lives and grows. Tier ministers are thousands of thousands. “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured,” no more can her people. The earth rolls onward, bringing “day and night in their season,” and the sun hears the missionary Angelus chiming around the globe. Let us study this sublime illustration. Look at the daily rotation of this globe, and imagine the power necessary to produce and maintain this rotation. Suppose we see what God’s oath of day and night means when represented by steam mechanics. Let us build our engine and run this revolving globe a while by steam power. The earth is not a fiat fly-wheel set upon its edge, but a massive sphere, 8000 miles in diameter. So, by the ratio of size of shaft to size of paddle-wheel on a large steamboat, the earth must be slung on a steel shaft about 250 miles in diameter and 10,000 miles long. It must be driven by an engine whose cylinder should measure 1200 miles bore and 2000 miles stroke, having a piston-rod 100 miles thick and 2500 miles long, working by a connection-rod 3000 miles long on a crank of 1000 miles arm, with a wrist 200 miles long and 50 miles thick. The piston of this engine will make but one revolution daily; but to do that it will travel 4000 miles, at an average velocity of nearly three miles a minute. The working capacity of this engine will be about fourteen thousand million (14,000,000,000) horse-power. It must be controlled by an automatic governor of infallible accuracy, and supplied with inexhaustible fuel and oil; and so run on, day and night, never starting a bolt, nor heating a journal, nor wearing out a box, age after age. The iron bed-frame for this machine must be 10,000 miles square and 4000 miles high, and not tremble a hair under the stroke that drives the equatorial rim of this fly-wheel globe up to a steady velocity of seventeen and one-half miles a minute, twenty times the velocity of a lightning express train! Who’ll take the contract to build and run this engine? The vast mass must fly through space in the earth’s orbit around the sun, with a velocity of more than 1100 miles a minute. The Armstrong 100-ton steel rifle sends its 2000-pound steel projectile at the rate of 1600 feet per second clean through a solid wrought-iron plate 22 inches thick. But God fires this globe, 8000 miles in diameter, through space with 60 1/2 times the velocity of the monster projectile, and 2000 times that of an express train at 34 miles per hour. And our engine that gives it its day-and-night rotation must fly with it at that speed, and never lose a stroke! And these are very slow among the velocities of the starry worlds. And yet these velocities only represent what God does every moment by the abiding force of that first impulse He gave to this silent spinning globe when He shot it from His creating hand like a top from a boy’s finger! Now, imagine the infidel trying to seize, in its mighty sweep, the flying crank that runs this globe, to stop its revolution! What then? Did you ever see a man caught and whirled and mangled on a little factory shaft, reduced to a shapeless pulp in a moment? Even so it has ever been with those who have tried to stop the engine of Christianity. (G. L. Taylor, D. D.)

Divine plans of action unalterable

I. The Almighty both in the material and spiritual departments of His universe acts from plan.

1. The text speaks of a “covenant” with material nature as well as with David.

2. The Infinite One acts evermore from plan.

(1) A priori reasoning would suggest this.

(2) The constitution of the creation shews this. The laws of nature about which philosophers talk are only parts of His plan which they have discovered.

(3) The Bible teaches this. It speaks of Him appointing everything in nature (Genesis 1:1; Genesis 8:21; Isa 4:10-11; Psalms 104:1. &c.).

II. The plan on which God conducts the material universe is manifestly beyond the power of His creatures to alter.

1. This is a blessing to all. If men could alter the order of nature what would become of us!

2. This is an argument for the Divinity of miracles, if miracles are changes in the order of nature.

III. The unalterableness of His plan in material nature illustrates the unalterableness of His plan in the spiritual department of action. It is not impossible for God to reverse the order of nature, but it is impossible for God to act contrary to those principles of absolute truth and justice which He has revealed (Homilist.).