²¹ so that as long as the sky remains above the earth, you and your children may flourish in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors.

³² He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³ And he will reign over Israel^[a] forever; his Kingdom will never end!”

⁴⁴ “During the reigns of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed or conquered. It will crush all these kingdoms into nothingness, and it will stand forever.

²⁴ “My servant David will be their king, and they will have only one shepherd. They will obey my regulations and be careful to keep my decrees. ²⁵ They will live in the land I gave my servant Jacob, the land where their ancestors lived. They and their children and their grandchildren after them will live there forever, generation after generation. And my servant David will be their prince forever.

¹⁷ For this is what the Lord says: David will have a descendant sitting on the throne of Israel forever. ¹⁸ And there will always be Levitical priests to offer burnt offerings and grain offerings and sacrifices to me.”

¹⁹ Then this message came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ²⁰ “This is what the Lord says: If you can break my covenant with the day and the night so that one does not follow the other, ²¹ only then will my covenant with my servant David be broken. Only then will he no longer have a descendant to reign on his throne. The same is true for my covenant with the Levitical priests who minister before me. ²² And as the stars of the sky cannot be counted and the sand on the seashore cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of my servant David and the Levites who minister before me.”

²³ The Lord gave another message to Jeremiah. He said, ²⁴ “Have you noticed what people are saying?—‘The Lord chose Judah and Israel and then abandoned them!’ They are sneering and saying that Israel is not worthy to be counted as a nation. ²⁵ But this is what the Lord says: I would no more reject my people than I would change my laws that govern night and day, earth and sky. ²⁶ I will never abandon the descendants of Jacob or David, my servant, or change the plan that David’s descendants will rule the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Instead, I will restore them to their land and have mercy on them.”

²¹ “And this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord. “My Spirit will not leave them, and neither will these words I have given you. They will be on your lips and on the lips of your children and your children’s children forever. I, the Lord, have spoken!