YHWH Guarantees The Provision Permanently Of Successors To David, And Successors To The Levitical Priesthood While They Are Still Required For The Offering Of The Regular Offerings (Jeremiah 33:17-18).
“For thus says YHWH, David will never want a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, nor will the priests the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt-offerings, and to burn meal-offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.”
YHWH's words are carefully chosen. He promises that there will always be a descendant of David available to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, not that one will always be sitting on it. Indeed the latter situation could not be true in exile. And it was from the line of David's successors that Joseph, Jesus' father, was king-elect in Israel, as Matthew's genealogy demonstrates, and that the right passed on to Jesus as the eldest son.
He also promised that there would never be a lack of a Levitical priest to offer the regular offerings and sacrifices, while such a priest was required. Unlike Isaiah Jeremiah did not foresee the day when the regular offerings and sacrifices would be required no more, because Another would have been offered up as an all-sufficient sacrifice (Isaiah 53; Hebrews 7-10), but he did recognise that YHWH would always make provision for man's atonement.
Both promises have been fulfilled. On the return to the land a Davidide was available to govern Israel, leading up to the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ, and there was an abundance of Levitical priests for the renewal of Temple worship. It was only when the sacrificial system finally ceased, never to be renewed, spiritually at the death of Christ, and literally at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, that the line of Levitical priests ceased. For by then we had One Who was chosen by God as both King and Priest to act on our behalf for ever. (Today we could not find either a genuine Davidide other than Jesus Christ, or a genuine Levitical priest).
‘The priests, the Levites.' This phrase is found nowhere else in Jeremiah, but it also occurs in Deuteronomy 17:9; Deuteronomy 18:1; Joshua 3:3; Isaiah 66:21; Ezekiel 43:19; Ezekiel 44:15; 2 Chronicles 30:27. As found in Deuteronomy 18:1 a distinction is made between ‘the priests, the Levites' and ‘the whole tribe of Levi' (see our commentary on Deuteronomy for evidence of this) which is then explained in more detail in Deuteronomy 18:2-8.