Jeremiah 33:14-22 explicitly promises Jerusalem will live in safety, that there will always be a Davidic king ON THE THRONE, and that there will never be a lack of Levitical priests offering burnt offerings and sacrifices -- for ALL TIME, guaranteed as unbreakable as the fixed order of day and night. 2 Samuel 7:12-16 similarly promises David's offspring an established throne and kingdom 'forever.' Since there is currently no reigning Davidic king in Jerusalem and no functioning Levitical sacrificial system, these 'for all time'/'forever' promises have manifestly failed.

This is a genuinely serious covenant-theology question and deserves a real answer rather than denial that anything is at stake. The most serious scholarly treatment of how OT 'eternal' (olam) covenant language actually functions is Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum's Kingdom through Covenant, which argues that the Noahic, Abrahamic, priestly (Phinehas), and Davidic 'eternal' covenants operate typologically and escalate toward a terminus, rather than each guaranteeing an unbroken, unchanging institutional form in perpetuity. The objection's false dichotomy is between only two options -- literal unbroken institutional continuity, or total failure -- when the text's own later canonical development within Scripture supplies a third: fulfillment and escalation in a single, permanent, greater instance of both offices. For the Davidic throne: Luke 1:32-33 -- the angel's announcement to Mary -- directly and deliberately alludes to the language of both 2 Samuel 7:12-16 and Jeremiah 33 ('the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David... he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end'), asserting continuity and fulfillment in Jesus, the last legitimate Davidic claimant, rather than a second broken dynasty. Acts 2:29-36 makes the same move explicitly: Peter cites Psalm 132 (itself dependent on 2 Sam 7) and argues David, as a prophet, foresaw his descendant's resurrection and enthronement. A king in exile whose line continues in a living heir has not had his dynasty broken merely because he does not currently hold visible territorial power -- which is precisely the claim made about the risen Christ. For the Levitical priesthood 'for all time': Hebrews 7 is the New Testament's own extended wrestling with exactly this tension, not a dismissal of it. The author knows the kind of perpetuity language Jeremiah uses and argues that the OT itself already signals the Levitical order is not the final word: Psalm 110:4 ('a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek') invokes a priesthood (Melchizedek, Gen 14) that predates Levi and Sinai entirely, and Hebrews reads this as pointing beyond the Aaronic system to a permanent priesthood in Christ, who 'holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever' (Heb 7:24). The argument is explicitly fulfillment and escalation, not nullification: the sacrificial content changes ('once for all,' Heb 7:27; 9:12) while God's commitment to perpetual priestly mediation is honored rather than broken. It is also worth noting that even within Jeremiah's and the broader Deuteronomic tradition, continued occupancy of throne and temple was repeatedly made contingent on covenant faithfulness (Solomon is warned of exactly this in 1 Kings 9:4-7; cf. Jeremiah's own Shiloh warning, Jer 7:1-15) even while the underlying promise to the office/line itself remained unconditional -- the conditional and unconditional elements interweave rather than simply contradict, which is the specific puzzle Gentry and Wellum's covenant-theological framework is built to resolve.

The historic Christian claim is that the divine intent behind both institutions -- a righteous Davidic king and an effective priestly mediation of forgiveness -- reaches a permanent, unbreakable terminus in one person, Jesus Christ, who is both priest and king. Psalm 110, which combines royal ('sit at my right hand') and priestly ('a priest forever') language in a single oracle, is the most-quoted Old Testament text in the New Testament -- this convergence of both 'forever' offices in one figure is a positive, textually-grounded argument for intentional typological fulfillment rather than coincidence.