God has always dealt with humanity by way of covenant. A covenant is “an agreement between two or more persons.” Covenant is often compared to contract, treaty, or alliance.
The history of God’s people is a story of covenants. God promised to reward Adam with life if he obeyed and warned of death if Adam disobeyed (Genesis 2:16–17). God made a covenant of safety with Noah and every living creature (Genesis 9:8–17). The rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant promise that he will never again destroy the world with a flood.
God made a covenant of destiny with Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3; 15:1–21; 17:1–27). He promised to give him a land populated with descendants as numerous as the stars (15:5). God said, “This is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations.… I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you” (17:4, 7). He also promised that through Abraham’s offspring all nations on earth will be blessed (22:18; cf. 12:3). For his part, Abraham was bound to obey God by circumcising every male in his household (17:9–14). Every one of these covenants was a personal bond in which God promised to bless and his people promised to obey.
In Jeremiah 31 God refers to “the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt” (v. 32a). For Jeremiah, therefore, the Old Covenant meant the covenant God made with his people at Mount Sinai. The Mosaic Covenant was for a people already saved by grace. “God spoke all these words: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery’ ” (Exodus 20:1–2). Once they were saved, God’s people had to keep God’s covenant in order to receive God’s blessing. They had to worship God alone, keep the Sabbath holy, preserve the sanctity of human life, tell the truth, and obey the rest of the Ten Commandments (vv. 3–17). The Mosaic Covenant was a good and gracious covenant.
The Broken Covenants
There was only one problem with the Old Covenant—sin. The covenant was broken even before it could be ratified. By the time Moses came down from the mountain, the people had cast a golden idol in the shape of a calf. “When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain” (Exodus 32:19).
So God reissued the covenant (Exodus 34), only to see his people break it all over again. The history of the Old Testament is one of idolatry, immorality, discontent, and disobedience.
Jeremiah rightly identified sin as the problem with the Old Covenant: “ ‘They broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,’ declares the LORD” (31:32b). “Jeremiah does not condemn the old covenant. He condemns Israel for breaking the covenant.”7 And not just breaking it! The first twenty-eight chapters of Jeremiah are an exhaustive record of how Judah shattered the covenant and ground the fragments into dust.
The shocking thing was that this agreement was actually a marriage covenant. More than once Jeremiah stated that God was like a husband to his people. But the day finally came when the Almighty filed for divorce. Israel “fell out of love” and committed spiritual adultery “on every high hill and under every spreading tree” (2:20b). She stood up in court to deny the charges, but God made them stick. His virgin bride had become a spiritual whore.
Here is the real shocker, however: If every sin is an act of covenant-breaking, then every sinner is a covenant-breaker. Every time you sin, you are being unfaithful in your marriage to God. That is why sin is so tawdry, cheap, and degrading. As the Apostle Paul so carefully explained, there is nothing wrong with the Law, the commandment, or the Old Covenant (Romans 7:7–13). The problem is with us. We are covenant-breakers by nature.
Failure to keep the covenant brings a curse (cf. Jeremiah 11:8, 10–11). Jeremiah cited the conventional wisdom of his day: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (31:29b). This must have been a popular saying because the prophet Ezekiel quoted it as well (Ezekiel 18:2). It is a memorable proverb. When a father bites into an unripe grape, the lips of his children pucker in disgust. This refers to the curse of the Old Covenant, in which God threatened to “punish the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5).
How the people of Judah resented that curse! “While in exile the people concluded out of self-pity and fatalistic despair that they were being punished unjustly for sins of previous generations.”8 They felt sorry for themselves. The sour grapes their fathers ate left a bitter taste in their mouths. Why should they suffer for the spiritual adultery of their parents?
What the prophet Jeremiah taught them, however, was that they deserved God’s curse for their own sins as well as for those of their parents: “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge” (31:29–30). Corporately or individually, everyone who breaks covenant is under God’s curse. This is also true for nations—including the United States of America—that have covenanted to live under God.
The New Covenant
If the Old Covenant ended in a curse, then the New Covenant merits investigation. Jeremiah 31 is the place to start because it is the only passage in the Old Testament that promises “a new covenant.” It is the one place in the Old Covenant that lists the promises of the New Covenant. And since a covenant is also called a “testament,” it is the passage that gives the New Testament its name.
Jeremiah listed seven promises in all.
- The New Covenant promised reconciliation, the bringing together of all God’s people into one redeemed race.
“The time is coming,” declares the LORD,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.” (v. 31)
Because of its emphasis on personal responsibility, Jeremiah’s New Covenant is sometimes viewed as the triumph of individualism. R. K. Harrison says:
Probably the most significant contribution which Jeremiah made to religious thought was inherent in his insistence that the new covenant involved a one-to-one relationship of the spirit. When the new covenant was inaugurated by the atoning work of Jesus Christ on Calvary, this important development of personal, as opposed to corporate, faith and spirituality was made real for the whole of mankind.9
The trouble with this view is that the first promise of the New Covenant was a corporate promise, not an individual promise. It promised to end the division between the northern and southern tribes. “ ‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will plant the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the offspring of men and of animals’ ” (v. 27). God promised to plant both houses in one land.
Jeremiah first promised this reconciliation at the beginning of his book:
“At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the LORD, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the LORD. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts. In those days the house of Judah will join the house of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your forefathers as an inheritance.” (3:17–18)
He would repeat it at the end of his book:
“In those days, at that time,”
declares the LORD,
“the people of Israel and the people of Judah together
will go in tears to seek the LORD their God.
They will ask the way to Zion
and turn their faces toward it.
They will come and bind themselves to the LORD
in an everlasting covenant
that will not be forgotten.” (50:4–5)
Jeremiah’s promises were fulfilled with the coming of Christ. There is only one New Covenant people of God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In the New Covenant community there is no black, no white, no brown. There is no rich, no poor. There is only one New Covenant people in Christ.
2. The New Covenant promised regeneration, the transformation of God’s people from the inside out:
“This is the covenant I will make with the house
of Israel after that time,”
declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.” (Jeremiah 31:33a)
The problem with the Mosaic Covenant was that it was written on tablets of stone (Exodus 31:18). If anything was written on the hearts of God’s people, it was only their sin:
“Judah’s sin is engraved with an iron tool,
inscribed with a flint point,
on the tablets of their hearts.” (Jeremiah 17:1; cf. v. 9)
With the New Covenant, however, God solved the problem of the sinful heart by giving his children new hearts and new minds. According to Calvin, the New Covenant “penetrates into the heart and reforms all the inward faculties, so that obedience is rendered to the righteousness of God.”10
It must be emphasized that the New Covenant did not abolish the Old. Christ did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). So, “the new covenant is not so called because it is contrary to the first covenant.”11 Both covenants demand obedience to the Law. The difference is that the New Covenant brings the law from the outside to the inside. “The distinctiveness of the ministry of law under the new covenant resides in its inward character. Rather than being administered externally, the law shall be administered from within the heart.”12
The Law written on the heart is a promise about the coming of God’s Spirit, for the book of Hebrews attributes Jeremiah’s promise to the Holy Spirit:
The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:
“This is the covenant I will make with them
after that time, says the LORD.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
and I will write them on their minds.” (Hebrews 10:15–16)
Only the Holy Spirit can change a heart. A Christian whose heart has been regenerated by God’s Spirit knows how to please God and does not need to pull out a Bible every time a decision needs to be made. The Law written on the heart helps the Christian know what to do instantly and instinctively.
For the Christian, obedience to the Law is not a prior condition for entering the New Covenant. Rather, it is one of the promised blessings of the New Covenant. In his notes on this verse Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) wrote, “I think the difference here pointed out between these two covenants, lies plainly here, that in the old covenant God promised to be their God upon condition of hearty obedience; obedience was stipulated as a condition, but not promised. But in the new covenant, this hearty obedience is promised.”14
3. The New Covenant promised possession. God’s people would have a claim on God, and he would have a claim on them: “I will be their God, and they will be my people” (31:33b). God’s people would no longer be their own. They would belong to God, and God would belong to them.
The promise of belonging to God in a mutual love relationship is among the most frequently repeated promises of the Old Testament:
“I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.” (Exodus 6:7)
You have declared this day that the LORD is your God and that you will walk in his ways, that you will keep his decrees, commands and laws, and that you will obey him. And the LORD has declared this day that you are his people, his treasured possession as he promised, and that you are to keep all his commands. (Deuteronomy 26:17–18; cf. 29:12–13; Ezekiel 11:20)
“I will say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God.’ ” (Hosea 2:23b; cf. Zechariah 8:8)
Whenever God makes a covenant with his people, what he is really giving them is himself. Thus the primary blessing of the New Covenant is friendship and fellowship with the Triune God. This “is the crown and goal of the whole process of religion, namely, union and communion with God.”15
4. The fourth aspect of Jeremiah’s New Covenant promise was evangelization.
“No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the LORD. (31:34a)
The Bible often commands believers to teach one another to know the Lord (Deuteronomy 6:1–9; Colossians 3:16). But Jeremiah promised a day when such teaching would no longer be necessary because everyone—from the youngest babe to the oldest saint—would know God. Here the word know “carries its most profound connotation, the intimate personal knowledge which arises between two persons who are committed wholly to one another in a relationship that touches mind, emotion, and will.”16
To a limited degree, this promise has already come true in the Church. Every believer knows Jesus Christ. So although every Christian needs the gospel every day, every Christian does not need to be converted every day.
Yet the promise of the end of evangelization is especially for eternity. There will be no revival meetings in Heaven. No one will stand on the corner and pass out tracts. No one will share the Four Spiritual Laws. No one will knock on your door and ask, “If you were to die tonight, what would you say to God when he asks, ‘Why should I let you into my Heaven?’ ” There will be no evangelism because there will be no need. Everyone will know God, from the least to the greatest.
5. Fifth, the New Covenant promised forgiveness: “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:34b). This is perhaps the best blessing of the New Covenant. The Old Covenant tried to deal with the problem of sin through the sacrifices of the Law. But in the New Covenant, sin would be dealt with once and for all. The price for sin would be paid in full; God not only forgives, but he also forgets.
The way the New Covenant deals with the problem of sin is through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The sins of God’s people were forgiven and forgotten at Calvary. When Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples, “He took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you’ ” (Luke 22:20; cf. 1 Corinthians 11:25). Jesus was claiming that all the promises of the New Covenant find their fulfillment in him. Jesus is the New Covenant. The New Covenant is established by his blood shed on the cross for our sins. All the blessings of the New Covenant are located in the crucified (and risen!) Christ.
The writer to the Hebrews was captivated by Jeremiah’s vision of the New Covenant. Again and again he speaks of “a better covenant” (7:22) or a “superior” covenant “founded on better promises” (8:6). A better covenant was needed because there was a problem with the old one. It was the same problem Jeremiah identified: “For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people” (Hebrews 8:7–8a). God found fault not with the covenant but with the people. A better covenant was needed to deal with the problem of sin.
The better covenant in Hebrews is one and the same as the New Covenant in Jeremiah, for Hebrews quotes Jeremiah’s entire promise (8:8–12). Then the writer to the Hebrews makes this significant statement: “By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he [God] has made the first one obsolete” (v. 13a). We have already seen that the Old Covenant is not abolished but fulfilled in the New. The laws of the Old Covenant remain, now written on the heart. But the New Covenant is so much better that it is as if the Old has been done away with completely.
The reason the New Covenant is so much better is because “Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant” (9:15; cf. 12:24). The New Covenant offers full and final satisfaction for the curse of God against every kind of covenant-breaking.
6. Sixth, Jeremiah promised that the New Covenant would be eternal:
This is what the LORD says,
he who appoints the sun
to shine by day,
who decrees the moon and stars
to shine by night,
who stirs up the sea
so that its waves roar—
the LORD Almighty is his name:
“Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,”
declares the LORD,
“will the descendants of Israel ever cease
to be a nation before me.”
This is what the LORD says:
“Only if the heavens above can be measured
and the foundations of the earth below be searched out
will I reject all the descendants of Israel
because of all they have done,”
declares the LORD. (31:35–37)
The God of creation is also the God of salvation. Therefore, the New Covenant in Christ is as reliable as the fixed laws of nature, if not more so. It is irrevocable.
Jeremiah’s pleas for God to remember his covenant have not gone unanswered (14:21). Not even the disastrous events of 587 B.C. (the ultimate fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the Babylonian captivity) marked its end. The New Covenant is as likely to fail as the entire universe is to grind to a halt. God will no more forget his people than humanity will unravel all the mysteries of interstellar space. The New Covenant is an everlasting covenant.
The Biblical covenants often sound like contracts, as if God does his part and we do our part. But of course we never keep our end of the bargain, and so the covenant ought to be null and void. Yet the mystery of God’s grace is that he continues to keep covenant even when we break it.
The only explanation for the permanence of the covenant is that Jesus Christ keeps it on our behalf. The New Covenant is a blood bond between God the Father and God the Son on our behalf. Jesus Christ makes and keeps the covenant for us. We are in the covenant because we are in Christ.
7. The seventh and final promise of the New Covenant was to Rebuild Jerusalem:
“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when this city will be rebuilt for me from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate. The measuring line will stretch from there straight to the hill of Gareb and then turn to Goah. The whole valley where dead bodies and ashes are thrown, and all the terraces out to the Kidron Valley on the east as far as the corner of the Horse Gate, will be holy to the LORD. The city will never again be uprooted or demolished.” (31:38–40)
There would be life after death for Jerusalem. The parts of the city that lay in ruins would be rebuilt. What had been cursed would be blessed.
All these promises came true. When Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem after the Exile, his engineers started at “the Tower of Hananel” (Nehemiah 3:1) and worked their way around Jeremiah’s map to make repairs “above the Horse Gate” (v. 28). That was the earthly, physical fulfillment of Jeremiah’s promise.
There is also a heavenly, spiritual fulfillment of the promise of the New Covenant. God is building his people an eternal city. “When Christ returns, his people will see “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2).
Bible expositions often end by applying the promises and commands of God to daily life. But after hearing the seven promises of the New Covenant, what still needs to be done?
There is nothing left to do—only believe. For all the promises of the New Covenant are things God himself undertakes: “I will make a new covenant” (Jeremiah 31:31). “I will put my law in their minds.… I will be their God” (v. 33). “I will forgive their wickedness” (v. 34). He will not “reject all the descendants of Israel” (v. 37). All the terms of the New Covenant are promises. Will you believe them?
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