“ 31 “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. 32 It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord.
33 “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. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 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. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.””
This week we watched Suni Lee win gold in women’s all-around gymnastics. That young woman is an athlete. I can’t imagine the power in her arms and legs. Despite her incredible strength and agility, Lee is not able to pull her entire body weight off the ground and float. Not even the strongest weightlifter at the Olympics can do that. The problem isn’t just gravity. The problem is that even as your own strength is attempting to pull yourself off the ground, your own strength is also pushing you to the ground. You are a closed system. Your attempts to pull your own weight off the ground can only be fruitless.
Many people spend their entire lives trying to do the spiritual equivalent of lifting themselves off the ground. They think that the deepest parts of themselves can change the deepest parts of themselves. They think their heart can change their heart. That’s hopeless because even as the heart is attempting to pull itself up, its own force is pushing it down. We are like filthy napkins trying to clean ourselves. The necessary change is the one we have no power to make; it is a change of heart. This passage is about how God accomplishes this change and that’s the claim of this sermon: the necessary change is the one we have no power to make; it is a change of heart.
We will study this in two points. First: the need for a new covenant. Second: the basics of the new covenant. We see the need for the new covenant in verses 31-32. We see the basics of the new covenant in verses 33-34.
First: the need for a new covenant. This is arguably the most important passage in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah makes the importance of it clear by repeating the phrase, “declares the Lord,” four times in four verses. This is Jeremiah’s way of highlighting these verses in neon yellow to tell us readers that this is critical. Look for something similar if you are currently reading the book of Judges.
These verses are so important because without their message the book of Jeremiah would give us no reason to expect anything other than an eternal cycle of life in the land, chasing after sin, refusing to repent, being exiled from the land, calling upon God, and returning to the land to start the process all over again.
These verses we are studying this evening are the climax of Jeremiah’s hope. Verses 31-34 are the centerpiece of verses 23-40 which are all about hope. The verses before our passage—23-30—are all about the return to the Promised Land and a fresh start for the people. The verses after our passage—35-40—are all about rebuilding Jerusalem and reconsecrating the valley of slaughter, which we studied earlier as Gehenna. The entirety of 23-40 is about everything returning to the way it should be and our passage—31 to 34—is the centerpiece—this is the people returning to what we ought to be. We can see the centrality of our verses by the fact that there are the same number of words before our passage—verses 23-30—as there are afterward—verses 35-40. What we are studying is the best of the best of the best of promises. Us becoming new is the best of the best of the best of God’s promises.
Our verses are all about the new covenant; verse 31, ‘“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. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord.’
The people broke the first covenant. They were so utterly unrepentant that there was nothing left for God to do other than to kick them out of the land as He kicked the Canaanites out of the land. That’s a fair bit of what we studied in our first two months in this book; “both Israel and Judah have broken the covenant I made with their ancestors,” as Jeremiah 11 put it.
The people didn’t break the covenant because there was a problem with the covenant. That needs to be said because many Christians have a very misguided view of the Sinai covenant. They think it had unrealistic expectations. They think it demanded perfection. That’s not the case. You don’t build in a route for repentance like the sacrificial system if you expect perfection. You only do that if you are looking for a repentant people rather than a perfect people. It’s the repentant who are the covenant keepers.
There was no problem with the Sinai covenant. The problem was with the people. That’s why verse 32 doesn’t say, “It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because I was completely unrealistic in expecting perfection and was honestly kind of a tyrant,” but rather, “It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord.’
The pronouns at the end of that verse make this point about fault emphatically. The “they” is empathic; “they broke my covenant.” The Lord didn’t set the people up to fail. They chose sin and continued to choose sin. The “they” is emphatic. The “I” is emphatic; “they broke my covenant, though I, I was a husband to them.” This is not a picture of a divine torturer expecting the impossible. This is a picture of a marriage partner who has done everything necessary to make the marriage work but whose efforts have been met by betrayal. This is a picture of this same God willing to make a new covenant, a new marriage, with these same people. This is grace upon grace. This is the Lord’s character, which is not only far better than that of a perfectionist with unrealistic expectations but better than the character of anyone in this sanctuary; “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.” How many of us would dare say that about ourselves?
For no reason other than His own grace, the Lord promised a new covenant. This new covenant would have similarities to and differences from the first. We should expect that there will be similarities because the same God makes both covenants, and, as Calvin puts it, “as to the new covenant, it is not so called because it is contrary to the first covenant; for God is never inconsistent with Himself nor is He unlike Himself.” Nothing about this new covenant would contradict the law of Moses. What the law called evil wouldn’t suddenly become good. What the law called good wouldn’t suddenly become evil. That’s why we can be seventeen hopefully sensible sermons into the book of Jeremiah with minimal explanation of the differences between Jeremiah’s day and our day.
This new covenant Jeremiah spoke of is like the first. It is also different. If it weren’t different there would be no need for it, and it certainly wouldn’t be called “new.” We will see some specific differences Jeremiah points out in our second point, but there are other differences he didn’t explain.
For example, both covenants are with children of Abraham, but the new covenant shows that being a child of Abraham has much more to do with having faith like Abraham than it does with being a genetic descendant of Abraham. That’s why we Gentiles who have faith like Abraham are children of Abraham and those who are genetically descended from Abraham are not necessarily children of Abraham. This also means that the parts of the Sinai covenant which were specific to Israel—purity codes separating them from the Gentiles—are no longer applicable.
John the Baptist spoke of what it means to be a true child of Abraham at the beginning of what we call the New Covenant, or New Testament, by telling the Pharisees, ‘Do not think you can say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father.” I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.’ The apostle Paul said something similar in his explanation to Romans as to why so few Jews and so many Gentiles had joined this new covenant, “it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.” So, one chief difference between the two covenants is that the new covenant shows what it means to be a child of Abraham. It means to have faith like father Abraham rather than merely be descended from father Abraham; we studied that for twenty-two weeks in Genesis last year.
So the first difference which Jeremiah doesn’t discuss in this passage is the inclusion of the Gentiles. The other is the fact that long awaited Christ would cut the new covenant. Some of what the Sinai covenant looked forward to arrives with the Christ and so parts of the Sinai covenant—like the sacrificial system—fall away because Christ has fulfilled them. We don’t refuse to keep certain parts of the Old Testament because they were unimportant. We refuse to keep them because to do so after Christ had come would be redundant. That’s a fair portion of the letter to the Hebrews. This is also why we shouldn’t be surprised that the beginning of what we call the “New Covenant” or “The New Testament” is the birth of the Christ.
Those are just two of the differences between the covenants which Jeremiah doesn’t make explicitly clear. Now we turn our attention to the differences that Jeremiah does make clear; that’s our second point: the basics of the new covenant.
This new covenant will be written on the heart. The Lord wrote the Sinai covenant on stone tablets. He writes the new covenant on human hearts; verse 33, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” This law must be written on human hearts because, as Jeremiah said in a passage we didn’t study, sin was currently written on human hearts; Jeremiah 17:1, “Judah’s sin is engraved with an iron tool, inscribed with a flint point, on the tablets of their hearts.”
The problem was never the law. You know that. You know that the problem isn’t the Ten Commandments. The problem is the human heart doesn’t want to keep them. By nature, it doesn’t have the law written on it; it has sin written on it. This is why the heart can’t change the heart. A dirty napkin can’t clean itself. A gymnast can’t pull herself up and float because as she tries to pull herself up, her own force is pushing her down. The same is true for us in sin. We can’t free ourselves from sin because even as we try to pull ourselves out, we are pushing ourselves back in. That which has sin written all over it can’t write God’s law on itself. This is what Paul said to the Romans when he spoke of, “what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh.” The law is on stone tablets. We need it on our hearts.
We need new hearts. The new covenant, or New Testament, teaches us that Jesus gives these new hearts by taking our sinful hearts—inscribed with sin—upon himself on the cross and by giving us his heart—which is inscribed with God’s law. That’s the cross and the Spirit. That’s the rest of Paul’s words to the Romans, “what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
You can’t change yourself. The law can’t change you either. That’s the message of the Old Covenant. You need a new heart. You need, as Jesus told Nicodemus, to be born again.
These are the people—the ones in whom, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts,” has occurred—who are the people of God. The next part of verse 33 makes that clear, “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
Christians are the people of God not because we are by nature different from anyone else or because we’ve got law of God. As Israel proved, these accomplish nothing before God. We are the people of God because He has so altered our hearts that we long to keep His word; “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” These are the only people of God. “I will be their God, and they will be my people,” as verse 33 puts it. That’s because these are the only “little Christs”; these are the only genuine Christians. That’s why in different ways we return to the question of whether, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts” has happened to you. That’s why George Whitefield kept coming back to the need to be born again and when a woman complained, “why do you keep saying to us you must be born again?” Whitefield replied, “because, dear woman, you must be born again.” There is no getting anywhere worthwhile with a person until, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts,” has happened.
This raises the question as to whether anyone in the Old Covenant had the law written on their mind and heart. The all too short answer is, “of course.” How else do you explain Psalm 119, “I seek You with all my heart; do not let me stray from Your commands”? How else do explain king Josiah whose reforms we studied? This is what Moses referred to as being “circumcised in heart.”
The message here, though, is that their old covenant hearts only had the law written upon them because the new covenant would have the power to do so. That’s why Old Testament saints were saved by looking forward to Jesus while we New Testament saints are saved by looking back at Jesus. That’s too short of an answer to an important question but that’s the danger with this whole sermon.
The next difference between the two covenants has to do with what it means to know the Lord; verse 34, ‘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.’ The message here is not that teaching will be unnecessary because the Spirit will speak to hearts without teaching as some groups like the Quakers have taught. There is much more to it than that and we only have time for one small part of it.
What we can say, as verse 34 puts it, is that we now know the Lord in a much more profound way than the Old Testament saints did. That’s why Jesus said, “I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” John was greater than Moses or Abraham or David because he knew the Lord to a greater degree because he knew Jesus. Mary Magdalene was greater than John because she knew Jesus better. You can know Jesus better. You can know the Lord.
We’ve now come to this final difference between the covenants, and it is arguably the most important of all; verse 34, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Does anyone know the basis for the Sinai covenant? In other words, what salvation did God perform to make these people His people? It’s the beginning of the Ten Commandments, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt.” Salvation from Egypt was the basis of the Sinai covenant. Salvation from sin is the basis of the new covenant;
“I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more” is the basis of the new covenant.
That’s the cross. That’s why the exodus is the big event of the Old Testament—salvation from slavery—and the cross is the big event of the New Testament—salvation from sin. The Exodus is what God did to make His people His people in the Old Testament. The cross is what God did to make His people His people in the New Testament.
Now that salvation from Egypt had the power to change a great deal about the people’s lives. They were free from oppression. They could live in the land. That salvation did not, however, have the power to change their hearts. The law couldn’t do that. The cross does. That’s why Paul called it the “power of God.” That’s why we sing lyrics like “This the power of the cross: Christ became sin for us, took the blame, bore the wrath. We stand forgiven at the cross.” That’s why we have a cross at the center of our sanctuary. It marks this whole sanctuary as a big box of people who have been lost and found. It is how God changes people who can’t change themselves. It’s how God changes hearts which lack the power to change themselves. Amen.