The New Covenant

Jeremiah 31:31-34

³¹“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, ³²not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

The six weeks of Lent are at an end and we have arrived at what we call Holy Week. Now we look at the Passion of Christ through the lens of the Cross and the resurrection. Easter is about God’s gracious forgiveness and our place in His Kingdom with the Lord. Without that gift, we are lost forever.

We stand on the enviable side of God’s plan for humanity. We get to look back at the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and know that His sacrifice fulfilled God’s demand for holiness and righteousness. God’s people in the Old Testament could only look forward with hope and trust that God would indeed fulfill His promises to them and make things right again after Adam and Eve fell into sin. In the midst of this waiting, God gave His people rites and rituals that would mirror the coming of the Savior. But those sacrifices were all that they had. They were a temporary reminder of what was coming. All of those sacrifices had to be repeated over and over. They were transitory in nature. The covenant that was forged at Mount Sinai served to keep the Hebrews separate from the nations around them. Those rituals and rites made them different in every way.

The old covenant imposed many rules upon the Jews, rules they found impossible to observe. Hence the old covenant certainly proved that no one could be saved by keeping it. For that reason the Lord says of their fathers, “They broke my covenant.” We would say, Before the ink was dry, they broke the covenant with the sin of the golden calf. The old covenant required endless animal sacrifices, day after day and year after year, showing that it was not God’s final word to the human race. The old covenant established a hereditary priesthood based on membership in one family (the family of Aaron) from one particular tribe (the tribe of Levi). No one else could minister at the Lord’s altar. The old covenant conferred privileges on and was limited to only one people, or nationality, the Jews.

Gosdeck, D. M. ©1994. Jeremiah, Lamentations (p. 205). Milwaukee, WI: Northwestern Pub. House.

We are people of the new covenant. We are blessed to know the story of Jesus’ saving work. The early church struggled with the tension between the Old Testament Covenant and the transformed Church that Jesus created by fulfilling the promise for a Savior. There were some who believed the only way to enter God’s Kingdom during the first century after Christ’s resurrection was to come through Judaism. This group of ardent Jewish Christians wanted all new believers to come through the Jewish faith, keeping with all of the old traditional rituals. They were actually called Judaizers. Paul takes on that idea with a passion. He teaches us that anything we add to the work of Christ, including all of those Old Testament sacrificial rituals, especially circumcision, is simply wrong thinking. (See the book of Galatians for Paul full teaching on this topic.)

Luke, writing about the formation of the early Church in the book of Acts, tells us of the Apostles’ have to deal with threats to the faith, such as was presented by the Judaizers. He shares Paul’s word to the assembly as they grapple with God’s plan of salvation and the fact that adding a little bit of Old Testament tradition to the mix is a bad idea.

Acts 15:10-11

¹⁰Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? ¹¹But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

Jeremiah speaks of what, for him, would be the distant future. The one in which we live to day. He shares the truth that there will be a new covenant, one in which the forgiveness of sins has been won and the grace of God will flow freely. But we too look even further forward to the time of Jesus return, when all of the sins of this earth will be done away with forever and we will go to live with the Father for eternity, ever able to gaze upon the face of our Savior.