A New Covenant

The city is surrounded. Smoke rises from the hills where the enemy army is camped. Inside the walls, people are hungry and afraid. And a prophet who has warned them for forty years is about to say something no one expects. Days of hope are coming.

Jeremiah's message had mostly been hard to hear. For decades he warned the people of Judah that they had broken their covenant with God, the promise made at Mount Sinai when God brought their ancestors out of Egypt. They had worshipped idols, ignored the poor and refused to listen. Judgement would come, through Babylon. People called Jeremiah a traitor. He was beaten, thrown into a muddy cistern and locked up. And now it was happening. The Babylonian army was at the gates. But in the middle of these chapters, Jeremiah writes down a little book of comfort, full of promises about what God will do after the judgement.

“Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.” A new covenant. Not just repairing the old one. Something new. God explains why it is needed. It will not be like the covenant he made with their fathers in the day he took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt. That covenant they broke, God says, although I was a husband to them. God had held their hand like a loving parent. He had been faithful like a loving husband. And they had walked away, again and again. The problem was not God's law. The problem was in their hearts.

So here is God's promise. “I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” At Sinai, God's law was written on tablets of stone. Outside the people. Something to read and obey, or to forget and disobey. Now God promises to write it inside them, on their hearts. Not just knowing what is right, but wanting it. And he says, “They will no longer each teach his neighbour, and every man teach his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they will all know me, from their least to the greatest of them.” Not just priests and prophets. Children and grandparents, rich and poor, everyone knowing God for themselves.

And then the last words, the foundation of it all. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” God doesn't forget the way we forget. He chooses not to hold their sins against them anymore. A clean slate. Jeremiah, surrounded by war, held on to that promise. About six hundred years later, on the night before he died, Jesus sat at a table with his friends. He took a cup of wine, gave thanks, and said: This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. The new covenant Jeremiah promised was beginning, through Jesus.

The word covenant gave Christians the name for half their Bible. When the Scriptures were translated into Latin, the word used for covenant was testamentum. And so Jeremiah's new covenant, the one Jesus spoke of at the Last Supper, became the new testament. By around the year two hundred, Christian writers were using the phrase New Testament as the name for the collection of the Gospels and the apostles' letters.

A new covenant. You'll find it in Jeremiah chapter thirty-one, verses thirty-one to thirty-four. A promise of hearts made new, of everyone knowing God, and of sins forgiven and remembered no more. So here is a question to carry with you. God promised to write his law on our hearts. What is one thing you want God to change in your heart?