Something New

Jeremiah 31:31-40

Main Idea: God is making something new.

1. New Day: The New Covenant Will Be Different from the Old Covenant (31:32).
2. New Distinctives: The New Covenant Will Have Four Distinctives (31:33-34).
   1. Internalized word (31:33)
   2. Personal God (31:34)
   3. Personal instruction (31:34)
   4. Permanent forgiveness (31:34)
3. New Permanence: The New Covenant Will Be Permanent (31:35-37).
4. New City: Jerusalem Will Be Rebuilt (31:38-40).

From the moment the piece of forbidden fruit slid from Eve’s hand and landed softly on the lush soil of the perfect garden, we have been waiting for something new. The Lord chased after Adam and then chased them out of the garden (Gen 3:8-9, 21-24). Everything was lost, and the only hope was that the woman’s offspring would come and bruise the head of the serpent (Gen 3:15). Some members of her offspring were types of the one who would rend time and come to make all things new. The partial newness came first in the form of a man named Noah.

God re-created all things from a new starting place. Yet Noah’s family was wrought with the same problem as Adam’s family (Gen 9). Noah shared DNA with Adam, and he shared a genetic disposition to ruin things, to make things old again. So we see the Adamic race building a tower when God had actually told them to disperse and multiply. God used the inauguration of diverse languages to force a scattering into the whole world (Gen 11:1-9). God wanted to make all things new, and this newness came in the form of a man named Abraham.

Abraham was called of God to bring new things. He was called to be the progenitor of a new spiritual race of people. God promised them land, offspring, and blessing (Gen 15; 12:3). None of this could be physically seen full orbed at the time; rather, it was to come. He was walking and living in faith toward a trajectory of newness he would never see with his eyes. The land would come through another man, Moses.

Moses would lead God’s people out of the bondage of Egypt and to the threshold of the promised land (Exod 3). The people led out of Egypt would suffer at the hands of their own rebellion and never see the promised land (Num 14:20-24).

Once Israel was in the promised land, the period of the judges and then the kings would follow. Solomon’s sin would lead to a divided country, and many other sinful kings came after him, leading the people astray. This brings us up to Jeremiah’s time. Now the people are exiles. If they ever wanted something new, this was the time.

They understand the weight of their sin. They understand the consequences of sin so deeply that they grieve and repent, as we saw in chapter 29. They finally get it. And then, in chapter 30, their prospects reverse. The God who was bent on destroying them now wants to restore them. He promises in 29:11 that he has a future and a hope for them. Jeremiah 31:31-40 is an explanation, a more explicit commentary, on Jeremiah 29:11. The future and the hope for Israel is this: a new covenant with them.

In order to understand this, you have to understand the background to get at the weight of what he is saying to them. You must understand the power of the covenant for their collective national consciousness. It was profound. You also have to understand what this means for us today. It is fascinating, so let’s get at it. Here is God’s declaration of something new and what it means.

A New Covenant (31:31)

“Look, the days are coming”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.”

It is extremely difficult to fully express how powerful the idea of covenant was to God’s people. God was always making promises, all the way back to the time of Adam and Eve. It was his way of communicating with us. God promised Adam death when he sinned. God promised Adam and Eve curses with a hint of blessing when they exited the garden. When Noah landed on the ground, God promised that he would never again flood the earth. Yet the idea of covenant crystalized when God appeared to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3.

The Lord said to Abram:

Go out from your land,

your relatives,

and your father’s house

to the land that I will show you.

I will make you into a great nation,

I will bless you,

I will make your name great,

and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,

I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt,

and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

God promises three elements of the covenant: land, offspring, and blessing. Later in Genesis 15:18 the covenant is made explicit: “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘I give this land to your offspring, from the brook of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River.’”

Abraham receives the covenant. The covenant is renewed in Moses, and later it is affirmed to David. Before they were taken into exile, Judah was living in the blessings of the Davidic covenant. Perhaps now they wondered if the covenant was still active. After all, it seemed that God had forgotten them. Then, right in the middle of their mess, God does not affirm the covenant. He does not come in and say he wants to re-up what he said in the past. What he said was not confirmation of something old. This was the promise of the inauguration of something new. This is new. Again, this was a shocking reality to their system.

We see all this clearly, of course, from the vantage point of living after the coming of Christ. We can see how God’s plans were fulfilled in the person of Jesus. Jesus referred to the cup at the Lord’s Supper as representing the new covenant: “In the same way he also took the cup after supper and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood’” (Luke 22:20). The cross of Jesus was a promise of salvation for all who would believe. And, unlike the old covenant, this new covenant would never fade away.

Paul makes this explicitly clear in 2 Corinthians 3:7-11, where he compares the new covenant with the old.

Now if the ministry that brought death, chiseled in letters on stones, came with glory, so that the Israelites were not able to gaze steadily at Moses’s face because of its glory, which was set aside, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious? For if the ministry that brought condemnation had glory, the ministry that brings righteousness overflows with even more glory. In fact, what had been glorious is not glorious now by comparison because of the glory that surpasses it. For if what was set aside was glorious, what endures will be even more glorious.

The new covenant is more glorious than the old because the new covenant has a glory that will not fade. Paul uses the fading glory of Moses’s face as a metaphor for the fading glory of the old covenant.

At the time the message of Jeremiah is recorded, all of this is still to come. God gives them details about what this new covenant will look like.

New Day: The New Covenant Will Be Different from the Old Covenant

Jeremiah 31:32

God begins with a reminder of the covenant that was broken. The language of marriage here is a reminder of how tragic the faithlessness of his people really was. They rejected the one who loved them and who wanted to protect them. Instead of fixing them, however, he will establish a new covenant that deals with such transgression in a similar but new way.

New Distinctives: The New Covenant Will Have Four Distinctives

Jeremiah 31:33-34

Internalized Word (31:33)

The word that was spoken to them was an external word that needed to be internalized. He is prophesying about a day when the Word would be in their hearts.

Personal God (31:34)

Notice the personal language used here. God will be theirs, and they will be God’s. This is a righting of the wrong of faithlessness he mentioned earlier. Even though they had been faithless, God is going to make all of this right.

Personal Instruction (31:34)

The people Jeremiah was speaking to knew the word from the elders and teachers. The scribal culture will soon begin with Ezra, and for the next few centuries learning from teachers in the synagogue would be their way of life. Yet this promise would be fulfilled in the person of Christ, and from then on the Word would be in the hearts of all the members of the sacred community of faith.

Permanent Forgiveness (31:34)

The forgiveness that would come in the new covenant would be permanent. Jeremiah invites Judah to imagine that forgiveness is purely an act of grace that can never be taken away (Eph 2:8-9). This is the promise of the new covenant.

New Permanence: The New Covenant Will Be Permanent

Jeremiah 31:35-37

This beautiful poem speaks for itself. It describes the permanence of the new covenant as being as fixed as the order of creation, as regular as the cycles of nature, and as immense as the universe. A new-covenant believer cannot read these words without thinking about the power of God to keep eternally all those who are in Christ.

New City: Jerusalem Will Be Rebuilt

Jeremiah 31:38-40

This did indeed take place. Starting in 538 BC, groups of exiles returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the city. So the prophecy was fulfilled in the fairly near future. Except it wasn’t. The promise of verse 40 is not just rebuilding but rebuilding in a way that the city “will never be uprooted or demolished again.” In AD 70 the temple was destroyed again. We might surmise that Jeremiah was getting a bit carried away; perhaps he was speaking in metaphor or hyperbole. However, another more probable explanation helps us understand this entire passage. Let’s leave the immediate question about the rebuilding of Jerusalem to look at the larger question of when this new covenant will be totally operative.

The best way to understand the fulfillment is to understand it as fulfilled at three different intervals, if you will (see Wright, Message of Jeremiah, 334–39). The first interval is the immediate. Jerusalem was restored and the people taken back into the land.

In the second interval we see this new covenant as fulfilled in the life of Christ. As we noted, Christ himself borrowed the language from this verse when he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). If someone reads the New Testament first then reads this passage in Jeremiah, several themes jump out as explicitly fulfilled in the work of Christ and in the church he established. First, the law is indeed written in our hearts. The Holy Spirit of Christ came to bring to remembrance everything Jesus had taught his disciples. The Word is now in us bearing fruit as we abide in his words (John 5:38; 8:31; 15:7; 1 John 2:14). The Word of God is now a witness within us.

The second promise is of personalization and possession. God will belong to us, and we will belong to God, made real by the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. Peter clearly expresses this idea of possession when he amalgamates several Old Testament prophets in 1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

The promise that we will need no teachers does not, of course, negate the teaching ministry of the church but rather affirms it. The work of teaching is explaining the Word of God in a way that resonates and affirms the inner work of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the teacher, and he uses teachers and preachers as instruments to open the eyes of understanding to the truth. In seeing the Word of God, we see the Son of God; and in seeing the Son of God, we understand the Father. This is the power of the inner witness of the Spirit.

Finally, there is the promise of forgiveness, a promise ultimately fulfilled in Christ (Rom 3:23-26).

This leads us back to our discussion of the temple and the timeline. We know that because of the power of Christ, who will return as our royal Messiah-Warrior, the enemy will be defeated and New Jerusalem will come down at the end of the age (Rev 21:9-27). This is the city of our eternal home.

When one considers all that is involved in the fulfillment of Jeremiah 31:31, it is breathtaking! This new covenant describes so much more than the events of Jeremiah’s life and time. This text serves as a hinge on which so much of salvation history turns. Yet the original audience could not have known that at the time. They were simply receiving the encouragement for the moment. And this speaks to how God works so often. We simply have grace for the moment.

Conclusion

Think back to the moment when God instituted the covenant with Abraham. Think about how much information God tells Abraham. Think about it: God tells him, in a dream, these magnificent details:

Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain: Your offspring will be resident aliens for four hundred years in a land that does not belong to them and will be enslaved and oppressed. However, I will judge the nation they serve, and afterward they will go out with many possessions. But you will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” (Gen 15:13-16)

Oh my! These are details no one in the world knew but Abraham: slavery, bondage, judgment, and deliverance. God is saying to Abraham, “I am giving you a lot of details that are going to happen before I fulfill my promise.” This leads us to two interesting facts about God’s promises.

God Often Gives a Lot of Information

God gave Abraham enough information to act and more. At that point he was the only person alive who knew the scope and sequence of God’s plans. So too with us. We don’t feel like we have all the information, but we have all the information we need to obey. More than enough really. Walking with the Lord is not a matter of information; it is a matter of obedience. And it seems, as a matter of curious observation, that the people who know the most of God’s plans are those who are acting on what God already said. Why did God trust Abraham with so much information? We can only guess. But the guess would have to factor in the reality that few people were as responsive in their obedience as Abraham.

God Does Not Give Us All the Information

But with all that God tells Abraham, he stops after the exodus. Think of it in terms of the Bible. We are still thinking about the implications of all that is in the Bible. The thousands of words, the promises of the psalms and the warnings of the prophets, and the glorious consummation that comes at the end of the sixty-six books in the book of Revelation! What a story! Yet God just gives Abraham the story up until chapter 12 of the second book. That’s it. This means Abraham was acting on what seemed like a lot of information, but he did not know the whole story. Maybe he thought he did, but he didn’t. God does not finish the story. He rarely does. He gives us all the information we need to walk as far as he wants us to go. And that’s all.

So we read in Jeremiah 31 of the wonderful promise of a new covenant. We cannot help but think of the promise fulfilled in Jesus. The word fulfilled is in past tense. We are reading this chapter with the end in mind. We can’t help it. We are living its fulfillment. Yet what you must realize about all of this is that it was, at the time, not clear. We look at this arc of newness and see the wonderful way the plan seems to fit together. So maybe the faith element is lost on us. At the moment the weeping prophet of doom is giving this good news, they can only believe it by faith. When times were good, they had a difficult time believing things could be bad. Now that times are bad, how will they do with the news that times will be good again?

You see, at this moment all is lost. Literally. Homes, families, comfort, civilization. The people are refugees. When they were cascading down the crescent of their own bad choices, when the memory of lost idols was so fresh they could see it, when being in exile was so awful, perhaps they lacked the capacity to see this; they did not know what was on the horizon and just how glorious it was. In this moment they had to walk by faith. And, of course, so do we.

This makes me wonder: What is all the rest of my life going to be like? What are the surprises of grace? What discipline will the Lord put on us? What discipline will we need to put on ourselves? What challenges? What joys? We just do not know. We need some type of assurance, some type of promise—you know, like a covenant. And there we have it. The words of the steely prophet are words for me. God has done something new. We’re living it. But the faith, needed by Israel to believe in what would come, is the faith I need to believe in what has already come. We are in the new covenant. God has done something new, and he has given us all the information we need to obey. Yet, praise God, we don’t know it all. There is a glorious mystery to the newness of God—the mystery that calls us to walk by faith.

Reflect and Discuss

1. Compare and contrast the old covenant and the new covenant. What are the differences? What are the similarities?
2. Where did the old covenant begin, and with which historical figure in the Old Testament did it begin?
3. Name the four distinctives of the new covenant. Discuss them.
4. Second Corinthians 3:1-7 compares the new covenant with the old. Discuss the metaphor used to describe the fading glory of the old covenant.
5. Do you agree that the best way to understand the fulfillment of the new covenant is to understand it as fulfilled at three different intervals? What are these three intervals?
6. Do we have enough information to obey God fully today? Why or why not?
7. Abraham is often viewed as a man of faith. Why did God withhold certain details from Abraham and still expect him to walk by faith?
8. Is the information that God gives us proportionate with our willingness to obey it?
9. Discuss this statement: God often gives us a lot of information, but he does not give us all the information.
10. How should we preach the old covenant in light of the new covenant?