Something New

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.

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.

Jeremiah 31:33-34

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.