Our Sermons

Bible Passage: Jeremiah 31:31-34
Pastor: Pastor Schlicht
Sermon Date:  March 18, 2018

Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I’m about as nervous as I am excited to preach to you today. Jeremiah 31:31-34 is an amazing passage of Scripture. It is the beating heart of Jeremiah’s book of consolations, the longest single section of the Old Testament to be fully quoted in the New Testament, and the clearest antecedent of Christ’s words at the last supper. “This is my blood of the New Covenant.” After all my study this past week, I felt overwhelmed at the immensity of what could be said about this incredibly important part of the Bible. I felt like I was trying to stuff a mattress into a pillowcase. This portion of God’s Word is a vital key to understand your relationship with God. It’s that pivotal. To put it another way, if God depicts his relationship with the Church as a marriage, then Jeremiah 31:31-34 could be his wedding vows. So I want to get started right away. Let’s unpack Jeremiah’s words and take a look at what’s new about New Covenant.

We begin with Jer 31:31,“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.” The first thing to note here is God’s initiative. “Declares the Lord occurs 4 time in these four verses and there are 13 uses of the first person pronoun in the original Hebrew. God is doing everything in this New Covenant! But before we talk about this new covenant, we need to define what a covenant is.

At its most basic level, a covenant is an agreement in which two parties make promises under oath to perform or refrain from certain actions. So, for instance, a Christian marriage with wedding vows would fall under this general definition. We promise to love our spouses in good times and in bad, to be faithful to them, and all this until death. That’s a covenant relationship. But in the ancient Near East, Covenants and covenant ceremonies were a little different than our wedding ceremonies. Covenants back then were usually political and, as part of their ceremonies, they would slaughter animals and arrange the pieces on either side of a pathway for the two parties to walk through. And by walking down this gory passage, the rulers or whoever was making the covenant, were in effect saying, “If I don’t keep what I have vowed in this covenant, you have the right to slaughter me.” (Not very romantic. It’s probably a good thing we don’t do this at our weddings!) This is also why the Hebrew literally translated isn’t, “make a covenant”, it’s “to cut a covenant.” In fact, this type of ceremony is exactly what God performs for Abraham in Gen 15, but we don’t have time to get into that this morning. Needless to say, a covenant is a serious promise, an oath-bound relationship, more binding than a legal agreement and more personal than mere affection. That’s what God is talking about when he speaks of a covenant.

In the Old Testament God made seven major covenants. They are sometimes counted differently, but there are at least seven. The first was with Noah, his descendants and every living thing on earth (Ge 9:8-17).  It was a one-sided agreement. God promising to never again destroy all life on earth with a flood, the sign of which is a rainbow. The next two covenants were made with Abraham. One was, again, a one-sided agreement, where God unconditionally promised give the promised land of Canaan to the nation that would descend from the patriarch (Ge 15:1-21). The other was a conditional, two-way agreement where God pledged himself to Abraham’s offspring for as long as they offered him the obedience that comes from faith, the sign of which was circumcision (Ge 17).  God made two more covenants consisting of his unconditional promises to do something for people. One was with Phineas the priest (Nu 25:10-31) and the other was with King David, in which he promised to establish and maintain his dynasty by means of a forever-King even greater than David, (1 Kg 4:20-21; 5:3-4) which was fulfilled in our Savior Jesus.

And the remaining two covenants are the ones referred to in Jeremiah 31. “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt” (Je 31:31-32). The Old Covenant is usually called the Mosaic Covenant, the one God ratified with Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai after he lead them out of Egypt. The terms of this covenant are spelled out in six whole chapters of the Book of Exodus (19-24). It’s long. It contains not only the Ten Commandments but regulations governing the civil affairs, religious life, and even the calendar. It was a two-sided covenant where God conditionally pledged to be Israel’s God and Provider of the Promised Land, and Israel pledged total obedience to the Lord as his people, living by his rules and serving his purposes.

But, as the Lord said, “It will not be like the [Old] covenant I made… when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they [Israel] broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them” (Je 31:32), Which hints at their breaking his heart too in the process. In fact, they broke the covenant almost from the moment they entered into it—Moses didn’t even get back down the mountain before they had bowed to the golden calf in Ex 32. And they continued to smash this covenant almost without interruption for twelve hundred years, culminating in their exile to Babylon during Jeremiah’s ministry. They couldn’t keep the very first of God’s laws, “You shall not have other Gods before me,” much less all 613 statutes of the Old Covenant. So many laws! Thus the questions naturally arise, “Lord, how is this New Covenant going to be any different? Because if it is based on human obedience it won’t work! How are we going to keep up our end of the covenant if we’ve failed time and time again? There are so many laws and they are really hard to keep!”

That’s the problem not with just the Old Covenant, but our own hearts as well. So often we fall into sin right after we promise to be better. So often we think of God’s law as impossible and so we don’t really attempt to follow it with zeal. Like those Israelites, we tend to throw up our hands and say, “There’s just so many laws!” And this leads to one of two ideas of our relationship with God.

We think our relationship is either conditional on our obedience, or simply a relationship of love where following God’s Law is more of a suggestion than a command. Isn’t that what happens? On one side, some only feel good about their relationship with God if they are obedient.  They feel closest to God based on their own work and feel distant when they sin. This type of person is among us here at Eastside, in fact inside each of us. It’s the person who sometimes feels better than others because of their righteous character. It’s the person who falls into sin and then has difficulty praying to God until they have proven to him that they can resist that sin. On the other hand, there is a person inside of each of us who doesn’t mind sinning because they know God is love and he will forgive them. They don’t worry too much about drinking to excess or crude joking because after all, they go to church a lot and know that God will forgive them.

Now, is it wrong to try to follow God’s law and feel bad when we fail? No, God cares about his Law. Is it wrong to champion God’s love and forgiveness? No, our God is a God of grace. The problem comes when we leave behind either God’s love or his law. When we choose to remember one without the other. That’s why we need the New Covenant!

To illustrate the difference between the New Covenant and the Old I’d like to talk about taxes. (Don’t leave!) You may have heard the US Tax Code is over 70,000 pages long, although it turns out the actual code itself is only a mere 2,600 some pages; which, if you are like the vast majority of Americans, you will never read.  And even if you did, good luck keeping it all straight without the help of accountants and tax preparers. So even factoring out your natural desire to pay as little tax as possible, you are probably in violation of some section or subsection somewhere and you don’t even know it. Not very reassuring, is it?

Now imagine if Uncle Sam said, “This isn’t working! We’re writing a new tax code, completely unlike the old one. Here’s the deal: it’s completely voluntary contribution based. No need for turbo tax, no need for itemized or standard deductions, no more W2’s. All of that is canceled. Done! Just take a few minutes to think about the advantages of being an American in this world and what it must cost to protect this nation and administer our freedoms, and then pay whatever you want. We are so confident that every citizen will more than pay their fair share that we are abolishing the IRS and forgiving any back taxes and/or penalties you may owe.” Wow! That would really be a tax reform!  Talk about a radical change! Talk about amazing! Yeah, more like ridiculous, or impossible, or disastrous.

But that’s what God did in his New Covenant. He says in verse 32, “This is the covenant I will make with the people 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.  God promised to Jeremiah, that he would cancel the old law code. That one which was written on tablets of stone would now be written on the hearts of his people. In the New Covenant, the law will be internalized. The will of God becomes our delight; it will be written on our hearts. Many people feel a disconnect between law and love, but in the New Covenant, the two are reconciled.

How is this possible? Jesus Christ, that’s how. Jesus dissolves any dissociation of law and love. He says, “If you love me, keep my commandments… (This also informs how we evangelize to those outside the church: love for Christ comes before obedience.) Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.” (John 14:15, 21). “ If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” (John 15:10). This is a beautiful cycle of love and law. If we love Christ, we will keep his commands, and those commands with show love to others and bring us back around to our love for Christ. Jesus knew that keeping God’s good law and showing God’s love walk hand in hand. Need more evidence? Just think of the cross!

Was Jesus fulfilling God’s law or God’s love at the cross? The answer is both! God’s law was so important that Jesus needed to live perfectly and die in our place! And yet there at the cross we also God give himself up for us in love. As he said, “I will be their God and they will be my people.” What an amazing thought, God binds himself to us! He took the plunge, he became human, he suffered with us, he died. He gave himself to us, so we can belong to him. And what about all those times we hated his law? The Lord declares, “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” It is an amazing truth that God can cause himself to forget, isn’t it? We may still be haunted by sins that have changed the course of our life, but God looks at us with a type of divine innocence. He has forgotten your sin! You are perfect in his eyes! At the cross, in the cutting of the New Covenant in Jesus’ very blood, once for all sin, God’s love and law are reconciled and we belong to him. That’s what’s new about the New Covenant! Thank the Lord!

Amen.