Title: A NEW COVENANT
Author: Andrew Nugteren
Company: Private

A NEW COVENANT!

Text: Jer 31:31-34
Readings: Heb 8:1-8,13, 10:1-18, Jer 31:27-34
Theme: God promised to make a new covenant with Israel in which they would know him internally, immediately and without guilt.
Purpose: To emphasise the great benefits of the new covenant and to encourage faith and thanks. 

One of the strong selling points used in advertising is the emphasis on a product being new. This washing power is new and improved! 
This car is the latest model!
This vacuum cleaner is new and more powerful!
This drink has a new delicious flavour!

Yet, as we know, people are often sceptical of something new. We know that new is not necessarily better. From personal experience we know that older products are often more reliable and longer lasting; that "they don't make things like they used to!"

So an even more compelling advertising strategy is to combine the old and the new; to take a reliable and well known car, like a BMW and to introduce a new model - so here is a product is well known and respected and this is the latest model with many new and improved features.
Or, here is a Tellus vacuum cleaner, familiar to many NZ homes, tried and tested over the years, but this is the latest, turboed, supercharged model, guaranteed to keep your carpets free of dust and grime!
Something old is combined with something new.

Now the Lord wasn't into slick marketing and he didn't need to advertise any new products and he wasn't in the business of selling anything to anyone; but when he promised a new covenant he based it on the old model.
Yes, this was a new covenant and it was a massive step forward on the old one, but there were some similar features between the two models. We'll explore these in more detail as we look at what God promised in this new covenant and then we'll consider the privileges of the new. 

Before we do that, however, we should pause to note that we are dealing here with one of the most outstanding passages of the Old Testament. This is the clearest and most comprehensive promise of the new covenant to be found anywhere in the Old Testament. It is also probably the most well known and most important passage of this book of Jeremiah and it is the highest peak of his prophecies. 

It is part of a larger section of the book covering chapters 30-33 that are known as the Book of Consolation. Most of Jeremiah's prophecies are full of doom and gloom but these chapters are filled with promise and hope. God promised to bring his people back to their own land and to make a new beginning. Included in these chapters is this promise that looks even further ahead to the coming of the Lord Jesus and the New Covenant through his blood.  

1. THE PROMISE OF THE NEW COVENANT was based on the Old Covenant arrangement, especially the covenant made with Abraham. God made a number of covenants with people in the Bible - with Noah, with Abraham, with the people of Israel through Moses, with the High Priest Phineas and one with David. 

The New Covenant God promised had strong continuities with the covenant agreement with Abraham. 

It involved the same promise: "I will be your God and you will be my people."
This short sentence expresses the heart of God's covenant with his people. The Lord repeated this again and again throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. 
The God who spoke these words is unchanging; he is immutable - the same yesterday, today and forever.  
This same God makes this same promise - a promise of a relationship between God and us his people. 
He is our God, we belong to him. 
He is the King, we are his subjects.
He is the Shepherd, we are his sheep. 
This is the promise that runs like a golden thread through the whole Bible, the Old and New Covenants, tying everything together in a unified whole. This one central promise connects everything together in the Old and the New Testament.

In both covenants there is one great purpose which is the salvation of sinners and the glory of God: the Lord rescues his people from slavery to Satan and from the guilt of sin and from the fear of death and he does all this for the praise of his glory!
Both covenants have the same requirement of faith. OT Israel needed to believe in the Lord and trust him and so do we today. 
In both covenants we have the same obligation to obey God and to follow his law. 

There is a consistency between these two covenants. They are the same in substance and in doctrine. There is one covenant in two parts; one arrangement in two phases. 

But the Lord made it clear through Jeremiah that there would be something distinctively new about this covenant. There were also discontinuities. 
This is explained in verse 32; "It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt." 
This is referring to the covenant with Israel through Moses. It is described in the Bible as the first covenant and known in biblical theology as the Mosaic covenant. 

This covenant would be replaced because the people of Israel had broken it. They had not kept God's laws. They had not obeyed his commands. They had not kept their side of the agreement. They had not done their part. 
The failure in the covenant did not come from God's side because he was always faithful to his promises; rather the failure came from their side. 

This was no surprise to the Lord. The first covenant was preparatory for the one that would follow. It was always God's intention to bring in a new covenant after Jesus has come and after they has sent the Holy Spirit.

In that old covenant God dealt with the people of Israel like a father deals with his little children. When children a small they need strict guidelines and close supervision and detailed instructions. In the same way the people of Israel were in their spiritual infancy and they needed a lot of guidance and detailed laws.  

The old covenant was also preparatory in that it showed Israel their sin and showed them that they could not do what God wanted them to do. The writer of Hebrews (8:13) declared that the first covenant was obsolete and aging and would disappear. They needed a new and better covenant. They needed more help. They needed the Messiah. They needed Jesus. 
When Jesus came he brought the new wine of the gospel and that needed new wineskins.  
That Old Covenant arrangement had served its purpose for that time but once Jesus came it was replaced by the new and much improved version! So the old covenant pointed forward to Jesus Christ and to all the privileges of the new covenant. 

2. This brings us to consider, secondly, THE PRIVILEGES OF THE NEW COVENANT. This passage mentions three great privileges.

First of all the law of God would be internal - vs 33.
"I will put my law in their minds 
	and write it on their hearts."

In the old covenant the law was external. God wrote it on two stone tablets and gave it to Moses. Later it was written down in the scrolls of the Torah, the first five books of Moses, containing the law of the Lord. 

The people of Israel were supposed to impress this law on their hearts. It was supposed to be internalised. It was meant to be part of them. But they failed to do this. 

That was illustrated in the early years of Jeremiah's ministry when Hilkiah discovered the Book of the Covenant  when they were doing a cleanup in the temple (2 Chr 34:14ff) That discovery prompted a major reform in Judah led by King Josiah. It was the most comprehensive reformation the nation had ever seen. But the reform only touched the externals; it did not change their hearts. The response of the people was only skin deep and when Josiah died the people returned to their old ways. 

The people of Israel prided themselves on having the Torah, the law. They thought of themselves as the People of the Book. 
But they did not have the law written on their hearts, and the law, by itself, could not make anyone perfect (Heb 7:19). 

In the new covenant, however, the law would be in their minds and on their hearts. 

The law itself would not change a great deal. Jesus explained that he had not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. Some parts would drop away because they pointed forward to him. Others would be unnecessary because they applied to the national life of Israel. But overall the law continued on from the old to the new covenant. 

What changed was the placement of the law. It would be placed on people's hearts, not just on stone. It would be written in people's minds not just in a book.
Today we still have the word of God in a book, the Bible. But we also have it in our minds and hearts. 
It is written there by God's Spirit. The Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit so that we might have the insight to understand God's law and so that we might have the ability to begin to keep it. We will never do that perfectly, but by the power of the Spirit we can begin to live according to God's commandments, because the Spirit writes this law in our hearts. 

Is that true of you? Is God's word written on your heart? Is it in your mind? Is it truly a part of you?

The second privilege of the new Covenant is that our knowledge of God is immediate, that is, it does not have to pass through any human mediator.

In the old covenant the people of Israel were taught about God through the prophets and the teachers of the law. They approached God through the priests. God spoke to them through men like Moses and Elijah and the wise men of Israel. He led them and taught them through Kings such as David and Solomon and Hezekiah and Josiah. 

In the New Covenant we don't have to go through other human beings to get to know God. God teaches us directly through his word and Spirit so that we can all know him. 

That was one of the great errors of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. 
It put the priest between God and the people. It made the priest a human mediator so that the people could only go to God through him. 
But the Scriptures are clear that now there is only one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Each one of us can go to God directly through him without having to go through anyone else. 

What's more, all God's people in the church can know him. In the New Testament there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). 
This emphasis on the entire people of God comes out in verse 31 where God promises to make a new covenant "with the house of Israel and the house of Judah". This new arrangement would include all of them, everyone of them. There would be no discrimination and no favouritism; no one would be excluded.

Of course, this does not deny the need for teachers today. God has given the church pastors and teachers to equip God's people for works of service (Eph 4:12-13). It is together with all the saints that we come to grasp the height and depth of God's love for us in Christ. We need a trained ministry to teach us from God's word. Early on the apostles recognised their responsibility to devote themselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). Since those times the church has set aside teaching elders "whose work is preaching and teaching" (1 Tim 5:17).  
But having said all this your knowledge of God is not dependant on a pastor or teacher. You can know God directly through his Spirit. You can approach the Father yourself through his Son, Jesus, the Mediator of a New Covenant. 

You can know the him for yourself. The word know in verse 34 has a great depth of meaning. It is sometimes used of the sexual relationship between a man and his wife. Adam knew his wife Eve and they had a son. It refers to a close, intimate relationship between two persons who are committed to each other. This describes the relationship between a believer and his Lord. "I will be your God and you will be my people", he promised. 

Do you know God like this? Do you know him closely? Intimately? Personally? Experientially?

In the New Covenant all believers have the privilege of knowing God's law internally through his Spirit, and the privilege of a direct and personal knowledge of God. 

The third privilege is that we have a comprehensive forgiveness.

The Old Covenant had an elaborate system for dealing with sin involving detailed ceremonies and sacrifices. The Lord gave them instructions about guilt offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings and fellowship offerings. But none of those sacrifices could take away sin. The sacrifices of the old covenant could not make the people of Israel perfect, even though they were repeated endlessly year after year. It was impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins (Heb 10:4). All those sacrifices only served as an annual reminder of sins. 

But those sacrifices were a picture of what Jesus would do in his one sacrifice on the cross. Jesus has done what hundreds of thousands of animal sacrifices could not do.
The writer of Hebrews explains this; "We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." Jesus, our great High Priest, "offered for all time one sacrifice for sins" and through that has made us perfect forever (10:10,12,14). 
The Old Testament believers were forgiven on the basis of the sacrifice of Jesus as it was anticipated in their animal sacrifices; and we are forgiven through Jesus as we look back to his death and resurrection. 

Because of this death God could say; 
"I will forgive their wickedness 
and will remember their sins no more."
This doesn't mean that God has amnesia, because God is all knowing. 
Rather this is a human way of emphasising that God does not hold our sins against us. Jesus has paid for all our sins with his precious blood. 
Jesus died in the place of all who believe in him and he carried our sins and bore our punishment. God has dealt with our sins thoroughly and completely in and through his Son. This is the basis of the New Covenant. At the institution of the Lord's Supper Jesus said; "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you."

These are the great privileges we enjoy in this New Testament age. 
Do you know these privileges?
Do you know God's law internally through his Spirit? 
Do you have a direct and personal knowledge of God?
Do you know the complete forgiveness of all your sins?
Do you thank God for these privileges?
Do you live in the joy and freedom of this new covenant and the blessings it provides?

Amen.