Bible Speaks By Rev. L. Althouse 

 

 

Sept. 14, 2014

Background Scripture:

Jeremiah 31:31-37

Dwight E. Stevenson says the Book of Jeremiah “does not yield up its treasure easily, for the treasure is like ore imbedded in hard rock; but it is there, and it is more precious than gold.”

This book is a jumble of oracles, narratives and confessions and it appears they have been thrown together without apparent design. But the absolute treasure of this book is the passage we are studying this week: Jeremiah 31:31-37.

It is Jeremiah’s presentation of the “Good News” of God and His relationship with Israel: “Behold, the days are coming says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel; and the house of Judah …”

This was the light Jeremiah beamed upon the deep darkness of the sixth century B.C. and that Jesus encountered at Nazareth: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18,19).

Is it not also a message for our own time? “Behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (31:31). “Covenant” is a term we use fairly frequently in our churches, but do we know what it is?

If you say, “It sounds like a contract,” you are close.

My Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible defines it as: “A solemn promise made binding by an oath, which may be either a verbal formula or a symbolic action … recognized by both parties as the formal act which binds the act or fulfills his promise,” The Old Covenant was the one made in the Sinai (Ex. 19, Num. 11).

But, as we say, “A lot of water has flowed over the dam since then.”

A broken covenant

But why a “new covenant?” What happened to the old one? One does not have to be a Bible scholar to answer that question: The people of Israel had broken it many times, and only God had remained faithful to do His part.

But Jeremiah is careful to point out this new covenant will be “not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt, my covenant which they broke …” If we know anything about the Old Testament, it is that the people of God frequently and flagrantly broke the covenant.

In our world of today, we know the seriousness of breaking a contract, but Jeremiah is saying something more: A covenant is merely the outward description of a promise and the promise is actually a relationship. To break a covenant, then, is to break a relationship, and Jeremiah understood God saw it that way too.

God was not merely a participant in a covenantal relationship: “But I was their husband, says the Lord” (31:32). The gravest threat is not just that we will break a covenant, but that we will ruin the most vital of relationships.

Some of us may worry about the ramification at Judgment Day of having on our record broken commands of God. (That’s a common concern of those concerned with “getting into” Heaven or The Other Place, but I am more concerned about the relationship and the grace of God.)

So, we are offered a New Covenant because the Old Covenant was broken – but the New Covenant is actually more to our benefit than the old one: “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (31:33). This new relationship will be personal rather than merely legal.

A law within

Best of all, the focus will no longer be two stone tablets containing the law, but the presence of the Living God: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; And I will be their God and they shall be my people.” In other words, when the time of restoration comes, people will do what is right from inner conviction and desire.

This is the same new covenant of which Jesus spoke in Luke 22:20 and Paul repeated in 1 Corinthians 11:25 and 2 Corinthians 3:6. (Also, see Hebrews chapters 8, 9, 10 and 12. What makes it a New Covenant” is that it affirms a new relationship with God.)

Agathon, an Athenian tragic poet living a century before Jeremiah, is said to have uttered the fateful, oft-repeated words: “Even God cannot change the past.” But he missed the point: God doesn’t have to change the past, because He has the power to change the results of the past in the present and the future.

There are lots of things in my past that I would do differently if I had a second chance, but God can and often does change the results of my past. Jeremiah could not change what had happened with the Jewish kingdoms, but God could help the Jews to write a different outcome to their folly.

The Arkansas Baptist tells us: “God does not ask about our ability or our inability, but our availability.” And that was the treasure Jeremiah gave to the people in captivity – and to us. Let us make ourselves available to the grace of God and follow where He leads us.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Those with questions or comments for Rev. Althouse may write to him in care of this publication.