God Deals With Us in Covenants
I am so grateful that God deals with us through covenants. The concept of covenant is vital to the Christian life. A covenant represents a life-binding promise. So when God makes a covenant with us, He binds His promise to the absolute most trustworthy, powerful, and transcendent life in all of reality, namely Himself. Therefore, God’s covenant promises to us establish the rock-solid foundation of our hope and assurance.
From the human side, the idea of covenant touches upon the central nerve of faith. Our trust and hope rests entirely in God, with complete assurance that what He has promised will come to pass. So from God a covenant signifies an infinitely trustworthy promise, and for man it exemplifies a call to faith.
Israel’s Covenant Unfaithfulness
From our last session, we considered that the covenant (berit) ceremony in Genesis 15 represented “a dramatized curse.” As covenant vows were being pronounced, the passing between two halves of sacrificed animals was nothing less than a graphical statement aimed at illustrating the curse of covenant unfaithfulness—death by division of one life graphically illustrates divorce.
While Genesis 15 is with reference to the Abrahamic Covenant, a covenant that God swore by His own life without the inclusion of any other contingent party, the same principle of covenant binding was applied to the covenant made between God and the nation of Israel, administered through Moses (often referred to as the Mosaic Covenant). God’s covenant with Israel, however, did bind both parties (God and Israel) together as in a marriage. The consequences and curses of Israel’s grotesque unfaithfulness to the covenant that she made with the Lord takes up the majority of the Book of Jeremiah, being signaled in Jeremiah 34:18-19:
And the men who transgressed my covenant and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made before me, I will make them like the calf that they cut in two and passed between its parts—the officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf.
Jeremiah teaches us that God is sovereign and man is steward. It reminds us that God directs without error and man decides without excuse. So Israel stands guilty of her unfaithfulness, without excuse.
In chapter 2, Jeremiah illustrates the insanity of apostasy. The book is filled with illustrations of judgment, all of which are intended to help us perceive the intensity of her just desert for personally defying her Husband and despising her covenant with Him. The judgment of God is the cry of justice against the criminal action of Israel against her God, based primarily on her covenant with Him. She has repeatedly and profusely committed spiritual adultery in the most grotesque of manners. Thus, the judgments proclaimed and illustrated in Jeremiah are designed to help us feel the weight of the evil of Judah’s sin in breaking covenant with God. The covenant drama of death by division should come to mind.
So after rehearsing Judah’s unfaithfulness and illustrating the covenant curses to which she is liable, we might summarize the Lord’s indictments as follows: “Because of your overt rejection of Me; because of your grotesque adulteries and unfaithfulness to Me, your Husband; because of your obstinacy, rebellion, unsubmissiveness, and disobedience; the First Covenant I made with you through Moses will not be the means of blessing upon you. Your vows have been broken and are in ruins; our marriage is destitute and altogether without hope.” It is at this very point that the reader is brought to the place of full anticipation of a complete divorce. The heaviness of the case against Israel is too great; she should be put to death (after all, this was the penalty of adultery). But, in the most unthinkable fashion, while the court is suspended with abated breath awaiting the final verdict of the Lord against Israel, the Lord cries out, “Return, O faithless children, declares the LORD” (Jer 3:14). Then, in chapter 31, the Lord announces the most amazing grace, “Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with tambourines and shall go forth in the dance of the merrymakers” (Jer 31:4). Instead of divorcing His ambitiously adulterous bride, the Lord says that He will make her as a virgin and remarry her! This is beauty of the New Covenant, a remarriage with both continuities and discontinuities:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, [32] not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. [33] For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. [34] And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jer 31:31–34).
God doesn’t need us or our works or our religion, He loves us. The New Covenant powerfully reminds us, through Israel, that we are not faithful, we are not righteous, we are not worthy of God’s covenant love. Our only hope is in Him—in His love, in His covenant faithfulness; not ours.
The New Covenant
The New Covenant corresponds to the (first, “old”) covenant that God made to Israel through Moses. Its “newness” stands in contrast to the Mosaic Covenant, not the Abrahamic Covenant.
It is important to note that embedded in the First Covenant, God had already made allusions to the inevitable necessity of the New Covenant. In Deuteronomy 10:16, He says, “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.” The lesson to be learned is not Israel, nor any man, can change his own heart. This is why, even within the First Covenant, the Lord said, “And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Dt 30:6). This is a clear allusion to the New Covenant, embedded within the old.
There is more meaning and blessing and grace and love in the New Covenant than any of us begin to appreciate. The importance of the New Covenant to biblical theology can hardly be overstated. Thus, this theme in the Book of Jeremiah is perhaps its greatest contribution to the Bible. “Expositors of all shades of conviction have written in glowing terms of the significance of this portion of the book. It has been acclaimed as one of the most important passages in the entire OT … Many expositors maintain that the concept of the new covenant is Jeremiah’s greatest contribution to biblical truth” (Feinberg, 574).
More Excellent Covenant
The Scripture presents the New Covenant as a more excellent covenant. Not that the First Covenant was not good, but that the New Covenant truly surpasses the first in glory because it centers on the excellencies of Christ.
Heb 8:7 - For if that First Covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.
At this point we must ask where was the “fault” in the First Covenant? Did God make a faulty covenant? Absolutely not! The fault rests entirely with Israel and not the covenant or God, which is the answer in the very next verse: “For he finds fault with them when he says…” (Heb 8:7).
[Hebrews 8:8-12 contains the longest New Testament citation of the Old Testament, quoting Jeremiah 31:31-34]
Heb 8:13 - In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
So the First Covenant (Mosaic Covenant) is here called “obsolete” just as the vows used in a remarriage make the first vows effectively obsolete—all now rests on the “new” vows. Jeremiah alludes to this in 3:16-17, where the “ark of the covenant” symbolizes the Mosaic Covenant: “in those days, declares the LORD, they shall no more say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the LORD.’ It shall not come to mind or be remembered or missed; it shall not be made again. At that time Jerusalem shall be called the throne of the LORD, and all nations shall gather to it, to the presence of the LORD in Jerusalem, and they shall no more stubbornly follow their own evil heart.” By design, the First Covenant represented a shadow of the things to come, supremely as their substance is found in Christ.
- Heb 8:5 - They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. …
- Heb 10:1 - For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.
- Col 2:17 - These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
Since the First Covenant relied on the faithfulness not only of God but also of Israel in order for its blessings and fulfillments to be realized, it was not faultless. Fault was abundantly found in Israel. The lesson to be learned is that Israel, or any other, is not capable of covenant faithfulness to the Lord. If there is to be a marriage between God and man, God would have to meet all the terms on behalf of His bride—this is the New Covenant: a more excellent covenant.
This is what Hebrews 8:6 says, “But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.”
Now, we must not conceive of the First Covenant (Old Testament) as faulty or bad, and the New Covenant (New Testament) as good. We should not see the testaments of the Bible as Law in the Old Testament and Gospel in the New Testament; as wrath in the old and love in the new. We commit a great dishonor to God and a great disservice to ourselves when we pit one testament against another; God against God.
I fear that many Christians today suffer from a low view of God in part because they do not understand the Old Testament and how it relates to them. We would do well to remember that the First Covenant with Israel was considered “gospel” or “good news.” In Deuteronomy 30:19–20 we read, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” A key statement, “for [God] is your life and length of days,” unmistakably reminds us that God is the gospel! The fact that God sought a relationship with Israel, that He saved her from the hopelessness of slavery and brought her through the wilderness to a land of promise, all illustrates the gospel. The gospel from the beginning of man’s existence has been the prospect of relationship with God; of truly knowing and fellowshipping with God, glorifying and enjoying Him.
So also in Hebrews, we read in “For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened” (4:2). Just a few verses later, “Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news [the Torah] failed to enter because of disobedience…” (Heb 4:6–7).
It was on the site of the First Covenant ceremony that the good news of the Lord was revealed: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Ex 34:6–7). So God was just as glorious, loving, merciful, and “good” in the Old Testament (First Covenant) as He is in the New Testament (New Covenant). Nevertheless, owing to human failure the First Covenant was designed to demonstrate the necessity of a New Covenant wherein God Himself would enact better promises bound to the faithfulness and excellencies of Himself.
More Excellent Promises
Heb 8:6 - But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.
1. New Mediation (New High Priest: Christ)
In Jeremiah 31:31-34, the Lord says “I will” no less than seven times. This plainly anticipates a new means of establishing and maintaining the New Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant prescribed human priests to mediate access to God. They served at the temple in an important role of maintaining the Mosaic Covenant. The New Covenant in Christ fulfilled and supersedes with greater excellence the shadows of the First Covenant mediation.
Greater clarity of a new mediation is given in the Book of Hebrews:
- Heb 7:23–25 - The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, [24] but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. [25] Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.
- Heb 7:27 - He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.
- Heb 9:25–28 - Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, [26] for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. [27] And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, [28] so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
- Heb 10:12 - But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God
2. New Atonement (New Sacrifice: Christ)
Imagine marriage vows that feature two unthinkable graces: (a) complete and irrevocable forgiveness and (b) personal payment on behalf of the adulteries of your spouse. Whereas the First Covenant prescribed animal sacrifices for the atonement of the sin of the people, the New Covenant is the First Covenant to actually promise forgiveness through the covenant to all the people in the covenant. This would be accomplished through a new sacrifice.
Je 31:34 - … “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Inherent to the First Covenant, was the repeat reminder of sin:
- Heb 10:1–3 - For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. [2] Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? [3] But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year.
(see also Heb 10:4-13)
Whereas in the New Covenant, Christ’s sacrifice “has perfected for all time”—that is no repeat reminder of sin through repeat shadowy sacrifices. The substance has come and has brought perfect finality.
- Heb 10:14 - For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
According to the First Covenant, saints were forgiven their sins through the exercise of their faith in God. As they brought their animal sacrifices, their demonstration of faith in obedience to the command of the Lord and trust in His provision to substitute the penalty of their sin on their sacrificial victim was perfectly accepted in the First Covenant economy. But those sacrifices were never efficacious in themselves to forgive sins. They were shadows, emblems, and graphic dramatizations of the substance and reality that alone can forgive sin. “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb 10:4). All sacrifices performed by faith and according to the terms of the First Covenant would be made efficacious only in and through the sacrifice of Christ.
- Heb 9:11–14 - But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) [12] he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. [13] For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, [14] how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
3. New Personal Presence (Spirit Of Christ)
Je 31:33 - For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
- Eze 36:26–27 - And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. [27] And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
- Joe 2:28–32 - “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. [29] Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit. [30] “And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. [31] The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. [32] And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls.
- Eph 1:13–14 - In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, [14] who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
- 2 Co 1:22 - and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.
- 2 Co 5:5 - He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
4. New Heart (Regeneration)
In the First Covenant, the Lord said through Moses, “Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn” (Dt 10:15–16). Jeremiah echoed this First Covenant call, “Circumcise yourselves to the LORD; remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds” (Jer 4:4). The problem is that man cannot change his own heart, that’s why the Lord said through Jeremiah, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jer 13:23). Therefore, foundational to the New Covenant is the promise of a new heart: “For this is the covenant that I will make … I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jer 31:33).
Je 24:7 - I will give them a heart to know that I am the LORD, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.
- Eze 36:26–27 - And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
- Ga 3:21–22 - Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. [22] But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
- Ro 8:2–3 - For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. [3] For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh
5. New Testimony (Internal Not External)
The vows of this covenant will not be engraved on stone (external), but on human tissue (internal). This stresses the internal nature of the New Covenant.
Je 31:33 - For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
- Ex 24:7 - Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. And they said, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”
- Ro 7:6 - But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
6. New Intimacy (Personally Revelatory)
The New Covenant will not be dependent on interpretation. It will involve an intimate, personal knowledge of God, fellowship with God, and the shalom of God.
Je 31:33-34 - For this is the covenant that I will make … I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
- Jdg 2:10 - And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.
- Ho 4:1 - Hear the word of the LORD, O children of Israel, for the LORD has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land;
- Je 9:23–24 - Thus says the LORD: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, [24] but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.”
- Jn 17:3 - And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
- Heb 9:6–8 - These preparations having thus been made, the priests go regularly into the first section, performing their ritual duties, [7] but into the second only the high priest goes, and he but once a year, and not without taking blood, which he offers for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people. [8] By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing
- Heb 9:9 - (which is symbolic for the present age). According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper,
- Heb 9:14 - how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
- Heb 4:15–16 - For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. [16] Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
7. New Enablement (New Power & Sufficiency)
Je 31:33 - For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
- Eze 36:27 - And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
- 2 Co 3:3–6 - And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. [4] Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. [5] Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, [6] who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
- Ro 2:29 - But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.
8. New Extent (Eternal, Permanent)
Je 50:5 - They shall ask the way to Zion, with faces turned toward it, saying, ‘Come, let us join ourselves to the LORD in an everlasting covenant that will never be forgotten.’
- Heb 13:20 - Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant,
9. New Guarantor (God: Father, Son, & Spirit)
In Jeremiah 31-40, no less than nine times we read “the LORD says.” This hints not only to the promises themselves but to the Lord as the guarantor of those promises.
- Heb 6:17–18 - So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, [18] so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.
- Heb 7:20–22 - And it was not without an oath. For those who formerly became priests were made such without an oath, [21] but this one was made a priest with an oath by the one who said to him: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever.’ ” [22] This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant.
More Excellent Glory
The Book of Hebrews makes the New Covenant one of the central arguments for the supremacy of Christ in the lives of Christians (cf. 2 Cor 3-4)! The New Covenant effects a greater glory (2 Cor 3:7-8), a greater hope (2 Cor 3:12), and a greater perseverance (2 Cor 4:1).