Jeremiah 31:31-34 "Covenant Vitality"

Introduction:

After Solomon, Israel split in two distinct kingdoms. There was the Northern Kingdom of Israel and it was often identified by its capital city of Samaria. The Southern Kingdom was most often reference as Judah and it was identified by its capital city of Jerusalem.

The Northern Kingdom was overthrown in 722 B.C. by the Assyrians and the Southern Kingdom remained until 586 B.C. when it was overthrown by King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians.

It would appear given our text and the place it has in the whole of Jeremiah’s prophecy, it would be probable that Jeremiah 31 is given with the Babylonian overthrow of Jerusalem in the background.

Jeremiah had previously foretold of the coming judgement of the Lord upon the Southern Kingdom and everyone thought He was a so negative and speaking falsely. The real false prophets of his day only spoke positive things about the Kingdom of Judah.

Jeremiah spoke of the coming judgement of the Babylonians due to Judah’s idolatry. The false prophets didn’t believe this and neither did the people because they probably thought they had a guarantee of David’s line being on the throne in Jerusalem.

But the people couldn’t keep the conditions of the covenant and neither could the line of David as we talked about last Sunday.

This is why the only way for the conditions of the covenant to be fulfilled it would have to be initiated and carried out by the Lord Himself.

It is important to know that the up to Jeremiah 31 the Book of Jeremiah is largely a condemnation upon Judah. But chapter 31 there is a shift to words of prophetic restoration.

This is a positive prophetic declaration being made by the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah. Judah was under the authoritative seige of the forces of Babylon. These were dire times of hopelessness and conflict because of Judah’s idolatry in their failure to be true to Yahweh and His commands.

This is why the Lord speaks of a New Covenant in contrast to the Old Covenant in verses 31-32 as something that would bring peace and hope for the Lord’s covenant people. Look back at your text to verses 31-32:

I. The Contrast (31-32).

First notice that the contrast of the New Covenant is with the Old Covenant. And the Old Covenant the Lord is referring to is not the Abrahamic Covenant but the Mosaic Covenant. The Mosaic Covenant contained the Law code and required strict obedience to it.

The people swore to keep it but they never could. They always violated it and were continually under the condemnation of the law of Moses. And here they are again under the judgment of God due to their disobedience and spiritual infidelity to Yahweh. The Abrahamic Covenant is still intact and full of Covenant vitality for the people of God.

Remember the Apostle Paul’s words in Galatians 3:15–17: “15 To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. 16 Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. 17 This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void.”

The point being that the Mosaic Covenant had no nullification affects upon the Abrahamic Covenant. The covenant stability and vitality is sustained in absolution because of the singularity of the seed or the offspring being spoken of is Christ and not someone who is just merely human with an inherited sin nature.

Second, notice that this New Covenant will not be dependent upon their fidelity to the Mosaic Law code. Under the Old Covenant Yahweh was the only one who was faithful in keeping up His part of the Covenant. He was a faithful husband to His covenant people but they repeatedly indulged is spiritual harlotry. The language is very graphic in the Book of Jeremiah.

Yahweh describes them to be like wild donkeys sniffing the wind and chasing the females in heat. And Yahweh describes their idols being like scarecrows in a cucumber field. They don’t speak and they have to be carried because they can’t walk. Idols are dependent upon the creative fashions of men for their existence. And Israel and Judah gave life to many of them just as idolaters do today.

But in this New Covenant things are going to be different for the covenant people of God. Everything is going to be converted over by the initiating grace of Yahweh. Look at verses 33-34:

II. The Conversion (33-34).

Yahweh will put His law within them and He will write it on their hearts (33).

The picture is one of an internal writing where the Lord doesn’t write His law into stone tablets like He did on Mount Sinai. But He will write it internally upon the hearts of His covenant people.

And by doing this the Lord will secure His relationship to His people. He will be their God and they shall be His people. We have seen this intense relational language before all the way back in Genesis 17 where the Lord spoke to Abraham. And He applied it to the covenant people too in various references in the Pentateuch and the prophets.

You can see what Yahweh is doing. He is removing the sin barrier in order to secure His people relationally and intimately to Him. The Lord will reveal Himself to His people and the sin that always brought about separation and judgment is going to be removed and no longer held against them. The Lord proclaims that He will remember the sins of His people no more because there will be a complete and final annihilation of all things related to the sin of His people.

So just how certain is this covenant security that the Lord promises? Can we really depend on it? Look at the answer in verses 35-37:

It is more secure than the order of the sun and the moon and the stars. More secure than the fixed order of the ocean and the shorelines. It is greater than the expanse of the heavens and deeper than the deepest depths capable of plunging on planet earth.

The Lord’s covenant order and security is more stable than the order of His creation of heaven and earth.

What makes it so stable is that covenant vitality doesn’t come from us but from the Lord.

Christian it is not the Lord and His promises that challenge our faith in these matters. It is when we seek to operate outside of these promises in our lives that challenge our faith. The pursuit of good works to validate ourselves by the work of our hands undermines our faith and our sense of security in Christ.

The reason we tend to gravitate in that direction is because labor and effort on our part is something we can identify with, it is tangible to us. We love the idea that we can perform and work to compensate for our sin. It is an attempt to preserve our pride and dignity of the self. But there is no way that our good works could atone for us before a Holy God.

Illustrate: I have seen missionaries who live under primitive conditions use a stationary bicycle with an alternator on it set up to charge batteries to gain access to electricity. I have a friend who has something similar for camping in remote areas. It actually takes a lot of peddling to produce enough power to just charge a cell phone off of the battery.

Imagine with me that such a contraption was hooked up to the sun and it was your job to produce energy enough to generate the function of the sun. You had to peddle to power the sun to shine.

And you say that it would be impossible I could peddle and peddle and never produce enough energy to power the sun to shine upon the earth. Why would I even attempt such a fools errand? True

Now imagine that instead of electric power you had to peddle to produce righteousness. And you had to produce enough righteousness to compensate for your past sins and to generate enough righteousness to keep the law of Moses perfectly without even the smallest of mistake, even in your thoughts. And you had to do it in accord with the absolute righteousness of God.

You wouldn’t have enough time to compensate to the point that you could out peddle death. You would die before you could do it because you would have to peddle for eternity twice over. Once to compensate for your offence against the infinite holy righteous of God and then to perform perfectly to the law for all time and existence.

This is what world systems of religion that focus on works righteousness attempt to do. They do it in an attempt to imagine that the self can be validated and absolved by God on the basis of what they do instead on the basis of what God has done through Christ.

The truth is you would have a better chance of powering the sun through your efforts than you would compensating the righteousness and justice of God according to the law. Why do we gravitate in that direction as fallen human beings? Because we are blind to the depth of our problem and how our sinful pride has perverted our perception of our depravity. People who are like god don’t appreciate being told that they are really the opposite of God.

We attempt to ride the bicycle because we perceive it validates us in God’s eyes. But truth is it is prison and bondage of being yoked to our acceptance tied directly to our ability to perform.

Conclusion:

The reality is Christian the real meaning of Christmas liberates us from the bondage performing as the basis of our peace with God once and for all.

Because the covenant vitality that it takes to set us free was God initiated by sovereign grace and accomplished in full by that little baby laying in that manger on that original Christmas.

He didn’t come into the world to just pay for our sin but to keep the law on our behalf. He came to fulfill the law, not to do away with it. The New Covenant is new because it is no longer us who is obligated to keep it all but Christ has kept it on our behalf. He rode that bicycle and death couldn’t keep up because Christ paid our debt in full.

Unbeliever there is no other means by which you can be counted as righteous before God. You might as well try to light up the sun by peddling on a bicycle. Christ alone as the second person of the Godhead took on flesh to compensate the holiness of God for sin on our behalf. Believe the gospel!

Christian this is why the gift of Christ was the greatest gift ever given. Christ has freed us from performance based religion forever. He performed for us and accomplished the compensation on all fronts. What have you ever done that could match the vitality of what Christ did? Come to Him and confess!

Let’s pray!