New Covenant

Let’s start today by immersing ourselves in a biblical story. Imagine with me that you have been a Hebrew slave in Egypt, your parents were slaves and your grandparents were slaves and your children will, most likely, be slaves.

Except, suddenly, a man named Moses and his brother Aaron stand up to Pharaoh on your behalf, And you see the God of your ancestors, El Shaddai Himself, moving in power unleashing ten plagues in Egypt until the cruel pharaoh relents and allows you to leave egypt and slavery behind.

This God who has revealed his name more fully -Yahweh - leads you by a pillar of fire or a column of cloud to the edge of the red Sea. When the pharaoh changes his mind and sends his army after you, Yawheh, working through Moses, parts the red sea and you pass through safely watching as the red sea collapses in on the egyptian army sent after you.

After this Yawheh rains down bread from heaven every night so that everyone has food to eat and water comes from the rock as Moses stands by it with his staff. You are in hostile territory and win battles you have no business winning, as long as Moses keeps his arms raised up. You have seen miracle after miracle after miracle.

Eventually you come to the base of Mount Sinai and make camp. “On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. You and everyone in the camp trembled…Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently. As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him.

Later that day you hear the voice of the Lord saying, “ I am Yahweh who brought you out of Egypt yo shall have no other Gods before me…” and nine other commands. The sound, the smoke, the thunder and trumpet blasts that accompany this are terrifying. All the people beg Moses to be the one who speaks to God for you cannot handle it. So after this Moses goes into the darkness of the mountain and you remain at camp.

Moses spends 40 days and 40 nights speaking with Yawheh on the mountaintop. You have seen incredible things in the past year. You have been freed from slavery through miraculous means, fed by miraculous means, protected by miraculous means. Led through the wilderness by a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. You have seen the place of Yawweh’ presence as he appears on Mt. sinai and heard you have even heard Yahweh’s voice speaking the commands to you.

So, naturally when Moses is gone for a mere 40 days you assume it’s all over. This God who rescued you, protected you, provided for you has now clearly abandoned you along with Moses. The only solution is gather everyone up and go to Aaron say, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

Aaron, of course, finds this reasonable and says,“Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

40 days. 40 days is all it took for the first two of the ten commands to be broken. The covenant God made with His people is broken by the people after 40 days - Have no other gods and do not make idols and worship them. After seeing the power, the provision, the protection of Yahweh, it takes 40 days for the people to despair and look to other gods.

It reminds me of one time when I overheard one of our children responding to a situation in a way that just wasn’t appropriate. So I intervened and we had a good conversation about how to handle our emotions and how to talk to people and how to treat others. It just really felt like a good parenting job. We took a negative situation and made it a learning opportunity. Not even 5 minutes later I could hear the same behavior happening all over again. And I’m thinking, didn’t we just go over this, how can this be happening so soon? Those moments are incredibly frustrating. We can understand Moses and God’s anger when after 40 days the people start worshiping a golden calf.

We know Moses’ response to the Isrealites immediat breaking of the first two commandments is to break the stone tablets that God wrote the ten commandments on. I bring this history up to show that people of Israel made a habit of looking to other gods to worship.

We skip forward now 837 years to the prophet Jeremiah. For those 837 years God’s people pretty consistently worshiped other gods. Sure, there are moments where they return to Yahweh and worship him alone and obey his commands but those moments are rare and don’t last very long. Even good kings like David still break the commandments and wise king Solomon allowed his many wives to bring their foreign god worship into the land.

So the prophet Jeremiah comes along, 837 years after the commands were first given, and opens with these words from the lord. Yahweh says to the people, in Jeremiah chapter 2,

“Long ago I broke the yoke that oppressed you and tore away the chains of your slavery, but still you said, ‘I will not serve you.’ On every hill and under every green tree, you have prostituted yourselves by bowing down to idols. But I was the one who planted you, choosing a vine of the purest stock—the very best. How did you grow into this corrupt wild vine?

“You say, ‘That’s not true! I haven’t worshiped the images of Baal!” But how can you say that? Go and look in any valley in the land! Face the awful sins you have done. You are like a wild donkey, sniffing the wind at mating time. Who can restrain her lust? Those who desire her don’t need to search, for she goes running to them! When will you stop running? When will you stop panting after other gods? But you say, ‘Save your breath. I’m in love with these foreign gods, and I can’t stop loving them now!’

We skip to Jeremiah 7 where the Lord tells the people, “My people would not listen to me. They kept doing whatever they wanted, following the stubborn desires of their evil hearts. They went backward instead of forward. From the day your ancestors left Egypt until now, I have continued to send my servants, the prophets—day in and day out. But my people have not listened to me or even tried to hear. They have been stubborn and sinful—even worse than their ancestors. (Jeremiah 7:21-26)

The prophet Hosea says, The Lord has brought charges against you, saying: “There is no faithfulness, no kindness, no knowledge of God in your land. You make vows and break them; you kill and steal and commit adultery. There is violence everywhere—one murder after another. (Hosea 4:1-2)

Every commandment in the covenant God made with His people and with Moses is broken. The gift of the law is trampled - Hundreds of years of escalating violence, injustice and idolatry. What will God do with these people? He has sent prophets to warn them, he has withheld rain to show them, he has made his will and desire known -he has been gracious - asking only that his people return, wholeheartedly to him, and he will forgive all sin. They simply keep running further from Him.

After more than 800 years of this God knows to save the people from themselves will take a drastic move. He will allow His people to be conquered by enemy nations and taken into captivity to Babylon. Then there will be a remnant who will become faithful to Him and the lord will restore his people. Through Jeremiah the lord says to His people, “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you,” says the Lord. “I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land.” (Jeremiah 29:10-14)

Not only is there this promise of restoration and good plans. But there is the promise of a new covenant. The Old covenant -the one given to Moses at Mount Sinai could not be upheld by the people. So through Jeremiah the Lord premises a new covenant.

“The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:31-32)

This is the only passage in the Old Testament that promises “a new covenant.” It is the one place in the Old Covenant that lists the promises of the New Covenant. And since a covenant is also called a “testament,” it is the passage that gives the New Testament its name. When Jesus arrives the New covenant is being established.

We should quickly note that although Jeremiah here promises this to Israel and Judah it is a covenant that will be for all people and nations. Earlier Jeremiah looks forward to this and says, “At that time they will call Jerusalem The Throne of the LORD, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the LORD. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts. (Jeremiah 3:17)

The Apostle Pual will recognize that even those who were not God’s chosen people, the gentiles, are invited to enter this covenant through faith in Christ. He will write, “Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed through you.” So those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. (Galatians 3:7-9)

In Genesis 22 God promises Abraham that through Him all the nations on earth would be blessed. In this new covenant that will be established in Jesus, a descendant of Abraham, all the nations of earth will be blessed. One of the promises of this new covenant is that it will not be limited to the Israelites -it will be for all people who have faith in God.

Jeremiah details what the promises of this new covenant will be. For the rest of the sermon I want to go through some of these promises because we are the people of the new covenant and we should understand its promises that Jeremiah laid out 600 years before the arrival of jesus.

The first promise of the new covenant is the promise of regenerated hearts. Just to recap, from our Holy Spirit Series, regeneration is the work of God taking spiritually dead hearts and making them spiritually alive. We are given spiritually new hearts and new minds by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul describes it: We once were dead but now are alive in Christ (Ephesians 2).

The promise of the new covenant is this: this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. (31:33)

You may recall that the prophet Ezekiel prophesied a similar thing. The Lord says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” (Ezekiel 36:25-27)

Only the Holy Spirit can change a heart. A Christian whose heart has been regenerated by God’s Spirit knows how to please God. It is, in many ways, instinctive as the Spirit leads us. -as the Apostle Paul says, “Now we can serve God, not in the old way of obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way of living in the Spirit.” (Romans 7:6)

The promise of this new covenant is amazing; it tells us that The law will no longer be external, written in tablets of stone - it will be internal written on a new heart, a spiritually revived heart. What we also see then is that the New Covenant is not opposed to the law -the new covenant is fulfilling the law - Jesus explicitly says he did not come to abolish the law but that he would fulfill it. And this leads us to the next promise of the new covenant - forgiveness.

Jeremiah 31:34b the lord says, “I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.” I want to bring us back now to Pastor Phil’s sermon on the covenant God made with Abraham; Remember that the ancient custom of making a covenant was to kill and separate an animal with both parties of the covenant walking between the animals which was a sign saying, “If I break this covenant may I become like these animals.”

God caused Abaraham to fall into a deep sleep and the Lord Himself - symbolized by a burning torch and a smoking pot walks the covenant alone. Essentially God is saying, if you or your descendants fail this covenant I will take that curse of breaking it - God is saying, “I will ensure this covenant holds up” I will take the curse upon myself even if I am not the one to break it.

Ian Duguid writes, “And that is precisely what God did in Jesus Christ. On the cross, the covenant curse fell completely on Jesus, so that the guilty ones who place their trust in him might experience the blessings of the covenant. Jesus bore the punishment for our sins, so that God might be our God and we might be his people. He could become incarnate among us, and he could become a curse for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.”

The Scriptures say, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’—so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:13, 14). And again, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The Old Covenant dealt with the problem of sin through the sacrifices of the Law. Animals would take the punishment for the people. But in the New Covenant, sin would be dealt with once and for all. The price for sin would be paid in full. The way the New Covenant deals with the problem of sin is through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The sins of God’s people were fully forgiven at the cross.

The Apostle John makes sure we get this, writing - My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world.

Hebrews 9: 13-15 affirms that the death of Christ on the cross is the only sacrifice needed. We read - Under the old system, the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer could cleanse people’s bodies from ceremonial impurity. Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins. That is why he is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant.

Under the new covenant we do not rely on our righteousness -our ability to do the right thing, to make the right choice - we rely on the righteousness of Jesus that is given to us by our spiritual union with Him.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief - we have God’s law written on our hearts by the Spirit who leads us. We have Christ’s righteousness given to us; and, even if we do sin, we are promised this, “But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.”

The new covenant is all about Jesus. When Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples just before he went to the cross we read in Luke’s gospel - “Jesus took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you’ ” Jesus was claiming that all the promises of the New Covenant find their fulfillment in him. Jesus is the New Covenant. The New Covenant is established by his blood shed on the cross for our sins. All the blessings of the New Covenant are located in the crucified (and risen!) Christ.

This means, the final promise of the New Covenant, is that it is an eternal promise. Jeremiah says, “It is the Lord who provides the sun to light the day and the moon and stars to light the night, and who stirs the sea into roaring waves. His name is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, and this is what he says: “I am as likely to reject my people Israel as I am to abolish the laws of nature!” This is what the Lord says: “Just as the heavens cannot be measured and the foundations of the earth cannot be explored, so I will not consider casting them away for the evil they have done. I, the Lord, have spoken!

The God of creation is the God of salvation. Theologians have struggled to explain the eternal duration of the covenant. The Biblical covenants often sound like contracts, as if God does his part and we do our part. But of course we never keep our end of the bargain, and so the covenant ought to be null and void. Yet the mystery of God’s grace is that he continues to keep a covenant even when we break it.

The only explanation for the permanence of the covenant is that Jesus Christ keeps it on our behalf. His covenant-keeping counts for us. In other words, the New Covenant is not an agreement between God and us. If that were the case, the New Covenant would be no better than the Old. Rather, the New Covenant is a blood bond between God the Father and God the Son on our behalf. Jesus Christ makes and keeps the covenant for us. We are in the covenant because we are in Christ and it is permanent and eternal because Jesus is permanent and eternal.

We often want to end our sermons with an application or an take away -something tangible that you can take form the sermon and apply. With today’s sermon the takeaway is this: you can rest because Jesus has done it all, for us. This doesn’t mean there isn’t work for you to do, this doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit isn’t still sanctifying you, making you more like Jesus, convicting us of sin and producing spiritual fruit in you.

However, I think sometimes we forget how much Jesus accomplished for us - we forget the vastness of His grace, the depth of His love, the endlessness of His forgiveness. We sometimes get too caught up in what we must do for the Lord or how we must live. So, today I invite you to rest - We can rest because there is only one thing we absolutely must do, only one thing we can do - we must believe. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. If we confess our mouth Jesus is lord and believe in our hearts he has been raised then we have been saved.

The new Covenant, in fact all the covenants, can be summed up by Paul’s words in Epeshians 2:8-10: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

As we prepare for Easter I pray you see how Jesus is the fulfillment of all the covenants. Jesus is the new covenant. You have been regenerated and forgiven, forever, because Jesus carried the curse, died with it, rose again defeating the curse of sin and death and giving us His righteousness for all time. Just rest in that truth this week.