Jeremiah 31:31-34 Grace Alone

Jeremiah 31:31-34 (Evangelical Heritage Version)

31Yes, the days are coming, declares the LORD,

when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel

and with the house of Judah.

32It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers,

when I took them by the hand

and led them out of the land of Egypt.

They broke that covenant of mine,

although I was a husband to them, declares the LORD.

33But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days,

declares the LORD.

I will put my law in their minds,

and I will write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

and they will be my people.

34No longer will each one teach his neighbor,

or each one teach his brother, saying, “Know the LORD,”

because they will all know me,

from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD,

for I will forgive their guilt,

and I will remember their sins no more.

Grace Alone

I.

Jeremiah must have found the times he lived in depressing. Long before, Israel had divided into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom was gone: Judah, the southern kingdom, was all that was left of once proud and powerful Israel. It was just a tiny sliver of a country, between the superpowers of Babylon to the north, and Egypt to the south.

Worse than the political decline, Judah had experienced a spiritual decline. False prophets put their spin on God’s Word. Again and again the people turned away from God. Faithfulness to God was the exception rather than the rule.

As we learn so often in Scripture, God remained faithful, even though his people were not. Again and again he sent his prophets to the people to remind them of the seriousness of their sin. They would urge the people to turn back to the Lord.

When a person is faithful to the Lord and his Word, we tend to expect that God will use that faithfulness to increase his kingdom. For Jeremiah, however, there was no growth in numbers of people turning to the Lord; there was only more spiritual decline.

“Yes, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers” (Jeremiah 31:31-32, EHV).

Jeremiah was working under what we call the Old Covenant. The Moral Law shows all people what God expects from every human being. God’s Covenant with Old Testament Israel included another set of laws: the Ceremonial Law. There were all kinds of rules and regulations about their worship. It wasn’t just about what day to worship or what special festival days they should have, but even restrictions to their diet. There were things a person might do that made one unclean, or ineligible to go to worship for a time.

Then there were all the sacrifices. All the laws, Moral and Ceremonial, made it clear there was no one really capable of living up to God’s standards. The way to appease God was to make sacrifices. But endless sacrifices didn’t really appease God, either. The fact that they had to be made again and again pointed to the fact that something better was to come.

That’s what Jeremiah pointed to. God said: “I will forgive their guilt, and I will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:34, EHV).

II.

Many years passed, and Jesus established the New Covenant. Over the centuries after Jesus, the gospel had become obscured. We say in our worship that the gospel must predominate. But it wasn’t predominating at that time. The law was predominating. That was the world in which Martin Luther was born and lived.

Last week we looked at Jacob’s wrestling match with God—his struggle. About that wrestling match Luther said: “This passage is regarded by all as among the most obscure passages of the whole Old Testament. Nor is this strange, because it deals with that sublime temptation in which the patriarch Jacob had to fight not with flesh and blood or with the devil but against God Himself” (LW 6:125).

In a sense, Luther also had a wrestling match with God himself. He was wrestling with God because the law was predominating.

Luther’s wrestling match with God has come to be known as Luther’s “Tower Experience.” He talked about it several times.

Luther had been taught that God is a righteous God who, in his justice, holds all people accountable for their sins. He wrote: “The words ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness of God’ struck my conscience like lightning. When I heard them I was exceedingly terrified. If God is righteous [I thought], he must punish” (LW 54:193).

Since the Law of God predominated, a person had to look at the good things you had done and weigh them against the bad. Had your actions been good enough to be worthy of God, or did you have to try a little harder? To make up for some of the bad things, penance was assigned so that you could try to pay for those bad things. That seemed to make sense to Luther when he saw God as only the righteous Judge.

The truth is, there isn’t anything a person can do that would be good enough to make ourselves right with God. Luther learned that, and it was troubling. Luther, and the church of his day, had put themselves back under the Old Covenant.

III.

“Yes, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers” (Jeremiah 31:31-32, EHV).

A covenant is a treaty. It’s an agreement between two sides. Each side has some benefits, and each side has some responsibilities. The responsibilities of the people of Israel under the Old Covenant were to keep God’s laws—both his Moral Law and the Ceremonial Laws about worship. When they did that, he would bless the people.

Israel hadn’t done so well at their side of the bargain. Not only were they constantly breaking God’s commands, they weren’t making much effort to keep his Ceremonial Laws about worship, either. When they performed sacrifices, it was just by rote—they didn’t give much thought to what they were doing or why when they sacrificed to the Lord. Or, they sacrificed thinking it was some magic formula to get what they wanted from God, rather than expressing their sorrow over sin.

Luther realized that the church had lost the New Covenant and people were laboring under the Old Covenant again, trying to make themselves right with God. It wasn’t working. It never really worked: it was always intended to point ahead to something better.

Luther’s “Tower Experience” was his lightbulb moment. “But when by God’s grace I pondered, in the tower and heated room of this building, over the words, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live’ [Rom. 1:17] and ‘the righteousness of God’ [Rom. 3:21], I soon came to the conclusion that if we, as righteous men, ought to live from faith and if the righteousness of God contribute to the salvation of all who believe, then salvation won’t be our merit but God’s mercy (LW 54:193-194).

Luther began to understand that a person is saved by God’s grace alone. “But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put my law in their minds, and I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34... I will forgive their guilt, and I will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:33-34, EHV).

God, through Jeremiah, pointed ahead to this new and better covenant. The New Covenant was a one-sided agreement, or treaty. God took on himself all the responsibilities, and people get all the benefits.

IV.

People are saved, not by anything they can do themselves, but by God’s grace alone. When he realized this up in his tower, Luther said: “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates” (LW 34:337).

God talked about this transformation, too. He said through Jeremiah: “I will put my law in their minds, and I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34No longer will each one teach his neighbor, or each one teach his brother, saying, “Know the LORD,” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:33-34, EHV).

The Hebrew way of understanding saw the heart as the sum total of the whole body—the total worth of the individual. The New Covenant transforms the whole being into a child of God. The New Covenant doesn’t really replace the Old, but fulfills it. A believer’s heart transforms his/her actions. Christians follow God’s law, but not out of fear. Christians want to follow God’s law out of joy and thanksgiving for what he has done for us.

It was a relief to Luther to finally realize that he didn’t have to keep looking at his past, and fearing that the righteous God would demand payment for all the bad things he had done that far outweighed the good. Instead, he focused on the future. Real peace with God comes from knowing and admitting that you can’t make yourself right with God, but Jesus has done it for you—he sacrificed himself so that no penance need ever be made, and no bloody sacrifices on altars needed to continue. The Old Covenant has been fulfilled by Jesus.

Luther wanted everyone to know that peace. He wanted everyone to feel the same sense of relief he felt when he realized he was saved by Grace Alone.

On this Reformation Sunday we give thanks that we have the completed history of God’s saving activity. Jeremiah could only point to the things God revealed at the time, we have all of it available—both Testaments to make sure we know all that God has done for us and for our salvation.

We give thanks also that, unlike in Luther’s day, the gospel hasn’t been suppressed. There is nothing stopping any of us from owning a Bible or studying a Bible, like there was in Luther’s day, and like there is in some parts of the world even today.

Share with others the truth that you give thanks to God that you are saved by Grace Alone. Amen.