THE NEW DEAL

THE NEW DEAL Jeremiah 31:31-34 October 30, 2005 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction Your grandfather might have gone to the bank one particular day 72.5 years ago, March 6, 1933, and found a sign hanging in the window that read Closed, even though it was a weekday when he would have expected the bank to be open. But it was the beginning of the Great Depression and many banks had suddenly failed, so just days after his election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the decision to close down all banks in order to save the economy.   Then FDR did something no other U.S. president had ever done before. He cozied up to a microphone, and with a fire lit in the fireplace behind him and his dog, Fala, at his feet, he had a little chat with Americans. It was his first of 30 “Fireside Chats”. In that short communiqu?he explained, sincerely and pastorally, what was happening in the wake of the sudden financial collapse. In moving speech and reassuring tones, he promised that he and Congress were doing all they could to prevent an all-out banking crisis, and that he would make good on his campaign promise of “a new deal for the American people.” But Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was not the first. Twenty five hundred years earlier, God spoke to one of His prophets, Jeremiah, the so-called “Weeping Prophet”, who was going through a great depression of his own. He and His Israelite countrymen were currently under the thumb of godless foreign powers and religious faith was evaporating fast among God’s chosen people. It was then God spoke through Jeremiah that a “New Deal” was coming. Jeremiah 31:31-34 – “The time is coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to the,” declares the Lord. “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man 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 wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Covenant = an arrangement provided by one party into which others may enter if they comply with the covenant conditions as set forth. For example, when you see an ad for “free kittens to good home” in the classified ads, what does that mean? For one thing it means it’s time to hide the newspaper from the children. It’s a covenant offer for free kittens. So, anyone who was wanting free kittens (and I’m certain there are many such individuals!) may have them—with one proviso. They must have a good home, whatever that might mean. And incidentally, what “good home” means is to be defined by the covenant extender, not the covenant acceptor. When it comes to covenant relationship with God, it’s the same way. God extends an offer, a covenant of blessing and relationship, to people. If God extends the covenant offer to them, if they are in the market for a relationship with God, and they determine they will meet the conditions for entering the covenant, God the covenant-extender agrees to enter into that relationship with the covenant acceptor. Please understand, the word “deal” may actually be misleading here. When it comes to a covenant with God, He and He alone determines the conditions of the covenant relationship. It is not a negotiable issue for the covenant acceptor. God sets forth the offer and the conditions, and we either accept and enter in or we reject the covenant offer. God has sovereignly determined to give us a choice in the matter. Our Bible is divided into two testaments (another word for covenants). There is what we refer to as the Old Testament, which is primarily a record of God’s dealings with the Israelites on the basis of the Mosaic Covenant given at Mt. Sinai. That is the Ten Commandments and the other commandments included in the Old Testament scriptures. In a nutshell, God offered to sinful human beings the opportunity to be received by Him and blessed by Him. The condition of this covenant offer was clear: keep the commandments and they could be God’s people. Even when they failed, God included a provision for forgiveness of sin through the offering of certain sacrifices. The New Testament, or Covenant, describes the new arrangement of God with men who are looking for a relationship with God. This new covenant offer is not based on the performance of law-obedience. It’s condition is only this: that the covenant acceptor would have faith in the Son of God, who alone kept the commandments perfectly, and whose death as a man God counted as paying for the sins of all who believe/trust in Him. Let me clarify: the old covenant required obedience to the Law; the new covenant requires faith/trust in the God who offers the covenant relationship. We have in the New Testament book of Hebrews a rather surprisingly bold statement about the New Covenant. It is in chapter eight, where this same text from Jeremiah 31 is quoted full-length. Right before Jeremiah is quoted, in Hebrews 8:6 the new covenant is described as being “superior to the old one” and “founded on better promises.” Then in Hebrews 8:7, it says, …if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people and said: “The time is coming…when I will make a new covenant…” The quote of Jeremiah 31:31-34 is recorded, and then the very next verse says, “By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete… (Hebrews 8:13) The New Covenant is God’s “New Deal,” His better offer. Under the older covenant a person had to become righteous through obedience to the law (commandments) in order to come into fellowship with God. But under the new covenant arrangement, sinful humans are invited to receive righteousness as a gift from God, if they will have faith in Christ. Romans 3:20-22 - …no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. But now, a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe… Four Features of God’s New Deal 1. Personal Relationship with God Did you notice the tender terms with which God described the kind of relationship He would have with His people under the New Covenant? He said, I will be their God, and they will be my people. If we want to see what kind of relationship God wants to have with us, we can look back at the Garden of Eden, prior to the entrance of sin. God made all things and gave them as a gift to man. He invited man to be co-regents with Him over creation. He walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden and spoke personally with them. This is how God longs to relate to you and me. But when sin entered the picture that relationship was radically changed. Sin cannot remain in the presence of the holy God, and sinners are banished from His presence. Without righteousness no man will see the Lord, and the only one who can ascend to the hill of the Lord is the one with clean hands and a pure heart. (Psalm 24:4) God gave commandments to His chosen people as a means of living righteous before Him, and He regularly forgave their sins and gave them a clean slate and a new start. But no one attained righteousness by keeping the law. So God revealed the next chapter in His great plan. He sent His only Son into the world, as a man. He was the only man who ever lived without sin, perfectly obedient to the commandments. In that He qualified to die as a substitute for all sinners—the guiltless lamb of God, the sin offering for the entire world. Whoever believes in Him, God says, to that one I will give righteousness as a gift. And he can be reconciled to me, and live in a restored relationship with me. This is the “New Deal” from God: we don’t have to live separated from Him by our sins. In Christ those sins are forgiven forever. There is no longer this forbidding and foreboding barrier between us and God—He has taken it away through Christ’s sacrifice! We no longer need to come toward God cowering in the fear of judgment, because Jesus became our sin offering for us, and we may come confidently into His presence. It’s not religion any longer—it’s relationship! 2. Perfected Relationship with God’s Law One of the key marks of the New Deal He has for us, God says, is that the law of God (that is, His perfect will and expectation for us) will not be written on tablets of stone any longer. Rather, He will put that law in our minds and write it on our hearts. What does that mean? It means, for one thing, that those in this new covenantal relationship with Him will no longer have to work hard to understand God’s will for them, searching and worrying if they are doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things. In Christ we are freed from that bondage. Colossians 2:14 says He has cancelled the written code, with its regulations that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. When Christ saves a person that person is in a place where the written law of the older covenant is no longer applicable. Saved by grace and standing in Christ’s righteousness, the Christian has nothing to fear in terms of judgment or condemnation. He is no longer trapped by the law of sin and death, but through Jesus Christ the law of the Spirit of life set me [him] free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do…God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering... (Romans 8:2-3) Recently a 12-year old Ethiopian girl was abducted by seven violent men who intended to force her into marrying one of them. This is behavior that is all too common as men band together to abduct a young girl and beat her into submitting to marriage. This young girl was taken into the jungle, beaten and raped. She screamed, but there was no one within earshot to hear her cries, no human at least. Incredibly, three mature Ethiopian lions, famous for their size and their large black manes, the national symbol of Ethiopia, came to the girl’s rescue. They leapt from the brush and chased her captors away. The girl thought she had traded one danger for another, but, remarkably, the lions returned and formed a protective perimeter around her for a day and a half, until the police arrived looking for her. Sgt. Wondimu Wedajo said when they arrived the lions simply left her life a gift and went back into the forest. One wildlife expert suggested that the girl’s whimpering sounded to the male lions like a lion cub in trouble. This twelve year old girl was helpless, powerless to change her terrifying circumstances. He deliverance had to come from a power greater that herself, somewhere outside herself. This is our situation when we are stuck in the condemnation of our sin. Our only hope is Christ, the lion of Judah. The fact is, when a person is saved through faith in Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God comes into his life to inhabit him. With him the Spirit brings a full and perfect understanding of the will of God. He plants it in the Christian’s mind and writes it on his heart. Enlightened and empowered by the Spirit of God, the Christian doesn’t need a commandment chiseled in stone to tell him to do God’s will, he does it almost automatically. One man admitted that he used to regularly drive 40 miles per hour through a school zone in his neighborhood that had a limit of 25 mph on school days. Now he drives 20 miles an hour through the school zone. When asked why the change—had he gotten a ticket or something? “No,” he explains, “my daughter attends that school now—she’s in first grade.” Our behavior changes when there is better motivation inside us. We obey laws a lot more effectively when we are not under condemnation and the Spirit of God is living in us, directing us. Jeremiah 31:33 – I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. 3. Grace for All The third feature about the New Deal of the New Covenant is that it is universally available. Under the Old Covenant the chosen people of God were the Israelites alone, along with the few proselytes to the Jewish faith they were able to pick up. They were the in crowd, the chosen people, and everyone else was an outsider. It was God’s intent that the Israelites would be a light to the rest of the world and draw the other nations to worship of the true God, but they never really got that mission done. Jeremiah 31:34 promises that under the new covenant, they will all know me. Clearly that does not mean that everyone will respond with faith in Christ, but it does mean that there is no longer only one favored nation. The chosen people of God are now all those, Jews and Gentiles, who trust in Christ. So widespread will be the knowledge of God that it will seem as though everyone has heard of God’s covenant offer. 4. Forgiveness of Sin The last part of this passage says, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” What an awesome thing God is willing to do for those who trust in Christ. He has determined that for those who will believe and enter into this new covenant relationship, He will forgive their sins, eradicating the barrier of guilt and judgment between Himself and sinners. And it is all possible because Jesus obediently endured the suffering and death on the cross for us. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21) In the Old Covenant this great atonement for sins was prefigured by the system of sacrifices in which animals were sacrificed and their blood sprinkled on the altar for the temporary forgiveness of the people’s sins. But when Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God--the sinless one--died, His sacrifice covered the sins of the entire world, once and for all. No other sacrifice is needed now! Hebrews 9:13-15 – The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! Listen, what is keeping you from a right and intimate relationship with the living God is one thing: your sins. If you have sinned one sin, you are forever banned from the presence of the holy God. But out of His great love for you, He sent His only Son to die in your place, paying the death debt of your sin, so that you can be reconciled to God again in Him. That’s the “New Deal.” A few years ago there was a very popular song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon." It tells of a man who's been sent to prison. He's served his time and is now coming home on the bus. But he admits that she who once loved him has every right to reject him. He's to blame. So he's written to tell her that if she forgives him, she should "tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree." If there's no yellow ribbon, he'll just go riding by on the bus. As the miles roll by, all the man thinks about is that oak tree. When he gets home, will there be a yellow ribbon on it? The song ends in triumph with the entire busload of people cheering as the man sees not one but a hundred yellow ribbons on that old oak tree! His lover not only forgives him, but she exuberantly welcomes him home. Like the man on the bus, we're fearful of death and what's ahead. We know our own hearts, and we wonder if God will really forgive us, let alone celebrate our coming. But the Word assures us of God's welcome. The yellow ribbons will be there. There is more grace in God’s heart than there is sin in your past. During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, George Wilson, a postal clerk, robbed a federal payroll from a train and in the process killed a guard. The court convicted him and sentenced him to hang. Because of public sentiment against capital punishment, however, a movement began to secure a presidential pardon for Wilson (first offense), and eventually Jackson intervened with a pardon. Amazingly, Wilson refused it. Since this had never happened before, the Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether someone could indeed refuse a presidential pardon. Chief Justice John Marshall handed down the court's decision: "A pardon is a parchment whose only value must be determined by the receiver of the pardon. It has no value apart from that which the receiver gives to it. George Wilson has refused to accept the pardon. We cannot conceive why he would do so, but he has. Therefore, George Wilson must die." George Wilson, as punishment for his crime, was hanged. Pardon, declared the Supreme Court, must not only be granted, it must be accepted.   [Back to Top]