Grace Will Reign in the End

Jeremiah 31:31–34 NRSV

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says 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. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

The man had been weeping. And why not? Everything around him was in ruins. His home, his neighbors, the city, even the temple. All in ruins. Everything came to be as he was told that it would and as he told the people as well. So, now what is to happen? What will the LORD do to the people who are left? And what will happen to those in exile?

Jeremiah has told them to make lives for themselves in Babylon. That they are to settle down, raise gardens, raise children because they are going to be there for a long time. 70 years to be exact. This was not the news that the people wanted to hear. They were being told by the prophets among them that they were going to be there only a short time, two years. What was “bummer man” doing telling them that they would be there longer?

What Jeremiah is doing is telling them the word of the LORD. There was no way that he could tell them anything else. The word of the LORD burned within him like a fire in his bones. He could no more not tell the people what God had said than he could stop breathing on his own. And so, he continues to weep. His prophesies show that he was a true prophet because they came true.

But wait. There seems to be a new word from the LORD. A word that is different. A word that gives hope to the prophet and hope to those who will be hearing it when he sends them the word. It is a word that tells them that God will make all things right and that the time is coming. It may take a while, but the day of redemption is coming.

Chapters 30 and 31 of Jeremiah are know as the Book of Comfort or of Consolation. In these two chapters there is a word from the LORD that is hopeful and not the doom and gloom of the other words before. It is a word that tells those in Babylon that they will return from their exile and come back to the land from which they were taken. It is in chapter 31 that we find the ultimate promise though. Here there are promises for the nation, the people and the city of Jerusalem.

The first is a promise that the land of Judah will be restored. The people will return, God will raise them up and they will raise the crops that they raised before. They will once again be the people of the land of Judah and the people of God.

The third promise is that Jerusalem will be restored as well. The city will be rebuilt. Not only that, it will be enlarged to include areas that had not been a part of the city before. God also promises that the city will never again be overthrown or the people uprooted from their homes there.

Which leaves the second promise. This is the heart of all three of the promises, the promise of a new covenant.

Remember that covenants are made between two parties and that the two parties are not equal. There is a relationship that is built between the two and the stronger cares for the weaker. The weaker party really has nothing to offer to the covenant. That is what is happening here. God is making a new (or in reality, renewing) covenant with both Israel and Judah.

To understand why this is significant for God to include both, one has to remember that Israel and Judah were two rival kingdoms of the same people, the Hebrews or the children of Israel. They had separated and been antagonistic toward one another until Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. Now God is telling Jeremiah that there is to be a renewing of the covenant that God had made with all the people. It was not to be just with Judah that this covenant was to be made but it was to be made with all the children of Israel.

And it is not to be like the one made on Sinai. That covenant had not been broken by God but by the people. They had worshipped other gods besides God, they had sworn falsely by the name of God and they had broken all the other stipulations of the covenant that had been established when God had led them out of slavery in Egypt. And God had given them second chances. God had told them “One more chance” like a parent tells a naughty child. Finally, God had had enough. The people had fallen away though God had been as a husband to them, taking care to provide them with all that they needed and all that they could want.

But the new (renewed) covenant will be different than the one given to the ancestors of those who are now in exile. This covenant will not be written on tablets of stone that were in the temple (or in today’s language a courthouse rotunda) to be seen, given its due and then forgotten. No, this covenant, this law, will be written on the inside of the people. It will be inside where the people will know it. They will have it inscribed or written on their hearts.

John Kaltner says this about the heart: “Today the heart is typically seen merely as the center of emotions, but in the Hebrew Bible the heart was also viewed as the place of intellectual, ethical, and moral activity.” This was where God would be putting the new covenant, in the place where there would be the life of the persons who were part of that covenant. And not only that, this is the place where all life comes from for the people.

Joel B Green. Connections: Year B, Volume 2 (Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship) (Kindle Locations 3009-3010). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Again, God claims the people. Once the law is on their hearts, they will no longer know other gods, for God will be their God and they shall be God’s people. They will be once again be the people of the one who brought them out of slavery and who gave them the teachings for them to follow.

But they will now no longer need to be taught. There will no longer be any need to exhort the people to know about God because the people will “know God” personally. There is a great difference between knowing about God and knowing God. The first is head knowledge and what one learns from another or from books. The second is heart knowledge.

Knowing is a word that has a very powerful meaning. This verb is a word that carries the connotation of profound, personal and intimate knowledge that comes from only being in a very intimate relationship. Those in the relationship will be committed whole heartedly to one another in mind, emotion and will. It is in such a relationship that the past is forgotten and sins are forgiven. In other words, there will be the relationship like that of a parent to a child or that of a husband and wife. They will know each other’s thoughts and feelings. They will be as one.

And the people will no longer have a hierarchy. No longer will there be those who are serving as intermediaries for the people. For all will know God and be the people of God. They will now know that they are in a covenant with God who, even when the people broke the covenant again and again and again, loved them so much that a new covenant was to be created.

So, what about this new covenant? Were the glories that were promised fulfilled? Yes and no. The people returned from exile and did renew the covenant with God. Jerusalem was rebuilt and the city boundaries were expanded. But there was still the need for teaching. There were those who conquered the city and the people were put under oppression. But the covenant remained. The people were still faithful to God. And they still are today.

But does this all mean that Jeremiah was wrong and the prophecy was not fulfilled? No. The people lived, and live today, in a “now/not yet” time. A time when the fulfillment has been partially completed and where the complete fulfillment will occur at the end of the age.

So what does a covenant with Israel mean to us as Christians today? We see the fulfillment of this covenant in Jesus. But we too are in the moment of “now/not yet.” We are in the now of salvation, but we still require teaching and we still sin, the not yet. John Goldingay has this to say about the covenant and its fulfillment: “…the new covenant promise was fulfilled soon after Jeremiah’s day and fulfilled again in Jesus, but it still awaits fulfillment. In Romans 11, indeed, Paul sees this promise about forgiveness as due to be fulfilled in the future after “the full number of the Gentiles has been gathered in”—in other words, it still lies in the future[1].” We still are waiting with the Israelites of Jeremiah’s day. We are sometimes discouraged because of this but Martin Luther King Jr. said that, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” We still need to have God inscribe the law on our hearts so that we will know who God is.

This is not to say that we have superseded the covenant with the “new” covenant and that the “old” is irrelevant. No. If God would give up the covenant that God made with the Israelites, then God could surely give up the covenant that was made with us. Instead of Jews and Christians wondering who is in or who is out of the covenant, of whether one covenant is obsolete and one is better, let us stand together in awe and grateful thanks to God that God has extended forgiveness and grace to us, that the teachings of God are written upon our hearts, and that because of God and God alone we are in the new covenant. May we ever remember that grace will reign in the end and that God will always make good on a covenant that God establishes. Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] Goldingay, John. Jeremiah for Everyone. Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015. Print. Old Testament for Everyone.