Jeremiah 31:31-34, part of the Book of Consolations, has the theme of Jeremiah promising a new covenant. I open with a brief reflection.
Prophets have the self-perception that they have become the emissary or mouthpiece of the divine. When people hear them speak, they have a decision to make. Do they trust this word? Do they reject it? A covenant is a formal agreement between God and a group of people, bestowing both privilege and responsibility on those chosen. One way that the Old Testament organizes the work of God with humanity through Israel is through an understanding of covenant. Thus, God had a covenant with humanity after the flood through Noah. God established a covenant with Abraham and his family. God made a covenant with Israel at Sinai that they renewed in their assemblies during the period of the Judges. God made a covenant with the family of David. The result of this accumulation of covenants was that God gave gifts to Israel. God gave the gift of land. God gave the gift of law, establishing moral law, laws of purity, sacrificial laws, and dietary laws. God gave the gift of a city (Jerusalem), a Temple, and a king. Yet, instead of responding with thankful obedience, Israel broke each covenant. The experience of Israel was that it profoundly violated the covenant it had with God. So much so, in fact, that in the experience of exile God took away land, city, Temple, and king.
Now, I am sure that for some, if God wanted to reform Israel, a renewal of the covenant with Moses was the way to go. A new nation that enforced the obligations of the covenant at Sinai and its external demands would, one might argue, bring renewal to the nation. In fact, when people returned from exile, they sought the re-building of the Temple, they tried to re-institute the Davidic line as ruler, and they brought a strict adherence to the Mosaic Law.
Yet, what if God wanted to do something new? God had already shown a willingness to enter new covenants as situations changed. What if God saw the series of broken covenants, saw a new situation that demanded a new covenant, and wanted to shift focus? What would happen if God wanted to go to the root of the problem presented by disobedience, namely, the human heart? The heart is where the people had engraved sin and disobedience. In this case, God would want internal transformation of desire. The promise of God gives a look into the future of what God wants for the people of God. If God wants to offer a new covenant, it suggests a revelation of something new that God wants to tell us about the future. The old was not sufficient. The old will need to give way to the new.
For the new to come, God will need to forgive the disobedience of the past. This is an act of pure, divine grace and mercy toward the people. God looks at the ruined relationship of the previous covenants and forgives. This new covenant still involves a law, only now written on the heart. This will truly be a new time when the Lord will teach the Law directly to the people. This new covenant will become an intimate part of who the people are. Their knowledge of each other will be more like that of a good relationship between husband and wife. The new intimacy of this changed situation is what makes the new covenant possible.
Now, one who believes himself to be the mouthpiece of the divine says something like this. Those of us who hear and read will need to trust this word or reject it.
Although some scholars have suggested that the biblical presentation of the covenant at Sinai played a much smaller role in the religious history of Israel prior to the period of the Deuteronomistic reforms of the 7th-6th centuries B.C. than the biblical record indicates, Sinai’s importance as a template of subsequent Jewish identity remains significant. A careful examination and dating of the biblical texts in which the Sinai covenant appears suggests that the reforming king Josiah recast Israelite religious identity in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. The theologians who supported his reforms took the idea of Sinai as the terminus a quo of the Israelite covenant came into greatest prominence through careful editing of received texts by the Deuteronomistic theologians. These theologians were the so-called “Deuteronomistic theologians,” so named because of their understanding of Deuteronomy as the core of Israelite belief. At the same time, based on such texts as this one and other passages that speak of a “new covenant” with Israel,[1] there was, competing with the essentially conservative Deuteronomistic reforms, a counter-reform movement that spoke of a “new covenant.”
31 The days are surely[2] coming, the prophet opening with apocalyptic language.[3] He then offers the introductory messenger formula, says the Lord.[4] He then states the message: when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.[5] In II Corinthians 3, the apostle Paul distinguishes between the old covenant and the new covenant. Two passages (Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25) cite the words of Jesus at the Last Supper as representing “the new covenant in my blood.” We need to think of this in the context of Exodus 24:5-8 and the sealing of covenants with blood sacrifice. Matthew 26:28 and Mark 14:24 do not have the word “new” with covenant. The writer of the book of Hebrews frequently connects the shedding of the blood of Jesus with the establishment of a new covenant and the forgiveness of sins through Jesus: See Hebrews 9:13-22; 10:29; 12:24; 13:20-21. In addition, Hebrews frequently asserts the superiority of several new things God is doing through Jesus Christ compared to what God had done formerly. It is within this context that the writer uses the long citation of Jeremiah 31:31-34 as part of his promises, along with pleas/warnings to the listener to take care to continue to follow in the ways of the new covenant, and not go back to the old ways. Jesus will refer to the theme of a new covenant in the context of the last supper, as Paul relates it in I Corinthians 11:25. The covenant is new in the sense that it is individualized, internalized, and democratized. It does not seem to have updated content.
The nature of the Old Testament covenant is that it seems capable of radical change in structure, particularly when it encounters the event or moment of the last days.[6] God had been establishing and renewing covenants since ancient times. God established a covenant with humanity and all creation in Genesis 9. God established covenants with Abraham and his descendants. Moreover, God established a conditional covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai/Horeb: God would be their God and they would be the people of God. This covenant formula is frequent in Scripture. God had delivered Israel out of slavery and through the sea, but God expected Israel to follow the stipulations (laws and commandments) that God associated with the covenant. God would bless them for keeping the terms of the covenant, but it would be to their peril to break them. Of course, they did break the covenant. The Deuteronomic History, read carefully, is a record of Israel braking covenant that made the punishment of exile justified. More than once God punished Israel then later restored/forgave them. Periodically there was a renewal of the covenant between Israel and the Lord (as at Shechem, in Joshua 24). So, what distinguishes the Jeremiah 31 new covenant from previous renewed ones?
If you want to get philosophical, here is the “Ship of Theseus” problem. In ancient times, there was a ship, called the “Theseus.” As the years wore on, the Theseus started getting weak and creaky. They removed the old boards, put them into a warehouse, and replaced with new ones. Then, the masts started tottering, and soon the owners warehoused and replaced them. In this way, after 50 years, this ship now has all new boards, masts and everything. The question then arises: Is the ship in the harbor, now called S2, the same ship as the ship that was in the harbor 50 years ago (S1, for convenience)? In other words, is S2 really the “Theseus”? Applied to the Old Testament, the assumption is that with all the changes from Abraham through the post-exilic period, the answer is affirmative. The New Testament will also give an affirmative answer in the sense that the same divine being who called Abraham, who revealed the covenantal name Yahweh, who guided Israel, also offered a new revelation and covenant in Jesus Christ.
We also need to have a moment of clarification. The promise of a new covenant is to Israel, and not to another people. God has not abandoned the former covenant with Moses. The new covenant continues by virtue of its relation to the Mosaic covenant. The church must not look at itself as a “new” people of God. The Lord promises a new covenant with the houses of Israel and Judah, a phrase almost unique to Jeremiah.[7]
32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand[8] to bring them out of the land of Egypt[9]—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. If we go back to the Mosaic, Joshua, and Judges period, we can see the importance of this covenant in the Ten Commandments, the Shechemite Twelve commandments and the covenant renewal ceremony during the Judges period, and the Book of the Covenant in Exodus. The willful covenant-breaking behavior of the people wronged Yahweh (referred to here as the "husband" of the nation just as Israel had been the bride). It would be difficult to isolate a more prominent or more important idea in biblical literature than the idea of the covenant. Whether in the form of the chosen people of Israel or, much later, in the form of the Christian church as the body of Christ, the idea of a solemn, formal agreement between God and a group of people, which bestows both privilege and responsibility on the chosen ones, lies at the core of biblical thought. Pre-eminent among the several forms of biblical covenant agreements is the covenant at Sinai (Exodus 19-20), which included not only Israel’s encounter with the LORD at Sinai, but, as indicated, here, the entire exodus experience
33 However, this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel[10] after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. This is the old covenant drastically renewed. Israel has broken the old covenant of Sinai so decisively that God must nullify it, but this new or renewed covenant will be keepable. We will learn that this new covenant has four themes.
First, the Torah, that is, the commands, will be central and authoritative as at Sinai, but now the people will intensely embrace them, unlike the Sinai economy of covenant. They will be intimately familiar and readily embraced. Here is the difference with the previous covenant that Jeremiah envisions. Life's most problematic organ, the one that most betrayed the human condition, is the heart. Jeremiah is already thick with assertions about the wickedness and weakness of this deceitful organ (see Jeremiah 3:17; 4:14; 5:23; 7:24; 9:14; 11:8; 13:10; 16:12). Most famous of all of Jeremiah's "heart" insights is his reference to Judah's sin being “written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts" (Jeremiah 17:1). The image is unique to Jeremiah. The point seems to be that reforms of Josiah, which were external, clearly did get into the hearts of the officials or the people, which has been the focus of the reforms. Remember, Deuteronomy itself focuses on turning to the Lord with the whole heart and fearing the Lord with one’s whole heart. Now, however, Jeremiah envisions a time when the obligations of the Sinai covenant find transformed internal desires so that people will experiences transformation from the inside. Yet, this thought is not unique to Jeremiah. Thus, in a similar way, Deuteronomy 10:16 and 30:6 refer to the circumcision of the heart, which would also refer to a new covenant of renewed devotion to the covenant God had with Israel. Further, the notion of covenant, while it begins with Moses, as noted above, becomes a theological theme for J, as that author goes back to the Patriarchs having a covenant, and traces it through the time of Moses. Then, we find prophetic circles emphasizing the covenant with David and the bond established with sacral kingship. The point here is that the theme of covenant runs throughout the various schools within Israel and throughout its history. The idea of a solemn, formal agreement between God and a group of people that bestows both privilege and responsibility on the chosen ones seems like it became a theme throughout the Bible.
Jeremiah is in the stream of tradition of the book of Deuteronomy and other books that emphasize heart-religion as well as outward obedience. In Hebrew, the primary words for “heart” also mean mind, understanding and will. Deuteronomy 6:5-6 says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.” Deuteronomy 30:6 says, “The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live.” Psalm 40:8 says, “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” Psalm 51:10 says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” In Ezekiel 36:26-28 the Lord says, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.” (See also Ezekiel 11:14-20.) Further, see Jeremiah 29:11-14 (“a future with hope”) and 32:37-42.
Many New Testament passages also emphasize God’s Spirit-given heart/will as the source of true obedience and true life with God. Among others, see John 3 and its reference to birth from above or new birth. Similarly, see such Pauline passages as significant portions of Galatians (e.g., 5:13 ff.) and Romans (e.g., see 6:17 ff. and 8:1-4), as well as Philippians 2:12b-13. See also Ephesians 2:1-10. Further, see II Peter 1:1 ff.
Second, we learn that the standard covenant formula of mutuality in relationship marks this covenant. We hear the covenantal language: and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Third, the newly formed community of Israel will be full of the knowledge of God. 34 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. The people heard themselves addressed as a people who had violated the covenant. The context seems to imply that the sin of Israel is so great until God has to intervene in a mighty way. Now the covenant is to become so deeply a part of each person that there will no longer be a need for teaching. To "know" is both to grasp intellectually and to have an intimate personal relationship -- as do a husband and a wife. The transformed people will "know God" and God's law with this kind of intimate association. The idea continues the thought of the entire passage, which is individual responsibility. The individual Israelite of the redeemed future will no longer be able to claim ignorance of the law or a deficient priesthood teaching a corrupt version of the law as an excuse for the disobedience first manifest in the wilderness generation and persistent in subsequent generations of the chosen people. Every Israelite will know the law and every Israelite will bear the responsibility of obeying it. The Mosaic covenant (“my law,” v. 33) remains unchanged in content; what is new is its internalized, individualized, democratized form.
We need to be careful, lest we simply fall in line with what everyone else is doing. David Rieseman was a psychologist in the 1950's who wrote one of the classics in his field, The Lonely Crowd (1950). He contrasts inner directed persons with the other directed persons. Inner directed persons have internalized the ethics and morality of their parents, their church, their God. This inner guide acts as a psychological gyroscope. It keeps them on the right moral and ethical course even when confronted with perplexing moral problems. Thus, even when parents and church are not there to give guidance in specific circumstances, these persons still know what to do. The other directed person has a radar system which picks up messages from other persons. They become like the people around them. What everyone else is doing, these people will do, whether it is right or wrong.
Novelist John Updike said, "The fact that we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly." Discerning right and wrong, living by truth, is the only way we can live nobly or with excellence. Many Americans have a high degree of material well-being. During a political year, we act as if this is all that mattered. Yet, if we have full employment and economic growth, while having people who have abandoned God, goodness, justice, and mercy, we will have failed.
A self-evident fact about the church is that we take the Bible seriously. When we gather for worship, we read from it. Many of us read it daily as individuals, couples, and families. This is one way we can be sure that God has not left us to our own devices. We have this constant check to our lives. The church today has accountability to the apostolic church and to the church of the centuries. We believe it faithfully communicates the will and purpose of God. The Bible takes time, patience, perseverance, and courage to read. It is difficult to understand at times, in part because the Bible is ancient and from a culture different from ours. Yet, we trust the witness of this text: God has shown us what God is like and what God wants of humanity in Jesus Christ.
Arthur Leff gave a lecture which became widely quoted. He admitted that God is now out of the picture for us modern people. That being the case, if you say, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," another person says, "Sez who? What gives you the authority to prescribe what is good for me?" He said that every time we make a moral judgment, it implies we are looking for an unevaluated evaluator, an unjudged judge, the uncreated creator of values. On the one hand, we want to believe there is a right and a wrong, findable rules which give us clarity about how we ought to live. On the other hand, we want to believe there is no such thing; we are free to decide for ourselves what we ought to be. His solution, he admits, is not appealing: "All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have." Looking at the world, it appears that if we are family, we are acting more like the brothers Cain and Abel. Love, reason, even fear, have not worked to make us better people. Nevertheless: "Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot - have done the right thing. Those who acquiesced have done the wrong thing. There is in the world such a thing as evil. All together now: Sez who? God help us."[11]
My question is this: Are we all that we have? Are we accountable to Someone far greater than us?
Jeremiah then affirms, says the Lord, a concluding messenger formula.
Fourth, the culminating feature of the new or renewed covenant becomes possible not by repentance or conversion on the part of Israel, but by the unilateral action of God, who will forgive and forget. The oracle concludes the Lord looking at the ruined relation of Israel with the covenant and pronounces, in act of pure grace and mercy: for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. That new locus for the law is the result of a restored relationship that comes from forgiveness. One of Jeremiah’s singular contributions to the theology of the OT is the psychological and emotional insight that forgiveness is key to a right relationship between the human and the divine, and the foundation for appropriate covenantal behavior by both parties. It is incumbent upon the divine to forgive fallen human covenant partners, and it is incumbent upon the human party to accept that forgiveness with sincerity of heart (i.e., with firm resolve not to sin again) to re-enter the restored relationship. Forgiveness is the divine initiation of restoration and redemption. Christians must guard against individualism since God directs the promises to a community; not overly stress the new element; not allow a new covenant to be antinomian. This line is so crucial because it makes possible the establishment of this new covenant. Before God can replace the brokenness of the old covenant relationship by the new, God must wipe the slate clean. The dire consequences of their sinfulness now erased; the cause of their sinfulness -- an evil heart -- now transformed. God firmly establishes the new covenant. Such a notion envisions a time when God must take control in human hearts so that we may accept each other, forgive each other, and help each other. Until then, only a formulation and execution of law that can meet legitimate claims can establish a lasting stable order in human relationships.[12] Clearly, forgiveness in this new covenant is important.
[1] (e.g., Isaiah 55:3; 59:21; Jeremiah 32:37-41; Ezekiel 16:60; 37:26; Hosea 2:18 [Hebrew 20]).
[2] A construction of the word “surely” that is virtually unique to his book (cf 7:32; 9:25; 16:14; 19:6; 23:5, 7, 30:3; 31:27, 38; 33:14).
[3] (cf Jeremiah 51:47; Luke 17:22; and especially the apocalypse of II Esdras: 5:1; 6:18; 12:13; 13:29)
[4] The construction here is a variation of the more common formula “thus says the LORD,” with the temporal clause replacing the resultative “thus.” This common expression, found more than 2,000 times in the prophetic literature, is from the epistolary and diplomatic language of the ancient Near East, in which a messenger, sent to deliver a message orally, began by saying, “Thus says [the sender],” followed by a direct quotation of what the sender had said. Thus the opening words of King Cyrus’ announcement of the end of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews: “Thus says King Cyrus of Persia ...” (Ezra 1:2). The formula was not limited to imperial decrees; Jephthah’s negotiations with the king of the Ammonites included a message that began, “Thus says Jephthah” (Judges 11:15; cf also 2 Kings 18:29). It was in this capacity that prophets in Israel were thought of as “mouthpieces” for the divine.
[5] Almost unique to Jeremiah, occurring five times elsewhere in his book (5:11; 11:10, 17; 31:27; 33:14) and in only one other place in biblical literature, and that is in the apocryphal book of Baruch (2:26). The dynastic connotations that became attached to the word “house” were secondary to the original meaning of the expressions “house of Israel” and “house of Judah,” which were simply other ways of saying “Israelites” and “Judahites,” the references to the house of Israel being far more common than the references to the house of Judah.
[6] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1 [32.2] 32.
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 473, 477.
[8] Much more commonly means “by the agency of” (as in I Samuel 18:25; 27:1; II Kings 14:27; I Chronicles 6:15 and many other passages), and its use here is ordinarily found in poetry, and then not often (e.g., Psalm 37:24; Isaiah 42:6; 51:18).
[9] A stereotyped formula for the experience of liberation, found more commonly in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Jeremiah than anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. The Lord as husband and Israel as wife is a symbol used often in prophetic speech.
[10] The expression is clearly functioning pars pro toto, with “Israel” encompassing both the northern and southern kingdoms. In the post-exilic period, long after both kingdoms had been destroyed, the name Israel completely eclipsed the name Judah as the designation of the chosen people, with the latter preserved only in frozen expressions (such as “the Lion of [the tribe of] Judah,” Revelation 5:5).
[11] ("Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law," Duke Law Journal, 1979
[12] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 584.
[13] Carver McGriff.
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