“If the first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need for a second covenant to replace it. But when God found fault with the people, he said:
‘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 led them out of the land of Egypt.
They did not remain faithful to my covenant,
so I turned my back on them, says the Lord.
But this is the new covenant I will make
with the people of Israel on that day, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their minds,
and I will write them on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
And they will not need to teach their neighbors,
nor will they need to teach their relatives,
saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’
For everyone, from the least to the greatest,
will know me already.
And I will forgive their wickedness,
and I will never again remember their sins.’
When God speaks of a ‘new’ covenant, it means he has made the first one obsolete. It is now out of date and will soon disappear.”
Most of today’s passage is a quotation from Jeremiah 31:31-34. Although I recently wrote about the empathy I feel for first-century Jews who saw Jesus as a threat, the reality is that God had been telling them about what was coming for a long time. The book of Jeremiah was written around 626 B.C., so the Jewish people had over six centuries to ponder the idea of God introducing a new covenant. Certainly there is also a lot of prophetic writing about a coming Messiah as well. God was not throwing a sudden curveball when Jesus came to earth.
The old covenant needed to be replaced because the contract had been violated, rendering it null and void. Who broke their promises? The people of Israel. God remained faithful and he saw that a covenant between himself and his people could not rely on their ability to keep their end of the deal. God had to guarantee BOTH sides of the contract. These laws, once written on stone, now needed to be imprinted directly into the hearts and minds of the people.
God isn’t a big mystery in the sky that we have to figure out. While he is infinite and mysterious, he has revealed a lot about himself and he wants you to know him. The Holy Spirit is now at work directly in your heart and mind, which is unprecedented access to God that was made possible through Jesus’ death and resurrection. God created a covenant in which he made it possible to know him and he promises to forget all your sins. This new system replaces the old covenant, so we no longer have to worry about keeping up our end of the bargain with God. He’s got the whole thing covered.