The New Covenant in My Blood
July 21, 2024
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares 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. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Please pray with me as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
My father often listens to our sermons, so maybe he’ll hear me say this. While we were growing up in the house, I remember him often singing. He has a great voice. He had his favorite Christian hymns. There was “Trust and Obey,” which told us there was “no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.” He’d also sing about his blessed assurance. “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! / Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine! / Heir of salvation, purchase of God / Born of his Spirit, washed in His blood / This is my story, this is my song / Praising my Savior all the day.”
He also sang popular songs. I remember a few songs by Harry Chapin about dads and teachers. Often on Sunday mornings he’d play a song and sing along with it. The song was, “Wake Up Everybody” by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes—not sure if anyone knows that one. The band The Roots did a version of it a few years ago.
There was another refrain he’d sing often, one you’ll all know: “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” My mother is not so good of a singer. I unfortunately got her voice, and my brother Brian got Dad’s. (I’m not jealous about that at all.) The character named Ash sings U2’s hit in the climax of the movie Sing 2. So if you’re old enough, you know the refrain from the band, and if you’re younger, you know it from the movie.
Here’s my question: can a Christian sing those words of longing, words of yet-un-fully realized desire? Now, of course, we can sing those lines, some of us better than others and most of you better than me. We can sing along in our cars and in the shower and apparently during a sermon. But my question is whether Christians can legitimately identify with that feeling of not having yet found all that we’re looking and hoping for?
I know these lines can accurately describe a person who doesn’t know the Lord. Maybe that’s you. You’re saying, I’m trying this and that, but you know it’s not what your heart is really looking for. You’re climbing mountains, running through fields, climbing city walls, kissing honey lips, holding hands with the devil (to quote U2’s song), and it’s not working. You haven’t found what you’re looking for because what you’re looking for can only be found in God. So, I think, these lines can apply to the person who doesn’t yet know God but is looking for God behind and beneath all the other longing.
But is there a way that this longing can still describe Christians who, in this life, continue looking for more? If we find Christ through faith, what else are we looking for? It almost feels wrong to say there’s more.
Consider another famous line, the one from a North African Christian named Augustine. He wrote five million words, but perhaps his most famous words come from his book Confessions. He says, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Again, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” The implication is that when you find God, you find rest. You stop looking because you’ve found what you’re looking for.
God gives these promises to a people beat up and broken. He gives these promises to people who are weak, wounded, and wayward. He gives these promises to people about to go through the hardest thing they’ve ever been through, and some of them wouldn’t make it through. In this way, they could be a lot like us, people in need of a word of hope and consolation, a word of comfort. I can certainly testify to that experience. I’ve been troubled and worried and seen by faith our God who is strong and kind, and I’ve found rest in him. I’ve been beaten up by my sin, discouraged and shamed, and felt the sting of guilt, and I’ve found rest, forgiveness, and happiness in the grace and favor of God given in Christ. I hope you know these too. You can know these. Your heart can right now find rest in God through Jesus.
So, perhaps this is how a Christian should talk, as one who has stopped looking, stopped longing because he’s found what he’s looking for, found rest.
I actually think both realities are true. We can find rest right now in God in this life no matter what’s happening. I also think there is a rest that is yet coming that is even better. And far more important than what I think, this is what Jeremiah 31 teaches. Rightly understood, in the context of the Bible, God is promising good news now and forever.
1. God promises to supply everything needed to find rest in him—now.
So, let’s look at this passage in two ways. First, I want to point out that in this passage God promises to supply everything needed to find rest in him now. God is promising to give you everything you need right now to find rest in him. Let me read the promises.
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares 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. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jer. 31:31–34)
For the better part of the first 29 chapters Jeremiah has functioned largely as a prosecutor in a lawsuit that God has him deliver to his people. But in chapter 30, something changes. In chapters 30 through 33, in these four chapters, we find a special subsection within the book. Theologians refer to this subsection as the book of hope or the book of consolation, the book of comfort. We can’t look at all of the material in these chapters, but we can zero in the key verses within the chapters. In fact, these four verses in Jeremiah 31 make up the largest quotation of any Old Testament passage in the New Testament. In the sermon we call Hebrews, the author quotes all these verses.
God promises a new covenant. Before I explain what’s new, we should discuss the word covenant. We don’t use the word covenant much, so I should explain it.
On Friday I went to Starbucks in the morning and bought coffee. Actually, I go often enough that my coffee was free that morning. That was nice. And later in the day on Friday, I went to a wedding where the couple, as couples do, shared vows with each other. One of these events is a consumer relationship and the other is a covenant.
Some of you like Dunkin Donuts coffee better than Starbucks coffee, and that’s fine. Some of you like coffee but hate both places because they’re too commercial. That’s fine. You can choose. And that’s the point. In a consumer relationship, you can choose what you like best, and as long as the arrangement continues to work for you, you can choose to continue to consume. If the price changes or your taste buds change, you can change. That’s a consumer relationship.
Here, God speaks of being in a covenant relationship with his people. A covenant was a solemn vow to act toward one party, not merely in the best interest of yourself—that’s what a consumer relationship is. A covenant relationship vows to do something for the good of the other person regardless of how they treat you. That’s why a wedding vow is a fitting example. Vows are said for better and for worse, in sickness and in health. They are not conditioned on the other person. They are, in this way, one-sided.
And that’s what God is saying here. He’s in a special relationship with his people; he’s entered a special covenant relationship. We see that in vv. 31 and 32 when God speaks of taking Israel by the hand. When I hear that phrase I think of a father taking a child by the hand. And certainly, God is a father to his people. But here the taking by the hand is that of a husband lovingly taking his bride by her hand. It’s an intimate gesture. A covenant of God with his people is not actually new. God made covenants with Adam and Eve. He made them with Noah and with Abraham and with King David, and those previous covenants had implications for all the people of God.
But here, God is describing something new. What’s new is that rather than the law of God being something external and outside of them, in the coming days God is saying he’s going to write his law on their hearts so that they can know him. It won’t just be like tablets of stone, which God’s people broke before Moses even came down the mountain. The writing of the law on the heart is not merely an internal awareness of the demands of God, but a power to live them. This is really special when you consider a verse we looked at a few weeks ago. In chapter 17, we read that written on their hearts was their own sin, sin written with a pen of iron (17:1).
For those of you who are parents of older children, maybe you can relate. You have this good desire to instruct and give your children good laws. But there comes the point where you hope and pray that those laws will not merely be something you pressed upon them from the outside but laws bubbling up from within. This is what God is promising. He’s promising to supply from the inside what they need to find rest in him.
And the best part of the promise is knowing God. The key to the new covenant promise is that people will know God. This is said in v. 34. It can be a bit confusing when you read it, so I’ll read those lines again and explain.
And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. (31:34a)
God speaks of people not having to go to their neighbors and go to their brothers to encourage them to “Know the Lord” because they will already know. In other words, God is promising to become so real that there won’t be a need to do evangelism among neighbors or discipleship among God’s family because everyone—from the least to the greatest—will already know God. What a wonderful promise to rest in. I see this as partly true in the church. Everyone who joins our church knows the Lord (as best as wee can tell).
And look how the passage ends:
For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jer. 31:34b)
What encouragement! God is promising to deal with their sin in such a way that he will choose not to relate to his people as the sinners that they really are because he’s going to forgive them and change them. To people beaten down by their sin, to people deflated and discouraged, to people who had made a wreck of their lives and rebelled against God, this would be so encouraging. It should be encouraging to you.
All this is clear. But when will these things be so? What is the timing of these blessings? It’s a natural question. I’ve been describing them to us now. But what does the opening verse say? The opening verse says, “Behold, the days are coming.” And many verbs are in the future tense: I will make, I will put my law, I will forgive, and so on. So were talking about the future to them, but how far into the future?
Last week we read the promise that after the seventy years of exile, God would bring his people home (see Jer. 29:10–14). And when you read the Old Testament story, there does seem to be a softening of the hearts of God’s people when they come home from Babylon. You can read about it in books like Ezra and Nehemiah and Malachi.
But as we read the biblical story, these promises are more fulfilled when Jesus comes. On the night before Jesus died, he said that in his death, he was pouring out the new covenant promises, the forgiveness of sins through his blood (cf. Luke 22; 1 Cor. 11). Which means that for us, for anyone here who has trusted in Jesus, these new covenant promises are true for you now. We can read Jeremiah 31 and see the way that God has promised and is right now supplying everything needed to find rest in him.
God has poured out himself in the person of the Holy Spirit, on young and old alike, from the least to the greatest, so that we can all say we know God when we have God living inside us. So when it comes to the timing of these promises and our finding rest in God, these new covenant promises are for now.
But I also want to say they are for the not yet.
Let me go back to Bono’s song. At one point in the U2 song, Bono sings,
You broke the bonds / And you loosed the chains / Carried the cross / Of my shame / Oh my shame / You know I believe it . . .
Cleary, Bono is signing the first Advent, the first coming of Jesus, of the new covenant promises given right now in the gospel, purchased by Christ on the cross. So, perhaps, you’d expect the next line to say, “I have found what I’m looking for.” That would have truth in it. Yet that’s not his next line.
You broke the bonds / And you loosed the chains / Carried the cross / Of my shame / Oh my shame / You know I believe it / But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
He knows God through the cross and that God has forgiven all his iniquity and remembered his sins no more and took away his shame. That’s good. So how, then, can he still sing that he hasn’t found what he’s looking for? This is confusing. Or is it?
Well, I don’t want to put words in his mouth. It’s his song. And what he meant or didn’t mean isn’t all that important. I want to talk about us. I would say we can still sing those lines because, in a sense, we are still looking. Not so much looking for something different but looking for more of what we already have in God. Paul expresses similar longings when he speaks of being thankful for what he has now in Christ, but pressing on to take more of a hold on Christ (see Phil. 3).
So, the first point in the sermon was that God is promising to supply everything we need to find rest in him right now. The second point is very short. And it’s the same point, but it adds one phrase. In Jeremiah 31, God is promising to supply everything we need to find rest in him, not just now but, in forever.
2. God promises to supply everything needed to find rest in him—forever.
The biblical metaphor is that our present experience of knowing God and forgiveness is a downpayment on a future inheritance that is even better. Or, to use the words from Augustine, our hearts are ever restless until they find their rest in God. That’s true. And it’s also true that there yet remains a future rest that will be even better.
And this should be obvious from the text. We still do evangelism, don’t we? Right now, we have a Sunday school class on the topic for seven weeks. And we handed out vacation Bible school flyers in the neighborhood. You still tell your co-workers and family about Jesus, right? All our neighbors do not yet know the Lord. But one day, in a new heavens and new earth, in the great forever, everyone with God will know him. And one day, the law will be written on our hearts with even more power, so much power we won’t ever sin again. And we won’t ever be sinned against. We can hardly imagine how great that will be.
To use theological terms, right now in Christ we have justification and sanctification but we don’t have glorification—not yet. We have all our sins forgiven and all of Jesus’s good deeds seen as though we did them; we have justification. And by the power of God’s Spirit, he’s making us more and more into the likeness of Jesus; we have sanctification. But we’re not perfect yet. We don’t have glorification yet. But we will.
In v. 33 God promises, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” That’s true now in Christ. And it will be most true later. We read those exact words in the book of Revelation 21. In the future forever we will be even more his people and he will be even more our God.
Conclusion
I want to close with an illustration I heard this week from another pastor. This pastor had an older woman in his congregation who, even though she had gone through so much and had so many hard situations, she kept her joy by finding rest in God. People would say, but people have been so mean to you and wronged you. And she would say that God would deal with them in the life to come. And she suffered so much physically. Yet she noted how in heaven she would have a perfect body and health. Stuff like this.
The pastor telling this story said he came up with the name for this kind of faith, what he called “climbing up the tower.” Here’s what he meant. He was saying it was like a battle where people surrounded a city. And from the city walls, all you can see is the enemy and certain defeat. But if you were to climb up a tower and see that off in the distance, there was an army coming to save you with overwhelming power, that would change you. You’d be able to come back down the walls and be different. (Illustration from Timothy Keller and shared by Matt Smethurst.)
In a way, that’s how the promises of God are meant to work. And here in this subsection of Jeremiah we call the book of hope or the book of consolation, God has taken Jeremiah up the tower, so to speak, and he’s given him promises that he can give to those in the midst of their trouble. And those promises were to produce a kind of rest and confidence and joy and thanksgiving now. These promises were just what they were looking for.
But, of course, they were looking for more. They were looking forward to the day the enemy would be fully defeated. And in this way, we’re actually a lot like these people in Jerusalem. The present realities of our lives can pull our gaze downward and inward. Jeremiah went up the tower so that he can come down to tell us who are still in the battle to lift up our eyes of faith because full victory is coming.
We have the privilege of lifting our eyes in communion. I’m going to pray and invite the worship team up, as well as Pastor Tony, who will give us instructions. Let’s pray…
Sermon Discussion Questions
Read Jeremiah 31:1–14. How is the tone of these verses changed from previous chapters? Why has the tone changed?
Look at Luke 22 and 1 Corinthians 11. These are the Last Supper passages. How do these passages relate to what Jeremiah promises in 31:31–34?
Theologians sometimes speak of the blessings Christians have from God as “already and not yet.” This means we have some blessings from God right now and we’ll have more later, more in eternity. Where do you see this in the passage?
Look up in the Bible the phrase, “And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33b). How often do you see this phrase (or a similar one) in the Bible? Why do you think it is said so often? When is it said last?
God means for these verses to encourage you. What are some of your favorite promises from God in the Bible? What makes the promises so special to you?
Share your favorite promises with others to both encourage your own heart and to encourage others.
