This morning we are going to continue a series that we started last Sunday and we're calling it the Bible in eight verses. The Bible in eight verses we are walking through the whole Bible story and trying to make eight pit stops along our way and just tell the whole story of the Bible. And we've already made two of those pit stops already last Sunday. We began in Genesis 3 15 where we saw first the creation of the world, but then God doing something interesting after the fall of man. After sin enters the world, God says he's going to create enmity inside the world. And we talked about how essentially the idea there was that God was competing for the affection, for the loyalty, for the desire of mankind. That when Satan said I'm going to try to get in this fight for the desire of man, God said I'm entering into the fight as well. And so that that was Genesis 3 15 and also the first allusion to the coming Messiah of how he would bruise Satan's head and Satan would bruise his heel. And then we made a big jump because after that we went all the way to Deuteronomy and it might surprise you at first thought that Deuteronomy was on the list of eight. However, Deuteronomy is one of the most quoted Old Testament books in your New Testament. Jesus quoted exclusively from Deuteronomy when he was tempted by Satan and I think it made some sense once you saw our text in Deuteronomy 6 because it was where Moses tells the essential truth that there is one God and he wants all of your devotion, he wants your heart and your soul and all of your might. And so we started out with the beginning of the world and then essentially the beginning of this new nation before they were going into the conquest. And now this morning we're going to make another big jump. We just have one more text in the Old Testament in our series and that text is going to come from Jeremiah. So if you turn your Bibles to Jeremiah chapter 31, Jeremiah chapter 31 holds in it one of the most significant passages in your Bible. It is the one place that explicitly references what we call the new covenant. If you want to go somewhere in your Bible to see where the Old Testament talked about the new covenant, Jeremiah 31 is the place you go. This is the text. And so what we're going to do first is we'll just read the text together and then I want us to kind of get an idea of how we got here before we explore this new covenant. So in Jeremiah chapter 31, let's begin reading in verse 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, 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, "for this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days," declares the Lord, "I will put my law within them. I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God and they shall be my people, 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." Of course, this prophecy had to deal with the return of Israel from exile, but we know now on this side of the cross that this is a prophecy for the church. This is a prophecy for God's people, and it was only fulfilled ultimately in God's people. And so while we're thinking about this great passage, I want us to start with just how we got here. How did we get to Jeremiah chapter 31? There's a great irony in the book of Jeremiah. We could rightly call the book of Jeremiah a book of judgment. Jeremiah is all about the coming judgment that is coming on the southern nation of Judah, about destruction that's going to come to Jerusalem. Jeremiah all throughout the book is giving prophecies of doom. And right in the middle of the book, there is one of the greatest prophecies of hope. Jeremiah 31 and the new covenant. And I hope what you see in this is that really it's just the Genesis story happening again. It's really just dressed up the new clothes because here Jeremiah is looking at a people that were supposed to be God's people, a people that God had done everything for them in order for them to follow him. But here's Jeremiah, and he's walking throughout the city, and he's looking for one good man and he can't find one, and he's walking throughout the city, and he sees idols in the streets of God's city, and he goes right outside the city, and he'll find the people sacrificing their children to a pagan God. But right in the middle of all of that, God says, "I'm not finished with you, I'm still your God." And it's the same story we saw in the garden where man sins against their God after he's done everything for them, and what does he do right in the middle of the curses he's pronouncing in Genesis 3? He gives you a prophecy of hope because God wasn't done with his people, and he still not done with his people in Jeremiah chapter 31. And so what he's continued to do throughout Israel's history is to send them prophets to remind them, to point them back to the original covenant that they made with their God. They need to go backwards if they're going to go forward, and Jeremiah is in that very same situation. He is coming to the people, to remind the people of the covenant that they made with their God. The people are resisting Jeremiah, the northern nation of Israel has already been taken away into exile. And likely we have a problem kind of appreciating the weight of that because they were no more. We have in our minds the people are going to come back at some point, but the northern nation was gone. Their covenant was over with God. God had cast them out, and they weren't coming back. And now Jeremiah is in Judah, in God's city in Jerusalem, and we're thinking, "How could things get any worse?" We started with one man named Abram that God made some promises with, and now all the way down the line, we've come to Judah and to Jerusalem, and God's people are just hanging on by a thread. There's just a couple tribes left in the southern nation. How could things get any worse? The answer is if Judah also slips into idolatry, and if they also forsake their God. And so the anxiety is high, and it gets even higher because in Jeremiah he is telling us at the beginning of the book, and throughout the book, that not only is judgment possible, but now it's imminent. Judgment is coming for Judah, and so we commonly call Jeremiah the weeping prophet. But here in our text in Jeremiah 31 he's not crying tears, sorrow. He's crying tears of joy because God is going to do something new with this nation. He's going to give them a new covenant. And so what I want us to do when we start thinking about this new covenant is first to think about the need, the need for this covenant. There was something that needed to happen for Israel, for Judah. It's not just restoration, it's more than that. There's something new that they need. They need a new exodus as Jeremiah alludes to in 31. They need a new active redemption, they need a new covenant. And really the need for the covenant comes because of what the people had done to their God. He says this in our text, he says it this way, that the people had broken the covenant that they made with God. They agreed that we are going to be your people. We trust you and we give you our loyalty, and we're going to fight. God was faithful to his end of the bargain, but the people were not. And so the need of the new covenant comes from the sin of the people. Then as we're going to see in our text this morning, it's not just a trivial thing. It is something that breaks relationship with your God. And that's the reason why there's a need for this new covenant. The Hebrew writer will pick up on this idea in Hebrews that it's not the covenant that was the problem. We tend to have quite a negative look on the law that the law was the issue, but that's not what the New Testament writers tell. It wasn't the law. It was the people that were the issue. God found fault with them. They are the ones that broke covenant. And so that's why there's a need for a new covenant. Sin, as we've already seen in Genesis, always leads exile. Sin isolates you. We understand this even just from our day to day interactions with people. What happens the moment you tell someone to lie? When you start lying to your family, when you start lying to your spouse, when you start lying to your children, that relationship starts to grow apart. You're worried about them figuring out your lie. So you separate yourself and you feel guilty about your lie. So you separate yourself or it's any other type of sin that you commit. And then you're worried now that I've committed the sin because of my pride or because of my anger, because whatever else it is, I want to separate myself from that person. So I'm not close to them anymore. So they won't find out or they won't feel the effects. By the way, that's just Genesis on repeat again. That's what happened to Adam and Eve and then Cain. So sin isolates you. It exiles you. And the same thing has happened for Israel. Now because of their sin, there is exile and because of that exile, there is a need for a new covenant. But the question for Israel is how are they going to fix this mess? How are they going to get back to their God? How are they going to solve this issue of them going into exile that Jeremiah has told them is imminent now? The answer is not. Did you notice in our text throughout the pronouns that are used here, God says, I am going to do this. It is going to be my covenant. You are going to know me. Yes, the people are going to have a place in this interaction. They have a part in it. But this is all about God driving this relationship. The only reason God's people are going to be his people again is because God is doing something. God is acting again, just like he did in Genesis 3. God is going to solve this mess. And we see this idea that even though he is going to solve things, there are consequences for what Israel has done. There is a reason they must go into exile. In fact, because of who God is, he must bring them into exile. And actually, he has already given us this indication at the beginning of the book of Jeremiah. I want you to turn to Jeremiah chapter 1, right, when we first see Jeremiah being called as a prophet, God tells Jeremiah exactly what he is going to do with this nation. But Jeremiah is going to prophesy to the nation and Jeremiah 1 verse 10, it's a key text for the book, he says, "See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant." God is going to overthrow their nation, his people. He's going to cast them out in order to build them up. Yes, God will let his people suffer, but he's not forgotten his people. And because of who he is, he must judge their sin, he must send them into exile. And so the question now is, okay, for those that are going into exile, those that will go to Babylon, those that will be separated from the God, how are they going to get back? This is the question that's been our question throughout this biblical story so far. We're cast out of the garden in Genesis 3, and how in the world are we going to get back to our God? How will we get out of exile? And the answer in Jeremiah 31 is a new relationship. God is a God that desperately wants relationship. He wants relationship with his people. He's wanted relationship with his people throughout Israel's history. But because of what God's...of God having relationship with his people, because God can't simply ignore sin. God, it's against his nature to ignore sin. It's against who he is. If you had to describe for someone or point in your Bible and show someone who God is, where would you go? Maybe a good answer would be I would show them an event, and that's probably would be the best answer, the best route to take, and so I would turn to one of my gospels. But if you had to give a description, if you had to point to some words about who God is, I wouldn't be turning to the New Testament in my Bible. I would actually be turning to Exodus, and that's what I want you to do with me right now. Let's turn to Exodus chapter 34. This is a text that was a candidate for one of the eight, didn't quite make the cut, but I can't help but take a nod to it here. Exodus chapter 34. What is happening in this text is that the golden cap and an incident has happened. The people have already agreed to be loyal to their God, but right from the get-go, they turned their back on him, and so God essentially says he's done with Israel, but Moses interseeds. And now the 10 commandments, the tablets are broken. God gives Moses some new tablets, and then he says this. Exodus 34, beginning in verse 5. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him, that is Moses, and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the Father on the children and the children children to the third and fourth generation. And Moses quickly bowed his head for the earth and worshiped. This is who God is, and this is why we love God. We love God because of who God is. And Exodus 34 is telling us exactly who God is. This is the place where God himself tells you what kind of character he has. And he begins by telling us that he is incredibly merciful. He is incredibly patient. He is incredibly loving, even though he didn't have to be. Sometimes we have in our head that the God of this universe had to be an all loving God. It didn't have to be that way, but that's your reality. God is trying to communicate that in Exodus 34. I am the almighty God that made everything. The idea of being a gentle giant doesn't do it justice. He could be whatever he wants to be, but his character is one of love and patience and mercy. And so that's why we love them. We might expect that kind of text to come in our New Testament. It kind of sounds like Jesus. I like that Jesus person. He sounds like that. But in my Old Testament, it seems like lots of times God is being angry and judgmental. I mean, he's sending Judah into exile in Jeremiah's day. But there's another reason why we love God. It's not just because of his love and his mercy. It's also because of his justice and his judgment. Maybe we can illustrate it this way. If there was a father that had a child and he knew that child was hanging out with other children that were addicted to drugs and he knew that they were getting close to each other and he'd even found maybe evidence of drug use in his child's things. And he knows that the relationship is growing closer. He's spending time with them and this is influencing him. What would we say if the father just ignored that? Or if the father said, I want to be merciful. I don't want to judge those kids. I don't want to be hard on my child. And so I'm just going to let that go. Would we say that's a good father? No, we would say he doesn't care about his child. We would say he doesn't really love his child. That's not mercy. Let's illustrate it another way. You have a dirty politician, if you will. And they've been laundering money and they've been committing adultery on their wife. And they come back from doing that one night and they're drunk and they're in their car and they hit someone else head on. And they kill every single person in the other car, but they're fine. And through the investigation of looking at the accident, people end up finding out the extortion that the politician has been involved in because of the papers in his car. And they see from his phone that he's been in an adulterous relationship. And here's the thing. He's not sorry about it at all. But what if he was close to the president? And the president said, you know what? I see everything that's been done, but I'm just going to pardon this. I'm going to sweep it under the rug. I'm just going to have mercy. Would we see that? Is mercy? No. It would be injustice. Ignoring sin is not something that is good. Ignoring sin is unjust. And we recognize that when it comes to other people. But sometimes we have a hard time recognizing that when it comes with the almighty God in his creation. We love God because he is merciful and because he is patient and because he is loving. But we also love God because he is just. And so yes, when people ask the question, how could God bring the flood? How could God bring the conquest? How could God exile his own people? The real question is, why did it take God so long to do it? How could he wait so long to do these things? How would we feel if God waited for a hundred years to save someone? And every single thing they thought was evil all the time. That's exactly what he did, begging them to return for a hundred years through Noah. How would we feel if the politician got a hundred years? We would be screaming injustice. And we look at the conquest of Canaan and we ask, how could God do this thing? But the real question is, how could God wait 400 years to do this thing? Go back and read Genesis 15. And this is the point we're making. What God is doing to Israel is not injustice. It is not hateful. It is love. What Canaan was going to do to Israel to God's people, God knew it was dangerous. There was a danger of the Canaanites getting them hooked on some pretty hard stuff. It's called idolatry and pagan gods and taking them away from their father. And God knew that. And so he judged those nations. And because they committed idolatry themselves, God is judging Israel and judging Judah. And that's the reason why we love him, because he is merciful and because he is just and because he doesn't just ignore them. But because of that, there has to be something God does to have relationship. He must make covenants. You can't have relationship with God without having covenants. The only way anyone in your Bible has a relationship with God is because of covenants. A covenant is more than just a legal document. We struggle with this idea sometimes. A covenant is, it's a bond that increases love and that increases trust and that improves relationship. But we tend to think this way about the first covenant, that we would sum up the first covenant at Sinai this way. God brought law, but we could sum it up another way. At Mount Sinai in the first covenant, God brought love. Actually, that's really the way God will describe it. And we have a hard time kind of mixing these ideas of love and love and putting them together. What a covenant does is it blends the idea of law and love. It blends the idea. A covenant is more intimate than just a legal document. But it is also more binding than just saying I love you. It is a blend of law and it is a blend of love. And we actually get this idea today because we see it in relationships we call marriages. It's like a marriage. We don't usually call marriages covenants, but that's really what they are. It's a blend of law and love. And that's exactly what God through Jeremiah said he did with this first covenant. I was like a husband to them. God was marrying Israel at Mount Sinai. That's what he does in covenants. It's like a marriage type of relationship. A non-covenant type of love will say this. I don't need any kind of document or any kind of agreement. I just know my partner loves me. Covenant love says. I am so committed to you. I love you so much. I am willing to make the ultimate commitment. I'm willing to write it down and I'm willing to live it forever, even when it gets hard. That's covenant love. Bows and documents don't make a marriage less intimate. They strengthen it. It avoids the idea of what we might call consumer love. And this is the problem God's people have had all along the biblical story. It's the problem that we can have today that you only love when it's convenient for you. When all your needs are met, or actually sometimes when all your needs are met, that means maybe I don't need you anymore. And so it's just whatever satisfies me, it's like shopping on the internet. I'm not loyal to anyone brand, so whatever fits me at the time. That's exactly what Israel has done over the years throughout this story. In order to combat that, God is making a covenant. And now he's making a new covenant, a new relationship, a new marriage with his people. God is desperately trying to marry his people. There's one other thing I want to point out about this relationship before we move on. It's also individual. You might remember that the first covenant about Sinai essentially was made with a nation. All the people agreed together. God was up on the mountain with Moses and he spoke down and the people agreed. All is one. They come up on the mountain individually, actually none of them did. It was a national covenant. Yes, individuals had parts in it, but this was something God did with the nation of Israel. But now Jeremiah tells us in Jeremiah 31, "No longer are you born into this covenant." No longer are you just on the eighth day circumcised and have the sign of the covenant. And then later you're taught about who God is. And later you're taught about this covenant community you were born into. Now God is making a marriage covenant with each individual person, each individual. He's making a covenant with you and with you and with you and with me, each of us individually. It has nothing to do with what your fathers did. It's actually what the people are complaining about just before our text in Jeremiah 31. It has everything to do with your relationship with God. This is an individual covenant. And what we see in this text is that that relationship is primarily again driven by God. The reason why this new covenant is coming is primarily because God has a desire for his people, but there's also a desire that's going to be created in his people. They are going to have a new kind of motivation in the covenant, a new kind of desire for their God. Again, we probably kind of tend to have a negative idea of the law, of the law of Moses, of that first covenant. We tend to think that, you know, it was just so hard for the people to live by faith because there was all these rules. That law was so nasty and I'm so glad that God got rid of that thing. You might need to pump the brakes and remember God created the thing. It was God's law. And even your New Testament writers that are on the other side of the cross will look back at the law with the gleam in their eye, all we'll say it was holy and it was good. Again the problem wasn't with the law, it was with the people. Some people have made the statement that the law of Moses is kind of like prison bars. It kept you with God by just keeping you from doing things. And the law of Christ is like a magnet that it keeps you to God by pulling you in. I would take some issue with that. I'm pretty sure when God rips you out of Egypt and rips you through a sea and says I'm going to be your God of all the people in the world and goes to Mount Sinai and shows you who he is, that's pretty magnetic. God was showing Israel who he was but they weren't motivated to follow him because throughout their history they continued to forget about who God was. But all along the way the motivation was there, it was supposed to be there. Moses told them in Deuteronomy 10, this is what God wants from you. He wants you to circumcise your heart, circumcise your heart and he doesn't wave his finger and scowl at them and say you better circumcise your heart than he tells them before in Deuteronomy 10. This is why you do this because remember what God has done for you. Out of the whole world he chose you Israel. He loved your fathers. God loved you and so you loved God. That's always been the motivation. That was always the motivation under the law, that they followed the law because God had shown them love. But by Jeremiah's time the people had lost that. They had lost that motivation. Maybe one of the best illustrations of that comes in a story we find about King Josiah. Because King Josiah was one of those kings, you write your list of kings and he gets a little smiley face by his name because he was a good king and he was, he was a really good king in many ways. There's actually a description of King Josiah in 2 Kings 23 of how it's the Deuteronomy 6 language that he loved the God of his fathers with all his heart and soul and might. Josiah did good things and here's what he did. He found something that was lost which might surprise us, the book of the covenant. The people somehow had lost the law and so they found the book of the covenant and Josiah decides to create a reform. I'm going to renew the covenant. He says I'm going to follow it and all the people along with him say we are going to follow it. But despite all of the efforts of King Josiah, the reform is only skin deep because as soon as Josiah dies, the people slip back into idolatry and immorality. They didn't really take to this new covenant. They didn't have the true motivation that was internal in order to follow the covenant. And so we might look at that and we might think, you know, what the Josiah story tells us is that law just doesn't work, that just pointing at people and telling them to follow the law of God, that's just not the way you're supposed to do things. And really what the whole thing about the new covenant is, is that we're getting rid of law. We're done with that law stuff. Now let's just have love. The new covenant is just about love. We've already talked about how that isn't a real dichotomy. That's also not what your text says. Do you notice what Jeremiah 31 said? It's not weakening the idea of law. It's not throwing the law away, actually it's doing just the opposite. It's heightening the place of law. Now the law will not be written on stone. Now the law is going to be written on human hearts. God cares about his law and he cares about his people following his law so much that he wants it written on their heart. And this brings us to the truth of really what's new about the new covenant. That it's not really the change of law itself. Yes, there was a change in law. But the real change in this new covenant is the desire from the people to follow the law as they always should have done it. It's going to be a new motivation that the people have that they don't need something external out there to convince them to follow the law. They don't need a profit that's yelling at them to follow the law. It's going to be something that comes from inside them. That's going to be the new motivation. And here's the question for us to finish this morning. Where is that motivation going to come from? Where does that motivation stem from? How are the people going to be motivated to do these things? And just quickly, we're going to talk about a few things. The first is that what this new covenant brings, it hits on something that is one of our greatest desires. We desire for things, the last. We desire for love, the last. We desire for the things we care about, the last. And for what we do to count for something, but here's the truth of things, nothing lasts. This world is killing you. Sometimes you don't really feel that full effect because it takes 80 years, 90 years for it to kill us. I mean, you go to Mars and you're going to die within a few seconds. I mean, on earth, you get a couple of years, but it's killing you. Everyone on this earth is going to die and save the Lord coming back. This earth, this world is against you. It is killing you. We weren't made for this world. We were made for the garden. And then the world was marred by sin. We're not made for this world and we lose that sometimes. We get so comfortable with a world of sin and a world of things that really aren't made for us. And here's what that reality tells us, is that everything you love and everyone you love, you will lose them, it will not last. I love my wife and I love my daughter. And I love her new child. I haven't even seen yet. I will lose all of them. I might go before them. They might go before me, but it will not last. Love does not last here. And it's because this world is in our home, we're in exile, excuse me. We are in exile. We were made for the garden. We were made to be with God. This is not our home. We are not meant for this place. And so what this new covenant does is it shows us that we can get back home. We can get back home with God. And here's the thing. It's never going to end. We don't have time to read it. What comes just after in Jeremiah 31, after the prophecy we read, is this is what God does. He essentially says, Judah, my people, this is when God is going to quit loving you, when the sun turns off, when the earth quits spinning. That's what I'll give up on Israel. That's when I'll say you're going back into exile. The point of the new covenant is exile, the idea of exile, the cycle of exile is finished. There's no more exile. There will be no more exile for God's people if they're with him in his covenant. And so now things can last. And you might say, well, Jance, you know, you're really just trying to make us depressed while we're on this earth. Everything is, you know, terrible. No, there's good in this world, but it's the good that Jeremiah talked about in Jeremiah 29. The people who are going to Babylon into exile, and this is what Jeremiah tells them. Don't decrease, increase, flourish, build houses, have families, but this is why you do it. Not because you're comfortable with Babylon, not because you're comfortable with exile. It's because your hope is outside of exile, because your hope is of leaving exile, it's of getting home. That's why we flourish while we're on this earth. Not because we're comfortable here, but because we're now we're going home. And here's the last part I took too much time as well. The final motivation that comes from this new covenant comes from the price that has to be paid for the covenant. Jeremiah doesn't explicitly tell us this in the text, but the most powerful part of the prophecy comes at the very end, at the last part of verse 34, where God says, "I am going to forgive them. I am going to forgive, and I'm going to forget." And here's the thing, because God is merciful, and because God is just, and because God can't just ignore sin, there had to be a price that was going to be paid. God had to redeem His people. That's how they were going to get home. He had to redeem them. And so we look at the blessings of Jeremiah 31, but we can't forget the cost. For God to give the greatest gift, He had to give the greatest price. And this is how we did it. God Himself left His home, and He became exiled, so He could take His people out of exile and bring them home. God took what we should have. God took what we lived through so that we could live like He lives. And the greatest gift comes through the cross. Exodus 34 tells us who God is. Jeremiah 31 reminds us of who God is, and the cross makes it unforgettable. That is how the law is written on your hearts. There are people today that wear the name Christianity, and they say this whole idea of the new covenant is God has to act on you miraculously, that He has to do something outside of your free will. That is taking away the power of the cross. The power of the cross is He can take rebels like you and me, people that have chosen exile, and you can look at the cross and it will change you. It will melt your heart. It will soften you because it's not a prophet screaming at you from the city streets. You are God hanging on a cross begging you to be in a marriage relationship with you. And that changes our hearts because of the price, because of this new covenant, you have a new heart. And you can serve God the way you were supposed to always serve God, not with something external motivating you, but you crave to talk with Him and you crave to learn about Him and you crave to live for Him. That's the new covenant. That was God's plan for the beginning. In the rest of our series, we're going to see how that plays out. The price that God pays, the way that He teaches us to live in this new covenant. Thank you for connecting with us this morning. We're so thankful that you were able to do that. If you have questions, we'd love to have the opportunity to talk to you. You can contact us at www.thebibleway.com or questions@thebibleway.com. We'd love to have you in person, come if you can, but thank you for connecting with us. We'll see you in the next episode. Anywhere else? Anywhere else? Please visit the youtube channel at www.thebibleway.com. You can also visit the youtube channel at www.thebibleway.com. You can also visit the youtube channel at www.thebibleway.com.
