The Unbreakable Covenant
When growing up, kids often develop a friendship with a particular person. “We will be best friends forever”, you hear them saying and they make all sorts of promises and covenants: “I will always be around”, “You can always count on me”. But inevitably they grow up, go to college and the promises are not kept. Humans forget, humans change and they break their covenants.
What would it take to make an unbreakable covenant? Is that even possible? A covenant where the promises and terms are fully kept and never broken?
Today is the last message in the series about God making promises through covenants. Every week we learned about the covenant with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Israel and last week David. All those covenants were, in one way or another, broken by the human parties.
Today, we will talk about the ultimate covenant between God and his people, a covenant that is unbreakable, a covenant that has no replacement, and no successor. All the other covenants that we learned about are superseded and consummated by what the prophet Jeremiah refers to as the new covenant. And we will see how this new covenant is ultimate and unbreakable. We can bank on it, putting our full confidence and hope in the promise-keeping God.
Would you please open your bibles in Jeremiah chapter 31. Jeremiah is right after Isaiah. We will read verses 31 through 34
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.”
Let us pray.
Jeremiah here speaks of two covenants, a covenant he made in the past with Israel. We will call that the OLD covenant. He also speaks of a NEW covenant that he is about to establish with them, a covenant that is different from the OLD covenant, and all the other covenants that we learned about, in that this new covenant is final, definitive and unbreakable.
We will divide this message in two parts:
Part 1: The old covenant (v. 31-32) Part 2: The new covenant (v. 33-34)
1. The Old Covenant (v. 31-32)
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”
As you can read, this word is directly declared by the Lord, and it makes a promise for the future: “the days are coming” he says when I (that is God) will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
Now, in order to understand the full force of this prophecy and the promise that comes from God, we need to consider the historical context, the situation in which the people of God receive this promise from God.
For instance, notice that he says he will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Why does he mention these two names, Israel and Judah? What is the significance of them?
When this prophecy is announced, the kingdom is divided in two because Solomon had broken the terms of the covenant promised to his father David. His disobedience produced internal conflict and eventual separation and division, but that was just the beginning of their problems.
Let’s keep reading verse 32
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”.
This soon-to-be-replaced covenant is the one that God established when he rescued the Israelites from their bondage to the Egyptians. If you recall, this act of liberation was a pretty extraordinary and magnificent event. God powerfully subdued a proud Pharaoh, who stubbornly refused to let Israel go to serve and worship God. God sent the plagues and later opened up the sea to provide a way of escape for his people. Then he restored the flow of the waters to smash down the Egyptian army.
In light of such a demonstration of unstoppable power and miracles you would think that the Israelites would easily trust, worship and honor the God who saved them. But they didn’t
Even as Moses receives from God the ten commandments, Israel is already breaking this covenant, worshiping a man-made golden calf.
The covenant said: “You shall have no other gods before me”! “You shall not make for yourself an image of any created thing, you should not bow down before them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God”! But that is exactly what they do, they break the covenant as soon as it is established. They exchange the magnificent glory of the omnipotent God with the image of an ox, an animal that eats grass! How low, how offensive, how atrocious unfaithfulness!
Think about that for a moment. How would you respond if you were the offended party in this relationship?
Imagine you are an influential, wealthy, powerful man, and you set your eyes on a woman who comes from an unimpressive family with no wealth nor status. However, you choose her and decide to love her, and marry her. You take good care of her. You buy her new clothes and jewelry. Bless her with expensive treatments and spas, invite her to nice restaurants, take her to beautiful and exotic places. But most importantly, you greatly respect her and honor her. You are committed to her to keep the covenant you made with her. You are intentionally, and singularly devoted to her. And yet, as soon as you marry her, she is unfaithful to you, and she betrays you with an old boyfriend, a wicked man who abused her physically and emotionally.
You gave her everything. You could have chosen any other woman with so many virtues, and yet you chose her. Although you were her husband, she chose the other man. How would you feel? What would you think about her? What would you do? Abandon her? Divorce her? Get her arrested?
I did not make that analogy up. That is exactly what God says: “though I was their husband”, though I treated them well, though I saved and was kind to them, they broke my covenant, they were atrociously unfaithful.
Do you think we are different from them? Do you think we are faithful to God and deserve his favor?
This old covenant that we are talking about is relatively simple: obey and respect the terms of the covenant and you will be ok. Love God with all your being and love others as yourself, and God will grant you happiness, provision and a blessed life. But break the terms of the covenant and you are in big trouble. Your life will be chaotic, unbearable, hopeless, tough, miserable.
The Israelites broke their part of the covenant over and over again. They were unfaithful. They were unable to keep their side, and they paid for their disobedience. They broke the covenant God made with their fathers when God took them out of Egypt and they broke every single covenant God initiated.
We saw last week that God promised David that God would raise up from his descendants a king who “shall build a house for my name and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever”. Now Solomon, David’s son, built a house for God, he started great, he asked for wisdom, he first honored and worshiped God, and God prospered his kingdom abundantly, it was the golden age for Israel.
But unfortunately, Solomon did not remain faithful to God. The story repeats again. He had hundreds of foreign wives and concubines who corrupted him and led him to worship false gods. And as a result God divided Israel and eventually gave them into the hand of their enemies who hated them and ruled over them. They were scattered and became slaves again.
Their situation turned really bad. If you would like to have a picture of their situation, think about the holocaust of last century. Their children were killed, their women were abused, their men were humiliated. Because of breaking the covenant, Israel loses the promised land, they lose their kings, their freedom and the favor from God. They are desperate, discouraged, defeated and forsaken.
It is in this moment of their history where they hear this word of great hope in Jeremiah 31:31
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel”
Yes, they had been unfaithful to God, and they had broken his covenant. But God was not done with them. He declares that he is about to establish a NEW covenant, not like the covenant they broke. But he is about to establish a new, unbreakable covenant.
Now, we can observe a pattern here: God makes a covenant with his people, and God remains faithful to his side of the agreement, but his people do not keep their part, they are unfaithful, they break the terms of the covenant. They forget about God and his law, they reject him, they dishonor him again and again.
To stop this vicious cycle something radical has to happen. If they are going to have any chance, any hope, a new type of covenant has to be established. A covenant that does not depend primarily on the obedience of human beings. A new covenant that is unbreakable, unchangeable and ultimate.
That takes us to part 2
2. The New Covenant (v. 33-34)
Jeremiah 31:33 “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”.
In this new covenant, God himself puts his law within his people. He writes it down and engraves the law in the hearts of the people he chooses to save. They will not be able to forget the law, because it will reside inside, it will be written in their hearts. Do you remember how God wrote the ten commandments with his own finger on tablets of stone? Now he himself is going to write in the hearts of his people.
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts”, says the Lord
With what purpose?
This is the goal: “so I will be their God, and they shall be my people”. Because the law will now be written in their hearts, they will honor God as the only God, and they will be known because they have him as their God: they are his people, the people, the nation, the chosen of the only true God.
Jeremiah 31:34 “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,”
They will not have to be taught about God, they will already know him. Because the knowledge of him will reside in their hearts. Isn’t that amazing? From the little to the great, from the feeble to the strong, they will all know the king, because they will be given a new heart with the truth of God inscribed, stamped on it.
And then the last sentence, in verse 34
“For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more”
What creates enmity between humans and God? It is sin! It is the inclination of the human heart to desire to be like God or to replace him with our own convenient version of god with a little “g”. It is the sickness and cancer of our hearts that leads us to reject him as GOD. We are not passive, we are not neutral, we are rebels, we are sinners! We do not honor God as he deserves, and because of that we are doomed to be cursed. We all break his law, all of us. Not even one is right before him.
Now, this is God’s master plan, this is his new covenant, this is his ultimate solution. Because it is sin and iniquity that creates a grand-canyon-sized gap between him and us. He says, in my new covenant, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
How can that be possible? How is it that God, who is infinitely holy and cannot just ignore sin and iniquity, would be able to forgive our iniquities and remember our sin no more, ever?
Before I answer those questions, let me take a detour.
As I was preparing this message I was thinking about my own story on how God saved me. I grew up in a religious, nominal Catholic environment. Most people of my home country used to be Catholic by tradition. But some of my uncles and aunts became believers in the Gospel of Christ at a young age, and they took me to their meetings. I had a genuine relationship with God when I was 9 or so. Eventually my parents also became genuine Christians, but I got into my rebellious teenage years and I decided to stop going to church and pursuing God.
I was not neutral. With time I became more hostile to Christians, including my parents. I thought that Christianity was for weak people and uneducated minds. I saw my parents and others still having tons of trouble, so I judged them and considered them a bunch of hypocrites. As I attended the university, the secular intellectual atmosphere virtually erased the beliefs about God that I had formed at a young age. When people tried to tell me about the Gospel, I used to tell them that I had tried that path before and it did not work. I felt sorry about their delusion.
I was a good student and then a successful professional. I was convinced I didn’t need God. Even more, at my lowest points I really thought that God was nothing but the product of the imagination of people who needed to believe in something. But he did not really objectively exist.
I had a great job and a promising career. I had made it and I was proud of my accomplishments, and yet I felt empty and miserable. I could not understand why I felt that way when I had everything that the world pursues to find happiness.
I was not seeking God, oh no. I was openly and actively rejecting him, and I was eager to prove Christians wrong, and yet, despite my rebellion, my sin, and my desire to dishonor God, he was patiently pursuing me. His irresistible, omnipotent grace triumphed over my rebellion. I was at war against God, but he won! He opened my eyes and made me realize my desperate need for him!
In John 6 we find Jesus quoting Jeremiah 31, and saying:
John 6:44-45. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me
I was running away from God, but the Father drew me to Jesus, just as Jeremiah said, God taught me and revealed my need for Jesus.
I broke his law multiple times in multiple ways, but his steadfast faithfulness, his promises, his unbreakable covenant prevailed!
He wiped out my iniquities and sin! How is that possible? How can God devise an unbreakable covenant? As human beings we all fail, we all break our side of the old covenants. We all do! So what is our hope?
In Luke 22 we find Jesus again
Luke 22:19-20. And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 20 And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood”
Jesus brought the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 to fruition. He gave his body, he shed his blood, he gave his life, he paid the price for my sin and my iniquity, he took on his body the just wrath from God that my sin deserved, he consumed it all, he placated the wrath of God against my sin, so I would not have to pay the penalty myself. He made it possible for God to forgive my iniquities and remember my sin no more. Not because he ignored them, but because Jesus carried them, carried my sin on himself and was punished in my place so I may go free. He also transferred to me his perfect obedience and righteousness, so that when God looks at me, he sees the purity and perfection of his Son! Alleluia!
That is the new covenant, that is the ultimate covenant, that is the unbreakable covenant, the God of the universe took our sin and shame upon himself, so that our salvation would not depend on us, so that we would not continue breaking the covenants again and again and again. He terminated the cycle, he solved the dilemma. He draws me to himself, he teaches me about my need for him, he saves me.
Right now, he is drawing some of you, he is calling you, listen to his voice. Turn around, repent from your pursuit of false gods, your pursuit of independence, and accept his free gift of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and his work on the cross, enter into his unbreakable covenant, and forever he will be your God and you will be part of his redeemed people, as he forgives all your iniquities and remembers your sin no more, never ever again.
If you are already a believer, I pray that as you see the magnificent faithfulness of God through his covenants, and in particular in his new and final covenant in Jesus, you find confidence and hope in his promises. No matter what difficulties you are facing in life, God will hold you fast, he will remain faithful, he will get you to the end, because his promises do not depend fundamentally on us, but on his omnipotent, unbreakable, unchangeable, and final covenant in his Son, Jesus Christ.