31 Jeremiah 31:31-34 Yes, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers, when I took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant of 33 mine, although I was a husband to them, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put my law in their minds, and I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34No longer will each one teach his neighbor, or each one teach his brother, saying, “Know the LORD,” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD, for I will forgive their guilt, and I will remember their sins no more. If you are a person of a certain age, you likely think that everything in the past is better than it is today. The music was better. The sun shined more brightly. The sky seemed bluer. Life seemed so much less complicated than it is now. That’s why people talk about the “good old days” all the time and they really wish they could go back. If you are younger than that, you likely think that everything today is better than it was in the past. You can’t imagine how your parents survived without high speed Internet coming directly into their homes. Today’s phones are so much faster and more feature-rich than those from just a year or two ago. Things like the COVID vaccines are miracles of modern science. Who wouldn’t love today? Well, you know what? Neither side is right. The good old days are not all they were cracked up to be. Some of those classic cars look amazing, but their mileage can be measured in gallons to the mile and heaven help you if you are in an accident. Today’s phones are technological marvels, but the old phones that hung on the wall couldn’t get hacked and didn’t keep track of our every movement. In this text the Prophet Jeremiah gives us an example where we definitely want something that is new rather than something that is old: God’s covenant. New Is Better. It will last, it will teach us, and it will forgive us. A synonym for covenant would be “contract.” Think of when GM or one of the other Big Three automakers negotiate a contract with the UAW. Both sides go back and forth, giving up a little and getting a little back. Eventually they come to an agreement that neither side is completely happy with, but that they can live with, at least for the next several years anyway. Then the process repeats. There was no negotiation when God gave his old covenant with his people. It’s not like the Israelites could really offer God anything anyway. God gave that covenant through Moses on Mount Sinai. God formally set them apart as his own people, the people through whom he would send the Savior into the world. In exchange, God’s people promised to be faithful to him. Texts like this one show that the old covenant was never intended to last forever. It only was intended to last until Jesus would finally come into this world. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “So the law was our chaperone until Christ, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a chaperone.” God’s covenant was there to make sure that his promises would come true. The problem was that the Israelites couldn’t keep up on their end of the bargain. They repeatedly rebelled against him. Last week we had just one example of that in our Old Testament lesson. Even though God provided them with food every day they whined and complained about it. Actually it was more than whining. They were basically accusing God of not caring about them at all. By Jesus time, people had gone in the complete opposite direction which really wasn’t any better. They acted as if they could keep God’s Law well enough on their own. The Pharisees actually thought that God’s Law wasn’t sufficient. They made up hundreds of extra laws. They felt that they were really God’s people because not only had they kept his law but they kept their own too. They missed the entire point of the old covenant. Now, you could still see God’s love for his people in that old covenant. There have been some people who have thought that the Israelites would have been one of the healthiest nations in the world because of the laws God gave about what they could eat and how to deal with various infectious diseases. That wasn’t the main part of the covenant by any means but it still shows God’s love. Every aspect of their worship life pointed them ahead to their Savior. When they saw the high priest enter the Most Holy Place in the Temple, they were getting a picture of how Jesus speaks to the Father on our behalf. When they brought a sacrifice, they were getting a picture of how their Savior would be sacrificed for them on the cross. Even the civil laws served to keep them as his own special people. God says, “They broke that covenant of mine, although I was a husband to them, declares the LORD.” That’s a picture God uses throughout the Old Testament. He is a faithful, forgiving, patient husband and Israel was his unfaithful, rebellious, short tempered wife. God showered Israel with blessing on top of blessing, but they always wanted something else. Sound familiar? These words are recorded as a warning for us so that we don’t repeat their exact same mistakes. New Is Better. It will last and it will teach us. God said he would make this covenant with “the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.” After King Solomon’s death, the nation was split into two halves—the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. The thing is that by the time Jeremiah spoke these words the northern kingdom had been gone for well over 100 years—destroyed and deported by the Assyrians. So why in the world would God make a covenant with people who were no more? In Romans 9 the Apostle Paul made it clear that not everyone descended from Israel is Israel. It’s not a matter of having the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob flowing in your veins, but sharing the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So this new covenant would not just be for the nation of Israel, but it would be for the true Israel—everyone who knows and believes in the Savior that God has sent, his New Testament church. It is with those people that God makes a new covenant. This one is going to be completely one-sided. God will do everything. We will get all of the benefits. If God is going to do everything and we don’t have to do a thing, then why is a contract necessary? A one-sided contract doesn’t make any sense at all. Well, everything God does has a purpose and always involves love for us. God knows what we are like. He knows that we wonder, we worry, we question. When our consciences are screaming at us we doubt that God’s full and free forgiveness is really as full and free as he makes it out to be. So God not only promises, he also binds himself to a covenant. It is just further proof that God cannot and will not go back on his promises. He wants us to be absolutely, positively sure. God says, “34No longer will each one teach his neighbor, or each one teach his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me.” At first those words might seem to contradict the Great Commission where Jesus sends us out specifically to teach people. The point is that things will be different in the time of the New Testament church. God’s Old Testament people had the prophecies and promises. God’s New Testament people have the reality and the fulfillment. So when I get up into this pulpit every Sunday, what I preach probably isn’t going to surprise you. You might not know what text I’m going to preach on. You may have forgotten some of the details you learned in Confirmation class. But the basics will remain the same: law and gospel, sin and grace. Every week I’m going to point out how we have failed to obey God. Every week I’m going to show how Jesus obeyed perfectly and how he paid for our imperfection. God says, “I will be their God, and they will be my people.” I’ve got to be honest. I’m not sure why God would want us. The only thing we’ve ever really given to him is trouble. Yes, we bring our prayers, but he already knows everything and how he is going to deal with every situation. Yes, we bring our offerings, but God already owns everything in the world. After all, he made it. He gave us our money in the first place. So why does God want to be associated with us—and not just associated with us, welcome us into his family? Because he is God and that’s what he does. He loves us with the love of a perfect Father. He loves his children. That’s grace, isn’t it. It’s undeserved love. Because it is undeserved we know that it will always be ours. God himself has promised. God himself has bound himself by his new covenant. New Is Better. It will teach us and finally it will forgive us. There was no such thing as the Lenten season when the Prophet Jeremiah wrote these words. As a matter of fact, when Jeremiah wrote these words, Judah was about to cease to exist as a nation. Jerusalem would soon be torn to pieces, even God’s beautiful Temple. But with the eyes of faith, Jeremiah looked ahead 70 years to a day when God would bring his people back home. He looked ahead about 600 years to the day when God would keep his promise and the Savior would be born. In that way we are even more blessed than the Prophet Jeremiah, or even Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They just got to see their Savior from a distance—in pictures and in prophecies. We are blessed to see the reality. We see how Jesus went to the cross to pay the price for our sin. We see how Jesus rose from the dead to prove that he had conquered sin, death, and Hell. We see how Jesus ascended into heaven where he lives and rules over everything for the good of his people. This text ends with some of the most comforting words recorded anywhere in the Bible. First God says, “I will forgive their guilt.” The word translated “guilt” pictures something being twisted or perverted. Instead of following what God’s Word says, we twist his words to say whatever we want them to say. The word also implies the guilt that has earned God’s punishment. Think of a credit card. Every time you swipe that card at the gas station or the grocery store or a restaurant, the bank keeps track of that. At the end of the month you will get a bill with all of the transactions on it. You maybe only have a small minimum payment, but if you want to avoid any interest charges, you’ll have to pay the whole thing off. Our debt of sin to God was so great that we couldn’t even come close to paying it all off even if we live to be a thousand years old. So how can God just forgive this debt? He placed that debt, all that guilt on Jesus when he was on the cross. God punished him as if he was personally guilty of every sin that ever has or ever will be committed. Up to the time of Jeremiah, God was holding off punishment for the sins committed up to that point until Jesus came. When Jesus died he paid for every sin, past, present, and future. From the Bible we know that God is omniscient, that means, that he knows everything. Our memories are so spotty and unreliable. God has perfect, immediate recall of everything that has ever happened. So the guilt is gone, but how does God really feel about us? You might have forgiven someone who sinned against you at some point, but you might have a hard time trusting them after that. So God goes on to say, “I will remember their sins no more.” How is that possible? How can the God who knows everything just choose not to remember our sin? Since God is perfectly just and holy, it’s actually quite easy for him. The only reason for him to remember sin is if it remains unforgiven. Imagine all of our sins written down in a big book. Then all of those pages are covered in Jesus’ blood, making them illegible. So we might remember our sins. I’m sure that you’ve got some highlights (or maybe better lowlights) from your life that your conscience likes dredging up. When God thinks about you—and he always is—he doesn’t remember any of those things. When he looks at you, he sees someone just as perfect, just as holy, as Jesus himself is. Jesus took our sin. We get his perfection. New Is Better. It will last, it will teach us, and it will forgive us. It is pointless to debate whether the old days or these days are better. Both have their own unique set of challenges and both of them have been showered with God’s blessings. But God’s new covenant is the best thing ever. It was promised by the prophets, fulfilled by Jesus, and guaranteed forever.