Sunday School Curriculum Jeremiah 31:31-34 April 13, 2014 Introduction This week we begin a two-part Easter series called The Story, based out of Acts 13. In the LAUNCH series, one of the core passions of our church, that we elevated as defining who we are and how God wants to use us, is that we are passionate about biblical truth. We explained that a main implication of valuing biblical truth is recognizing that we are a part of God’s story. There is a temptation, when we read the Bible, to lapse into a mindset that what we are reading happened a long time ago, to people whose names we sometimes can’t even pronounce. Some of the places don’t even exist anymore. Our historical removal from the original setting of the Bible narrative can lull us into the dangerous misperception that there is a great distance between the figures of biblical narrative and our experience today, as though they are not related. There are some warning signs that we are being drawn toward that misperception. We begin to think things like, “Well, sure. But THEY are in the Bible. I’m trying to live my life now.” The other side of that coin is that we look down on the sinfulness of the biblical figures. We think that surely we would not have denied Jesus like Peter did. Or we wonder how the disciples could have been so blind to everything going on around them. Why did Adam and Eve bite that piece of fruit in the first place? I mean, they heard the voice of God! As we let our minds wander down these types of thought processes, we inadvertently allow ourselves to slip away from identifying with the Story. Instead, it is critical that we gaze deeply into the pages of Scripture as the Spirit leads us so that we understand that the same bent toward sinfulness that is evident in all of these figures plagues us as well. We are unified by the same need for a Savior. There is one story, written by one Author, and we all play a role over the span of millennia. If we pay close attention as we read God’s Word, we can see periodic glimpses of God tying his story together – even starting as early as Genesis 3:15 with the first prophecy of the coming Christ. When we observe these points in Scripture that remind us that God holds all of time, from beginning to end, in the palm of his hand, we can understand in a profound way that we are all a part of the same story. What is more, that story was completed before the events recorded in Genesis 1:1 ever happened. Peter bears witness to such in 1 Peter 1:18 – 20. As Easter week approaches, we look at a passage this week that demonstrates the reach of God’s redemptive story, a story that we are all a part of - Jeremiah 31:31 – 34. 1 Biblical Background Jeremiah was called to be a prophet as a young man in 627 BC. Jeremiah’s ministry took place in the final days of the crumbling monarchy in the kingdom of Judah. His ministry to his own people was extremely difficult and filled with persecution. He endured ostracism of every kind, kinsmen conspiring to kill him, being dropped in a cistern and left for dead, and imprisonment. The book of Jeremiah is remarkable in the way Jeremiah interweaves the description of his soulful torment with the prophecies of God’s coming wrath. Jeremiah’s internal turmoil is more than understandable. The message he is commissioned to preach is one of judgment and conviction. He preaches of the coming fall of everything that represented God’s favor and covenant to the Jewish people: the land, the people, the king from the line of David, and the temple. He prophesied of the coming Babylonian exile. This was much more inflammatory than just telling his countrymen that bad days were ahead. He was preaching that God had commissioned him to tell them that God was going to publicly strip away their identity due to their sinfulness and idolatry. In over 40 years of public preaching and ministry, Jeremiah does not record a single convert. It is no wonder that Jeremiah is referred to as the “weeping prophet.” However, in the midst of tremendous sorrow and oppression that Jeremiah experiences, there is hope. Chapters 31 – 34 are referred to as the Book or Comfort or the Book of Consolation. Those chapters contain the promise of restoration of God’s people. God promises that, despite the horrific and treacherous unfaithfulness of Israel and Judah, they will be reunited in a new covenant as one people who will again share in the ceaseless faithfulness of holy God. The Text In a notable departure from the preceding 30 chapters, hope streams from chapter 31. In keeping with the cyclical pattern that occurs from the Exodus throughout the Old Testament, the book of Jeremiah demonstrates the failure of God’s people to faithfully uphold their part of the covenant, reflects the righteous anger of God as a result, and then presents the lavish grace of God’s faithfulness and restoration. We see that in our passage immediately: “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…” (Jeremiah 31:31) “The days are coming” alerts us to the fact that whatever comes next happens in the future. That sounds like a simple thing, but it is important for Jeremiah’s hearers to understand that the following words of hope are not meant to mean that the judgment that was spoken of in the previous thirty chapters is now null and void and everything is ok. At this point in Jeremiah’s ministry, the people of Judah have not even entered exile yet. There are still 7 decades of judgment in exile coming as God promised. The point is that the exile is not the final chapter. Hope is. 2 This is the only time this term, “new covenant,” is used in the Old Testament. In this verse, the only thing we are told about this new covenant is that it will be with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. That is incredibly significant because, long before the historical reunification of these two countries is reality, it is spoken of by God. The mentioning of both names together conjures the images of what has been lost by the Israelites, due to their hard-heartedness and idolatry, since the glories of King David’s rule. Mentioning the two parts of the divided kingdom together in covenant with Yahweh carries the sweet aroma of restoration. God is initiating covenant renewal, but not with the current generation that will go into exile. “…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.” (Jeremiah 31:32) The new covenant will not be like the old and it will not be made with the people who had broken the old. The covenant that was made with the people of Israel as Moses led them was repeatedly broken. Perhaps the most egregious instance occurred while Moses was still up on Mount Sinai meeting with God regarding the covenant. The people pressured Aaron, the father of the priesthood, to make them a golden calf to worship. Since that time, every generation of Israelites repeatedly broke the covenant, even up to the generation of Jeremiah’s day. The time for judgment had come. To heighten the understanding of how significant the covenant breach was, Jeremiah places in the context of broken marriage vows. There is a play on words in the Hebrew here that is significant. The name of the god that the Hebrews repeatedly worshiped in their idolatry was Baal. That name has the same root in Hebrew as the word “husband.” The implication is that God is saying that the idolatry of the Hebrew people meant abandoning God in their covenantal relationship; they had walked away from the marriage. Scholars point out that, “the Sinai/Horeb covenant had been brought to an end. Both the analogy to a broken marriage and the promise of a ‘new’ covenant make this point clear: Only a powerful act of divine mercy could make them God and people for each other again.” A powerful act of divine mercy indeed. “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.” (Jeremiah 31:33) “After those days” again reminds the reader that God orchestrates the future with sovereignty. That phrase refers to the coming days of judgment. Notice that at this point in the oracle that there is no longer a separation between the house of Judah and the house of Israel. The hope of the new covenant already envisions the reality of a reunited Israel. Next we see the essential difference between the old covenant and the new. The covenant at Sinai was written on stone tablets and read to the people by Moses. At Moses’ death the Law was written and entrusted to the Levites, who were commanded to read the Law in its entirety to the people every seven years.