The New Covenant

The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah... This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, 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 wickedness and will remember their sins no more.

Jeremiah 31:31a, 33, 34

This is a marvelous promise. God is going to do what the people themselves could never do. Despite all their failure, he is going to bring them around. He will do it by a new process. First, he says, I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. That is a new motive. God is going to change the motivation of a person's life; changing it to come from within instead of without. The Old Covenant is a demand made on us from without. This is impossible for us to carry out. But the New Covenant is something put within us. What is it? Love. Love is the motive in the New Covenant. To respond out of love for God, out of love for what he has already done in our life and heart, that is the new motive.

The second manifestation is a new power. I will be their God, and they will be my people. God himself is the strength of man's life. He supplies all the power to act. They are the ones who do the acting; he is the One who does the supplying. This is a beautiful description of the New Covenant. Everything coming from God; nothing coming from me. Not, I, trying to do something for God, but God doing something for me, through me, in everything I do. That is the new power.

Then there is a new family. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. All those in the family know each other. We already know what are the dominant drives, and underlying hopes and passions of each life, because they are all the same: That we might know Him better, become like Him. That is why, when Christians meet one another, though they have never met before, they always have a ground of sharing. They know each other and share the same life.

The New Covenant rests on this great platform: ...for I will forgive their wickedness, and will remember their sin no more. That is how God proposes to win this battle. When the Law fails, and we cannot respond the way we know we ought to, how are we going to win? It is changed when we begin to understand that provision has already fully been made for all our failure. God does not hold that failure against us. His love will be with us and will sustain us through even the results of our folly and our failure. He does not hold anything against us; he is for us, and will turn all the difficulty we are going through to our own advantage, so that it makes us transformed people. That is the New Covenant in action. As we learn to walk in dependence upon a new motive and a new power, in a new relationship with one another, resting upon the forgiveness of God, we discover that marvelous things are happening in our life.

Father, forgive me for the way I am so sure I can make it myself. Help me to assume this poverty of spirit, which then opens to me the very riches of eternity.