“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,…and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jeremiah 31;31,33 ESV)
When God made the first covenant with Israel at Sinai, he said, “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine;” (Exodus:19:5 ESV)
But Israel did not have the power to obey. Because the entire human race had fallen in Eden, mankind’s whole nature was incapable of obeying any set of rules, let alone the 10 commandments of a holy God without the Holy Spirit empowering them to “keep” and “obey” the agreement in the Spirit. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 ESV)
Only if we are led by the Spirit of God by faith in the grace that Jesus has provided for sinful man, are we are gladly motivated by two primary divine measures of law: love and justice. When these two principles are missed or side-stepped as the modus operandi of man’s relationship to God and to man – if these are unheeded, relationships suffer and we will pay the dire consequences of the written law, which is the judicial representation of love and justice brought to bear in a life when love to God and man (and thereby justice) is unheeded.
The first covenant/agreement was to keep all the laws of God prescribed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. It offered no provision for the grace that could make mankind obedient. Why? Because Jesus had not yet entered the scene of earth’s history to redeem us from sin and our fallen nature.
Before Christ, the law only served to show mankind (the Jewish race first via the old covenant) their sin, a teacher or a tutor to lead them by experience, as they sought to obey on their own steam and by their own methods – it taught them to be ready to realize their need of Christ’s new Spirit-led covenant based on loving God first and your neighbour second, which fulfils the two divine metrics of love and justice in God’s universe.
Men argue about the evolution of the earth, its age, and the many scientific theories related to carbon dating matter – rocks, skeletons, dinosaurs etc.. However, man’s greatest evolution is that God’s Spirit has been teaching mankind a progressive revelation as he works to redeem us as sons and daughters – to bring fallen mankind back to Himself from our ruin, Man has become wrapped up in self importance – mentally unbalanced because the conscience is not led by the Spirit. He wants to return us relationally to an Edenic status of living in the Spirit led and motivated by love and concomitant justice.
In our text God promised to make a new covenant in which He would enable men to live a life of obedience:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant…” (Jeremiah 31:31 ESV)
The Spirit of God must lead our desires
In this new covenant, the law was to be put in their mind and written on the heart, not with the ink of inscribed letters, but with the Spirit of the living God. As Jeremiah puts it in context, “I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good for them. I will put a desire in their hearts to worship me, and they will never leave me.” (Jeremiah 32:40 NLT)
The operative of the new covenant would be the inner urging of the Spirit of God motivating values-based directives: “And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left”. (Isaiah 30:21 ESV)
There were certain men who walked closely with God and evidence tells us that they understood the need to walk as Spirit-led men. King David of antiquity understood this. He said “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” (Psalm 40:8 ESV) This is why God called him “a man after his own heart”. (1 Samuel 13:14 ESV) When David was anointed King over Israel God said through Samuel: “I have found David, my servant; with my holy oil I have anointed him” (Psalms 89:20 ESV)
Further after David committed adultery with Bathsheba, he prayed a prayer to the Lord that made it clear that his prior obedience was due to waking in accord with the indwelling Spirit. This is important because David also confessed in the same prayer, that he was part of the fallen race: “I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me” (Psalms 51:5 ESV) The following verses indicate that David was a man after God’s own heart when he was walking led by the Holy Spirit prior to his great moral fall.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right[a] spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” (Psalms 51:10-15 ESV)
These prophetic texts must be viewed as operative new covenant promises
These promises ensure a continual, wholehearted obedience – the mark of the true believer who takes God at His Word and fully claims what these promises secure. We need to bow in deep adoration and quiet calm before God and believe what He says. Then all of His moral law, motivated by what it is based on love and justice, will bring us delight. The moral law will take possession of our inner life with all its power within our minds and become an advanced philosophic way of living anew. This is why Jesus said when he offered the wine to His disciples during the Last Supper at Passover: “for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sin.” (Matthew 26:28 ESV)
The cross was to bring about a revolutionary new way of thinking about love versus legalistic living law in relation to God and man The cross of Jesus Christ was meant to display love and justice to the very end in contradistinction to bare rules. Man could realize just how far they had slipped into a critical mass – into a collective consciousness bound to disobedient hatred, and murderous selfishness both intellectually and morally. Man had collaborated to kill their own God! Yes God. The apostle Paul noted the absolute supremacy of Jesus Christ as God, collaborate tri-unified in mind with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” (Colossians 1:16 ESV)
Jesus knew that the disciples would need the Holy Spirit to help them understand the depth of the new covenant. He told them prior to his ascension, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16: 12-15 ESV)
The new covenant glorifies Christ in life’s application of the promises
“He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” He is glorified when we demonstrate our trust and obedience, by faith living out the covenant in love as we apply the promises of the God in our real life circumstances. “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God” (Romans 8:14 NAS)