New covenant, new king (Jeremiah 31)

“I know the plans I have for you,” may be our favourite text from Jeremiah. But here’s the favourite of the New Testament writers (quoted in Luke 22:20; Romans 11:27; 2 Corinthians 6:16; Hebrews 8:12; 10:16-17):

Jeremiah 31 (NIV)
³¹ “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. … ³³ “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.”

Why did God promise a new covenant? What was wrong with the old one?

A covenant was a legally binding relationship. Nations of the Ancient Near East had covenants with their king. They did not have covenants with their gods. According to the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1977-2012, volume 2, page 278): the idea of a covenant between a deity and a people is unknown to us from other religions and cultures.

The Sinai covenant established this unique relationship between YHWH and Israel. The Lord rescued Jacob’s descendants from Pharaoh, establishing them as nation under his reign. They were a kingdom with a heavenly king, living under his Law and leadership (Exodus 29:45-46).

By Jeremiah’s time, that covenant relationship had fallen. Refusing to live as the people of YHWH, the kingdom had fallen. The temple had fallen. The kingship had fallen. Instead of being a kingdom under God, they were subsumed into the Babylonian Empire, ruled by Nebuchadnezzar.

They needed a new exodus from Babylon, a new covenant to establish them as a kingdom of God again. That is the promise of Jeremiah 31: a new covenant that would re-establish them has God’s kingdom, rescuing them and empowering them to live under his leadership.

Before Babylon, God’s reign on earth was expressed in an earthly king descended from David. But the stump of David’s dynasty wasn’t dead. A branch would sprout, just as Isaiah 11 had promised:

Jeremiah 33:14–16 (NIV)
¹⁴ “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will fulfill the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah. ¹⁵ In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line; he will do what is just and right in the land. ¹⁶ In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord Our Righteous Saviour.”

Such amazing promises! But when were they fulfilled? When did a son of David rise to reign again? A generation later, some Jews returned to Jerusalem, but no king was raised up to represent God’s reign for another 500 years.

And then a descendant of King David began to announce God’s good news: “The time has come,” he said, “The kingdom of God has come near. Turn and trust the good news!” (Mark 1:15).

The Christ — the heaven anointed leader — established the new covenant for God’s people. How he reestablished his Father’s reign was astounding: not through bloodshed against their enemies, but through his own blood being shed (Luke 22:20 || Mark 14:24-25).

The kingdom of God is restored to the earth in the new king. God gave the kingdom to the anointed son of David by raising him from the dead (Romans 1:1-4). Astonishingly, this new covenant is greater than anyone imagined.

The nations had not been God’s people, but the heavenly sovereign includes them in the new covenant by proclaiming his Christ as Lord of all. In raising up his Anointed, God’s sovereign authority extends to all the people of the earth.

That’s why God called Saul of Tarsus to be his emissary to the nations (apostle to the gentiles). According to Paul, God’s gospel is the good news that God’s reign extends to all the peoples of the earth in the Messiah (Romans 1:1-4).

As Paul explains, the relational problem between God and Israel was part of the broader rebellion by the nations, since they rejected God’s sovereign authority too. So while Jeremiah proclaimed the Lord who does right by his people and rescues them (the Lord Our Righteous Saviour), Paul proclaimed the God who does right by the nations too, rescuing them in his Messiah.

This is how the Lord Our Righteous Saviour has now been revealed:

Romans 3:21-22 (my expansion, compare NIV)
And now, beyond the bounds of the Sinai Law covenant, God-doing-right has been revealed, just like the Law and the Prophets testified he would.
God-doing-right came to light through the faithfulness of Messiah Jesus, and now it’s visible in all whose trust his leadership. That’s not just the nation established by the Sinai covenant; it’s the kingdom established by the new covenant — all who give allegiance to the heaven-installed king.

While different scholars expand this incredibly dense statement in various ways, there can be no doubt that Paul is a) explaining how the Christ fulfils what God promised in the Old Testament, b) contrasting our side of the relationship with God’s, and c) highlighting the extraordinary way God has done right by all the peoples of the earth by rescuing them in the Messiah. In short, the Lord Our Righteous Saviour is manifest for everyone in Christ.

That’s the gospel Jeremiah had promised: the new covenant, arriving in the new king. It turned out to be the re-establishment of God’s reign not just for Israel but for everyone — the whole earth as the kingdom of God in the anointed ruler he raised up.

That’s the gospel Jeremiah glimpsed when he delivered God’s promise of a new covenant.

What others are saying

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Message of Jeremiah: Grace in the End, The Bible Speaks Today (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2014), 324-326:

Imagine yourself in the depths of exilic depression reading Jeremiah 7:21–29 and 11:1–14. … These are undoubtedly the bleak backdrop to the ‘new covenant’ text before us. Up to now, the only way Jeremiah had ever spoken of the covenant was to say that it was broken, shattered — lying in ruins as Jerusalem itself now was. What question would be uppermost in your mind? Surely it would be, ‘Can there be any future for us now? If the covenant has ended, surely it is the end also for Israel. If we are no longer the covenant people of YHWH, then we are no longer a people at all. …

God himself will initiate a new covenant out of the wreckage of the old. … There was a future and a hope for Israel, not because of who they were, but because of whose they were.

Michael F. Bird, Romans. The Story of God Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 111:

There is a new state of affairs that gives hope to the human predicament. There is a new event that is already imposing itself upon the morass of the present evil age. This new event is the revelation of God’s righteousness in Messiah Jesus.

I have already discussed the “righteousness of God” (dikaiosynē theou) in the commentary on Romans 1:17. To briefly recap, such a phrase should be located in the spheres of creation and covenant. God’s righteousness describes the actions whereby God rectifies creation and shows himself faithful to the covenant. God’s righteousness is chiefly a way of designating his saving action as it is expressed in his feats of deliverance for his people. The righteousness of God then is the character of God embodied and enacted in his saving works.

Related posts

• The plans I have for you (Jeremiah 29)
• The hands that shape history (Jeremiah 18)
• Temple as God’s presence (Jeremiah 7)
• My blood of the covenant (Matthew 26:28)
• How do the Prophets apply to Christ?
• How do the Prophets apply to us?