None of us likes it when someone breaks a promise that they have made to us. It is especially distressing when it is a solemn promise or a legal agreement that is broken. In these cases we might even feel the need to go to court, seeking a legal remedy. If we, as humans, dislike a broken promise or oath, we can imagine how God feels about it when we break a promise or vow to Him. In our brief Old Testament Scripture for this week from the Prophet Jeremiah, we will read about how God, after His people’s constant failure to keep their covenant with Him, the sworn contract or agreement they had, He will make a new covenant with them.
When God brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, when through the power of His mighty arm He brought them redemption from a life of bondage and servitude, He made a covenant with them. This covenant was written upon stone tablets and then placed inside the Ark of Covenant, within the Most Holy Place in the Tabernacle. The Lord God never violated the covenant. However, the people continually, repeatedly broke their promise and vow to keep it, and frequently showed no sign of repentance. Through the mouths of His prophets, God warned of coming judgment if the people refused to keep God’s Word. In the midst of all of His warnings, though, God gave us a message of hope, a promise of a New Covenant that He would make with His people.
God promised a New Covenant, where those who know Him would participate in the blessings of salvation. This New Covenant supersedes the old, and is open to everyone, not just to the Jewish people. The Old Covenant was given following God’s redemption of the people from slavery in Egypt. The New Covenant followed God’s redemption of believers from sin. The New Covenant that God made with all of those who put their faith and trust in the Lord Jesus cannot be broken like the Old Covenant was (Hebrews 8:7-8). This covenant was mediated by Jesus Christ through His death and resurrection (Hebrews 9:12-15; Hebrews 10:10-18).
The Old Covenant was engraved upon stone and put in the Most Holy Place. The New Covenant God makes with believers is engraved upon their hearts. Christians become like a living temple where the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within them and His Law is written on their hearts. In Jeremiah 17:1 we read that the people of Judah’s sins were engraved upon their hearts. They so habitually disobey God. When we turn our lives over to Him, the power of the Holy Spirit gives us the desire to obey Him.
The foundation of the New Covenant God makes with us is the Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews 8:6). Through this covenant we are offered a unique, personal relationship with God Himself. With this New Covenant we can come boldly into God’s presence (Hebrews 4:14-16), not needing an earthly, human priest, but through Jesus, our Great High Priest. Jesus’ Blood ratified this covenant, and made that privilege possible.
As the Prophet Jeremiah closes our passage today, he reminds the people that when we come to God in repentance, He will forgive us our sins (vs. 34). When God forgives us our sins, He no longer remembers them. They are cast into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19). They are separated as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). As we all learned in school, those two directions never meet up together. When we go south, eventually we come to a point where we start going north. However there is never a point heading west where eventually we start heading east. They never meet, and that is how far God separates our sins from us when we come to Him for forgiveness. When God forgives, He remembers wrongs no more. He refuses to use past wrongs to continue to punish us if we have come to Him for forgiveness through His Son Jesus, and His shed Blood. When God forgives, it is forever.
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