Hebrews 8:7-13

7 For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. 8 But God found fault with the people and said[b]:

“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.

9 It will not be like the covenant

    I made with their ancestors

when I took them by the hand

    to lead them out of Egypt,

because they did not remain faithful to my covenant,

    and I turned away from them,

declares the Lord.

10 This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel

    after that time, declares the Lord.

I will put my laws in their minds

    and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God,

    and they will be my people.

11 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.

12 For I will forgive their wickedness

    and will remember their sins no more. ”[c]

13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

Dig Deeper

Most people that I know that are married first went through a period of engagement before they were actually married.  I have seen people remain in the state of being engaged to be married for as much as several years and as little as two months.  The period of engagement is an incredible time where a couple commits to one another deeply, yet at the same time looks forward to the marriage itself and begins to prepare for that.  Traditionally, the period of engagement is a wonderful time of commitment and building relationship.  There are wonderful advantages to being engaged.  It is an exciting period where people begin the process of meshing their lives together and preparing to spend the rest of their lives as one flesh.  This period of engagement anticipates and points forward, of course, to the time when the couple will be married.  In a very real sense, the engagement in our culture (at least American culture) is a type of covenant relationship (or maybe a pre-covenant relationship, so to speak) but it points to a greater one.  There are certain privileges and advantages in which an engaged couple cannot, or at least should not if they are following God’s will, participate in.  Those things come with the greater covenant of marriage to which their engagement points.

Speaking for myself, I enjoyed my time of engagement.  It was wonderful and exciting, but I enjoy being married even more.  I love my wife and I love my marriage and I love the covenant of marriage.  Yet, there are times when things can get rough and we have to work very hard in our marriage.  At no time, however, have I ever considered the thought of stepping out of the marriage and returning to the period of just being engaged.  Don’t get me wrong, as I said, our engagement was a great time, but marriage is better and even when things have been a little rough at times (and they’ve never been all that rough to be honest), I have never started to think that it would be better to just go back to being engaged and lose the privileges of marriage.  That would be crazy.

And yet, in some very real parallels, that is what Hebrews wants to warn those struggling in their faith to stay away from.  Some had hit the rocky and difficult time in their covenant with Christ and rather than remaining faithful and working through the issues by reminding themselves just how incredible it was to be in covenant with him, they had walked away and returned, in many cases, to their Jewish beliefs.  This was tantamount to dissolving a marriage and going back to being engaged.  And it was just as crazy in the mind of the author of Hebrews.

In what ways was this like leaving a marriage and going back to the pre-marriage state?  Well, the Old Covenant was not exactly like an engagement in that it was a very real covenant relationship with Israel, not just a state before the real covenant.  But it was never designed to be the once-for-all, definitive and permanent covenant between God and his people.  One might think so, of course, if they read some of the Covenant language from the Old Testament that talks about God creating a Covenant forever with his people.  On one hand, that was absolutely true.  But on the other hand, God had always pointed ahead to the fact that he had a better Covenant in mind that he wanted for his people.  That God would always have a Covenant with his people was the eternal part; the specific aspects of the Old Covenant, however, were never to be eternal.  When a couple gets married, you see, it doesn’t break the covenant of their engagement, it fulfills it and brings it into a better covenant state.  That’s what God wanted for his people.  He wasn’t breaking the Old Covenant, but he was bringing them in the better Covenant state that he had always promised.

That is precisely why our author turns to Jeremiah 31 in this section.  Throughout this sermon/lesson, the writer has systematically expounded about certain Old Testament passages to make his point concerning the superiority of Christ and his Covenant.  In chapters 3 and 4 the focus was on Psalm 95 as the author urged his readers not to harden their hearts like the Exodus generation and the people of David’s day.  Then in chapters 5 through the beginning of 8, the attention turned to Palm 110, as the author basically taught through the Messianic and practical significance of that important Psalm.  Now he turns to Jeremiah 31 (and will continue to discuss it through the end of chapter 10), a passage where God promises that one day he will establish a New Covenant with his people.  The central theme of all of these passages is that while God had established something good with Israel, he promised something better yet to come; not all that unlike a an engaged couple being promised that there is something better yet to come in the covenant of marriage.

In fact his quote from Jeremiah 31 is the longest New Testament quote of an Old Testament passage in the entire Bible.  And just as the promise of an eternal priesthood in the order of Melchizedek pointed to the fact that the old priesthood was inferior and thus, obsolete, so the promise of a new covenant meant that the old was inferior and just as obsolete.  It was not as though God was simply nullifying the Old Covenant, however.  He was fulfilling the Old Covenant through the coming of something better.  Just as a caterpillar does not die when it transforms into a butterfly and an engagement is not broken but becomes something better when that couple is married, so the Old Covenant was transformed into a better Covenant.

The context of Jeremiah 31 included the comforting words of Yaweh through his prophet for a struggling people who would be returning from exile in Babylon.  They had been faithless to the Covenant with their God and had paid the price as he removed his hedge of protection from them and allowed them to taste the bitter brew of disobedience to God.  That was the problem with the Old Covenant, points out the writer of Hebrews.  It wasn’t that the Old Covenant was bad as though God had intentionally given the people a skunk just for laughs.  The problem was that it didn’t enable the people to transform.  It didn’t allow them to truly escape the slavery of sin.  It was inadequate for the permanent needs of humanity and that is exactly what God wanted his people to learn.  He wanted them to enjoy the first Covenant but to look forward to the ultimate Covenant every bit as much as he did.  So, he promised them that a day was coming when he would bring about that better Covenant.

This new Covenant would be with the people of Israel, and that was certainly true, because as the Gospel writers go to great lengths to demonstrate, Jesus was the true and valid representative of Israel.  In a sense, he became Israel, God’s Son, and is the recipient of all of the promises given to Israel.  This Covenant would engulf and surpass the Old Covenant in an even greater way than a marriage engulfs and surpasses an engagement.  This Covenant would ensure Covenant faithfulness on the part of God’s people because their status would not be balanced on temporal things like the Law and the Levitical Priesthood.  It would be based on Jesus Christ himself.  He is faithful to the Covenant and because we can lay down our lives and enter into his, we are allowed to enjoy the covenant faithfulness of the life of Christ.

Jeremiah goes on to describe the differences between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant in broad strokes, and the differences are stark.  The difference is so striking that they are less like the differences between an engagement and a marriage and more like the betrothal period of an arranged marriage and the actual marriage that is the result of love, choice, passion, and commitment.  No longer would people simply be born into the Covenant without really knowing who the Lord is and having to be taught to be obedient to it by parents, the priesthood, and the rest of the society.  No longer, in other words, would it be a religion where people were called to be conformed externally by the rule of the Law.  In this New Covenant, God’s people would respond to God’s call and choose to enter into his family.  They will know the Lord, every one of them, because they will have exercised faith in the life of Christ and embraced the new life that he offered.  In that New Covenant, sin wouldn’t just be covered over by animal sacrifices that could only picture true forgiveness of sin without ever actually giving it.  In Christ, sin is erased from God’s memory, not meaning that God will have a true memory lapse but that he will not act on the deserved consequences of sin.  In the New Covenant that God was promising, sin would truly be forgiven.  That is something that the Old Covenant could never offer and could never, ever achieve.

Hebrews draws this section to a close by making a point that should be obvious now and is very similar to the one he made about the redundancy of the Old Covenant priesthood.  Just as God, in pointing to a new priesthood, made the old one obsolete, so in promising a New Covenant he made the Old Covenant equally obsolete.  Once your married, you don’t need to be engaged anymore and now that the readers of Hebrews were members of the New Covenant, to return to the old and obsolete one where sin could never be fully forgiven would be crazy.  It would be to cling to what was to soon disappear.  To cling to it would be to lose sight of reality, it would be foolish, and indeed it would be idolatrous by exalting the Old over what God had always promised for his people.

Devotional Thought

Most of us are probably not tempted to walk away from the New Covenant in order to return to the Old Covenant, but I think that many of us can be tempted, from time to time, to leave our marriage with God in order to return to the revelry of our old lives before we entered into Covenant with God.  Spend some time contemplating how this passage helps you during times like those when you are tempted.