Articles
They Will All Know Me
We have become accustomed to phrases like “new covenant” and “new testament” to describe the relationship that we have with God through Christ. Occasionally, we also consider that this is a contrast with the Old Testament/Covenant that Israel had with Moses. We do not always consider where this idea originated, or this terminology came from. Many times we are ignorant of what it means.
In Jeremiah 31:31-34, God promised that He would establish a new relationship with His people through a new covenant. “Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD. (verses 31-32)
In this preamble, He described this covenant as being different from the Mosaic covenant, and indeed the necessity for a new one because Israel had ceased to uphold it. This leads to His description of what makes the new covenant different, and indeed better.
“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” (verse 33) We recall that the former covenant was written on tablets of stone (Exodus 24:12; 31:18; 32:15-16), not once, but twice (Exodus 32:19; 34:1-4). The covenant with God that the people of Israel were to maintain was connected to their ability to keep the requirements of the Law (Exodus 19:3-8). This is the first failure God describes. The new law was different, because it would not be external, but internal. These people would not keep the statutes of the Law as a code of behavior, but they would obey God’s will out of loyalty.
“They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (verse 34) The kind of loyalty that leads to obedience under this new covenant was based on two elements. The first was an intimacy with God’s ways. There would be no one in God’s kingdom who did not know His ways (cf. Judges 2:10; I Samuel 2:12; Hosea 5:4). The second element was His forgiveness. All of the people who related to God in His new covenant relationship would be forgiven of their sin. (Luke 7:36-50)
We are the ones under this new covenant, but are we fulfilling it completely? Do we truly have God’s ways in our heart so that we follow Him in loyalty? Is our loyal obedience based on a close familiarity with His nature and will? Do we see our forgiveness from sin by the blood of Christ as a reason to obey all the more? Let us truly fulfill God’s new covenant by being the people that He promised would belong to Him.
