Jeremiah 31:31 – 34
In the spring of 2010, a skiing accident took the life of Tara Storch’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Taylor. What followed for Tara and her husband, Todd, was every parent’s worst nightmare: a funeral, a burial, a flood of questions and tears. They decided to donate their daughter’s organs to needy patients. Few people needed a heart more than Patricia Winters. Her heart had begun to fail five years earlier, leaving her too weak to do much more than sleep.
Taylor’s heart gave Patricia a fresh start on life. Tara had only one request: she wanted to hear the heart of her daughter. She and Todd flew from Dallas to Phoenix and went to Patricia’s home to listen to Taylor’s heart. The two mothers embraced for a long time. Then Patricia offered Tara and Todd a stethoscope. When they listened to the healthy rhythm, whose heart did they hear? They heard the still-beating heart of their daughter. It was in a different body, but the heart was the heart of their child.
Our lesson today comes from the Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was called to minister to Israel at a time when it was in serious trouble. Jeremiah is called to minister while the Babylonians are invading Judah, the southern kingdom, and its capital Jerusalem is burning and as we know they will carry a vast number of Jewish people into exile. Jeremiah himself is one of a small group remaining in Judah, living amid the rubble. The people who had been promised God’s protection and deliverance were in a place of desolation because of their disobedience.
Jeremiah was called to lead Judah through a process of accepting God’s judgement for their disobedience and ultimately repenting. He leads a time of lament, of weeping and mourning. But in the midst this dark valley of despair and judgment, he reveals hope and promise for God’s people.
Even though the circumstances are terrible and catastrophic, and everything seemed hopeless, Jeremiah proclaims that God’s people can rejoice and praise God for his promises. “The days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and the people of Judah.”
As we know from our lessons lately, a covenant is “a pledged and defined relationship”. In a covenant God pledges to do certain things in a defined relationship of responsibility toward certain people. At the time of Jeremiah, the existing covenant between God and Israel was Mosaic covenant, given to them through Moses, the man who God had chosen to lead Israel.
The Mosaic covenant was a conditional covenant, meaning that both parties were responsible to fulfill a duty to the other. The Ten Commandments, written on stone tablets by God’s own finger on Mount Saini and given to Moses, consecrated the covenant between God and mankind.
As those of us that have recently finished our Bible study on the Book of Exodus know, those stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were so important that God had the Israelites build the Ark of the Covenant to hold them. The Ark was then housed in Holiest of Holies, the inner sanctum of the tabernacle, it was there in the Holiest of Holies that God resided on Earth, to be near His people. In this conditional covenant the people of Israel were required to simply follow the Law, and in return, God promised to abundantly bless and protect Israel.
But as we know, obedience was not the strong suit of the Israelites. They had violated their covenant, judgement had been passed and consequences were being served but God will not leave his people in this dark place, He will make reconciliation possible, and He will create a new relationship. Jeremiah is given a proclamation to make, that God has a new covenant for his people.
God promises that this new covenant “will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors”. Some features of the old will remain. God will continue to be the initiator of the covenant rooted in God’s gracious works on behalf of the people. The Law will remain as the foundation for living as God’s people. The goal will be the same: to love God and to love neighbor as God’s chosen people in the world.
Under the old covenant, the Ten Commandments, the Law was written on tablets of stone. It was a check list of do’s and don’ts, as firm and unyielding as the solid stone on which they were inscribed. A check list, if you will, impersonal and static. They knew what not to do and what to do and the consequences of it and the payment due to clear the debt.
Under the Mosaic law faith becomes transactional, each act of disobedience incurs new judgement and requires another atonement. But God has a different plan for believers something that is more personal and longer lasting.
The biblical understanding of the “heart” is that it is the center of human intellect, will and being. Knowing what is right and having the desire to do it. The word heart is used in Scripture as a comprehensive term for the authentic person. It is the part of our being where we desire, deliberate, and decide. It is the place of conscious and decisive spiritual activity”. It is “the term for a person as a whole; his feelings, desires, passions, thought, understanding and will. And this is the place to which God turns to redeem and reconcile mankind.
The old heart, Jeremiah says in chapter 17, is deeply engraved with an evil inclination to rebel against God and God’s law: “the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of the heart” Jeremiah would proclaim.
Yet Jeremiah promises that God will replace this deeply engraved sinful heart with a new heart. engraved with God’s law, written in God’s own handwriting. After the heart of mankind is rewritten because of the new covenant, people will obey not because they are expected to obey but because they genuinely want to obey. Obedience will become habitual and unconscious. We will love God and our neighbor because it is in our nature, often without even realizing what we are doing.
But under the new covenant, God will write the words of the covenant on the hearts of man. Pastor Dennis Olson suggests this is some sort of spiritual heart “replacement” to be done. Like the story of Patricia Winters at the beginning, there was a need to replace a failing human heart. But in our case, it is a failing spiritual heart, the place of conscious and decisive spiritual activity”, the desires, passions, thoughts, understanding and will, need to be replaced with a new spiritually strong heart willingly offered to us and for us.
And if we were to listen to it in the new soul, it would beat with the divine heartbeat of Jesus Christ, it will be the heartbeat of God and the heartbeat for God dwelling in a new body, the body of a redeemed soul.
Hear the Good News my friends………
The word covenant in Hebrew translates to “testament”, therefore Jeremiah’s proclamation of a new covenant becomes the basis for naming the second part of the Bible as the “New Testament” or “New Covenant.” This Good News is about a new unconditional covenant that God has with all of mankind with the arrival of Christ, his ministry, his death and his resurrection. All we need to do is to accept the offer.
We see this playout in the final days of Christ’s life. The most powerful example of Jeremiah 31 is in the person of Jesus and in his actions in the Upper Room just before he is arrested. Jesus eats the old Passover meal but re-creates it into a New Covenant meal. Jesus lifts the Passover cup of wine and proclaims on the eve of his death and eventual resurrection: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sins”. Dear ones, the Last Supper makes it possible for us with failing spiritual hearts to have that needed rebirth, a renewal, as we accept the body and blood of Christ into our hearts and bodies.
Rev. Graham Ware writes: Through death Jesus makes it possible to nail our sinfulness to the cross and experience the freedom of walking into a new relationship with God, in which we become his people, and in which we have ongoing intimate relationship with the King of kings and Lord of lords.
I have been challenging you over the past few weeks to remember, to consider your testimony of how you came to faith in Jesus Christ and here, in this scripture is why it important for you to reconnect with that moment.
The new covenant that Jeremiah announces to the people of Israel is not like Mosaic Covenant where it covers an entire nation, it is not like covenant with Noah where God says that he will never destroy the entire world again with a flood.
Instead, the good news of the New Covenant is that it is for each one of us individually. When he says “I will put my law in their mind, I write it on their heart. I will be their God, and they will be my people” He is not talking a nation of people, a particular culture, a specific tribe of people. The New Covenant is for all people, individually called and individually responsive to the heart of God.
When you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior God, the story of your testimony is Written in Your Heart, to remind you how you are part His people and why He is your God. Friends, it is through your personal relationship with Him and with an understanding of his being, his nature, his feelings, desires, passions, thoughts, and will, that you will find His divine transplanted heart surging spiritual blood through your soul, and you, individually, will come into right relationship with God and the story of your salvation will be Written in Your Heart for all time. Amen.