The New Covenant prophesied in the Old Testament

Jeremiah 31:31-34  “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on 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. “For 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 write it on their heart; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each one his neighbor and each one 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 wrongdoing, and their sin I will no longer remember.”

Note the differences between the Old Covenant of laws to obey and things to learn, and the New Covenant which is our God’s requirements put within His people. We no longer learn His will and commands and then try to do them, for He has put them into us. How? In the last “The New Covenant in Scripture” installment, Ezekiel 36:22-27, we read that our God will prepare us to receive these and then will put them within us by His Holy Spirit. ”… I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put My Spirit within you and bring it about that you walk in My statutes, and are careful and follow My ordinances.“ He gives us a new heart softened to Him and a new spirit to connect with His Spirit. He puts His Spirit into us to live His life in place of our own lives.

Here is one of the great gifts of our God to us in the New Covenant; what He expects of us as His true disciples He intend to do in us by His Spirit indwelling us.

Another of the great gifts of the New Covenant is our union relationship with the Triune God, expressed here as knowing our God. The word for “know” in the Jeremiah passage above is a term for deepest intimacy. True New Covenant disciples will experience a deep and growing intimacy with the Father and Son by the indwelling Holy Spirit, an intimacy for which the marriage relationship is the closest metaphor. Such depth of love and intimacy between our God and fallen humans can exist only our God’s initiative in us, and only by the joining of our life into His life by way of union with Him.