Jeremiah 31:27-34
“Internal Covenant”
October 17, 2010 - Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

         Oedipus is the classical Greek example of inexorable fate. Before he was born, the oracle at Delphi prophesied to his parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, that if they had a son, he would murder his father and marry his mother. So when Oedipus was born to them, Laius ordered that he be left to die on a hillside. But the servants who took Oedipus out thought it more kind to simply send him far away. So he grew up the adopted son of the king and queen of Corinth.

         When Oedipus was grown he went to Delphi himself and heard the same prophecy: he will kill his father and marry his mother. So he decided not to return home to Corinth, to the couple he thought were his real parents. Instead he went to Thebes. On the way he met and killed a man he did not know was his father. To make a long story short, despite both his parents’ and his own efforts to avoid it, the prophecy all came true. Unknowingly, he gets to Thebes and marries the grieving widow, his mother. When he finally learns the truth, Oedipus put his own eyes out. His mother hangs herself. Oedipus wanders blind around the countryside. As Jocasta herself says, it was “miserable fate” catching up with them.

         “You cannot escape your destiny,” is a common theme both in classical tragedy and in modern entertainment. The television shows “Lost” and “Heroes,” both dealt in this old, old idea that your life plays out according to a fate set long before you were born, possibly by what your parents or grandparents did.

         Ancient Jewish people had a similar idea. As we come to the end of Jeremiah’s story he addresses a nation suffering total disaster. Many of them are blaming it on an inexorable fate brought on by the sins of their parents. They walked around the streets of Jerusalem as it was being destroyed by the Babylonians, shaking their heads and repeating the proverb quoted in verse 29, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” What parents do determines what happens to their children.

         You may remember there is some basis for that proverb right at the beginning of the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 20 verse 4, when God says, “for I… am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents for the third and fourth generation of those who hate me…” It sounds like God Himself insures that the actions of one generation are punished in those to come. In 587 B.C. as Jerusalem was flattened and looted, it felt like that had happened.

         We have some sense that proverb is true just by natural mechanisms. A recent French study on mothers who drink alcohol during pregnancy brought the news that an occasional drink might be safe, but that it’s still clearly true that a baby will pay the price in physical and mental handicaps if a mother has several drinks a day.

         We are also familiar with what has come to be called the “cycle of abuse.” A child growing up in an abusive home is more likely to become an abuser himself. That horrible sin and its hideous consequences can reach down several generations.

         Completely apart from any sense of sin, we also know today that all sorts of biological forces beyond our control determine our fate. Genetics determines your looks, your height and weight, and your intelligence. Your genes also direct whether or not you are likely to get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and many other maladies. We may not be listening to an oracle of Delphi, but we feel completely bound by the oracle of DNA.

         There is also a kind of inescapable destiny to social status. Despite an African American president in the White House and the American dream that anyone can become anything, persons of color growing up in a ghetto will tell you their fate is pretty limited, usually a choice between being a gang member or working some menial job for folks who live in better parts of town.

         For Christians, as much as for ancient Jews, there is a sense that all this inescapable fate comes from God. The Lord is sovereign, in control, the director of all the smallest details of our lives. Whatever happens, God planned and directed it. But when what happens is lousy, is just plain cruel and horrible, that’s a depressing thought.

         That depression, that sense of despair, was behind the quotation of that proverb about parents and sour grapes in Jerusalem in 587 B.C. The Jewish people believed their parents and grandparents had sinned against God. So their punishment, their fate was unavoidable. It didn’t matter what they did, the Babylonians were still knocking down the walls, still carrying them off into exile. They despaired.

         You and I still despair, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned and more. It doesn’t matter what we do. Send out a thousand résumés and you still won’t get a job. Fix up that house and drop the price till it’s less than you owe and it still won’t sell. Jog your rear off, eat nothing but granola and vegetables, get a physical every year, and that heart attack is still out there waiting for you. No wonder we despair.

         To all that kind of fatalist thinking, Jeremiah and the prophet Ezekiel brought a new perspective during the Jewish exile. Both prophets addressed that sour grape proverb with an idea that was not new, but which Israel had forgotten. Whatever God meant by punishing children for their parents’ sin, it did not take away personal responsibility, it did not make our fates inescapable. In Deuteronomy 24:16, God told Israel that they themselves were not to put parents to death for the sins of their children, nor children for their parents’ sins. “Each of you will die for your own sin,” God said. That’s what the prophet wants remembered here in Jeremiah 31:30. If you eat the sour grapes, it will be your own teeth that ache, your own mouth that puckers.

         Challenging that old proverb, challenging fate, is God beginning an announcement that verses 27 and 28 previewed, an announcement that was part of the prophet’s mission from way back when we first met him in chapter 1. God told Jeremiah as a young man that he would “uproot and tear down, destroy and overthrow,” but that he was also sent “to build and to plant.”

         This rest of the text is the beginning of the building and planting, the beginning of something beautifully new. It’s a key text for Christian faith. Verse 31 is the only place in the whole Old Testament that explicitly mentions the promise of a “new covenant.” It’s what gives the second part of our Bible its name. “Testament” means “covenant.” Jeremiah announced that God was going to change things, that something new and gloriously different was coming, that the old covenant would give way to the new.

         The new covenant, says verse 32, is not going to be “like the covenant I made with their ancestors.” Why? “Because they broke my covenant, though I was a father to them.” Read the story of the Old Testament, read the story of our own lives, and it seems like our sins are inevitable, inescapable, the inexorable hand of a fate beyond our control. It’s like that movie where you shout at the screen, “Don’t open that door!” or “Don’t split up!” or “Don’t mail that letter you wrote when you were angry!” But they do it anyway, and so do we, no matter what we tell ourselves, not matter how much we know better.

         What Jeremiah promised, and what God did, was a better sort of covenant, a covenant that would remove the hand of fate, a covenant that would break the cycle of sin, even if it’s been handed down from father to son and mother to daughter for generations.

         The problem with the old covenant is that it was an external matter. God gave His people the Torah, the Law. He gave them a list of rules. Almost anyone who reads the Ten Commandments and the other rules of the Torah realizes that life would be good and fine and beautiful if we obeyed all of those rules. Yet we don’t. We can’t.

         It feels like it’s often pictured. God is up there in heaven and hands down to Moses His list of rules written on stone. Those rules are copied into books. We even memorize them. But we can’t do them. No matter how hard we try, we let an idol get between us and God, we tell a lie that hurts someone, we want what somebody else has. That list of laws are written out there on stone and paper, but we need them in here, in our hearts and minds where we live and feel and think and then act.

         That’s what God promised here in verse 33. “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” The new covenant will not be an external rule book. It will be an internal transformation of people’s hearts and minds. It won’t be just a matter of a family or a nation handing down a sad history of sin. It will be a covenant that touches and changes each human being personally.

         The new covenant will not be so much about rules as it is about relationship. That’s what the beginning of verse 34 is about. It’s about not just obeying God and following His rules, but knowing God. The rules were supposed to help God’s people know Him, to know what kind of Lord He is and what life with Him can be like. But they were external, they had to be taught. They had to tell each other as the verse says, “Know the Lord.”

         Under the old covenant, knowing God is all about getting the information correct, doing the right thing, obeying the rules. Memorize the Ten Commandments. Don’t work on the Sabbath and don’t commit adultery. Do what God has said. And all that remains in place. The new covenant doesn’t undo the old. That’s why Paul wrote about the inspiration of Scripture to Timothy in another text we read today, telling him how important it is to keep studying and learning and preaching what God says. But the new covenant takes all that learning and moves it deeper, makes it an internal matter, not just a posted rule that we work at obeying.

         As that little parable from Luke 18 about being persistent in prayer suggests, God wants us to know Him not just as an object of study, but as a person. He wants to have a relationship with us. He wants all our obedience and keeping of rules to come not from knowing the list of commandments, but from love for Him.

         Paul said the Law was like a schoolmaster. It gets us started toward knowing God, but we have to go beyond it, just as eventually we all have to graduate from school and get on to real living.

         Imagine yourself young and on your first serious date. That’s easier to imagine for some of us than others. But there you are, inexperienced, awkward, shy and totally baffled by how to act and what to say. So talk to your parents, maybe read a book, and sit down and write yourself a little note card of reminders: “Open the door for her.” “Laugh when he tells a joke.” “Ask what his favorite sport is.” “Ask who her friends are.” “Be sensitive to her feelings.” “Be careful of his ego.”

         You’ve got it all down on that card and throughout the evening you sneak little glances to see if you’re getting it right, if you’re remembering those courtesies, if you’re using those conversational tactics you planned. This actually might not be a bad idea for some of us.

         But at some point, maybe not on that first date, but sometime before too long, you want to forget about your little note card. You want to reach out and join hands across the table and look in his or her eyes and just understand that other person, just know them well enough to say the right thing and behave the right way without referring to all the guidelines you wrote on your card.

         That’s the sort of new covenant relationship God wants with you and me. The word “know” here in Hebrew is an intimate word. It’s the same word used to mean a sexual relationship in the old King James translation of Genesis 4 that says, “And Adam knew his wife.” The new covenant is knowledge of God written so deeply and intimately into us that you do what He wants without trying, without even thinking. What is good and right and holy comes naturally rather than being read off a rulebook.

         This new covenant relationship with God is behind the workshop our conference is putting on this coming weekend. Yes, the Bible has rules about stewardship, about giving. It’s fine to follow the rules, to tithe and give a tenth of your income to the Lord. But what God really wants is for us to be as the workshop title suggests, generous people, people who give naturally and freely and with joy, not just because it’s the rule.

         As Walter Brueggemann said about the new covenant, “Obedience becomes as normal as breathing or eating.”[1] That’s how God wants us to know Him, to be with Him. God knows you and He wants you to know Him. The new covenant is about a personal relationship with God in which you and I love Him and are loved by Him. The great good news is that such a relationship is possible for anyone. Verse 34 continues, “‘they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord.”

         Knowing God is possible because God took the initiative. He took the initiative in the first covenant, bringing Israel out of Egypt and giving them the Law. He took the initiative in the new covenant by coming to us Himself, living and breathing and speaking His love in the person of Jesus Christ.

         We couldn’t keep the rules. We always blow that first date with God, and the second and the third and every time after that. It’s God who reached across the table, took us by the hand and declared His love. Jesus died on the Cross to show us that God loved us and that the cycle of disobedience and sin did not need to be our fate. Our text ends with the gracious promise, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” God’s forgiveness in Jesus is what sets us free from fate and gives us a gracious and beautiful new destiny with Him.

         “They will all know me,” says God. That includes you. You can know God in that deep, blessed, intimate way that transforms your life and makes it all new. All it takes is grasping the hand He reaches out to you. Believe in and trust Jesus as your Savior and you will begin to know and love God in His great new covenant of grace.

         And if you do know Him, if Jesus is your Savior, remember that you are in that new covenant. Don’t despair. Your sins and their punishment are not an inescapable fate. Let yourself grow in the knowledge of Him that He is placing in your mind and writing on your heart. We are none of us there yet, but by the grace of Jesus we are all being moved toward the time when obedience is as normal as eating and breathing, a time when, as Paul wrote in a great chapter on God’s love, we will know fully, even as we are known.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj