SERMON III. THE GOSPEL COVENANT. JER. XXXI. 31-34. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which My covenant they brake, although I was an Husband unto them, saith the Lord but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. ERUSALEM had been taken by the Assyrian army, JERU and the Prophet Jeremiah, with a band of other captives, had been carried in chains to Ramah, where the Assyrian general, Nebuzar-adan, had fixed his head-quarters. In those dark hours, when the Prophet was leaving a ruined home, and passing into the keeping of a pagan despot, it might well have seemed to a merely human forecast that all was lost; the independence of Israel as a people, and even the prospects of the religion of Israel. In those dark hours, God, Who so often sets His bow in the cloud of an earthly sorrow, spoke to Jeremiah in visions which lit up his inward thoughts with the light that comes from another world. To this period of his life belong the thirtieth and thirty-first chapters of his book; and they contain a group of prophecies, written down, we are told, by Divine command, and all of them intended to relieve the gloom of the first days of Captivity by the anticipation of better times beyond. The ultimate restoration of the people to their home in Palestine;a the announcement of the second David; the picture of Rachel weeping from her tomb at Ramah for her captive descendants, and relieved by the sure promise of their deliverance;" and, lastly, the proclamation of the New Covenant;"-these form a group of consolatory prophecies, each one of which is a perfect composition in itself, while all are directed to promote a common object. And of these the last, the prophecy of the New Covenant, is the most important. e b I say it is the most important; for this prophecy is singled out to occupy a place of great prominence in the New Testament. When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is engaged in showing that the old Priesthood of the Law was done away at Christ's coming, because Christ was the true "Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedek," Whom the Old Testament itself had led men to expect, he enforces his argument by observing that the Jewish Priesthood, and the old covenant of God with Israel, must stand or fall together, as parts of one religious whole; and that, therefore, the Jewish Priesthood must have been abolished, because the old covenant to which it belonged was, according to the Jewish Prophet, to give way to a new and a better covenant. Thus it is that this passage of Jeremiah is lifted by the Apostolic writings into a prominence which is almost unique; and a Jer. xxx. xxxi. 1-9. d lb. xxxi. 31-34. c Ib. xxxi. 15, 17. f Ib. viii. b Ib. xxx. 9. it will supply us, I hope, with some useful thoughts at a season when Christians are thinking of the preparation which God made for Christianity before Christ came, and of what was said about it by the Prophets who were inspired to prepare the world for the Divine Redeemer, and for those new relations between earth and Heaven which He was to introduce. с I. a Here, then, we observe, first of all, that the Christian religion is described as a New Covenant. "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a New Covenant with the house of Israel, and the house of Judah." The Gospel was, we remember, to be preached among all nations, but beginning at Jerusalem." The "Israel after the flesh" b was to be widened into " the Israel of God," and was to embrace the world. The covenant would be new; for it had had predecessors. God is said to have made a covenant with Noah, when He promised that a judgment like the flood should not be repeated ; a and with Abraham, when He promised Canaan to his descendants for an everlasting possession, and imposed the condition of circumcision. But by the phrase, “the Old Covenant," is meant especially the covenant which God made with Israel as a people on Mount Sinai.1 The writing termed the "Book of the Covenant" comprised the Ten Commandments, and the body of laws which are recorded in the twenty-first and two following chapters of Exodus. These were the conditions imposed by God, when He entered into covenant relations with Israel; and the solemn act by which this covenant was b a first inaugurated is described in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus. Gathered at the base of the holy mountain, before an altar resting on twelve pillars, in honour of the twelve tribes, the people waited silent and awestruck, while twelve delegates (as yet there was no Priesthood) offered such sacrifices as yet were possible, and while the Lawgiver sprinkled the blood of the victims upon the assembled multitude. That ceremony had a latent meaning, unperceived at the time, which many centuries afterwards would be drawn out into the light under Apostolic direction; but the solemn character of the transaction was there and then profoundly felt. And at later periods of Israel's history this covenant was again and again renewed; as by Joshua at Shechem, and by King Asa at Jerusalem, and by Jehoiada the Priest in the Temple, and by the Priesthood and people under Hezekiah,1 and under the auspices of Ezra and Nehemiah in later days. still, after the great Captivity. It was renewed because it was continually broken. It was a Divine work, and yet, through man's perverseness, it was a failure. And hence the words, "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I led them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which covenant they brake, although I was an Husband to them, saith the Lord." с "The New Covenant" is a phrase which sounds strange to the ears of Christians, who have been accustomed all their life to talk of "the New Testament." A covenant is a compact or agreement, and it implies something like equal rights between the parties to it. Monarchs make covenants or treaties with monarchs, nations with nations; one private person signs a deed of agreement with another. Laban made a covenant with Jacob upon a heap of stones, to attest its reality; the Gibeonites made a covenant with Israel; the men of Jabesh, in their extremity, proposed, but in vain, to make a covenant with Nahash, the Ammonite king. In all such covenants a certain equality of relations between the contracting parties is assumed; each party acquires rights, each accepts liabilities. Even when, as sometimes happens, the Government of a great Power enters into a contract with a house of business or with an individual, this is because the firm or person in question is, for the purposes of the contract, on terms of equality with the negotiating Government, as having at its disposal the means of rendering some signal service, which for the moment throws all other considerations into the background. And this general equality between parties to a covenant may be further illustrated in the case of the most sacred of all human contracts-the marriage tie; that marriage tie which, by the law of God, once made, can be dissolved only by death, and in which it is the glory of the Christian law (I do not speak of all human legislation in Christian countries) to have secured to the contracting parties equal rights. It is, then, a little startling to find this same word. employed to describe a relation between the Infinite and Eternal God and the creatures of His Hand. He wants nothing, and He has everything to give; man needs everything, and can do nothing that will increase a Blessedness Which is already infinite, or enhance a Power Which as it is knows no bounds. But here are covenants between God and man in which there seems no place for reciprocity; covenants in which indulgence or endow a Gen. xxxi. 44. b Josh. ix. 6, 15. 1 Sam. xi. I. |