Sunday, March 29th, 2009
Lent 5B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Theme: The Old and New Covenants between God and God’s people
The main thing I appreciate about contemporary praise music is the degree to which it lifts texts straight from scripture and puts it to music and makes it accessible to people like me who are otherwise memorizationally challenged. Hymns do that to a degree, but they carry more theology in them. Praise songs allow us to ‘breathe in’ the words directly, with little or no commentary in SOME cases.
The first time I heard the words of these four verses and they STUCK was the first time my family and I visited Third Baptist Church of Santiago, shortly after we moved there at the end of 1974. It would become our home church for the remainder of my time in Chile. The words stuck because they had been put to the music of a praise song that we sang during the first part of the service. Santiago was ‘the big city’, and much more up to date in the songs that were sung in churches compared to the ones we sang out in the outlying areas. I still remember being electrified by hearing the tune and the guitar strumming and the voices being lifted together in song. Ever since then, whether I read the words in English or Spanish, that song begins to play in my head. It has, in the same sense that the text speaks, been written on my heart.
Let me give a little context to the time and place when these words were written. It is during or shortly after 587 BC. Jerusalem has just been sacked and destroyed by the Babylonians. The mass transfer of survivors from Israel to Babylon has not quite begun. Jeremiah, who has dedicated his life to bringing God’s word to God’s people, is surrounded by the rubble and destruction of all that he held dear – except his relationship with God.
In the midst of that wandering, in the face of the desolation that was before the prophet and the people of Israel, God sends God’s word: and it is, in essence, this: “some day it won’t matter what the place is, or how the temple looks, because my relationship with you won’t depend on where you are or on what you bring. YOU will KNOW in your HEART that I AM YOUR GOD, and nothing can destroy THAT relationship – not even sin, because I will have forgiven it!”
To us, as Christians, to hear those words is … to hear the essence of the Gospel, and in that sense, they are nothing new, because we know, as followers of Christ, that our sins HAVE been forgiven, we know that the relationship we have with God DOESN’T depend on where our building is or on what it looks like, because we UNDERSTAND that to begin with, God calls us into an individual relationship – within a corporate context, but to a necessary degree, initially there HAS to be some sense of individual forgiveness of sins WE individually have committed – and THROUGH that forgiveness our relationship with God has been reestablished.
This passage has been called ‘The Gospel before the Gospel’; it is the earliest and closest approach to the New Testament faith in the Old Testament.
Four times in the four verses we read “says the Lord”. While the translation is correct, the literal translation is ‘whisper of Yahweh’. I love what that does to the picture I have of Jeremiah struggling over the rubble of the temple and looking out over the smoking ruins of Jerusalem and hearing the voice of God. We have these images, especially from the Hebrew Scriptures, courtesy of ‘The Ten Commandments’, of God either speaking in a booming voice from a cloud or a pillar of fire, or carving words into stone tablets with lightning bolts to communicate with the people of Israel. How often do we get to think in terms of a whisper from God communicating something completely new, something radically different?
When you whisper to someone, do you do it from across the field, or the park, or the street, or the room? No, you do it when you are right up next to them – a whisper is one of the most intimate manners of communication we USE. It is THE most personal form of conversation. And in the original Hebrew, God is using it with Jeremiah!
It was completely new and radically different because the old way, the old covenant, had collapsed because the people of Israel had – not occasionally or sporadically – but persistently broken it. As one scholar has put it, the covenant had been made with the nation, and the nation had crashed on the rock of God’s law. So the question arose: how can a holy God maintain a relationship with a sinful people?
The answer comes in the concept of a new covenant, guaranteed against failure.
This new covenant is a blend of the old and the new. In the same way as the old, it is still based on the Law of Moses – the Torah – and it will still be for the house of Israel, but it will transcend the national entity – it will broaden the scope of who belongs to the house of Israel. The individual becomes the focus of the covenant – but never apart from the group. Rugged individualism in religion is not biblical.
In a new way, this new covenant is radically different from the old: old covenants were made, this covenant is promised. To make a covenant in the old sense is more along the lines of making a business contract – with stipulations, and articles, and points, addendums, what have you … to make a covenant in the form of a promise raises the stakes immeasurably. It PERSONALIZES the agreement in a way that the old covenants never did, though they intended to.
What the new covenant DOES do is it creates a new person through a new divine deed; God will now write God’s law – the revelation of God’s order for Life for God’s people – not on tablets of stone, but on the heart – the inner being of the individual.
This is radically different from what was before – God will put God’s will straight into our hearts, so that the necessity of communication through external methods – sacrifices and offerings – is bypassed.
You see, in this new relationship, humanity is brought back into relationship with God. But we need to understand, in Jeremiah’s context, what HE meant when HE said ‘to KNOW God’. One can know the law in a formal sense and not know God. To know God one must refrain from wrongdoing and practice righteousness, justice, and love. To know God, one must have a pure and regenerate heart that turns to God in loyal obedience. To KNOW God is not a formal affair, but a direct, dynamic, intimate, personal fellowship with God which controls the course of one’s life. This doesn’t come through liturgy or ceremonies, but through contact – through communion in the relational sense of the word – through hearing the whispers that God is speaking to us.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?
It means that our task, our calling, our invitation, is to live in a relationship, not a religion. What we as followers of Christ have the opportunity to do as witnesses TO that relationship is to extend the … range … the scope of it. When we offer a helping hand, an encouraging word, a gentle offer of reconciliation in the name of Christ, we are, in effect, introducing someone to the one who has reconciled us to God. The downside to that is that when we DON’T, we are in effect perpetuating the Old Testament concept of meeting the requirements of the Law in order to gain righteousness, which has, as God God’s self recognized, required this new way to be provided – through the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray.
Lent 5B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Theme: The Old and New Covenants between God and God’s people
“31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
The main thing I appreciate about contemporary praise music is the degree to which it lifts texts straight from scripture and puts it to music and makes it accessible to people like me who are otherwise memorizationally challenged. Hymns do that to a degree, but they carry more theology in them. Praise songs allow us to ‘breathe in’ the words directly, with little or no commentary in SOME cases.
The first time I heard the words of these four verses and they STUCK was the first time my family and I visited Third Baptist Church of Santiago, shortly after we moved there at the end of 1974. It would become our home church for the remainder of my time in Chile. The words stuck because they had been put to the music of a praise song that we sang during the first part of the service. Santiago was ‘the big city’, and much more up to date in the songs that were sung in churches compared to the ones we sang out in the outlying areas. I still remember being electrified by hearing the tune and the guitar strumming and the voices being lifted together in song. Ever since then, whether I read the words in English or Spanish, that song begins to play in my head. It has, in the same sense that the text speaks, been written on my heart.
Let me give a little context to the time and place when these words were written. It is during or shortly after 587 BC. Jerusalem has just been sacked and destroyed by the Babylonians. The mass transfer of survivors from Israel to Babylon has not quite begun. Jeremiah, who has dedicated his life to bringing God’s word to God’s people, is surrounded by the rubble and destruction of all that he held dear – except his relationship with God.
In the midst of that wandering, in the face of the desolation that was before the prophet and the people of Israel, God sends God’s word: and it is, in essence, this: “some day it won’t matter what the place is, or how the temple looks, because my relationship with you won’t depend on where you are or on what you bring. YOU will KNOW in your HEART that I AM YOUR GOD, and nothing can destroy THAT relationship – not even sin, because I will have forgiven it!”
To us, as Christians, to hear those words is … to hear the essence of the Gospel, and in that sense, they are nothing new, because we know, as followers of Christ, that our sins HAVE been forgiven, we know that the relationship we have with God DOESN’T depend on where our building is or on what it looks like, because we UNDERSTAND that to begin with, God calls us into an individual relationship – within a corporate context, but to a necessary degree, initially there HAS to be some sense of individual forgiveness of sins WE individually have committed – and THROUGH that forgiveness our relationship with God has been reestablished.
This passage has been called ‘The Gospel before the Gospel’; it is the earliest and closest approach to the New Testament faith in the Old Testament.
Four times in the four verses we read “says the Lord”. While the translation is correct, the literal translation is ‘whisper of Yahweh’. I love what that does to the picture I have of Jeremiah struggling over the rubble of the temple and looking out over the smoking ruins of Jerusalem and hearing the voice of God. We have these images, especially from the Hebrew Scriptures, courtesy of ‘The Ten Commandments’, of God either speaking in a booming voice from a cloud or a pillar of fire, or carving words into stone tablets with lightning bolts to communicate with the people of Israel. How often do we get to think in terms of a whisper from God communicating something completely new, something radically different?
When you whisper to someone, do you do it from across the field, or the park, or the street, or the room? No, you do it when you are right up next to them – a whisper is one of the most intimate manners of communication we USE. It is THE most personal form of conversation. And in the original Hebrew, God is using it with Jeremiah!
It was completely new and radically different because the old way, the old covenant, had collapsed because the people of Israel had – not occasionally or sporadically – but persistently broken it. As one scholar has put it, the covenant had been made with the nation, and the nation had crashed on the rock of God’s law. So the question arose: how can a holy God maintain a relationship with a sinful people?
The answer comes in the concept of a new covenant, guaranteed against failure.
This new covenant is a blend of the old and the new. In the same way as the old, it is still based on the Law of Moses – the Torah – and it will still be for the house of Israel, but it will transcend the national entity – it will broaden the scope of who belongs to the house of Israel. The individual becomes the focus of the covenant – but never apart from the group. Rugged individualism in religion is not biblical.
In a new way, this new covenant is radically different from the old: old covenants were made, this covenant is promised. To make a covenant in the old sense is more along the lines of making a business contract – with stipulations, and articles, and points, addendums, what have you … to make a covenant in the form of a promise raises the stakes immeasurably. It PERSONALIZES the agreement in a way that the old covenants never did, though they intended to.
What the new covenant DOES do is it creates a new person through a new divine deed; God will now write God’s law – the revelation of God’s order for Life for God’s people – not on tablets of stone, but on the heart – the inner being of the individual.
This is radically different from what was before – God will put God’s will straight into our hearts, so that the necessity of communication through external methods – sacrifices and offerings – is bypassed.
You see, in this new relationship, humanity is brought back into relationship with God. But we need to understand, in Jeremiah’s context, what HE meant when HE said ‘to KNOW God’. One can know the law in a formal sense and not know God. To know God one must refrain from wrongdoing and practice righteousness, justice, and love. To know God, one must have a pure and regenerate heart that turns to God in loyal obedience. To KNOW God is not a formal affair, but a direct, dynamic, intimate, personal fellowship with God which controls the course of one’s life. This doesn’t come through liturgy or ceremonies, but through contact – through communion in the relational sense of the word – through hearing the whispers that God is speaking to us.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?
It means that our task, our calling, our invitation, is to live in a relationship, not a religion. What we as followers of Christ have the opportunity to do as witnesses TO that relationship is to extend the … range … the scope of it. When we offer a helping hand, an encouraging word, a gentle offer of reconciliation in the name of Christ, we are, in effect, introducing someone to the one who has reconciled us to God. The downside to that is that when we DON’T, we are in effect perpetuating the Old Testament concept of meeting the requirements of the Law in order to gain righteousness, which has, as God God’s self recognized, required this new way to be provided – through the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray.
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