Jeremiah 31:29-34 (A new covenant...)

Jeremiah 31:29-30
“The people will no longer quote this proverb:

‘The parents have eaten sour grapes,
    but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.’
All people will die for their own sins—those who eat the sour grapes will be the ones whose mouths will pucker.

Each person will be held to account for their actions and made to pay for their choices. Sounds pretty bleak to me. If I make a misstep, then I will die.

God despises sin and tells us quite plainly in Romans that the wages of sin is death. Put simply, if we sin, someone has to die. And yet this isn't the end of the plan God laid out to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 31:31-34
 “The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord.

“But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbours, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.”

This new covenant sounds awfully familiar.

Jeremiah has just been told about the coming of Jesus, although he probably didn't see it as such. Many are the benefits of hindsight.

So many parts of the Gospel are laid out in this short passage. The law on our hearts, forgiveness and forgetting of sins. Sin demands a death and that death belongs to Jesus, who laid Himself on a cross for me; For us!

God promised to Jeremiah that there would be a new covenant that was different from the old. The old covenant demanded rules and sacrifices with days of atonement and festivals to try and get sins erased. The new covenant requires sacrifice of a different kind.

The old covenant was a two way street; As long as we did our part, God did His. The new covenant, confirmed with the blood of Jesus goes one way. God has forgiven us and paid for our sins already. This isn't a ticket to sin, but rather an invitation to freedom from sin.

As Casting Crowns so beautifully puts it:
Not because of who I am
But because of what You've done.
Not because of what I've done
But because of who You are.