Daily Reading - 8/11/26

Above: Salvador Dali, The Blood of the New Covenant. Spain, 1965.

• Jeremiah 31-32

• Psalm 41

• Proverbs 11

“Behold the days are coming,” declares Yahweh, “When I will cut a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.”

Jeremiah 31:31

In today’s reading we again encounter one of the most famous and influential passages in the book of Jeremiah. In this text we read one of the earliest hints of the radical transformation of God’s promises, which were ultimately fulfilled in Jesus.

Leading up to the prophecy, Jeremiah quotes an Israelite proverb—a general saying, not a text from Proverbs. Neither Jeremiah nor Ezekiel (cf. Ez. 18:2) liked this proverb. It said, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” In general, the proverb expresses the idea that children suffer for the mistakes of their parents. In some ways, this is obviously true. If a pregnant woman drinks alcohol, her child will probably suffer for it.

But Jeremiah and Ezekiel rejected the theological implication that was intended by the proverb. Those who said it were not commenting on the quality of Israelite children’s teeth. Rather, through the proverb the Israelites were expressing the idea that God’s punishment of them was unjust. Previous generations of Israelites were sinful—worshipping idols and breaking the Law—but then later generations were punished for it. A child born on the first year of exile in Babylon would probably live their entire life as an exile, though they had not personally committed any sins to cause the exile.

On one level, this is an absurd criticism. If a nation is going to be collectively punished by God at all—a principle which the Bible clearly accepts—then not everyone in the nation is going to deserve the punishment. There are righteous people everywhere, even in the most vicious and violent societies. And when societies fall, everyone suffers. But, on another level, the criticism makes sense. The child did not do anything to deserve the exile. The child was in fact innocent. It seems that the real theological conflict was between two ostensibly true theological principles.

The next verses of Jeremiah describe how this tension was resolved in the course of salvation history. In 31:31-40 the prophet gives one of the clearest anticipations of the later, fuller Christian Gospel. He explicitly says that God would make a “new covenant” with the Israelites (31:31), which was “not like” the Old Testament covenant of Law (31:32). Instead of simply telling people how to live righteously, God would infuse his Holy Spirit into people to cause them to live righteously (32:33). Thus all Israelites would have a direct, immediate relationship with God and would not have to have a priest as a mediator, because their sins will have been forgiven (31:34).

Even someone with a very passing knowledge of Christianity can see how this clearly anticipates the later Christian Gospel. This was precisely the “new covenant” that Jesus referenced on the night before his death (Luke 22:20). Though he did not fully understand it, Jeremiah had predicted that God would overcome the tension between the punishment of the nation and the punishment of individuals by redefining the concept of the “nation.” Now, after the birth of Jesus, the “nation” of God’s people is not a state based on ethnicity and defended by an army. Now we are a “nation” composed of all peoples and ethnicities, whose Kingdom advances not through war but through peace.