November 22 2020
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Well, by now I imagine everyone’s Thanksgiving menu is probably set. My daughter Elizabeth has created a spreadsheet for our Thanksgiving spread where we can all put down what we plan on bringing to the party. Now, everybody kind of expects that there will be turkey, that’s a given. Then you probably have some kind of veggie dish like corn or a green bean casserole. And of course you have to have some kind of starch, mash potatoes or noodles or both. Last but not least is dessert perhaps pie, most likely pumpkin to top everyone off to full to overflowing. What is most likely not given much thought is what kind of bread will be served to go with the meal. It’s kind of interesting that one of our families favorite memories of Thanksgiving centers around the bread we ate more specifically the rolls that we had for our dinner. My sister and her family were coming up from Columbus and she said one of the things she would bring for dinner was the rolls. Now, when our family thinks about rolls our thoughts turn to soft doughy little balls of bread. So, we were a little perplexed when my sister shows up with hard rolls and when I say that that they were hard I mean that they like a rock. I mean you needed tools to break them open and you had to be careful how you ate them or you could have chipped a tooth. They did taste good but they were just so hard that our family just wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. At least they created some memories of Thanksgiving that still make us laugh.
Well, our experience with those hard rolls just proves that while we like to have bread with our meal it really isn’t the main event. We are blessed to have so many other options when it comes to eating. But it hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when bread was the main staple on many peoples table. We to keep that in mind to understand how radical it must have been for these same people when they heard Moses tell them that the reason God had fed them with manna, this strange bread from heaven was so that they might know that man does not live by bread alone but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. What is implied in what is being taught here is that there are two ways to view life, one way is by bread alone and the other way is through every word that comes out of the mouth of God. Now what is not apparent is that these two ways of coming at life are the background to our scripture for today.
In our scripture that is found in the book of Jeremiah, we hear Jeremiah tell the people of Israel that God has declared that the days are coming when God is going to make a new covenant. This new covenant will not be like the old covenant that of had with his people, the one he had made when he had brought his people out of Egypt, the covenant that God points out, that his people had broke. This is why God had decided to enter into a new covenant because the old one was broken, no longer able to define the relationship with God. Before we are to consider the new covenant God is proposing, I believe that it is important that we have an understanding of just why the old covenant had broken, so damaged that it had to be abandoned and replaced by something else, something better.
If we go back to some of the earlier chapters of Jeremiah what we find is that Jeremiah writes often about the matters of the heart. In the seventeenth chapter we find what is perhaps the best description of just what exactly is the problem that God is solving by initiating a new covenant. Jeremiah begins this chapter by stating that the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts. When you read this then you begin to see why it is important that we begin here because the heart on which God is going to write his law is not a blank slate. As Jeremiah tells us the hearts of the people of Judah have written on them, their sin. This sin has been written down using a pen of iron which has a point of diamond which implies that their hearts are hearts of stone. This echoes the prophesy of Ezekiel who in the thirty sixth chapter of his book declares in the days to come God is going to remove the stony hearts of his people and replace them with hearts of flesh, hearts that are beating with life.
So, Jeremiah wants his readers to understand that the problem affecting God’s people is a heart problem.Yet as important as this is, Jeremiah also wants his readers to understand the root of just why the hearts of God’s people, the people God has claimed and promised so much to their well being, why are their hearts in such an unholy state. Here is what Jeremiah tells us further in the seventeenth chapter that the Lord says, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness…”What again, may not be apparent is that what Jeremiah is telling us here is this way of life, this life is the same life that Moses was referring to when he said that man does not live by bread alone. In our modern times we have a difficult time to get the full weight is being said in this reference to live by bread alone. For us bread is just that loaf of Wonder that we grab on our way through the grocery store but for the people in ancient times to speak about bread meant speaking of plowing the ground, planting the seed, the watching and waiting until harvest, the harvest and threshing of the crop and then the storing and grinding of the crop into flour and finally the mixing up the flour into dough and the baking of the dough into bread. Now, it is easy to sympathize with the people who lived in these times when we find that this creation of bread became a kind of obsession for them. It’s obvious that the whole process was plagued with a lot of uncertainty, a lot of ways that problems could occur that could bring ruin upon the people struggling to just to have enough to eat. Yet God tells his people don’t believe for a second that this is what life is all about. When his people began to think that life was about raising a large crop so they could eat lots of bread then what they would do is use their creative urge that is part of being in the made of the image of God and use that to achieve their goal of a bountiful crop. This lead people to put their confidence in what they could do, what the strength of their own flesh could accomplish, their trust was in their own ability. This is what God declares is a cursed life. When we hear this we may be a little confused especially as we live in a world where personal achievement is an exalted way of life. But what happens when life becomes all about us and what we can achieve and when our focus is on the goal we have set out to achieve then we expect that God should be the guaranty of our success. Do you see how warped things begin to get when life is all about us? This is why this life is cursed because we start to expect that God will support our definition of life instead of allowing God to be the one who defines our life. What happens to a person’s relationship with God is that it morphs into religion. Religion is where people think they can formulate an understanding of the terms of God’s actions, the preconditions of God’s favor. In other words, religion is thinking that we have God all figured out so that all one has to do is just follow a formula and God’s favor will follow.
Well, this life that puts its trust in man and finds its strength in the power of the flesh not only ruins ones relationship with God it also ruins the relationships we have with those around us. You see the thing is that it isn’t easy to a live a life where we are seeking to fulfill the goals we desire using our own power. People or nature can block us from reaching our goal which results in us getting angry at our inability to achieve what we desire. Or we begin to realize that there are any number of things that could go wrong, that there are so many things that are beyond our control that can destroy any hope we have of achieving the goal that we have chosen. The result is that we become anxious, worrying because of the reality that so much of life is beyond our control. Or it may become apparent that the goal we are pursuing is going to be impossible for us to ever achieve. This is going to make us depressed and distraught.So do you begin to understand how a life where we trust in ourselves, a life of anger, anxiety and depression how this is really a cursed life?
Well, God is not fooled when we are trusting in our own efforts, when we attempt to use him like a utility we can plug into to make our life better. Jeremiah writes in the seventeenth chapter that the heart is deceitful and desperately sick; who can understand it? What Jeremiah is saying here is that we believe, wrongly that we can use part of our heart to pursue the goals we desire and at the same time use another part of our heart to maintain a relationship with God. Yet God is not fooled because as we read further, God says, “I search the heart and test the mind to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” God is the searcher of hearts, the one who knows who we are at the very depths of our being and God is not fooled and he will not be used to further the pursuits of anyone.Because the people of Israel continued to do what they wanted while religiously trying to maintain their relationship with God , God finally decided to send his people to serve foreigners in a foreign land. The reason was that the people of Israel striving to find life in their own strength by the power of their flesh were in effect being no different than the life lived by the foreigners who did not know God. So if they were going to live like foreigners then they might as well live with foreigners.
God had a purpose for sending his people out to serve the foreigners and that was to change their hearts. In the twenty ninth chapter of Jeremiah, God tells his people that after they had been in Babylon for seventy years, his people would call upon God and come and pray to him and God promises that he would hear them. They would seek God and they would find God when they would seek God with all of their heart. You see God put them in a place where no matter how strong or how smart they might be, in the power of their flesh they could nothing while in the captivity of foreigners. This is where God has to bring people, to places where they come to the end of themselves because it is there that God at last can be found. It is when we can admit the weakness of our spirit, what directs the power of our flesh that is when God can offer us his Spirit which gives us the victory to control our flesh.
This brings us to the new covenant that God promises to his people. In Hebrew thought we are given first the result of God’s action and we need to read down to find the cause of what God has promised. The cause of this new covenant is that God declares that he will forgive the peoples iniquity and God would remember their sin no more. What is incredible about this is that God forgives without any demands that his people do anything. There is no call for God’s people to repent, to grieve and clothe themselves with sackcloth. No, the message God is sending to his people is that it is not about them. There is nothing God’s people can do to win his favor, to manipulate God’s grace to be in service of them. No, God just forgives, he just forgets what is past in order that his people night have a future. In forgiving the sins of his people, they no longer are living under a death sentence. Now they can know with certainty that their life is a gift from God. In knowing that their life is gift from God they then know God as the gift-giving God, the life-giving God. This is why we read that all will know the Lord from the least to the greatest. Why is this so? This is is going to be the reality because all will have experienced the forgiveness of their sins thus all will know their life as a gift from God and all will also know God as the life and gift giving God. So it is not hard to understand how it is that in this new covenant that God writes his law upon our hearts. God has given our life to us as a gift and so now our hearts are open to receive the word of God because now we know that God and not our strength is the fountain of our life.Instead of planting seeds in order to have bread for life God calls us to take the seed of his word into the seedbed of our heart and by faith plant it there and discover life through the power of God.
Well, the prophesy that God was going to make a new covenant was given with no clear date in mind only the ambiguous saying that it would happen in the days to come. As it turned out that those days turned to months and years and centuries because it wasn’t until seven hundred years had passed, in the fulfillment of time, God sent his Son, Jesus. Jesus came to condemn sin in the flesh, this cursed condition where we put our trust in our own abilities, where we trust the strength of our own flesh. This is condemned because through the cross the world witnessed that the flesh far from being strong was in fact, weak. The flesh was unable to do the good it knew to do, held captive by the power of sin. It was this power of sin that Jesus destroyed upon the cross where he placed no confidence in his flesh but only found his strength in his faith in his Heavenly Father. There upon the cross Jesus shed his blood so that we people far from God might be forgiven of our iniquity so that our sin might be forgotten. Here at the cross we knew that we deserved death but in the gift of Jesus we received the gift of life. Now all can know God as the giver of gifts, the giver of life. Now we know that the words God speaks are words of life that gives us life when we place our faith in that word. This we know to be the truth because the faith of Jesus was proved to be true when he walked out of the grave after three days. Now, through the Holy Spirit the life of Christ can live in us. This is the one thing we can be certain of that there is nothing in this world that can prevent us from growing to be more like Jesus except us. All of this is possible, our hope of God’s new covenant because God forgives us, before we even repent, before we are even sorry, God has forgiven us and accepted us just as we are all to give us a blessed life. So, this Thanksgiving in addition to giving thanks for the turkey and all the rest of our feast let us also give thanks for a life that comes from every word God speaks to us. To God be he glory! Amen!
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