I was reading this week about “The New Deal.” Some of you remember it. Some lived during it. Most have at least read it in history books. “The New Deal” was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign platform back in 1932, when he ran against incumbent Herbert Hoover.

In 1933, Roosevelt’s first as president, the United States was in a severe economic depression, highlighted by the crash of the stock market in 1929. The gap between the wealthy and most other people was enormous. Unemployment was sky high. Banks had collapsed, and employers were regularly going out of business.

“The New Deal” included scores of new federal projects and programs designed first to provide relief, and later to reform systems. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, Social Security and a wealth tax were all part of the new deal.

The “New Deal” was a response to the “old deal,” which clearly wasn’t working. Historians are somewhat ambivalent on the long-term effectiveness of the New Deal, but most wouldn’t argue that it began to get the U.S. out of a disastrous time of depression.

Nowadays, we are besieged with all things labeled “new.” Half of the products on store shelves say “new,” or “new and improved.” Most advertising money is for the latest and greatest, new things in every consumer category. And the rate of technological advancement right now is so stunning that if something isn’t new, it is at best ineffective and at worst obsolete.

So maybe when we come to this letter to the Hebrews again, and find the talk of a new covenant…we yawn a little bit. Been there. But for the writer to the Hebrews and this community of faith, it is no yawning matter. The readers have lost the edge that their faith had when they first started to follow Jesus. The constant opposition from the culture around them has worn them down. The pull is to go back to the old way, the old faith, the law and the temple. Why not?

That’s what the writer to the Hebrews wants to talk about this morning. When Hebrews speaks about the new covenant, it must first speak about the old covenant in these terms: It wasn’t good enough. It didn’t work.

“For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, there would have been no need to look for a second one.”

A covenant is a treaty, an agreement, a contract of sorts. In the case of the covenant set by God with the people of Israel, it’s not a compact between equals, but the commitment between a superior and an inferior that provides for the care of the weaker party. The first covenant was the relationship between God and Israel, symbolized by the writing of the Ten Commandments on the stone tablets. Another word for “covenant” is “testament.” Old King James versions of the Bible called the “Old Testament” the “Old Covenant.” In other words, our Old Testament is the story, of the first (old) covenant.

And here’s what the writer of Hebrews says about that first covenant: It didn’t work. The first covenant described the behaviors of what a relationship with God would look like. Laid them out chapter and verse, described what God wanted. Even described God as being bent towards His people. But the problem was that the people kept breaking the covenant, and that a tablet, a law, a sacrifice…could not take away sin. Something else was needed. Something new, that worked.

And so the writer turns to the prophets. He goes back to the 6th century BC prophet Jeremiah. And quotes him verbatim except that he does not attribute the words to Jeremiah. He simply says that “God said…” and quotes the Jeremiah passage. It’s the fact that it’s God’s Word that is important to him, not Jeremiah. And that word, six centuries old, is applied directly to the first century Christians. God said in Jeremiah, “I will do this,” and in Hebrews it says, “This is what God has done.”

The new covenant is given. Going back to the old would make no sense, like the U.S. choosing to voluntarily walk back into the Great Depression after they had begun something new.

Notice that the covenant is declared by God. Period. It doesn’t actually have a prescription for what the people’s part of this new covenant is, at least not here. God just makes the declaration. God does it. God acts. God judges the old, and God initiates the new. I love that. God just does what is needed and right. God sends his Son, Jesus Christ.

Some of you this morning would describe your coming to faith in the first place in the same way.

“I turned around, and God was already there waiting for me.”

Despite our strong desire to be autonomous, independent, self-determining, free-willing people…we turn around, and God has acted. There’s something very reassuring to me about that. More than I might see, God has his grip on us.

I went to an elementary school assembly a while back, and the kids’ choir did a great job of singing a couple of songs. The last song was an old classic, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” But there was something different about it.

What the kids were singing was not He’s got the whole world in His hands….but we’ve got the whole world in our hands. Undoubtedly the God-Police had sent out a memo that “He refers to God, and we can’t refer to God in the school system.” It was a scary thought, though. If we have the whole world in our hands then I fear even more for our world than I do now. The assurance of scripture is that somehow, despite all appearances…the world remains in God’s hands.

This New Covenant comes as a declaration, an action, from God.
And in it are three “I will” statements that I want you to hear this morning.

First, God says, “I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.” External things like stone tablets can list out laws and commandments, can regulate desired behavior…but the new covenant is to be written internally, on minds and hearts.

Imagine that you are in a friendship. What would you rather have…a friendship that is built on a written mutual contract that specifies certain kinds of behaviors?

“Will bring flowers once each month, will smile based on other person’s jokes, agree to see each other once each week...”

Or would you rather have a friendship of spontaneity, where because you love one another, you choose to bring flowers, to laugh, to call one another and spend time together out of the sheer joy of the growth of an intimate relationship? Of course you’d rather have the second.

The new covenant is a relationship built on internal things, things of the heart. Perhaps we would say,

“But how can I be in that kind of intimate relationship with the great and powerful God of the universe? How can I know what God is truly like, the Ruler over all the earth?”

Scripture would say that to know the heart of God, to know God’s compassion, to know God’s desires, to know the depth of God’s love…intimate…we look at Jesus Christ. The New Testament might be called The Story of the Second (new) Covenant….and it is of course Jesus’ story.

Second, I will be their God and they will be my people, declares the Lord. We will be part of the family of God. We will be known by God.

Have you ever gone to a business meeting, or a wedding reception…and looked around and realized that you know almost no one in the whole room, and no one seems too concerned with coming over to introduce themselves or welcome you? And you say to yourself, “What in the world am I doing here? I don’t belong here!”

Not when you are part of God’s family. You belong. You are known. You are loved. In Christ, God held nothing back to be sure you could be in his family.

I don’t pretend that we always feel this way, or that it is easy to understand. Last winter I went up to speak at our Alpha retreat one weekend, talking all weekend about the Holy Spirit. One of the scriptures I mentioned in the evening was the story of Jesus’ baptism at the Jordan River. Remember that Jesus is there in the water with John the Baptist and suddenly the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus and then the voice of the Father speaks from heaven and says two things:

“This is my Son the beloved…with whom I am well pleased.”

At the end of the talk, I invited everyone to a quiet hour…just to be with God, to pray and reflect and listen. I walked out in the dark and sat on a bench down by the lake.

And as I sat there, not thinking of anything in particular, that scripture again came to my mind over and over. Never, ever had I ever thought about that passage as applying to anyone other than Jesus…that God loved him, and was well pleased with him. But I felt as though God put the scripture to me and asked me a question:

“Why do you believe the first part (I love you)…but refuse to believe the second part (I am well-pleased with you)?”

I realized that was true about me. I usually can believe God loves me…partly because I have felt it many times, partly because it is a theological truth from scripture: God loves us.

But God being well-pleased with me? I struggled with that, and I’m still struggling with that. It seems somehow so much more personal to me, not a theological statement but an intimate declaration of pleasure with someone in your family.

In Jesus, God assures us that we belong to his family, that he desires all to know him…including you and me.

“I will be their God and they will be my people.”

Third, God says: I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. Lewis Smedes was a writer and professor down at Fuller Seminary who thought long and hard about forgiveness. I like so much of what he wrote.

“Forgiveness,” he said, “is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And he invites us all to forgive each other.”

Smedes often counseled people that “forgive and forget” was a fallacy. That human beings could do no such thing. Nobody just forgets. We don’t somehow erase part of our memory system. No, Smedes says, forgiveness is returning to a relationship with the offense no longer acting as a barrier. Forgetting could happen after healing and over time…but not always. And remembering an offense does not mean that you have not forgiven.

I like so much of what Smedes says. But I don’t like what he says about this idea that God does not only forgives but forgets. Smedes says,

“God does not have amnesia; to say that God forgets is to say that he feels about us the way he would feel if he had forgotten.”

The problem I have with this is: It’s not what Jeremiah said, and it’s not what Hebrews quotes. What it says here is:

“I will forgive, and will remember their sins no more.”

God is different than we are. And imagine the implications. A forgiveness that no longer remembers.

All of us have experienced the pain of something forgiven and yet remembered. A couple comes to me for marriage counseling. And in the course of hearing their story, I keep hearing these words:

“You have always done this.”
“Remember when you did this to me.”

They are things that long ago had been asked forgiveness for, and granted. But in the time of crisis they are still on the radar screen, sometimes popping up in painful ways.

The idea that we might come repentantly to God and ask forgiveness…and find it already granted to us, be restored to relationship and never have to worry that it will be brought back up and used against us is enough to bring you to your knees. And it is this forgiveness that has already been made available to us in Jesus Christ. I will forgive…and forget.

Last week in Hebrews 7 the writer told us that Jesus was a high priest, a far superior high priest than any ever known. Now we see that the covenant which he brings is far superior to the old. Jesus is, in effect, the new covenant set before us, carving it onto our hearts by giving up his own body and blood. People broke the old covenant, but God sets up the new one at great cost. It hardly seems fair. It wasn’t fair. It was grace. And it was God’s grace poured out so that you and I, who so often resemble dry, dusty, cracked ground might receive the new and delicious water God intends.

And as that water pours into us, we are empowered to live out what we are receiving…inviting others into relationship with the Living God, opening our arms in hospitality, practicing an extraordinary kind of forgiveness.

We’ve never known a “new deal” such as this. Permanent and eternal and totally sufficient, so far beyond the old…and so the writer of Hebrews asks, why would you look to the past, to things that were inadequate when the new is here? Eugene Peterson translates it like this:

“By coming up with a new plan, a new covenant between God and his people, God put the old plan on the shelf. And there it stays, gathering dust.”

This morning, we will come to the communion table, and listen for this new covenant. We will hear the words Jesus spoke to his disciples 2000 years ago…

“This cup is the New Covenant, sealed in my blood…”

But we will also experience tangibly here the presence of the God who grabs our hearts, who claims us as family, and who washes away sin forever.

Let us pray.