At the Last Supper, Jesus said that He would shed the blood of the covenant for His disciples (Mark 14:24). So, what is this covenant He was talking about?

At least in part, He was referring to Jeremiah 31, which describes the new covenant that God promised to make with His people. And why would God need to make such a new covenant? Because His people had regularly and repeatedly broken the first covenant He had made with them. And as 31:32 says, whenever we sin, whenever we forget God’s law in order to do what we want, we are just as unfaithful to God as when a wife cheats on her husband.

That’s why God sent so many prophets like Jeremiah to remind His people of how He had blessed them, and how He expected them to respond to His grace with faith and obedience. But hundreds of years of such reminders had had little effect.

And so, as we see in 31:33, a new covenant would be necessary. But instead of being outward and symbolic, the way the Law of Moses was, it would be inward and spiritual. That’s because with the coming of Christ, it is our faith in Him that matters most. And as 31:34 says, those who trust in Him not only have all our sins forgiven. We also know Him personally and intimately.

Moreover, in this new covenant, our relationship with God’s law also changes. Because Christ kept the Law of Moses perfectly on behalf of all His people, we are not saved by what we do or leave undone. Instead, once we are joined to Christ by faith, God writes His law on our hearts, as 31:33 says. God changes our desires so that we will follow His law of love not because we have to, but because we want to.

And it is only such a change of heart that can truly keep us in a right relationship with God. May we draw close to our gracious Redeemer in love and faith today.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 (NASB)

31 “Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,
32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.
33 “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the LORD, “I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.
34 “And they shall not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the LORD, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”