By We are familiar with the covenant that God made with people like Abraham, and many years later with his descendants through Moses. However, there is a covenant described in Jeremiah 31 is that far superior to all other covenants. It is what the prophet Jeremiah called “the New Covenant”.
What is so much superior and different about this New Covenant is that the New Covenant is uniquely a spiritual-salvation covenant. In the New Covenant there are only true believers. The New Covenant is a covenant that saves. All that are part of the New Covenant are saved, and all who are saved are part of the New Covenant. In the New Covenant there is no more confusion of who is saved and who is not – like there was in Israel throughout the whole Old Testament. In the New Covenant it is very easy and straight forward. If you are saved you are in it; If you are in it then you are saved.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD.
Jeremiah 31:33-34
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
This is a great promise. This is God promising that He will forgive sins, produce a true knowledge of God, and instil true obedience in those He chooses as part of this New Covenant.
One day it will be true for all Israel, but now already it is true for those of us who, although not Israeli’s, have been made recipients of this covenant. If you are a Christian, then your sins are forgiven, you know God, you are learning to obey from the heart.