COVENANT, THE NEW (בְּרִית, H1382, διαθήκη, G1347, testament). The legal disposition of Jesus Christ for the redemption of men, esp. when viewed as the goal or accomplishment of God’s older, OT covenant(s).

Outline

1. OT anticipation.

A. History. Throughout its pp. the OT had spoken of God’s gracious, contemporaneous בְּרִית, H1382, “testament,” which He established for His people (see [http://biblegateway/wiki/Covenant (in the Old Testament) COVENANT, IN THE OT]). It was only with the 8th cent. prophet Hosea that He first granted a specific revelation concerning a newer b’rith, that would some day replace and fulfill the older. Seemingly in despair because of his immediate Baal-worshiping surroundings (Hos 2:17), Hosea looked forward to a better time ahead when, as Jehovah said, “I will make for you a covenant” (v. 18). This covenant, or testament, was shown to possess two aspects: an internal—“I will betroth you to me in righteousness...and you shall know the Lord” (vv. 19, 20)—and an external—“And I will make for you a covenant...with the beasts of the field...and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety” (v. 18). These aspects reached complete expression, respectively in Jeremiah’s new testament, just prior to the exilic period, and in Ezekiel’s testament of peace, during it (see below, IV). Meanwhile Isaiah, in the latter part of his life, carried forward the internal portion of Hosea’s revelation. In his messages of comfort to Judah, subsequent to the devastating attacks of Sennacherib in 701 b.c., he spoke of the deliverance that would be accomplished through God’s “Suffering Servant” (Jesus Christ, Luke 22:37), and specifically, of how the future b’rith would be embodied in Him: “And I will give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles” (Isa 42:6; 49:8 KJV). That is, what had so far been considered as a legal disposition is summed up as a P erson. Jesus Christ is not only the everlasting Son of God who establishes the testament, but He is the priest who at the same time officiates at the death (52:15). He is also the testator, the offering that dies (53:8), and He becomes Himself the living blessing of reconciliation; indeed, He is the inheritance that is bestowed: “that thou mayest be my salvation” (49:6 KJV). Christ, in other words, is the Testament.

In the year 597, after the commencement of Jerusalem’s depopulation (Jer 29:1, 2), God revealed through Jeremiah the more detailed truth of His new testament (31:31-34). After declaring its name (v. 31), the prophet proceeded to identify four primary elements in the new b’rith (see below, B), the anticipation of which represents perhaps the highest point in the whole sweep of OT theology.

Across the desert in Babylon, the prophet Daniel next provided God’s date for the termination of the animal sacrifices that played so great a part in the older testament and for the confirming of the new (cf. Dan 9:24-27 on the seventy “weeks” of years, or 490 years). He revealed also that this confirmation would involve the rejection of the Messiah, followed by a proclamation of the b’rith to Israel nationally (cf. v. 24) for approximately three and one-half additional years (cf. Acts 2:28; 3:25; 6:8, but then 8:1; cf. Rev 12:6, 14, and J. B. Payne, Theology of the Older Testament, pp. 276-278). Malachi, the last of the OT prophets, spoke both of Moses (Mal 4:4-6) and yet, at the same time, of the need for that future b’rith which had been foreseen by Hosea and his successors. He anticipated “the messenger of the covenant,” who was the Lord Himself (3:1b), whose coming would be preceded only by another human messenger, namely “Elijah the prophet” (3:1a, 4:5, 6), whom Jesus in NT times identified with His cousin, John the Baptist (Matt 17:11-13).

B. Characteristics. Even before Jeremiah’s enunciation of the major elements of the new b’rith, the OT had begun preparing for their announcement. In Jeremiah 31:34 God said, “I will forgive their iniquity”; this, however, assumes an antecedent state of guilt, and within the very year of the founding of the nation of Israel under the old, Sinaitic testament, Moses had commenced warning the people that their breaking of the older b’rith could serve only to bring about terror and disaster (Lev 26:15, 16): “the vengeance of the covenant” (v. 25), or “the curses of the covenant” (Deut 29:21; cf. Isa 24:5, Jer 11:8). Indeed, almost the entire 800 year course of Israel’s existence as an independent nation in Canaan was marked by God’s continuous and increasingly severe judgments, a course that could terminate only with the destruction of Judah in 586 b.c. and, ultimately, with a superseding of the older testament altogether. The very testamentary judgment of God would prove to be, in itself, the means for achieving that forgiveness of sin of which Jeremiah prophesied. For Jesus Christ “was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa 53:5).

Though Christ would endure judgment, His work yet constitutes a triumph and accomplishes another feature of Jeremiah’s new testament, namely, a direct personalness to faith. By His acceptance of Israel’s punishment, He would fulfill the typical institutions of the older testament and cause the Mosaic offerings to cease (Dan 9:27), replaced by a direct access of men to God. It was only thus that the way into the holy place could be made manifest (Heb 9:8), that God’s elect might “all know me [not just the priests, who served in their ceremonies as types of Christ, but] from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer 31:34). At the close of the 8th cent. Isaiah anticipated a corresponding, universalistic outpouring of the Holy Spirit (44:3); and even earlier Joel had described how God’s Spirit would fall directly “on all flesh, your sons and your daughters” (Joel 2:28), whether of priestly descent or not.

While divine judgment brought about the forgiveness and the non-typical directness of Jeremiah’s new testament, it was God’s positive works of mercy that accomplished its other two characteristics, of reconciliation and of internality. Concerning the former, God spoke through the prophet, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:33), the same promise that is found in all other revelations of the testament, from Genesis 17:7 to Revelation 21:3. By “removing the guilt in one day” (Zech 3:9), the Messianic Branch would accomplish the fundamental restoration for which mankind had been longing since the disaster of Eden—He would put enmity between Satan and the seed of the woman (Gen 3:15); He would bring into being that reconciliation with God which constitutes the essential inheritance of the testament; and he would betroth Israel to Himself as His bride forever (Hos 2:19), truly to know the Lord (v. 20).

Jesus Christ was also to fulfill Jeremiah’s fourth anticipation, that God would some day place His law in men’s internal consciousness: “I will write it upon their hearts” (Jer 31:33). As Moses had long before promised to his people, “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live” (Deut 30:6). The OT had, from the first, been aware of the indwelling presence of Yahweh’s Spirit to convert and to guide His own (Neh 9:21; Ps 143:10; Hag 2:5; cf. Isa 63:10) and of His infilling power for special accomplishments (Exod 31:3; Judg 6:34; 1 Sam 16:13; Isa 59:21); but the latter had been restricted to Israel’s leaders (Num 11:17, 29), and even then to intermittent occasions (Judg 13:25; 14:6; 1 Sam 16:14; cf. Ps 51:11). The Pentecostal fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy of the Spirit (Joel 2:28) would, however, enable all to live by the love of God, radiating from the inner heart (Rom 5:5; 2 Cor 3:6). In consequence, though Jesus could designate John the Baptist as preëminent among those who had lived under the older testament, He could go on to assure His followers that those who were little in His newer kingdom of heaven were yet greater than this greatest forerunner (Matt 11:11).

II. Intertestamental deviation. Speculation upon the concept of the new covenant receives documentation from the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran. Produced by a sectarian community that existed for c. 200 years, up until a.d. 68, they bear witness to an intertestamental belief that though the בְּרִית אֵל, “God’s covenant,” with the Heb. patriarchs had been violated by sinful Israel (CD, i), God would continue to “make good his everlasting covenant” with the faithful remnant (iii, 12) in accordance with Deuteronomy 7:9 (viii, 5). They refer specifically to His “new covenant in the land of Damascus” (vii, 9-viii, 21), by which they identified their own sect at Qumran, perhaps fig. designated as “Damascus” (cf. Amos 5:27, though a literal Syrian exile has also been proposed). The “covenanters” as God’s true Israel thus laid claim to the prophecy of Jeremiah 31, but with an unresolved tension. On the one hand they rightly appreciated the new b’rith as a divine enactment, on the basis of which God would forgive the iniquities (iv, 10) of those whom He had “chosen to be the partners of His eternal covenant” (I S, iv, 22); yet on the other hand, Qumran’s stress upon rigid observance of the Sinaitic law (CD, iv, 8) accords more closely with Pharisaic legalism than with the internal religion anticipated by Jeremiah; and they could speak of their own “entering into a covenant, in the presence of God, to do according to all that He has commanded” (1 S, i, 16), namely to observe the Qumranic discipline. To “be admitted to the covenant of the community” (iii, 16) thus came to mean simply to join the sect (cf. H. Ringgren, The Faith of Qumran, p. 128). In their rituals they might indeed confess their sins and invoke upon themselves the bles sings, or curses, of God (I, 16-ii 18); but the covenant became a mere human oath, representing either initiation or subsequent annual resubscription (per Jub 6:17) to the life of the community. While the concept of “the new covenant” may thus be said to sum up the beliefs of Qumran, it does this not as a God-given arrangement for redemption but as a membership pledge to a secret society which had deviated into self-righteousness.

III. NT fulfillment.

A. Abrogation of the old. In contrast with both the orthodox and the sectarian forms of intertestamental Judaism, Christianity proclaimed that the anticipatory older testament, particularly as this had come to be embodied in the Mosaic ceremonial law, had now been superseded and fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In a sense, the new testament paralleled the old, since both were based upon the saving intervention of God in human history, first on Sinai and then on Calvary. Furthermore, the old had foretold (1 Pet 1:10, 11), foreshadowed (Col 2:17), and found its actual effectuation (Heb 9:15; 11:40) in God’s final act of redemption on the cross. In another sense, the two were not parallel. Jesus was made “the surety of a better covenant” (Heb 7:22), “the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises” (8:6). “Finding fault” with the first (v. 8), He “made the first old” (v. 13) and abrogated it. NT Christians are therefore “free from the law” (Rom 7:1-6), so that Sinai’s moral curses upon man’s failure to keep “the works of the law” have been blotted out (Gal 2:16-3:13; Col 2:13, 14) and its ceremonial requirements have been antiquated and specifically repudiated (Col 2:16-22; Gal 5:1-4).

B. Characteristics. In its place, God has proclaimed through the new diathēkē how “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor 5:7). Even as Jeremiah had looked forward to the new b’rith under which God would “forgive their iniquity” (31:34), so Christ brought about “redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Eph 1:7; Col 1:14). Christ Himself stated of the communion cup at the Last Supper (Matt 26:28), “This is the new testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” His words are best understood as a purposeful fulfillment of Jeremiah 31 (“undoubtedly,” TWNT, II: 136) and prob. of Isaiah 42:6 and 49:8 (see above, I-A). Bultmann denies, indeed, that the concepts either of sacrifice (“my blood of the new testament,” Mark 14:24, Luke 22:20) or of redemption (“poured out for many,” Mark 14:24) constituted an authentic part of our Lord’s message; he considers them as later additions to the original idea of sacramental communion (Theology of the NT, I: 146-151). The NT’s repeated references to the blood of Christ testify to the central significance of His sacrificial death; and, as A. Richardson has pointed out, Christ’s death as a deliberate ransom (Mark 10:45) accomplishes that new redemption which fulfills Isaiah’s prophecies, both of the covenant and of the Suffering Servant (Isa 53:10, 11; An Introduction to the Theology of the NT, p. 231). It also serves as a passover sacrifice, “by which a new and better covenant was ratified between God and a new Israel” (ibid., p. 371; cf. p. 383); cf. the constant allusions in Hebrews to ritual forgiveness under the Sinaitic testament (Vos, “H ebrews the Epistle of the Diathēkē,” PTR 14 [1916], pp. 1-61).

At the time of Christ’s death, the veil of the Temple was rent in two (Luke 23:45), “the sign that through the perfect offering of the Lamb of God the way was opened for every repentant and believing sinner to enter into the most intimate communion with the Holy God without any further offerings for sin” (N. Geldenhuys, NIC, Luke, p. 611; cf. Heb 10:19). By this “new and living way, that is to say, his flesh” (Heb 10:20), Jesus thus accomplished another feature of Jeremiah’s prophesied new b’rith, that of unmediated directness; “the temple and the old form of ceremonial religion were no longer necessary” (Geldenhuys, loc. cit.). The new diathēkē then resulted in a prophesied enlargement (e.g., Gen 12:3; Isa 42:6; 44:5; 56:3; Ezek 16:61; Zech 2:11; Mal 1:11) in the redeemed community of the Church, “the household of God” (Eph 2:19). Bodies of Gentiles that had once been “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel...and without God in the world” (v. 12) were “made nigh in the blood of Christ...no more strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints” (vv. 13, 19).

On Easter morning, moreover, Christ “was raised for our justification” (Rom 4:25), assuring all Christians of His ever-living presence and His triumph over sin and death. Just as the OT had appealed to the saving event of the Exodus—“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exod 20:2)—so the NT would appeal to the resurrection: “he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies” (Rom 8:11 ASV). Here was achieved that reconciliation with God which Jeremiah had long before described. As B. Weiss, commenting on 1 Peter 1:2, which is in turn based on Exodus 24:8, has asserted, “God concluded the old covenant with the children of Israel at Sinai...so believers are described as being elect unto obedience and sprinkling with the blood of Jesus Christ...to be the peculiar people of the new covenant...to be cleansed from the stain of guilt which hinders them from enjoying perfect fellowship with God” (Biblical Theology of the NT, I: 234).

The cleansing, the directness, and the reconciled fellowship all contribute to the fourth characteristic of Jeremiah’s new b’rith, which he had in fact mentioned first, namely its internality, when God would “write his law in their hearts” (31:33). It is to be noted that God’s former law still stands, though synthesized under the more comprehensive “new commandment,” that Christ’s disciples are to love one another as He has loved them (John 13:34). Even the ritual, though usually abrogated, might be elevated to a higher spiritual significance. For example, as Richardson remarks, “The rabbis spoke of circumcision as a seal, the divinely appointed sign of the individual’s standing in the Covenant [the אֹ֣ות בְּרִ֔ית, Gen 17:11]...Paul thought of baptism as a seal of the New Covenant...the means by which the individual is made a member of the covenant people” (op. cit., pp. 352, 353; cf. Col 2:11, 12). Primarily, however, the emphasis of the NT centers upon men’s freedom under the new diathēkē, contrasted with the legalistic bondage which Pharisaism had imposed under the older testament (Gal 4:21-28). The letter of the law had been twisted so as to kill (2 Cor 3:6); but Christ came, first to change men’s hearts through the Spirit, and then to bring them into that living dedication to the moral standards of God of which Jeremiah had spoken; cf. the Lord’s declaration of internal priorities in reference to sabbath observance (Matt 12:8, 12).

IV. Relationship to the testament of peace. Even as Jeremiah 31:31-34 had spoken of “the new b’rith” written in men’s hearts, so Ezekiel 37:24-28 had developed the concept of “the b’rith of peace” when the nations of the world should acknowledge God, permanently present in His sanctuary in the land of Israel; see [http://biblegateway/wiki/Covenant (in the Old Testament) COVENANT IN THE OT]. The relationship, however, that is sustained between these two programs, particularly in their applicability to the present Christian Church, has been defined in at least four major ways.

A. Liberalism. Negative critics of the OT tend to limit the sphere of predictive prophecy to situations contemporaneous or immediately future to the prophets themselves; predictions lacking such immediately observable accomplishment as appears, for example, in Jeremiah 31:27-30, with its anticipation of the Exile and the postexilic restoration that followed it, are relegated to the category of pious but essentially false pronouncements. As M. Noth has concluded, “Shortly before the collapse of the Judean kingdom...the saying about the future new covenant explicitly assumed that the covenant made at the Exodus from Egypt was now at an end....However, the heralding by Jeremiah and Ezekiel of a new covenant seems to have played no special role in later times; it faded before the hope of a speedy restitution of the old order” (The Laws in the Pentateuch, pp. 63-67). The Church is thus divorced from the OT: the prophets were no more describing the Church of the NT than was Jesus really serving as the testator whose death was proleptically providing salvation for the saints under the older testament. Liberal scholars will concede that Christ and His apostles taught these views, but they are unwilling to accept them themselves.

B. Amillennialism. Among evangelicals, Bible believing exegetes yet fall into three distinct categories of Scriptural interpretation. Those who hesitate to affirm a literal (millennial) fulfillment for the OT prophecies of a future earthly kingdom tend to equate the spiritual existence of the Christian Church with the achievements anticipated, not simply by Jeremiah’s internal new testament, but also by Ezekiel’s more external and earth-centered testament of peace. As an amillennial neoorthodox writer has put it, “God would make with Israel, forgiven and restored, a new and everlasting marriage covenant (Ezek 16:60-63). The NT writers think of this prophecy as having been fulfilled in the marriage covenant between Christ and his church” (Richardson, op. cit., p. 257). Jeremiah’s new b’rith is thus identified with Ezekiel’s and becomes the final word in testamentary revelation, “not to be displaced by any other more complete realization of what covenant grace embodies” (J. Murray, NBD, p. 267).

C. Traditional millennialism. Interpreters who favor a more literal realization for the earthly (millennial) kingdom prophecies of the OT recognize that the newer diathēkē in Christ’s blood is an “eternal covenant” (Heb 13:20); but they insist also that an eternal program may, at the same time, exhibit a series of progressive developments. Thus, it is maintained, that at the Second Coming of Christ the four features of Jeremiah’s presently existing, church-centered new testament—its internal character, accomplished reconciliation direct faith, and explicit forgiveness—will be, not transcended, but rather expanded, brought to fulfillment, and rendered determinative for life throughout the entire world, under Ezekiel’s testament of peace. Specifically, men’s internal religion will become productive of a totally consistent external pattern of conduct (Ezek 37:24); their reconciliation with God, expressed at all points in history by the Biblical promise, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (v. 27), will then eventuate into the fullness of divine fellowship; the Christian’s present blessing of direct faith will become that of direct sight (v. 26); and the explicit forgiveness that is now granted to the saints will be honored by the whole creation together (v. 28). The testament of peace will then, after the final judgment, be resolved into the new heavens and the new earth of Revelation 21, 22.

D. Dispensationalism. A final segment of evangelicalism seeks to locate both Jeremiah’s new testament and Ezekiel’s testament of peace in the future kingdom of the millennium. Dispensational interpretation springs from J. N. Darby’s doctrine of the discontinuity of the church, which forbids its mention within the pages of the OT (C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism Today, p. 133). Discussion then centers about the quotation of Jeremiah 31:31-34 in Hebrews 8-10, with Darby’s followers stressing two main points.

(1) The fact that the predicted new testament is to be made “with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Jer 31:31; Heb 8:8) is taken to mean that it cannot be fulfilled in the Church (Ryrie, The Basis of Premillennial Faith, pp. 108-110). In the NT, elect Jews did receive the Gospel and were for some time the only ones who made up the Christian Church (Matt 18:17), thus continuing as God’s people (Rom 11:5). Faithless Jews, on the other hand, are described as ceasing to constitute true Israel and as being cut off (9:6), becoming instead “a synagogue of Satan” (Rev 2:9). After Peter’s experience with Cornelius, Gentiles came to be ingrafted into God’s people (Rom 11:17; Phil 3:3). The NT may also apply the term “Israel” to unbelieving portions of the Jewish nation, esp. with reference to their conversion at the Lord’s Second Coming (Rom 11:25-27); but it seems to guarantee that the standing of the believing Gentiles is to continue without change (v. 22). It is the converted Jews that will rather be reingrafted into Israel (vv. 23, 24).

(2) Dispensationalism then understands the quotations in Hebrews as descriptive, not of God’s present relationship with the Church, but of His future relationship with Israel. It is granted that the Church receives similar blessings and that the “better testament” mentioned in Hebrews 8:6, of which Christ is the Mediator and which supersedes the older testament of Moses, refers to the Church. But this better testament is then distinguished from the “second testament” in the verse that follows (Heb 8:7), namely Jeremiah’s new testament with Israel, which is then cited at length (in vv. 8-12). The prophet’s words are said to have been quoted in Hebrews to show that, since in the millennium there will be a superseding of the older testament by the new testament which will then be made with the nation of Israel, it is not impossible now to think of a superseding of the old by the better diathēkē of the Church (ibid. pp. 117-121).

Such unelaborated subtlety of thought, however, might not have answered the 1st cent. temptation to lapse into Judaizing as well as the argument that Jeremiah had simply predicted the Church. Dispensationalism is also faced with three contextual problems. (a) Hebrews 8:13 notes that Jeremiah’s new testament is what makes the first old. The period of the first diathēkē was limited to the pre-Christian era (9:8); and, as Ryrie has said, “In Hebrews 9 the Christian order supersedes the sacraments of the mosaic covenant” (ibid., p. 121; cf. Heb 9:11). It would seem to follow that the Christian order should itself be Jeremiah’s new testament (cf. B. Ramm, Protestant Biblical Interpretation, p. 256). (b) In 9:14, forgiveness is said to exist for Christians (cf. 8:12 with Jer 31:34) because of Christ’s mediating the new testament (9:15), so that Ryrie concludes there must be two “new testaments” in Hebrews, the future one in ch. 8 and the present one in ch. 9 (ibid.). (c) Since Hebrews 10:16, 17 again quotes Jeremiah’s new testament this passage should also be understood as future; but because of the remission of sins that “will” result from it the writer adds “Having therefore, brethren, boldness...” (v. 19 KJV). It would appear that while the concluding portion of Jeremiah may well present a parallel to Ezekiel’s millennial testament of peace (Jer 31:38-40), his preceding deliverance on the new testament (vv. 31-34) accords best with the chronologically prior, internal diathēkē of Christ with His Church.

Bibliography B. Weiss, Biblical Theology of the NT (1883), I: 102, 103, 234, 235; II: 166-182, 202-234; G. Vos, “Hebrews, the Epistle of the Diathēkē,” PTR, 13 (1915), 587-632, and 14 (1916), 1-61; R. Bultmann, Theology of the NT (1951), esp. I:146-151, 278, 308-310; A. Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the NT (1958), 229-232; J. B. Payne, Theology of the Older Testament (1962), 115-119, 463-478; E. Stagg, NT Theology (1962), 249; cf. Covenant (in the New Testament), Bibliography.