The New Covenant Prophesied in the Prophets
The question is “what did God do during this whole period of decline of about 400 years where David’s rascally heirs were reigning over the throne of Israel and really not following in his spirit-filled footsteps, and the kingdom of David was getting smaller and smaller and ultimately defeated and led into exile? Wasn’t God doing anything to reverse that course of decline?” The answer is “Yes, God was doing quite a lot to attempt to reverse that.”
This period of the decline of the Davidic kingdom was really the golden age of the prophets of Israel. It’s when the great prophets, the famous prophets like Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were being sent to the people of Israel, calling them and their kings to turn away from sin, to repent, to come back to God’s covenant so that they could be restored to blessing. The different prophets, we can basically summarize their message, all of them, as basically a “Bad News/Good News” message.
All the prophet, first of all, presented bad news to the people of Israel, telling them, “Look, Israel, you are under judgment for your failure to obey the Mosaic covenant.” But then the prophets came back with good news. That good news was, “Israel, a new covenant is coming, that’s going to restore all the good features of the Davidic covenant. We’re going to get a new king, a new temple, God’s Spirit is going to be not only on the king but [on] all the people as well. There’s going to be peace like that of Eden. All the good things of the Davidic covenant and even of the earlier covenants are going to be restored, it’s going to be realized it’s going to come to fruition in a new covenant that God is going to send.”
Where do we see this prophesied? Here are some key verses. Jeremiah 31:31 is the only verse in the Old Testament that uses the exact phrase “new covenant.” There, the prophet says, “The days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah and the house of Israel. Not like the covenant which I made with them when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, my covenant which they broke.” There, Jeremiah is prophesying the coming of a new covenant that will not be like the covenant with Moses. What was wrong with the covenant with Moses? The people sinned, broke it, had all those penitential laws added in, it becomes a really messy situation as you remember. The new covenant is not going to be like that.
Isaiah talks about the new covenant when he says, “incline your ear and come to me. Hear, that your soul may live, and I will make with you an everlasting covenant. My steadfast sure love for David” (Isaiah 55:1-3). There, the prophet speaking on behalf of God is inviting all the poor people of the earth to heed God’s voice and come to God and God’s going to offer them a free meal and that free meal is going to induct them into an everlasting covenant which is really nothing other than the covenant relationship that God once extended in the past to David. We can see where that’s going: the Eucharist is going to be that free meal, that’s going to usher us into the everlasting covenant that is really nothing other than the covenant that David once enjoyed.
Ezekiel says that in the future, “David, my servant, shall be their prince forever and I’ll make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them and I will bless them and multiply them, and I’ll set my sanctuary in the midst of them forevermore” (cf. Ezekiel 37:25-26). That language of a covenant of peace and blessing and multiplying, we hear the echoes of Eden there. Ezekiel’s suggesting that the new covenant will be kind of a return to Eden. We’ll see how that’s going to play out as we move forward into the New Testament how those prophecies are really fulfilled in Christ.
For the moment, let us just observe that as the kingdom of David was declining, God was very active sending His prophets to predict the good news, predicted a new son of David who was going to come, and the new covenant that was going to be more perfect than any covenant God’s people had experienced to that point.
Let’s talk about the relevance to evangelism of the new covenant prophesied in the prophets. Once again, we see the point that the Gospel is not just another invented religion by a religious leader who comes with illusions of grandeur and concocts a holy book, etc. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is grounded in actual history, in world history and in the history of the people of Israel. These prophetic documents from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, they are historical documents written in ancient times by these holy men of the people of Israel. We see in them predicted the contours, or the shape, of what Jesus really did and is doing through His Church, beginning from the Cross and then through the Book of Acts to the contemporary moment where we continue to expand the kingdom of David over all the earth. This has been predicted centuries before.
Furthermore, all these older covenants were broken, but the prophets predicted that this new one was going to be everlasting. It is not going to be replaced by some other form of relationship with God that’s superior to it in some way. It’s the new and everlasting covenant, as the prophets emphasize. That assures us that with Christ, we have the fullness of Revelation and we’re not to look for some other religious leader, not a Joseph Smith, not a Mohammed, not a guru nanak, not some other leader, but the fullness has been fulfilled now in this new and eternal covenant with Jesus Christ. This is the way back to God for the rest of human history until human history ends.