The Bible Study Podcast, episode 203. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of newness,

talking about a new covenant.

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. As those of you who have been listening know, we've been studying newness as a theme in the Bible. And my contention is that the Bible starts with creation, ends with recreation, that all in the middle is having to do with newness, or at least quite a lot of it. It's a major theme in the Bible. Now, when we talk about

the new covenant, you probably remember the old covenant. It was covered by Cecil B. DeMille in the

movie The Ten Commandments. God leads the people of Israel out of Egypt, leads them to Mount

Sinai, and then says to them, I'm going to form a covenant with you. You will be my people. I will be your

God. And then gives them the Ten Commandments as well as the rest of the law. You may also remember

that before they even got all of the law, they managed to break the first and most important

commandment of I will be your God,

and you will have no other gods before me and start worshipping a golden calf.

And so even in the Old Testament, there was the sense of a need for a new covenant, something

that wasn't as tarnished as it was with the old covenant.

And certainly all of the prophets

are dealing with the fact that God's people have broken the covenant with him. In fact, the reason

to send a prophet. In general, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a prophet in the Old

Testament whose job is to say, add-a-boy, you're doing a great job, keep it up. In fact, all of the prophets

seem to be coming to say, you've forgotten me, you put other gods before me, you need to

turn back now. And so we find, for instance, in the prophet Jeremiah, these verses from chapter 31.

This is verses 31 through 34. The days are coming, declares the Lord,

when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be

like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt,

because they broke my covenant,

...