How does the new covenant operate during the Millennium?

Question 10196.

The new covenant is the promise God made through Jeremiah that He would write His law on the heart, forgive iniquity and remember sin no more, and that promise finds its fullest national expression in the Millennium. That is where a Baptist has to be careful, because we live in the blessings of that covenant already and yet the terms were originally addressed to Israel and Judah.

So how do both things stand together? Let me take the passages in the order God gave them rather than in the order our systems prefer.

What Jeremiah actually promised

Jeremiah 31:31 to 34 could hardly be more specific. The days are coming when the Lord will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant He made when He brought them out of Egypt, which they broke. He will put His law within them and write it on their hearts, He will be their God and they will be His people, they will all know Him from the least to the greatest, and He will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.

The Hebrew word for covenant, berith, carries the sense of a binding arrangement cut and ratified rather than negotiated. This one is unconditional in its terms. God says I will, six times over, and He attaches no clause about Israel keeping her end of it, which is precisely why the new covenant can succeed where Sinai failed.

Jeremiah then anchors it in creation itself. If the fixed order of sun, moon and stars ever departs, then the offspring of Israel will cease from being a nation before Him. That is not the language of a promise waiting to be reassigned to somebody else.

Notice too where Jeremiah places this promise. It sits in the middle of the book of consolation, chapters 30 to 33, immediately after the description of the time of trouble for Jacob and immediately before the promise that the offspring of Israel will never cease to be a nation. The new covenant is not an afterthought; it is the answer to Israel’s worst hour.

The blood of the covenant and the church

Jesus took the cup in the upper room and said in Luke 22:20 that this cup is the new covenant in His blood. Paul repeats it to the Corinthians, and Hebrews quotes Jeremiah at length in chapters eight and ten to show that the sacrifice of Jesus is the ground on which forgiveness is given. The covenant was ratified at the cross.

So the church drinks the cup of the new covenant every time we come to the table, and we enjoy the forgiveness, the indwelling Spirit and the inward law that Jeremiah described. Paul calls himself a minister of it in 2 Corinthians 3:6. That is not a slip of the pen and I have no wish to explain it away.

My own understanding, which I set out at greater length in the article on the new covenant, Israel and the church, is that the covenant was made with Israel, ratified by Israel’s Messiah, and its blessings are shared with believing Gentiles in this age without the national promises being transferred away from Israel. One covenant, one blood, and a wider circle of beneficiaries than Jeremiah’s first readers expected.

Hebrews 8 quotes Jeremiah in full and then says that in speaking of a new covenant God makes the first one obsolete. That has to mean the arrangement at Sinai, with its priesthood and its repeated sacrifices, has been superseded by something better established on better promises. It does not mean the promises to Israel were transferred elsewhere, since the quotation names the house of Israel and the house of Judah without alteration.

Why the new covenant comes home in the Millennium

Read Jeremiah’s terms again and notice how much of them requires a nation rather than a scattered remnant. All Israel knowing the Lord from the least to the greatest, no longer needing to be taught to know Him, living in the land under one shepherd, with the city rebuilt and holy to the Lord. That is national and geographical, and it has not happened yet.

Ezekiel says the same thing in different words. Ezekiel 36:26 to 28 promises a new heart and a new spirit, the removal of the heart of stone, and dwelling in the land given to their fathers. Ezekiel 37 adds one king over them and an everlasting covenant of peace.

So the new covenant is operating now in its spiritual blessings and it will operate then in its national fullness, when the nation He named receives what He promised, in the land He specified, under the King He appointed. That is the kingdom described in my article on the Millennium.

How it works in daily millennial life

Picture the kingdom under these terms. The law of God written on the heart of a converted nation means obedience from the inside rather than a code enforced from outside. Isaiah pictures nations coming up to Jerusalem to be taught the ways of the Lord, and disputes settled by the King Himself.

Forgiveness is settled and known. Nobody in the kingdom will be wondering whether their sin has been dealt with, because God has said He will remember it no more. The Spirit is poured out, as Joel 2:28 and 29 promises and as I discuss in the article on the Spirit in the Millennium.

And yet children are still born with fallen natures, and some of them will not believe. So the new covenant governs the converted nation while the population continues to grow, which is why the kingdom ends with a rebellion by those who complied without ever coming to faith.

There is a further feature of life under the new covenant in the kingdom which we tend to overlook. Jeremiah says they shall not teach one another to know the Lord, for they shall all know Him. Universal knowledge of God within the nation removes the need for evangelism among its members, though not among the generations still being born, which is a distinction worth keeping clear.

What about the sacrifices in Ezekiel’s temple?

This is the standard objection. If the new covenant means sin remembered no more, why does Ezekiel describe a temple with an altar and offerings in the kingdom? Hebrews says the sacrifice of Jesus was once for all, and no Baptist is going to surrender that.

My answer is that the millennial offerings are memorial rather than propitiatory, looking back to the cross as the Lord’s Supper does now, and functioning within a visible national worship for a people living in natural bodies. The blood of bulls and goats never took away sin at any point in history, including under Moses.

I have set that out in full in the article on millennial worship, and I would rather hold Ezekiel and Hebrews together than delete either one.

The word memorial is worth defending here as well. A memorial is not a pretence, and it is not a lesser form of worship. Every time we take the bread we are doing something God commanded, in a form He chose, for a purpose He stated, and nobody thinks it competes with the cross.

Why this matters for reading the whole Bible

If God can promise something to a named people, have it broken by them, ratify it in the blood of His Son, extend its benefits to outsiders, and still keep the original national terms intact for a future day, then His faithfulness is a far larger thing than our categories.

It also secures our own standing. The same unconditional character that guarantees the new covenant to Israel guarantees the forgiveness of everyone who has trusted Jesus. If He would not go back on His word to a nation that broke covenant repeatedly, He will not go back on it to you.

That is the logic Paul follows in Romans 11 when he says the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable, and it is why I read the covenants with Israel the way I do in the article on those covenants.

The unconditional character also explains the tone of the prophets. They could denounce the nation without qualification and promise its future in the same breath, because the promise never rested on the nation’s performance. Anyone who has tried to hold both honesty and hope about a church or a family will recognise how useful that combination is.

So, now what?

Next time you take the bread and the cup, take them slowly. You are handling the sign of a covenant that God ratified in His own blood and that He has never once broken, and you are drinking it centuries before its national fulfilment arrives.

And if you have been fearing that God might yet drop you, let Jeremiah settle it. His promise was I will, and He has never had to add a condition to make it work. What would change this week if you actually believed your sins are remembered no more?

For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Jeremiah 31:34 (ESV)