The new Covenant (31:31-34). 

        Under Josiah Jeremiah evidently worked among the remnants northern tribes that were still in Palestine. After Necho’s triumph this area was again detached from Judah, and Jeremiah could no longer visit them. So in the time he was hiding from Jehoiakim he will have written down his message of hope in chs. 30-31. After the fall of Jerusalem the collec­tion, The Book of Hope, was enlarged to apply to the South as well.

        The message of the new covenant could be proclaimed by him, because he had first experienced it himself. It would not need either laws written in stone or teachers to instruct men in it. Here was one who had been denounced by both priests and prophets, but though he had stood alone, he had yet been proved right. In his heart God had written His will.

        All prophecy is of necessity partial (Heb. 1:1) and so Jere­miah did not rise to the whole truth. God revealed to him that true religion cannot be external or bound to externals. What Jeremiah apparently did not grasp was the universalism we find in Isa. 19:23ff, or at least not in this connexion. The new covenant can no more be linked to national origin than to any other externals. That a man is a physical descendant of Abraham means in itself nothing to God (Matt. 3:9). But the fact that when the new covenant was ratified at Golgotha by the blood of the Lamb of God it was freed from every national limitation, does not mean that we must dismiss the nationalistic setting of Jer. 31 as meaningless or spiritualize it into thin air. Rom. 11:26 shows that it has a yet future application to all Israel.

        It is one thing to say that Jeremiah was not given to see what the new covenant would mean for the world, it is entirely another to say that by Israel and Judah he really meant the Church. So to understand Jer. 31:23-40; 33:14-26 is to make all sane Bible interpretation impossible. On the other hand, we must not fall into the opposite error of supposing that the new covenant will mean something else for “all Israel” than it does for the Church, that saved Israel will be saved in some other way than is the Church. God does not abolish physical Israel, but in saving it transcends it, just as He does not scrap this earth but renews it.