What Is the New Covenant? God’s Law Written on the Heart

The new covenant is God’s promise to write his law on his people’s hearts and to forgive their sin for good. He spoke it through the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31–34), and Jesus took it up at the Last Supper with the cup: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:20).

The first covenant, made at Mount Sinai, was written on “tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). The people heard it read and answered with one voice, “All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Exodus 24:7). They meant it, and they could not keep it. Jeremiah does not tell them to try harder. He hears God promise to move the law from the stone to the person: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.” What God once carved on rock, he now writes inside us. That one line holds the whole new covenant.

What does the new covenant promise?

Jeremiah preached from the thirteenth year of King Josiah until “the carrying away of Jerusalem captive” (Jeremiah 1:2–3). He watched the covenant break in his own lifetime. Into that ruin came these words:

Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Jeremiah 31:31–34

Four promises sit in those verses. God will write his law within. He will be their God and they his people. Everyone will know him, the least as surely as the greatest, so that no one has to be told about God at second hand. And he will forgive and “remember their sin no more.” Notice the order. Forgiveness comes last, and it is given as the reason for everything before it: they shall all know me, because I will forgive. We come to know God because he has first put our sin away.

Ezekiel, a priest among the captives in Babylon in those same years (Ezekiel 1:1–3), heard the same promise in other words: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). The next verse says how: “I will put my spirit within you.” Stone again, and again God’s answer is a living heart.

How is the new covenant different from the old covenant?

God made several covenants in Scripture: with Noah, with Abraham, with Israel at Sinai and with David. When the Bible says “new covenant”, the old one it has in mind is Sinai, “the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.” Here the two stand side by side:

The difference is in the heart and in the sacrifice. The law of Moses told Israel what was holy; it could not make a heart love it. Its priests stood “daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins” (Hebrews 10:11). Christ “offered one sacrifice for sins for ever” and sat down (Hebrews 10:12). A priest who sits down has finished his work.

The same God gave both. Jeremiah calls the Lord “an husband” to Israel even as he grieves the broken covenant, and the new covenant keeps the old one’s heart: God “will be their God, and they shall be my people.” What changes is where the law lives and how sin is put away.

Did Jesus speak of the new covenant?

Yes, once, at supper on the night he was betrayed, and four books of the New Testament record it. “This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins,” he says in Matthew 26:28. Mark has “This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many” (Mark 14:24). Luke and Paul give the words over the cup as “This cup is the new testament in my blood” (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25), and Paul adds the command, “this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.” If your Bible reads “my blood of the covenant” in Matthew and Mark, it is not a different saying: many editions of the Greek text lack the word “new” in those two Gospels, and modern translations such as the NIV and ESV follow them, while the King James translators followed texts that include it.

The disciples would have heard Sinai in those words. When Moses sealed the first covenant, he “took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant” (Exodus 24:8). Jesus lifts a cup and says, in effect, this is the blood of the covenant now, and it is mine. And when Matthew records “for the remission of sins,” we hear Jeremiah’s last promise come true: “I will forgive their iniquity.” The forgiveness Jeremiah saw from far off is poured out in a cup the disciples can hold.

Catholics hear that cup at Mass. Over the chalice the priest repeats Jesus’ words as the Roman Missal gives them: “the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” The Missal joins the “new” of the Last Supper to the “everlasting covenant” of Hebrews 13:20.

Why does the King James Bible say “new testament”?

Because the Greek word, diatheke, means both a covenant and a last will. Strong’s concordance gives its King James renderings as “covenant, testament”. The King James Version uses “testament” 14 times, all in the New Testament, and “covenant” 292 times across the whole Bible. Hebrews plays on the double meaning: “For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator” (Hebrews 9:16). A will takes effect when the one who made it dies. So does this covenant.

The Latin Bible translated diatheke as testamentum, and Easton’s Bible Dictionary traces the names “Old” and “New Testament” for the two halves of our Bible to that word. Paul already speaks of “the reading of the old testament” (2 Corinthians 3:14). So the name of every New Testament we pick up comes from the same Greek word the Gospels use for Jesus’ words over the cup.

How does Hebrews 8 explain the new covenant?

Hebrews 8 sets Jesus beside the priests of the old covenant and says he “is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises” (Hebrews 8:6). Then the writer quotes Jeremiah 31:31–34 almost word for word, and draws one conclusion from the single word “new”: “In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13).

Hebrews comes back to the promise two chapters later and keeps only the heart of it: “I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” Then it adds, “Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:16–18). Jesus is “the mediator of the new testament” (Hebrews 9:15), and the letter’s closing blessing names his blood “the blood of the everlasting covenant” (Hebrews 13:20).

Is the new covenant for Israel or for the Church?

Jeremiah’s promise is addressed to “the house of Israel, and … the house of Judah”, and Hebrews repeats those words. Yet Jesus gave the cup to his disciples, and the Church has always drunk from it, Jew and Gentile together. Paul holds both at once. He writes that “all Israel shall be saved,” quotes God, “For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins,” and insists that “the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:26–29). Churches put these verses together in different ways, and each says it in its own words.

The Catholic Church teaches that the books of the Old Testament “retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked” (Catechism, 121). It calls the Church “the People of God in the New Covenant”, gathered as “a race made up of Jews and Gentiles which would be one, not according to the flesh, but in the Spirit” (781, 839). Of the Jewish people it says that their faith “is already a response to God’s revelation in the Old Covenant”, and it repeats Paul: “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (839). It reads Jeremiah’s promise as fulfilled in the New Law, “the work of the Holy Spirit” that “becomes the interior law of charity” (1965).

Reformed churches confess one covenant of grace under two administrations. The Westminster Confession (1646) calls the time of the law “the old testament” and the time of the gospel “the new testament”, and concludes: “There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations” (7.5–6).

Dispensationalists keep Israel and the Church distinct. Dallas Theological Seminary’s doctrinal statement says the Church “began at Pentecost, and is distinct from Israel,” and that at his return Christ will “restore Israel to her own land and give her the realization of God’s covenant promises.” Dispensationalists differ among themselves on how the Church shares in the new covenant today. Lewis Sperry Chafer, who founded Dallas Seminary, held that there were two new covenants, one for the Church and one for Israel; others hold that the Church shares in one new covenant’s blessings now. On either reading, God’s covenant promises to the nation of Israel are still to come. There is more on that hope in Israel’s role in the end times.

However a church reads these verses, it drinks from the cup Jesus passed around the table that night, and hears in it Jeremiah’s promise of forgiveness.

How do we live in the new covenant?

Paul answers by pointing at people. To the Christians in Corinth he writes that they are “the epistle of Christ … written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3). He calls himself a minister “of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (3:6).

So the new covenant is something we carry. It is in the conscience that knows God’s will without being told, in the prayer of a child who knows him as well as any scholar, in the relief of a sinner who is forgiven and does not have to come back with another offering. And it is at the Lord’s table. Each time we take the bread and the cup, Paul says, “ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). Each time, we remember him. And he keeps the promise he made through Jeremiah, naming the one thing he will not remember: “their sins and iniquities will I remember no more” (Hebrews 10:17).

Related reading

• What is the Abrahamic covenant?
• What is the Law of Moses?
• Old Testament vs New Testament: differences and how they fit
• What is Israel’s role in the end times?
• 17 Bible verses about Communion