Follow the Trail

Focal Passages: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Luke 22:20

Daniel Boone is probably my pioneer hero thanks to Fess Parker and the glory days of NBC. While the television show that aired from 1964 to 1970 was more fiction than fact, Boone did play a significant role in the western expansion of the United States in the late-1700s.

In 1775, Daniel Boone and a team of about 30 axmen hacked their way from Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, cutting the Wilderness Road. Along the way, they widened and connected a series of existing Native America paths, opening the door for American settlement on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains.

As he carved this new road, Boone “blazed a trail.” While we use that phrase today as an idiom to mean pioneering a movement or innovating in some new field, to Daniel Boone, “blazing a trail” meant to cut notches (blazes) into trees to point travelers in the right direction.

Historians estimate that roughly 200,000-300,000 people used the Wilderness Road, following Boone’s blaze marks, to reach Kentucky and beyond.

I’ve been reading the gospels in the last week as we approach Easter and found a new way to look at God’s redemptive work, following a trail God blazed long ago. Follow it with me.

This trail began before creation. Paul tells us this much in 2 Timothy 1:9.

He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.

There’s our first blaze. We can follow the trail to the Old Testament. The prophet Jeremiah came at a time when the people of God had again fallen away from God. They broke again the old covenant with God and faced a future in captivity and exile. Hopelessly lost in their sin.

What Jeremiah proclaimed was the high point of his prophecies. A deep blaze in the trail of God’s salvation, pointing us toward Jesus and the cross.

The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant though I was a husband to them. (Jeremiah 31:31-32)

Jeremiah declares that a new covenant is coming. This new covenant will be different by recognizing that God’s people would never on their own be able to keep the old covenant. God would provide a new way to restore his bride to himself.

Listen to the words of God that Jeremiah proclaims.

This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

Can you see the promise of Easter in his words?

This new covenant, sealed with the blood of Christ, says that rather than laws written in stone, God will write his law in their hearts and in their minds. Faithfulness will become less an outward demonstration, but an inward transformation…a change of heart.

When God declares that he will be their God and they will be his people he is encouraging intimacy and belonging. They will have a restored relationship that is not based on compliance, but on connection and grace.

God promised that they will no longer be dependent on priests or intermediaries to know him. The relationship with him in the new covenant will be personal and direct. He will speak to them and they will speak to him. The new covenant will be available to anyone…from the least to the greatest.

The promise of something new has been made. Put a notch on this tree and let it lead us further down the trail.

The thought of this new covenant crossed my mind during a sermon my pastor preached several weeks ago in his series from the Gospel of Mark. Follow me on this path of discovery.

Jesus, confronted by some folks who were upset that Jesus’ disciples didn’t always fast like the really holy people of the day (Mark 2:22), broke into a parable about wineskins. It’s a story that would have left all who heard nodding in agreement. “You don’t pour new wine into old wineskins.”

You see Jesus had come to do, as the prophet said in Isaiah 43:19, “a new thing.” One simply could not pour Jesus’ teachings into a tired, old religious system that led to ruin. Jesus was doing a new thing. Once restricted to the Jewish people, God was prepared to do a new thing. His “new wine” would not only break out of the rigid trap of the Law that limited salvation to a select few, it would be available to all people, both Jew and Gentile. God is doing a new thing.

Cut a notch into that tree and keep blazing the trail.

Later, in Luke 22, Jesus gathered his closest disciples in a non-descript upper room in the heart of Jerusalem to share the Passover meal, hours before his betrayal, arrest and crucifixion. Thick with emotion and meaning, it was unlike any other Passover they had ever experienced.

Jesus shared the bread with those around him, urging them to take and always remember what he had done and what he was about to do.

This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. (Luke 22:19)

Then, Jesus shared the cup. Listen closely to what he said and watch him cut another notch in the trail.

This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you. (Luke 22:20)

The wineskin story ultimately led me to Isaiah’s promise that God is doing a new thing, which in turn led to Jesus’ promise of a new covenant. It is a statement so rich in meaning.

In a biblical sense, a covenant is a promise between God and humanity. The old covenant, set out in Exodus 24, was that God would take Israel as his people. Israel promised to obey the laws God set before them. God upheld his end of the bargain. Israel could not consistently obey the law, thereby breaching the covenant time and time again with their sinfulness. All of the Jewish sacrificial system was established to atone for that sin through blood sacrifice.

Before we get too high on the horse with Israel, we would do no better than they in keeping the law. We would get just as lost in our attempt to follow the old covenant.

So in this teachable moment, Jesus tells his disciples that his death, his blood, will create a new relationship between God and humanity. His sacrifice on the cross replaced the old covenant system based on obedience to the Mosaic law with a new covenant based on forgiveness and grace.

Jesus and his work on the cross lies at the end of the trail this trail. Jeremiah’s beautiful description of what that new covenant would mean to you and me is another blaze along the path. Let’s follow it toward Easter as we look again at the prophecy of Jeremiah through New Testament eyes.

I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

The old covenant with its laws, sacrifices and temple system required repeated offerings. The new covenant in Jesus is sufficient, final and personal…offered to you and me through his sacrifice on the cross and sealed by his resurrection.

The new covenant offered through Christ will not be some externally driven creed or code. It is a a life lived by the teachings of Christ, written on our hearts and burned in to our minds. It is our turning point. It isn’t an attempt to modify our behavior, but a way of transforming out hearts to be like the heart of Christ. In this new covenant, we don’t conform to the law, we are changed inside to be like Christ.

As a result, we know God in a different more intensely personal way. He is our God and we are uniquely and securely his. No dependence on intermediaries. No barriers beyond those we create through our waywardness. He is not someone we cannot reach. We have this direct relationship with God through Jesus.

Because of Christ’s death for our sins and his resurrection that promises new life, our sins are forgiven and forgotten. God chooses not to remember. Jesus paid the price of atonement on the cross, so we don’t have to suffer the penalty.

That’s the promise of the new covenant and the hope and joy of Easter, isn’t it? Easter is Jesus saying, “By my life and my death, I have opened the door to a new relationship between you and God. I am the forever sacrifice that atones or covers every sin. The trail has been blazed. All you have to do is follow it.”

The Jeremiah passage may be the clearest Old Testament prophecy of what Christians understand as the new covenant fulfilled in Christ.

It shifts the focus from external law to internal change; from a national covenant to a personal relationship; from repeated sacrifice to complete forgiveness.

God planned his redemptive work and set it in motion long before time began, blazing a trail through human history, to bring us to that first Easter morning and the resurrection of the one who died to mark the pathway for us. Jesus is our trailblazer.

I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)

These are the questions we all must answer. Have you seen the blaze marks he cut for you? Have you followed the trail that leads to this new covenant and to the eternal life he promised you?

I hope you have, but if not, it’s never too late to start walking.

If the trail has already led you to Jesus, have you honored the new covenant he made with you? Are you living your life following Christ as your example?

I hope you have, but if not, that next blaze mark could bring you back to the path he needs you to walk.

Thinking Points

How does this new covenant change the way I view my relationship with God?

 

How is my faith different when it comes from inner transformation rather than external rules or traditions?

 

What does it mean for me personally that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is sufficient and final?

 

How can I live out the hope and freedom of the new covenant starting this Easter?

 

How can I share the reality of God’s personal relationship with others in my life?