Recently, our life group has been looking at God’s promise of a New Covenant in Jeremiah 31:31-34. This promise comes as a bright ray of hope in the midst of one of the darkest seasons in Judah’s history. It is a promise that things won’t remain the way that they are, that God will establish a New Covenant with His people that will draw them into a deeper relationship with Himself. That relationship will include God’s laws being written on their hearts and the total forgiveness of their sins. In our class, we looked at how Jesus establishes the New Covenant in light of Luke 22:20 and Hebrews 8-10.

During this discussion, I made a comment about obedience not being a necessary component of the New Covenant. I quickly retracted my words because my theologian-conscience-sirens started going off. But I wasn’t sure what to say in place of them. So I told our group that I would research, pray, and think about the role obedience plays in the Old and New Covenants. This blog is the product of my inquiry.

Here’s my thesis: Obedience was required of God’s people under the Old Covenant, but it is produced in God’s people under the New Covenant. Let me flesh that out.

Obedience Required in the Old Covenant

In Jeremiah 31:23, God defines the Old Covenant as the covenant He made with Israel after He brought them out of Egypt. This covenant included keeping God’s laws, feasts, and sacrifices (Exod. 34:11-28). God required their total obedience if they wanted to receive His blessings (Deut. 27:15-26). If they disobeyed, they would receive the promised curses (see Deut. 28:1-14, 15-68).

This covenant became burdensome because of the sinfulness of the people and the repeated judgments they received for their covenant-breaking (Heb. 8:7-13). In God’s grace, He promised to bring about a new covenant that would fulfill and replace the current one, a covenant that He would establish through the person and work of His Son.

Obedience Produced in the New Covenant

In one sense, obedience is still required in the New Covenant. But that obedience is found not in God’s people, but in Jesus. He fulfilled the law (Matthew 5:17-18), lived His entire life without sin (Heb 4:15) and always did what was pleasing to His Father (John 8:29). Therefore He perfectly kept “the righteous requirement of the law,” which can now be fulfilled in us (Romans 8:4). How? Through imputed righteousness: when we respond to the gospel through repentance and faith in Christ, Jesus grants us His righteousness and His perfect obedience. They are credited to our account, and God chooses to see us as righteous in His sight because we are in His Righteous Son.

But Jesus doesn’t just fulfill the righteous (obedience) requirement of the Old Covenant. He takes the penalty of the law breakers- the curses. Paul makes this abundantly clear in Galatians 3, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” He continues, “He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Galatians 3:13-14).

Jesus establishes the New Covenant by fulfilling the righteous requirement of the Old Covenant and taking on the curses of the Old Covenant. Why? “So that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Gal. 3:14). Notice “by faith.” Obedience is not required of us- but repentance and faith is! Then we are given the Spirit, the One who will give us a new heart, write God’s laws on our heart, and produce obedience in us. Obedience is no longer required of us to have a right relationship with God, because Christ obeyed on our behalf. But obedience will be produced in us through the power of the Spirit. In fact, God saved us for this purpose! “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10).

As those who live under the New Covenant, we should love, worship, and obey God, not because we are required to, but because we have the privilege, freedom, and ability to! That is one of the primary reasons why the New Covenant is far superior to the Old. Praise be to God, who kept His promise to establish a new and better covenant where we might know Him and walk with Him more closely (Jer. 31:31-34). Once again we see that all of God’s promises are YES and AMEN in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20)!