Theopedia

New Covenant

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

— Jeremiah 31:31, 33 (ESV)

Definition

The New Covenant is the covenant God promised through the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 31:31-34), instituted by Christ through his own blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25), in which God’s law is written on his people’s hearts, their sins are forgiven fully and finally, and they are granted a direct, unmediated knowledge of God rather than one passed down by human teaching. Hebrews reads Jeremiah’s prophecy as already announcing the old, Mosaic covenant’s own obsolescence: “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete” (Heb. 8:13).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes the covenant of grace as revealed “by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.”1 The Westminster Confession states the same basic continuity from the Presbyterian side, holding that the covenant of grace was “differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel,” one covenant under two forms rather than two covenants.2 Where the confessions divide is over what follows for covenant membership: on the Owen-Coxe reading behind the 1689, the same reading that shapes the confession’s treatment of the Mosaic Covenant, the New Covenant’s own terms (a people who all savingly know God, Jer. 31:34) mark a real substance-level change from the Old, not merely a change of outward form.

Biblical Basis

Jeremiah promises a covenant unlike the one made at the exodus, one that will not be broken as that one was (Jer. 31:32): God will “put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33), forgive sin completely (“I will remember their sin no more,” Jer. 31:34), and give a knowledge of himself no longer dependent on being taught, “for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:34). Jesus identifies the cup at the Last Supper with this promise directly: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20; cf. 1 Cor. 11:25).

Paul calls himself and the other apostles “ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:6), contrasting its life-giving Spirit with the old covenant’s “ministry of death.” Hebrews quotes Jeremiah’s prophecy in full to argue that the very fact God promised a new covenant already condemned the first one as imperfect: “if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second” (Heb. 8:7), so that “in speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete” (Heb. 8:13). Hebrews names Christ himself “the mediator of a new covenant,” whose death “redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant” (Heb. 9:15), and whose blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24).

Historical Development

John Gill devoted a full chapter of his systematic theology to the New Covenant’s own place in redemptive history, arguing that what changes between the covenants is the administration, not the covenant of grace’s own substance, which “remains invariably the same in all periods of time.”3 Within that administration, Gill argued the New Covenant’s scope could no longer be confined the way the Old had been: where Israel’s worship had been tied to “a certain people in a certain country,” Jeremiah’s own prophecy of a people gathered “from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same” pointed to a new administration open to every nation, not Israel’s alone.3 Gill read the New Covenant’s central mark as an unmediated, universal knowledge of the Lord among its members, quoting Jeremiah directly: “according to this covenant, and the administration of it, all know the Lord from the least to the greatest.”3

John Owen made the fuller case for a substance-level change in his own exposition of Hebrews 8, arguing the Old and New Covenants differ in kind and not only in administration, though “the way of reconciliation and salvation was the same under both.”4 Nehemiah Coxe, a Particular Baptist minister who helped prepare the Second London Baptist Confession, argued the same case in his treatise on the covenants God made with men before the law.5 This Owen-Coxe reading, applied to the Mosaic Covenant as much as to the New, is now often called “1689 Federalism.”

Opposing Views

Doesn’t Jeremiah’s own wording limit the New Covenant to “the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jer. 31:31), excluding Gentiles? Gill answers from within the covenant’s own terms: the prophecy that Israel’s worship, once confined to “a certain people in a certain country,” would give way to a Messiah to whom “the nations” themselves would gather already anticipated a covenant no longer restricted to ethnic Israel.3 Paul reads the New Covenant the same way, grounding Gentile inclusion in the earlier Abrahamic promise itself (Gal. 3:8, 14).

Most Presbyterian and Reformed covenant theologians, following Westminster, hold that since the New Covenant is the covenant of grace’s own “different administration” rather than a different covenant, its sign should be applied the same way the Abrahamic sign was, to believers and their children alike.2 The Owen-Coxe reading behind the Baptist confession instead grounds covenant membership in the New Covenant’s own promised content: since Jeremiah describes a people who all, without exception, “know the Lord” (Jer. 31:34), New Covenant membership itself, not merely its sign, belongs to those who have actually believed, the same conclusion Owen and Coxe reach from the Abrahamic Covenant’s own sign.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  2. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 6. ↩ ↩2

  3. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book IV, chap. 5, “Of the Abrogation of the Old Covenant, Or First Administration of It, And the Introduction of the New, Or Second Administration of It.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 23 (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), commentary on Heb. 8:6-13. ↩

  5. Nehemiah Coxe, A Discourse of the Covenants that God Made with Men Before the Law (London, 1681). ↩