What Does the Bible Say About the Church? The New and Everlasting Covenant

What Does the Bible Say About the Church? The New and Everlasting Covenant

The author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews describes Jesus as the fulfillment of the New and Everlasting Covenant. (Hebrews 8:8; 13:20). The New and Everlasting Covenant is an allusion to the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31; Jeremiah 32:40). And the ways in which that Prophet describes the characteristics and qualities of the New and Everlasting Covenant teach us about the Church of Jesus, which is the Community living the New and Everlasting Covenant.

Regarding the New Covenant, Jeremiah writes:

“It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers...for they broke my covenant and I ignored them, says the Lord.”

(Jer 31:32)

This is already a crucially important fact about the nature of the New Covenant, the nature of the Church. Unlike the previous covenant, which resulted in a break between the People and their God, that will not be possible in the New Covenant.

We then learn that in this New Covenant, “I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts.” (Jer 31:33)

He is describing here a community that will not turn away from the terms of the covenant because it is not written on Stone Tablets lying in some Ark. It is within them.

Regarding the Everlasting Covenant, Jeremiah writes:

“I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.”

(Jer 32:40)

“I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.”

In the Everlasting Covenant, God instills into the hearts of the faithful his fear, h is reverence. He does this so that the Church will have the quality of indefectibility, the inability to turn away from him.

The belief that the Church in ancient times or the Middle Ages fell into serious errors of belief or practice is not compatible with Jeremiah’s teaching on the New and Everlasting Covenant.

Jesus told his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth (John 16:13). And so, if the Church lives out the New and Everlasting Covenant described by Jeremiah, then whatever that Church came to believe and practice, is true. And it is not a problem if any of those teachings or practices are not always found directly described in the Bible itself. Because, according to these passages of Jeremiah, the Church cannot break this covenant. The Church, after all, cannot turn away from God. The Church did not turn away from God.