A number of years ago a man owned a red Ford Pinto station wagon. He bought it when he was going to college, and kept it for quite some time. In its last few years of service, the car had several thousand dollars put into it. The owner had to replace the engine; he had to put in a new transmission; and he had the whole body repainted. It looked good on the outside, but it had some serious problems on the inside.

The heart of the matter was that it was really on its last legs. When he finally bought a new car, the man traded in his Plymouth -- a much nicer car. The dealer said he would give him $2,000 for it. Then the man asked the dealer to take a look at the Pinto. After taking it for a drive and inspecting it carefully, the dealer told the man he would give him $2,000 for both cars. The station wagon basically had to be scrapped.

That's the way it is with some things. Sometimes appliances or other items have so much wrong with them that they aren't worth fixing, or they can't be fixed. They simply have to be replaced.

That was the situation that faced the people of Israel back in the time of Jeremiah. Their relationship with God, based upon the events at the Red Sea and Mount Sinai, based on the Exodus event and the Law of Moses, wasn't working. They had tried for several hundred years to make the covenant work. But it just wasn't working out as God had intended.

Although God had been faithful to the covenant, the people of Israel had shown time and time again that they could not keep the requirements of the Mosaic covenant. They broke the law of God; they broke the heart of God.

Many of the prophets had been sent by God to warn the people to change their ways. If they didn't repent, they would be disciplined by God. Sometimes the warnings were heeded. But mostly they were ignored.

Jeremiah lived and ministered during the last years of the Kingdom of Judah. He was called to preach a message of judgment and doom because of the people's continual, willful disobedience. Perhaps no other prophet felt the pain, the anger, and the pathos of God as much as Jeremiah. He told the people that Jerusalem would be destroyed. Babylon would conquer the city of God. Nebuchadnezzar would violate the Temple that Solomon had built. This destruction would come because Israel could not, or would not, keep their part of the bargain.

Just how bad things were can be seen in the attitude of the exiles. The opening part of this passage, which was obviously addressed to those who had experienced the destruction Jeremiah had long predicted, quotes a proverb that was popular in those days: "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge."

What the proverb means is that children suffer for the sins of their parents. Those who had experienced the destruction of their beloved Temple and city were blaming that event on the sins of their parents! Instead of owning up to their own responsibility and admitting that they had been wrong, that they had sinned, they were complaining that God was unjust, and that they were paying the price (unfairly) for the mistakes of their parents and grandparents.

But their behavior had brought their own destruction. They were responsible for what had happened, because if they had repented, they would not have witnessed the events of 586 B.C. Jeremiah always held some hope for a change of heart on the part of God. God would change his mind if the people repented.

Jeremiah, who had spent most of his career predicting the destruction of the city and Temple, now found himself called to offer comfort and hope to those who were hurting because of the Babylonian victory.

Jeremiah's message showed that the heart of the matter was that the old covenant didn't work and needed to be replaced by a new one. In verses 31 through 34, Jeremiah shares a message from God about a new covenant that God will make with the people.

This is one of the most important passages in the Bible. It represents the high point of Jeremiah's message, and one of the theological summits of the Old Testament. It was a passage that had great influence in the New Testament. It is quoted in Hebrews, and referred to in the Words of Institution for the Lord's Supper. In fact, it is because of this passage that the Bible's two parts are called the "Old" and "New" Testaments. It is a passage that the Church knows well.

In this promise of a new covenant, there are three promises made by God. And it is significant that the phrase "says the Lord" is used four times in the passage. This shows that the words are stamped with a high degree of divine authority. We can be sure of these three promises because the Lord has said they will occur.

In the new covenant, God promises to write the law of God on the hearts of the people. We know that the law of God was an important part of the old covenant made with Moses. The ten commandments were written on stone tablets, perhaps to suggest that they were unchangeable, and kept in the Ark of the Covenant. They were objects of veneration. The law was central to the Hebrew faith. And all the other laws that are included in the Old Testament gave shape and meaning to the decalogue. In essence, the other laws helped Israel understand what it meant to have no other gods, to honor your parents, to remember the Sabbath day, and so on.

The problem was not that the people of Israel did not understand what God wanted. The heart of the matter was that they really wanted something else. They wanted to decide for themselves what was right and wrong, and so they disregarded the law of God at best, and they willfully disobeyed it at worst.

This was the heart of the conflict between the kings and the various prophets in Israel's history. Elijah opposed King Ahab because Ahab permitted and encouraged the worship of other gods in his kingdom. Elijah opposed the king because Ahab thought he could unjustly take the vineyard that belonged to Naboth. Idolatry and social injustice were two things banned by the law of God, but they were very prevalent in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

These sins of Ahab were not isolated events. The same sins were repeated again and again in the history of this people. What God wanted was not what the people wanted. And so they broke the law; they broke the covenant.

Through Jeremiah God promised that the new covenant will not be like that. God will put his law within his people so that they will want to do what God wants them to do. There will be no external code of behavior, no stone tablets, no need for a written law -- because there will be a unity of wills. God's people will automatically do God's will because they will want to do so.

I know a family that just got a puppy at their house, and they've been working on house-training the dog. They have read a lot of books on the subject and talked to many people. One thing has been mentioned several times. Experts claim that the dog really wants to please its owner. It wants to do things that result in praise rather than a scolding. And, for the most part, this family has found that to be true. It's easier working with the dog when it wants to do what we ask of it. I can't imagine working with an animal that willfully does things to displease its owner.

It must have caused the Lord great distress to find that the people of Israel did not want to obey God's commands. To understand how awful that can be, just recall the times you have seen a screaming child in a store begging for something on the shelf and a parent who is refusing to give it to the child. It can be an ugly scene. Or imagine trying to drive an automobile that has a will of its own, a car that doesn't respond to your direction. Wouldn't that be a nightmare? Or imagine employees who don't do what you ask of them, but do what they want, even if it's wrong.

God and Israel had had that kind of experience and it ended in heartache and pain. But in the new covenant, God will write the law on the hearts of the people. They will want to please God. They will want to do the will of God. There will be no contest of wills, no conflict of interest. Doing the will of God will be part of their nature. That is the promise of God.

In the new covenant, not only will the people of God want to do God's will, but it is promised that they will know God. Knowing God is an important prophetic theme. Ignorance of the Lord is a frequent criticism made by the prophets. It was Hosea who said, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge ..." (Hosea 4:6). People had forgotten that it was God who had redeemed them and continued to sustain them. They had forgotten the law of God and so were living in ignorance.

In the new covenant that will not be the case. Everyone will have knowledge of God, from the greatest to the least. It will not be necessary for some people to teach others about the Lord. There will be no need for Sunday school, Bible studies, seminaries, expository sermons, or Bible commentaries. In the new covenant, people will know God in an intimate, personal way.

The passage suggests this knowledge of God will be similar to the knowledge of God experienced by the prophets. It will be that personal, that intimate. One of the problems we have in our society, and in our churches, is that so many people confuse knowledge about God with knowledge of God. Knowledge about God is what we learn from books, from parents and teachers, from video tapes, and from preachers. It is secondhand knowledge. A person can have a lot of this kind of knowledge about God and still not know God in a personal way, from firsthand experience.

You could answer every question on the Jeopardy board in the Bible category and still not have a living relationship with God. That's knowledge about God. And it has very little use in life. But personal knowledge of God comes from a relationship with the Lord. We get this knowledge when we invite Jesus to become the Lord and Savior of our lives. Only when we make that commitment do we begin to know the Lord in a personal way.

A father took his young son to a major league baseball game along with one of the father's friends. The father's friend had a son who was a pitcher for one of the major league teams. It was the father's intention to stay after the game and have his friend's son introduced to his own boy.

After the game, the trio made their way to the locker room door and waited for the players to come out. As they waited for his friend's son to come out, some of the star players pushed away the fans and made a dash for their cars. Other players came out and signed autographs, but the boy didn't really get to talk to any of them. But when his father's friend's son came out, because the lad was with his dad, the player took the time to shake his hand, to talk to him, and to greet him as a real human being. After that experience, the young boy paid a lot of attention to that player's career. He did so because he felt he had a relationship with the player. He had met him face to face, and that made all the difference.

Our knowledge of God in this life is very limited. We need to have other people teach us about God. That's how we get introduced to the Lord. But some of us are content with this secondhand knowledge, and this creates problems. We are not as intimate with the Lord as we need to be.

But in the new covenant, Jeremiah claimed that all God's people will have firsthand, full knowledge of God. That's a promise.

The third promise for the new covenant is that forgiveness of sin will be abundant. It will be a time of boundless grace, limitless love, incomprehensible forbearance. Please note: God does not promise that in the new covenant people will be perfect, or that they will be sinless. God promises to forgive and to forget their iniquity. That suggests there still will be mistakes and problems. But forgiveness will be the rule of thumb. Grace will be more important than sin.

It has been suggested that forgiveness gives us a new sense of worth, and with this sense of worth comes a desire to be worthy. A sense of worth, a sense of self-esteem, has tremendous regenerative power. When we feel good about ourselves, our actions tend to be positive, wholesome, and edifying to others. It is when we feel bad about ourselves that we engage in destructive, hurtful behavior.

Billy was the youngest of three children born to a woman who became addicted to heroin. The children did well to survive. There were many nights when their mother never came home. There were days when there was no food in the house. They often wore dirty clothes. Billy didn't feel very good about himself. This negative self-image was reflected in his behavior toward others. He was a problem at school. He always seemed to get into trouble.

When he was eight years old, the state took the children away from their mother, and placed them in a foster home. For the first time in their lives, those children knew that someone cared for them. They had clean clothes, good food, and adults who set limits on their behavior. In six months Billy changed from being a problem student to a model student. Feeling good about himself encouraged him to live a life that would make others proud.

The best news the people of Israel who were in exile could hear in those days was the fact that the new covenant was going to be based on forgiveness and grace. By being grounded in God's willingness to forgive, both the power and the permanence of the new covenant was assured.

In the new covenant there are three promises that we hold dear: God promised to write God's law on the hearts of God's people; God promised that all God's people will have intimate knowledge of God that comes from a personal relationship, and God promised to build that covenant on forgiveness and grace.

Comparing the new covenant to the old, we see that there are no more "if" clauses in the new. In the covenant made with Moses, there were all kinds of conditions attached to the promises. If the people obeyed God's law, they would prosper in the new land. The history of Israel showed that people just aren't capable of keeping that kind of covenant. We just can't do it.

God, in God's goodness and grace, therefore decided to make a new covenant. This one has no conditions, no "if" clauses. The heart of the matter is that it is built on grace, not law. We understand that in Jesus Christ the new covenant has come into being. Forgiveness of sin is the basic message of the gospel. That's why we declare to the community every week this phrase: "Friends, believe the good news of the gospel: in Jesus Christ we are forgiven." Our knowledge of God may be imperfect, but we know all we really need to know. We're not perfect, but we do want to please the Lord with our lives.

The heart of the matter is this: we aren't sure why we should be, but we're forgiven, and in Christ we're moving toward what God wants us to be.