1507 - "The Historical Setting of the New Covenant Promise" Jeremiah 31

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1507. Today, before we get started, I want to welcome four new cities. We're now up to 4,370 cities. I want to welcome from Tokyo, Japan, a new city, Nakano City. It's in the Tokyo area, Norman Park, Georgia. There is a new district in Hong Kong that came on board yesterday. And in Marquette, Michigan, the Upper Peninsula in northern Michigan. Many of you know Marquette because of their basketball team that's constantly on TV. They usually have a winning basketball team. And for years they have been known for that. They have a lot of other things they're known for. But that's what many people that follow Marquette, they follow the basketball team. And so welcome all of you that are listening. We're now up to 170 countries, 170 nations that are listening to On the Way podcast. And I want to say a personal word of gratitude to those of you who pray for this ministry. Pray for me, pray for my family. Thank you. Continue to do that. Many of you have supported you send in checks every month so that we continue to do this in first class ways so that we can produce these and send them out. Thank you so much. It's a true labor of love and trust in God and His goodness to get across barriers with the good news of Jesus and to teach disciples all over the earth. Many of you who listen to this know the scriptures much better than I do. But thank you for listening and continuing to listen for your encouraging words, your emails, your text, your words that come to me in a variety of ways. Thank you for all that you do and continue to do. Many of you have told me that this is really a lifeline for you, that you listen to on your way to work, and it sets the tone for the day for you. And I pray it's a good tone and that God blesses your heart. Many of you who have advanced degrees say that these challenge you to go back and reread passages again and do the language studies and the historical context that you should have done years ago. All of us are in the lifelong school of learning, and I pray to God we never stop learning until the day the Lord takes us home, and then our knowledge will be perfect. But until that time we need to stay in the Word, we need to keep studying, we need to keep reading and uh pouring over the scriptures, seeking the face of God so that we can share the wonderful life-giving message of Jesus and His love and His forgiveness to those that God puts us in contact with. Well, I want to give you some historical context of the book of Jeremiah because it's very important. For instance, when we start through the book of Jeremiah and the prophecies that we're dealing with now, the new covenant, when you come to chapter twenty nine, you have a letter from the prophet Jeremiah to the people in Babylon who have been carried off against their will. It's a letter that you wouldn't expect to read from a prophet as Jeremiah, and we'll look at that at another date. But it was a letter for the people to plant their lives there and bloom where God had planted them and where God had taken them, and to pray for the city and pray for the country, to seek the peace of the cities where they're living, that when they bless the cities and they pray for the people there and they plant their lives there, and God gives them peace, that He's doing that in order to give them a future and to give them encouragement and hope that there will be an end to this one day, and that after seventy years God will bring them back into the land and he would promise them that he would do that. It was not one of rebellion against the country that uh had stolen them away, but it was rather one of peace and of goodwill. So what is the context for all of that? Well, from the time that the children of Israel came into the land of Canaan in the early 1400s, they left uh Egypt in 1446, they came in the land. It took them several years to conquer the land that they did. They didn't conquer it all, but what they did, God told them, He said, I'm going to give you this land, and it's going to be yours, and it is uh eternal possession of the nation of Israel. And uh you're going to prosper there and you're going to be blessed if you'll follow me. But please understand. And this he echoed over and over again through Moses, and he reiterated this over the years and centuries through the prophets. And he said, If you will live in the land and you'll worship me and you'll honor me, I'll let you live there. But if you don't and you rebel against me and start worshiping the gods of the Canaanites and the Amorites and all the people that I'm going to send you to take their land. It's a land that they're on, but I gave it to your ancestor Abraham. And I gave that to him four hundred years plus, almost five hundred years ago. And now you're in the land and I'm giving it to you, but I'll spew you out of the land if you get in there and you fail to obey me. And so God did that over and over again. He sent other nations that came in and took possession of the land, and God would raise up a judge, and and they would repent, and God would let them have a revival. They would get back in the land, God would restore them, give them rest, then they would rebel again. This went on for over three hundred and fifty years, and finally, during the transition of the time of Samuel, God sent them a king. And uh, you know the story of King Saul, and then he raised up David and the Judaic dynasty and uh made a an eternal covenant with David, like he had his ancestor Abraham, an unconditional covenant where he said, I'm going to, as I gave Abraham this land and lineage and the promises I did, I'm going to give you a kingdom, and a kingdom that's going to be everlasting. The Messiah is going to come through your loins, the one that was promised in the Garden of Eden. He's going to be a descendant of yours, David, and I promise you that, and I will keep my promises, and he did. And Jesus, in the opening uh verse of the opening chapter of the first book of the New Testament, of the New Covenant, you will read in Matthew 1, verse 1, this is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, who is the son of David, who is the son of Abraham. God always keeps his promises. And so you know the story. At the death of Solomon, the kingdom split in two, and the majority of the tribes uh bolted north and and became the nation of Israel, also sometimes called Ephraim from the son of Joseph. While he was in Egypt, his two sons, Joseph, two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, were given a huge portion of the land on both sides of the river. God blessed Joseph and uh for his faithfulness and and for his faith in the Lord and his promises, and Joseph's body was actually brought back and buried in Shekim, near Shechim. That is just another testament of the faithfulness of God and Joseph's faith. But as the kingdom split, the northern kingdom only lasted until 722 BC when the Assyrians came in and totally decimated, captured the city, the capital city of Samaria, destroyed it. It was during the days of the reign of Hezekiah the Judaic king, one of the descendants of David. As you'll recall, God turned back the Assyrian army, killing 186,000 in one nine. After that, God continued to woo his people and warn his people, and uh they continued to go astray. Even the tribe of Judah and the southern kingdom and the the Davidic line just kept having just a spurt of revival from time to time, and so finally God uh said enough's enough. And after the last uh revival under godly King Josiah, and he was killed in six oh nine, when Nebuchadnezzar had wiped out Assyria, and he made his way on down to Jerusalem, and in six hundred five BC after the Battle of Carkimish, he came to Jerusalem and took away all of the elite, the educated, uh, the blue bloods, the royalty. He took them as captives in six hundred five BC to Babylon. Of that wave in six hundred five, that first initial wave of captivity was Daniel, Hezariah, Meshael, and Hananiah. Azariah, Hananiah, Meshael were later named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, those three Hebrew young men that we learn to love as they would not bow to Nebuchadnezzar and the great colossus outside of Babylon in the province. Daniel would have not been there, he would have been back in the palace overseeing everything as he was under Nebuchadnezzar and had been left in control there. But while uh Daniel was in the palace and Shadrach, Meshach, and Nebedigo were out in the province as rulers and leaders, and uh had been placed there by God uh by agency of uh Nebuchadnezzar. You'll recall when Nebuchadnezzar came back in five ninety-seven, just a few years later for the second wave, Ezekiel was taken captive, and Ezekiel had most of his prophecies by the river Kibar. Now the river Kibar, just from a geographical standpoint, was not a river like the Tigris or the Euphrates, but rather it was an irrigation river or canal that had been dug and made for the crops of Babylon, and uh it was just uh not far from the city of Babylon to the southeast, the best that I can determine. That's where Ezekiel was prophesying. So God had someone in the palace, someone in the province, and then he had someone out with the common people. That was Ezekiel. And then back in Jerusalem was Jeremiah. Jeremiah had been left behind, he was part of the priest that had been uh outcast. They lived at the gates of Shaol, the gates of Saul, just north of Jerusalem in the city of Anathoth. And they were the primary descendants of Abiather, and he was banished by King Solomon after he took part in the rebellion of Adonijah during the days of the closing hours and days of King David's life. And so you can go back and read about that, but it it's a fascinating story. But Jeremiah was left by God back in Jerusalem to speak to the king and the people during the great siege of Babylon that ended in the uh destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC. And when you read the prophecies of Jeremiah, it's fascinating as you read, as I said in chapter 29 of the letter of Jeremiah. But Jeremiah uh was in a mess. He was constantly in the days of when he wrote the letter to the uh captives in uh chapter 29, all the way through verse 33 and 35. You have these great prophecies, and none greater than the prophecy of what we call chapter 31, the prophecy of the New Covenant. And this is a prophecy that uh worked itself out in the New Testament through a great musterion, a truth that was hidden in the heart of God, and it wasn't revealed until the days of the apostles and their preaching. And it was first made plain to Peter in the book of Acts, chapter ten, where Cornelius and the opening up of the door to the Gentiles. That's right. For the first decade of the New Testament, from the time of the ascension of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit to live in the life of every believer, starting with the Jews at Pentecost, for the next decade, only Jews were saved. It was not until God spoke to a man, a warrior, a centurion in Caesare Maritime, which was Herod the Great's uh city that he had built, beautiful port city. The remains of it are still today. Many of you have been there and I've taught you there, and uh you've been with other people. I'm so glad you get to go and they just keep finding things there. And if they dug, they could dig from now on and be would be finding more and more. But it was a beautiful city, a beautiful port city, a beautiful harbor. It was there that the gospel was open to the Gentiles. In other words, the Lord had a muster on something that was hidden in the heart of God, that one day the grafting in process would take place, and that grafting in would be to the new covenant. That is, that the way of forgiveness and the way of salvation would be open to the Gentiles, and you didn't have to become a Jew to become a follower of Jesus. You could come directly through the cross of Jesus and have equal standing in the church of Jesus, the ecclesia, the called out body of Jesus. This was one of the great mysteries, and it's spoken of as a mystery in the epistles, and the apostle Paul was called to be. That is a Jewish rabbi, the protege of the great Gamaliel that's mentioned in the book of Acts, the grandson of the great rabbi Hillel, who was carrying on in his traditions, and the protege of Gamaliel was the Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, was taught by Jesus in the desert for three years, then commissioned to preach the gospel, the gospel to the Gentiles. To the Jew first, yes, but to the Gentiles. Paul talked about this great mystery, how that God had it all planned all along. Had he forsaken his people Israel? No. Has he now? Absolutely not. The church of Jesus was never meant to replace the Jewish people, and we'll see that. The new covenant was not to the Gentile, it was primarily to the Jew, then only by revelation of the great mystery of God that Paul talks about, that Peter opened up that door to the Gentiles, uh, where the Gentiles grafted into the new covenant. And we'll talk about that more. I just wanted to kind of set the stage for you historically as to when this new covenant was written. It was written during the days of, and the promise was given during the days of captivity, during some of the darkest days of Jerusalem. The brightest and the greatest of all the prophecies were given concerning the new age to come, and that is the promise and the prophecy of a new covenant. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.