The following verses, Jeremiah 31:33-34, then go on to describe this New Covenant. Notice the expression used by Jeremiah: a “new covenant.” Notice also the fact that, as God’s prophet, he looked to the future. “The time is coming … when I will make a new covenant.” When Jeremiah wrote, the time for the New Covenant was still in the future. When it did come, it would be recognized as “new” because it would stand out as difference from the old covenant. God plainly predicted and promised…
“a new covenant…not like the [old] covenant.”
“a new covenant… not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,” declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:31-32)
Which covenant did they receive when they come out of Egypt? As we saw in Lesson Two, it was the Ten Commandments covenant written on stone tablets. Here is a truly amazing prediction. Jeremiah’s Jewish readers knew that the covenant given at the time of the exodus was none other than the Ten Commandments covenant. As great as the Ten Commandments and their accompanying laws were, they would be followed by a new covenant unlike (“not like”) the Ten Commandments covenant.
This was not the only such prophecy. Even while God was giving the covenant to Moses, He was already promising to speak through His future spokesman—the “Prophet” to come.
“I will raise up for them [the Israelites] a Prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him.” (Deuteronomy 18:18)
God used Moses as the go-between—the mediator—to give His covenant to Israel. By predicting a Prophet “like” Moses, God was paving the way for the next Mediator who would reveal “all” God’s will. That promise lets us know that the law of Moses was not God’s full and final revelation. God had more to reveal, and He would do it through the coming Prophet. Acts 3:18-26 quotes from Deuteronomy 18 and shows that God’s promise about the Prophet was fulfilled in Jesus. Hebrews 8 confirms that Jesus has established the New Covenant.
The theme of the coming Leader—the Prophet, the King, the High Priest, the Servant—runs through much of the Old Testament. Isaiah 42 and 49, for example, predict the coming Servant, the Messiah. In both passages God promises, “I will make You to be a covenant for the people” (Isaiah 42:6; 49:8). The New Testament quotes these Isaiah passages, making it clear that Isaiah was predicting Jesus, the Messiah or Christ (Matthew 12:18-21; Luke 2:32; Acts 13:47; 26:23). Jesus is the covenant in the sense that He embodies it, the final and “everlasting covenant” described also in Jeremiah 32:40; Ezekiel 16:60; 37:26; Isaiah 55:3 (quoted in Acts 13:34) and Isaiah 61:8 (quoted in Luke 4:18-19). As Acts 3:18-24 sums up, “all the prophets” pointed ahead to Jesus.