“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah."
Jeremiah 31.31
God is just and holy and separated from sinners like us. This is our main problem in every season, including Christmas. How shall we get right with a just and holy God?
God is merciful, and he promised in Jeremiah 31 (five hundred years before Christ) that someday he would do something new. He would replace shadows with the reality of the Messiah. And he would powerfully move into our lives and write his will on our hearts so that we are not constrained from the outside, but are willing from the inside to love him, trust him, and follow him.
It is the greatest salvation imaginable--a Christmas gift worth singing about. But there is a huge obstacle: our sin. Our unrighteousness separated us from our God. How can a holy and just God treat us sinners with so much kindness as to give us the greatest reality in the universe (his Son) to enjoy with the greatest joy possible?
The answer is that God put our sins on his Son, and judged them there so that he could put them out of his mind and deal with us mercifully while remaining just and holy. Hebrews 9.28 says, "Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many."
Christ bore our sins in his own body when he died. He took our judgment. He canceled our guilt. And that means our sins are gone. They do not remain in God's mind as a basis for condemnation. In that sense, he "forgets" them. They are consumed in the death of Christ.
God is now free, in his justice, to lavish us with the new covenant. He gives us Christ, the greatest reality in the universe, for our enjoyment. And he writes his own will-his own heart-on our heart so that we can love and trust and follow Christ from the inside out, with freedom and joy.
This is an excerpt from 'Joy to the World-Daily Readings for Advent' by John Piper.
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