Dr. Thomas Schreiner · The Master's Seminary · 26 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Three movements in one hour: Jeremiah's promise of a covenant whose every member knows the Lord, Lamentations teaching Israel to grieve from A to Z, and Ezekiel watching the glory leave the temple and promising it back. Listen for what makes the new covenant genuinely new.
Jeremiah, like all the prophets, moves from judgment to restoration, and his restoration has surprises in it. The ark of the covenant will be forgotten, no longer needed in the future he sees. There is a new exodus here too, with fishers sent to fish the people of God home. The famous promise of a future and a hope in chapter 29 belongs, in context, to the return from exile, and Schreiner allows its general application to our lives so long as heaven and the new creation are the horizon, for there the promise finally comes to pass, and, in a line he loves, my people shall be satisfied with my goodness. As for the difficult saying that a woman will encircle a man, he reads the woman as Israel and the man as the nations, a prophecy of future salvation, and he declines the sermon he once heard that made it a warrant for a new order of church leadership; all of Scripture must be heard.
Then the great promise: a new covenant, with the law written on the heart. Israel's fundamental problem was that they were unregenerate, and this is Jeremiah's way of speaking of regeneration, the circumcision of the heart at last performed by God himself.
In the new covenant no one says to his neighbor, know the Lord, for they will all know him. The old covenant bound a whole people and state together, believing and unbelieving alike, so covenant members had to be urged toward conversion; the new covenant is different in kind, because every member of it knows the Lord personally and savingly. Every member is regenerate. Schreiner is frank that this reading marks him off from Presbyterian covenant theology, which allows unregenerate covenant members and explains the warning passages that way, and from the baptismal regeneration of Lutheran teaching, and he tells of a man raised to presume on grace, taught he was forgiven while living far from God, as the fruit of that presumption. He says it with open affection: praise God for our evangelical Lutheran and Presbyterian brothers and sisters. But on Jeremiah's terms, what sets the new covenant apart is that there is no one inside it who does not know the Lord.
The new covenant community is no longer tribal: blessing is not mediated through kings, prophets, and priests, for the gift of the Spirit is democratized, everyone in the covenant has the Spirit, and everyone's sins are forgiven. Jeremiah also sees a new David coming. And in a fascinating word, he declares the Levitical priesthood irrevocable, which cannot mean Levitical priests forever offering sacrifices, since their sacrifices are fulfilled in the sacrifice of Christ. Schreiner leans toward reading the promise as fulfilled in Christ's own priesthood, while remaining genuinely open to Gentry and Wellum's argument that it is fulfilled in all believers being priests, as 1 Peter 2 says. Both readings honor the text.
Asked how Jeremiah's justice preaching applies today, Schreiner answers on two fronts. The prophets indict injustice both within the covenant community and among the nations, so there is a place for such preaching. But the church's fundamental task is not to be an agent of social transformation, and ministries that make justice their center usually lose the gospel. It is a mistake, he argues, to use the pulpit for particular policy, tax plans, welfare programs, and the rest, though sin can be named plainly, as John the Baptist named Herod's. And he calls simplistic the habit of splitting the Bible into a conservative Paul and a progressive prophets, as if Jeremiah were a policy manual; the covenantal setting of the prophets has to be honored.
Lamentations is a poetic rendition of the exile inside a disciplined acrostic framework, and the form is part of the message. Anyone may burst into tears, and people will sympathize; but to enter grief fully, to articulate it, takes a certain distance, and articulated grief lets others resonate at a depth that weeping alone cannot reach. So Israel's sin and sorrow are confessed from A to Z, and chapter 3 stands at the book's center. The covenant is crucial throughout: Israel is in exile because of sin, and everything has ended in shocking failure.
The book lingers over horrors that really happened: tears without a comforter, festivals silenced, the king in exile, no prophetic word, elders dishonored, women violated, young and old slain. And its hardest confession is who did it. God gave full vent to his wrath: he scattered them, stamped them like grapes, flung them from heaven to earth, broke bones, besieged and chained, refused to hear prayer, met them like a bear and a lion, shot his arrows. Schreiner quotes Norman Gottwald's little study of the book, historical-critical though it is, for its exact summary: no accident, no demon, no foreign god was responsible for Israel's plight, but Yahweh alone. Who speaks and it comes to pass unless the Lord has ordained it? Do not both adversity and good come from the mouth of the Most High? God rules.
Hope in Lamentations lives in its prayers, which dot the book with piercing simplicity: behold my affliction; look, O Lord, and see, for I am despised; look, O Lord, for I am in distress. The whole of chapter 5 is a prayer, and the book ends praying: you, O LORD, reign forever; restore us to yourself, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and your anger burns still. It ends on that trembling word, yet the author's hope is covenant renewal, for at the book's center stand the lines the church still sings: the LORD's covenant love, his mercies new every morning, great is his faithfulness. The Lord is finally faithful to his people and will restore them.
Ezekiel prophesies from 593 to 571 BC, and his opening vision has attracted bizarre interpretation since the rabbis restricted its reading. Seen whole, it is simple: the four living creatures are cherubim, as chapter 10 says outright, the guardians of God's presence, and above them Yahweh sits enthroned. The point of the vision is the tragedy of the book: Yahweh is leaving his temple, abandoning his people because of their sin. The lecture counts the word abominations ninety-three times in Ezekiel, and you will know that I am the LORD seventy-two times; Ezekiel the priest speaks constantly of a people unclean and defiled. Chapters 16 and 23 press the marriage-and-whoredom picture with a vividness Schreiner calls nearly unreadable in public worship, the same spiritual whoredom Jeremiah named.
Chapter 18, a most fascinating chapter, insists that judgment is also an individual reality: each soul answers for itself. The leaders, shepherds, priests, and prophets, bear a special responsibility for the nation's sin, and the oracles against the nations show that Israel's God judges the whole earth.
Ezekiel's restoration begins with knowing: Israel will know that Yahweh is the Lord. The cities will be rebuilt and inhabited, a new Eden is coming, Gentiles will be included, and Yahweh himself will be a sanctuary for his people. Then the most famous promise: a new heart and a new spirit, the heart of stone removed and a heart of flesh given, God's own Spirit placed within, causing his people to walk in his statutes. This is regeneration: every member of the people of God will have a heart of flesh, and God does it for the sake of his name, not for theirs. Chapter 37 shows the same miracle from the graveside: Israel is dry bones, and the Spirit breathes on them through God's word and grants life; the nation is reunited and comes home. Ezekiel does not say new covenant; he says covenant of peace, and its center is presence: God's dwelling with his people again, the Lord returning to Zion.
A new David is coming, a shepherd for the flock, and Ezekiel 34 promises that Yahweh himself will shepherd his people. The prince of chapters 40 through 48 is messianic, and Schreiner cites Iain Duguid's summary of Ezekiel's Messiah: a powerful ruler who is at the same time a gentle shepherd. Chapters 38 and 39 bring Gog and Magog, disputed and obscure even geographically: a horde like a cloud attacking a people at peace, God's wrath poured out, the enemies buried, and the Spirit poured out after. The course will return to Gog and Magog in the New Testament.
The closing vision, chapters 40 through 48, is a new temple embodying God's holiness, and Schreiner does not expect it as a literal building. He notes that even his progressive dispensationalist colleague expects no restored millennial temple, and he cites Daniel Block's commentary: the blueprint as given cannot actually be built. The temple is a spiritual reality, a new Eden, a cosmic mountain, the presence of God with his people, and it is fulfilled eschatologically in the new creation rather than the millennium. The telling evidence: Revelation 20, the millennium passage, says nothing of this temple, while Revelation 21 and 22, the new creation, are where John takes up Ezekiel's temple language. Nor is it any contradiction that John's new Jerusalem has no temple, for that is the point of reading the vision as symbol: it symbolizes God's presence with his people, from which everything defiled is removed. The book ends with the city's new name: the LORD is there.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What does Jeremiah 29:11 promise in its own context?
2. What is the law written on the heart, in Jeremiah's new covenant?
3. What sets new covenant membership apart from the old?
4. What does it mean that the new covenant community is no longer tribal?
5. How does Schreiner handle Jeremiah's word that the Levitical priesthood is irrevocable?
6. What does the lecture say about the church and social transformation?
7. Why is Lamentations written as an acrostic?
8. Who does Lamentations say brought the disaster on Jerusalem?
9. Who are the four living creatures of Ezekiel 1?
10. What is the point of Ezekiel's opening vision?
11. What is the new heart of Ezekiel 36?
12. Why read Ezekiel's temple vision as the new creation rather than the millennium?
All twelve correct. Lecture 18 is complete.
The new covenant's glory is that everyone inside it knows the Lord. Where are you tempted to presume on grace rather than know him, and what would seeking him personally look like this week?
Lamentations grieves with an alphabet: ordered, articulated, prayed. What loss of yours has never been put into words before God, and what might writing those words, A to Z if need be, begin to heal?
Ezekiel's city is finally named The LORD Is There. If your home or church were named today for what most fills it, what would the honest name be, and what would you ask God to rename it?
Ezekiel 36:26, the surgery of grace: God takes out the heart of stone, gives a heart alive to him, and sets his own Spirit within his people.
The lecture's own recommendations: Daniel Block's commentary on Ezekiel, whose argument about the unbuildable blueprint it adopts, and, read with the caution the lecture itself gives, Norman Gottwald's little study of Lamentations. The Jeremiah and Ezekiel chapters of The King in His Beauty carry the fuller case.