Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 88 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session finishes Jeremiah and opens Ezekiel. Its center is a careful classroom discussion of how the new covenant promised to Israel and Judah relates to the church that now shares its forgiveness: Dr. Essex lays out four positions, explains why he holds the one he holds, and shows how the debate turns on hermeneutics. Around that center, watch Jeremiah's word come true in his own lifetime while the people still refuse to hear him, and listen closely to the counsel about why the church avoided Jeremiah for a century.
Jeremiah speaks the Book of Consolation after two of the three exiles have already happened, having told the captives to settle in for seventy years from 605 BC. God's plan is not disaster but hope, so Jeremiah writes down the message of healing, restoration, and forgiveness under the provisions of a new covenant, then shows his own faith by redeeming family land the Babylonians already control. Chapter 33 ties the restoration to God fulfilling his covenants with David (2 Samuel 7) and with the Levitical priests (Numbers 25), all of it resting on the Abrahamic covenant: the land is emphasized as chapter 30 opens, the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as chapter 33 closes. The broken Mosaic covenant will not be the instrument; the new covenant will, and Essex hears in these chapters a definite echo of Deuteronomy 30:1 to 10.
The Lord will create a new thing in the earth: a woman will encompass a man. All interpreters agree the exact meaning is beyond recovery. The early church fathers read it as a cryptic reference to the virgin birth, a woman surrounding a man within her womb; Harrison (with a question mark) and Ryken allow that as an application this side of the New Testament, though not as Jeremiah's own meaning, and Essex demurs even from the application. More likely, within a context where faithless Israel is the daughter, the woman is Israel embracing her husband Yahweh, a new thing given the divorce imagery, since the judgment will cure Israel of idolatry and God, as Hosea 2 promises, will woo and win her again under the new covenant. A third view takes encompass as protect: Israel, long subservient to the nations, will lead and protect like a man. Feinberg simply lists the positions and calls a decision impossible, and Essex plants his feet firmly in midair alongside him: no one can be dogmatic here.
Within Jeremiah and the Old Testament there is broad agreement: the new covenant replaces the Sinai covenant for Israel in the future. The difficulty arises this side of the cross. In Luke 22:20 Jesus lifts the cup: this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood, and the only Old Testament source for the phrase is Jeremiah 31. The analogy holds: the old covenant was initiated with the shedding of blood in Exodus 24, blood sprinkled on the stones and the people, so the new covenant too is initiated by blood, the life of the mediator poured out at the cross.
Hebrews 8 declares Christ the mediator of a better covenant which has been enacted, a past event with continuing consequences, then gives the longest continuous Old Testament quotation in the New Testament, citing Jeremiah 31 in full, and concludes: in saying new, he has made the first obsolete, and what is growing old is ready to disappear. Hebrews 10:15 to 18 adds that where sins are forgiven, no offering for sin remains. Written in the mid to late 60s, Hebrews stood a few years from AD 70, when temple, altar, sacrifice, and priesthood ended outwardly; and since the tribal records perished with the temple, to this day no Jewish person knows whether he descends from Aaron, though Luke 2 shows tribal identity still known before the destruction. In some real sense, then, the new covenant is present now, particularly in the forgiveness of sins; yet Jeremiah says the covenant is made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. How do these fit?
The covenantal approach: the old covenant ended at the cross, the new covenant is fully in effect, and its parties are resolved by identifying the church as the true, spiritual Israel, the spiritual seed of Abraham. Jeremiah used language his audience understood, but the cross reveals its true referent. Essex objects that the surrounding verses also promise the seed planted in the land and Jerusalem reestablished, and once the interpreter has gone symbolic, land and city can be made to stand for anything. He adds a sharper problem: if church-as-new-Israel is the key that unlocks the Old Testament, the New Testament writers stated it remarkably poorly. The one candidate text, Galatians 6:16 and the Israel of God, requires a non-predominant reading of the Greek connective, and the majority of exegetes, including many outside dispensationalism, take the phrase as a distinct group rather than an explicit equation of church and Israel. There is no other explicit statement.
A view strong in the mid-twentieth century and now largely died out, found in Chafer's Systematic Theology and Walvoord's Millennial Kingdom: Jeremiah's new covenant belongs to Israel only, so Jesus and Hebrews must speak of a different new covenant made with the church, which ends with the church age, after which God makes Jeremiah's covenant with Israel. Essex begs to differ: nothing in Luke 22 suggests the disciples should hear a second covenant, and Hebrews explicitly sets its new covenant against the old in exactly Jeremiah's frame.
Position three holds a partial spiritual fulfillment in the church now with full fulfillment for Israel later. It is not only dispensational: John Murray, an amillennialist to his death, held from Romans 11 that ethnic Israel will be saved eschatologically, and Ladd's already-and-not-yet frames the same instinct; several TMS faculty use the language of partial fulfillment. Position four, which Essex leans toward with other faculty, substitutes one word: benefits. A covenant takes two parties; in Jeremiah 31 they are Yahweh, now incarnate in Jesus the mediator, and Israel and Judah, who through rejection of Christ have not yet entered it. But believers, Jew and Gentile, are united to the mediator himself (Galatians 3), and through union with Christ receive the covenant's spiritual benefits, forgiveness and, as Ezekiel 36 will add, the Spirit, without the covenant itself being fulfilled until Israel enters it. Practically, positions three and four differ little; hermeneutically, position four preserves single meaning, the principle Essex says he lives and dies by.
Asked whether the church's share in new covenant blessing belongs to the mystery Paul describes, Essex agrees: the present age, Jew and Gentile in one body united to Christ, was not revealed in the Old Testament. And that concession cuts the other way: if the present arrangement is a mystery, then Jeremiah's words, and Ezekiel's after him, still mean what they say, a real Israel, a real land, a real Davidic king on a real throne for a literal thousand years, the millennium itself being a New Testament disclosure (Revelation 20) of what the Old Testament anticipated. Asked about Israel's national salvation, he answers that embracing the Messiah and embracing the gospel are one act: Ezekiel 20's purge removes the rebels, so that all who enter the kingdom are regenerate, and thus all Israel will be saved without every individual Israelite of the final generation being saved.
During the siege of 588 BC, Zedekiah and the princes covenanted to release their Hebrew slaves; when Babylon briefly lifted the siege to meet Egypt's army, they re-enslaved them. Here, says Jeremiah, is Judah's root problem: no covenant loyalty; you free slaves when frightened and re-enslave them when relieved. Against them stand the Rechabites of chapter 35, from Jehoiakim's days: pledged by their father never to drink wine, they refuse it even when the prophet sets it before them. Essex is careful: the Rechabites are not examples of Mosaic covenant keeping but of covenant faithfulness as such, an oath made and kept, the very thing Judah lacked and the ground of the coming judgment.
Chapter 36 opens the section: Jehoiakim slices the scroll and burns it, but you may cut up the word and in the end the word cuts you up. Chapters 37 to 44 trace the historical outworking: Jeremiah beaten and imprisoned for saying Egypt will not save Judah, rescued from the cistern by Ebed-melech's faithfulness, pressed by Zedekiah for a favorable word he will not give, buying the field while under arrest, the city falling in chapter 39 exactly as he said. Freed by the Babylonians, he stays with the remnant under Gedaliah; they assassinate Gedaliah, refuse his word to remain in the land, bind the prophet, and carry him to Egypt, where through chapter 44 they still refuse to listen. After 585 BC the text falls silent about him. Chapter 45 preserves the word to Baruch, blessed for writing and heeding the message as Judah never did. Forty years of faithful preaching, validated by events before everyone's eyes, and the validated prophet ends his ministry bound, in Egypt, unheeded.
The oracles against the nations begin with Egypt, where Jeremiah has just been taken, and end with Babylon in chapters 50 and 51, where the exiles are; God will judge both. Even inside the judgment oracles come echoes of Israel's restoration and, as in Isaiah, glimpses of restoration for at least some of the nations. Chapter 52 is an appendix reiterating 2 Kings 24 and 25 on Jerusalem's destruction, ending as Kings ends: Jehoiachin lifted from prison after Nebuchadnezzar's death. The Davidic house endures, and though no physical son of Jehoiachin will reign, the note of hope stands. Chapter 52 is the book in miniature: overwhelmingly the covenant curse carried out, with a glimmer of restoration at the end, just as the book's fifty-one chapters of darkness carry the four bright chapters of 30 to 33.
One Old Testament book was ignored by friend and foe alike through the twentieth century: Jeremiah, with fewer commentaries and articles than its size warrants. Not a conspiracy, says Essex, but a matter of taste: the century opened with postmillennial confidence in both liberal and evangelical circles, the Christian century, revival around the corner, and nobody marching to victory wants a book whose message is judgment around the corner. Jeremiah pulls apart the heart of man, deceitful and desperately wicked, and insists that judgment precedes restoration: God must tear down before he builds. With forty-eight chapters of judgment to four of restoration, the book's proportions themselves preach. Essex admits he has never done a verse-by-verse exposition, giving instead several messages on judgment, chapters 2, 10, 11, and 18, weighted equally with restoration, and stands in awe of Ryken, who preached the whole book chapter by chapter to a congregation that would hear it. And none of us, he says, is ready to preach Jeremiah until Jeremiah has been preached to us.
Ezekiel 1:1 dates the opening vision to the thirtieth year without saying of what. The predominant view, which Essex takes, is the thirtieth year of Ezekiel's life, placing his birth around 623 BC, four years into Jeremiah's ministry and near the finding of the law book in the temple (2 Kings 22); Block, whose major commentary Essex respects, puts the birth at 627 BC with a question mark. The name means strengthened by God, and as with Jeremiah the name is a theme: the opponents will come with everything they have, and God will make his prophet stronger. Ezekiel is of a priestly family, called Ezekiel the priest, one of the important people carried to Babylon with Jehoiachin in 597 BC at about twenty-six.
Uniquely among the prophets, Ezekiel dates every oracle, often to the very day on our calendar, so the whole book can be charted from his induction in 593 BC through a ministry of some twenty-two years in Babylon. His first fourteen years were lived under Josiah's outward conformity, his youth under the rampant hypocrisy Jeremiah exposed; from twenty-six on, his body never leaves Babylon, though visions carry him to Jerusalem in chapters 8 to 11 and chapters 40 and following. As God kept one faithful prophet in Judah through the generation of destruction, he raised a younger contemporary among the exiles: Jeremiah could send a letter to Babylon; Ezekiel lived there, ministering to the captives of 605 and 597 and, in time, 586. His first hearers are the good figs of Jeremiah 24, good not by inherent goodness but because from the exile God will bring the restoration.
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 twenty-two are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What does Essex conclude about the meaning of Jeremiah 31:22, a woman will encompass a man?
2. How did the early church fathers read the woman encompassing a man?
3. Where is the only Old Testament source for the phrase new covenant that Jesus uses at the Last Supper?
4. What Old Testament pattern shows that covenants are initiated with blood?
5. What distinction does Hebrews 8 hold for its quotation of Jeremiah 31?
6. Why does no Jewish person today know whether he descends from Aaron?
7. What is Essex's chief exegetical objection to the church-as-new-Israel position?
8. Which position holds that there are two new covenants, one for the church and one for Israel?
9. What did John Murray, an amillennialist, conclude from Romans 11?
10. What single word separates position four from position three?
11. On position four, why can believers receive new covenant blessings though Israel has not entered the covenant?
12. What hermeneutical principle does Essex say he lives and dies by?
13. Why does calling the present age a mystery support a literal future for Israel's promises?
14. What did Zedekiah and the princes do when the siege briefly lifted?
15. What are the Rechabites an example of in Jeremiah 35?
16. What happened to Jeremiah after the remnant assassinated Gedaliah?
17. Why does Essex call Jeremiah 52 the book in miniature?
18. Why, on Essex's account, was Jeremiah ignored by scholars and preachers through the twentieth century?
19. What does Essex say must happen before any of us is ready to preach Jeremiah?
20. What is the predominant interpretation of the thirtieth year in Ezekiel 1:1?
21. What is unique about Ezekiel among the prophets?
22. Who were Ezekiel's first hearers?
All twenty-two correct. Lecture 10 is complete.
Essex holds that believers receive the new covenant's benefits through union with Christ rather than through the covenant's fulfillment. Whether or not you share his framework, what difference does it make to know that forgiveness comes to you through union with the mediator himself?
The debate over the new covenant and the church has divided careful, Bible-believing interpreters for generations, and Essex notes it can turn brutal. From this lecture, what would charitable disagreement over secondary matters look like without treating the question as unimportant?
Judah freed slaves under threat and re-enslaved them when relief came. Where are you most tempted to keep commitments only while the pressure lasts, and what does the Rechabites' plain faithfulness suggest about the alternative?
Jeremiah ended his ministry validated by events yet still unheeded, bound, and carried to Egypt. What does his story say about measuring faithfulness by results, and how might it steady someone whose obedience seems to produce nothing?
Essex argues the church avoided Jeremiah for a century because its message of judgment did not suit an optimistic age. What messages of Scripture does our own moment find easiest to avoid, and what would it cost to hear them?
Hebrews 8:6
Read Jeremiah 31:31 to 37, then Luke 22:14 to 23 and Hebrews 8 in one sitting, watching how the New Testament takes up Jeremiah's words. Then read Jeremiah 36 through 39 to follow the scroll from Jehoiakim's fire to the fall of the city, and finish with Jeremiah 52 beside 2 Kings 25 to see the appendix and its closing glimmer of hope. Next session: Ezekiel's opening vision and his strange, hard commission among the exiles.