Jeremiah 31:32f – Surpassing Spousal Love

31 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— 32 not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. Jeremiah 31:31-32, New King James Version

The reality of being fired was still ringing in my ears. My boss's euphemistic expression, "Today's your last day with us," didn't soften the reverberation. I snapped to the duty of looking for new work, but my heart was still wounded, subsisting on the gruel of the old identity and script.

Sensing this, my wife stepped in. At that moment, she was the only one earning an income, but she was more than the begrudging subsidizer of my subsistence. Gifted in her spirit with his sense of hospitality, she knew how sight and feel change what we experience within. She took me out to get a new suit.

She saw my future worth fussing over, worth the intricacies of measuring a man in a wheelchair with broad shoulders and the need for an unusual fit in order to allow for donning the coat in the chair. In typical wifely fashion, she saw that the timing of her gracious intentions coincided with a God-ordained sale to make the most of them. I felt a little more like a new man and was able to summon that identity in interviews.

I consider that as God closes out Jeremiah 31:32. He is about to introduce real newness, the new covenant that will change hearts rather than manage external realities. American advertisers know how this is supposed to work generally. They will introduce new for the sake of new, new only slightly different from the old. To salt our thirst for new, they will denigrate the old. They will set up a straw man to argue against, selecting adjectives and aspects that emphasize the difference.

Not God. Just as Paul will remind his New Testament audience that the wall was a good gift to ready us for comprehensive newness in Christ, so God recalls the good aspects of the old covenant. The one He saved for last in Jeremiah 31:32 is His husbandly affection for the same people who broke His covenant. Though He used them to humble Egypt, they were not simply chess pieces in geopolitics. Deftly searching for a human equivalent by which they could begin to understand the heart with which He was all in in the old covenant, He says He loved them like a husband.

He cared for their daily details as my wife cared for mine. His manna reminded them of His care every morning. Clothing that didn't wear out reminded them of His care for bodies that would eventually die. Just as CS Lewis's Screwtape concedes what he would have humans forget, that what happens with our bodies impacts our spirits, so God used, and reminds that He used, physical manifestations of spiritual affection as reminders of who His people were in Him.

How much would we invest in the old covenant if we knew it would be broken and replaced by one as extravagant as Christ's sacrificial love for His own? How many reminders would we stir of our spousal faithfulness, indeed doting extravagance, if we knew what God knew, that these would be jilted AND that the whole arrangement would be infinitely surpassed by the new covenant which changes us from the inside out, to be ultimately impervious to recidivism?

Yet, the fact that he doesn't fast-forward to such a dazzling bottom line is instructive for even the recipients of the new covenant. We can't transform people's spirits the way God's new covenant can, but this doesn't render insignificant what we CAN do. The love we can demonstrate, though it is but a pale shadow of God's transforming love, matters. The spouse-like ways we can show day-to-day affection for the image of God we see in even the basest of His human creations can be used two points toward a more lasting and radical reality.