NOTES for Jer 31:31-34
Jeremiah was the first of the prophets to speak of a new, messianic covenant with God. This was undoubtedly a revelation: no human mind would have been sufficient to understand what was disclosed to the prophet. Yet, as so often happens, the revelation was given in the context of a very definite experience that Jeremiah had lived through.
He had witnessed the reform carried out by King Josiah and saw what it led to. He saw a multitude of Yahwist believers who had appeared from nowhere, regarded themselves as pillars of the faith, and at the same time continued to worship pagan gods in their own homes. He saw boastful, ostentatious religiosity and an absolute unwillingness to keep the commandments God had given. He saw proud nationalism, heavily mixed with myths that had nothing in common with Yahwism, taking possession of his compatriots' hearts, while he heard the words repeated like a spell: “We have the house of Yahweh, we are God's people, Yahweh is among us.”
Such spiritual fruit could hardly gladden God's witness. But he also understood that if the spiritual work with the people of God were simply left to itself, the results would be no less lamentable. What remains if natural religiosity leads a person into the dead end of paganism, while reforms imposed from above touch a person only externally and do not change him inwardly at all?
The answer came from God: the Torah, God's law, must not simply be inscribed on stone, as the text of the Decalogue had been inscribed on tablets of stone. It must be imprinted upon every heart, becoming not merely a law given from outside but an inner spiritual backbone for everyone who seeks genuine knowledge of God and full communion with Him. Only then will the messianic Kingdom open to a person, for there what will be required is not formal religiosity or declarations of adherence to Yahwism, but a readiness to give oneself wholly and without reserve to God.
Without the Torah imprinted upon the heart, which later, in the post-exilic age, would be called the inner Torah, this is impossible. Every inhabitant of the Kingdom will have to remain constantly before God, for no other kind of life is possible there. The whole of life must become uninterrupted communion with God. This, Jeremiah testifies, is the new covenant without which there is no Kingdom and therefore no salvation.