The New Covenant Written in the Heart

Come Follow Me 2026 — Week 43 (Oct 26–Nov 1) — Jeremiah 31–33; 36–38; Lamentations 1; 3

Introduction: A Prophet Who Lived What He Preached

Jeremiah is one of the most fully drawn human beings in the entire Old Testament. Unlike the brief prophetic books that give us only oracles and pronouncements, the book of Jeremiah is a living biography of a man consumed by his calling and sometimes nearly broken by it. He wept over Jerusalem before it fell, preached repentance that was ignored, watched the city burn, survived imprisonment in a cistern, and yet — through it all — delivered the single most important promise in the entire Hebrew prophetic tradition: that God would make a new covenant, writing His law not on stone tablets but on human hearts.

The chapters assigned for Week 43 (Jeremiah 31–33; 36–38; Lamentations 1; 3) span both the height of Jeremiah’s prophetic vision and the depths of his personal suffering. Together they form one of the most theologically rich and emotionally honest units in all of scripture. To read them carefully is to encounter a God whose faithfulness endures even when His people do not — and a prophet whose courage is all the more remarkable because it cost him so much.

Jeremiah 31: The New Covenant Promise

Chapter 31 is the theological summit of the entire book of Jeremiah. Here, amid the wreckage of a nation that has broken every covenant it ever made with God, comes an astonishing promise: God will not merely renew the old covenant — He will establish an entirely new one. The nature of this new covenant is what makes it unprecedented in Israel’s history.

Jeremiah 31:31–34

“Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

The distinction here is fundamental. The Mosaic covenant was written on stone — external, legible, carved by the finger of God onto tablets that were then broken when Israel sinned. The new covenant will be written in something far more intimate and indestructible: the human heart itself. External law can be disobeyed or ignored. Interior transformation is a different category of relationship altogether.

This is not merely a promise of easier compliance. It is a promise of a fundamentally changed humanity — people whose very desires have been re-oriented toward God. The Greek word for this transformation in the New Testament is metanoia: a change of mind, a reordering of the inner person. Jeremiah sees this coming centuries before it arrives.

The New Testament writers understood Jeremiah 31 as the lens through which Jesus’ entire ministry should be interpreted. The author of Hebrews quotes this passage at length — twice — making it the longest Old Testament quotation in the entire New Testament. When Jesus took the cup at the Last Supper and declared “This is the new covenant in my blood,” His disciples who knew their scriptures would have immediately heard the echo of Jeremiah 31.

New Testament Fulfillment

• Hebrews 8:8–12 — Paul quotes Jeremiah 31 as the foundation of the new covenant in Christ’s blood
• Hebrews 10:16–17 — Quotes Jeremiah again: “their sins and iniquities will I remember no more”
• Luke 22:20 — “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you”
• 2 Corinthians 3:3 — Paul: ministers of a new covenant written not with ink but on tablets of flesh, of the heart

Jeremiah 31 also contains the tender image of Rachel weeping for her children — “Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded” (v. 16). Matthew quotes this verse at the slaughter of the innocents (Matt 2:18), showing how Christ’s story recapitulates Israel’s sorrow before its redemption.

Chapter 32 reinforces the promise with an enacted symbol: even as Babylonian siege works surround Jerusalem, God commands Jeremiah to purchase a field as a legal deed of ownership. In a city about to fall, Jeremiah buys real estate. The message is unmistakable: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land” (32:15). Hope is not the absence of present suffering — it is the conviction that present suffering does not have the final word.

Jeremiah 36–38: The Scroll That Could Not Be Silenced

Jeremiah 36 recounts one of the most dramatic episodes in the entire prophetic tradition. God instructs Jeremiah to dictate all his prophecies to his scribe Baruch, who then reads the scroll publicly in the temple. The scroll is brought before King Jehoiakim, who — seated by a fire in his winter palace — takes it section by section, cuts it with a penknife, and throws it into the fire.

It is one of the most arresting images of human defiance against the divine word in all of scripture. A king, warm by his fire, methodically destroying the Word of God. Yet the chapter ends with a detail that undercuts the king’s action entirely: “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe... who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jer 36:32). God’s word cannot be silenced. You can burn the scroll; you cannot burn what it says.

This episode raises a question that resonates through every age: what do we do when we don’t want to hear what God is saying? Jehoiakim’s penknife is the ancient version of every attempt to eliminate inconvenient truth. The answer scripture gives is always the same: the word endures.

Jeremiah 37–38 narrates Jeremiah’s arrest and imprisonment. He is accused of treason — of going over to the Babylonians — and thrown into a dungeon, then into a muddy cistern where he sinks in the mire. A court official named Ebed-melech the Ethiopian intercedes with the king and rescues Jeremiah with ropes and old rags. The detail of the rags placed under the ropes to pad Jeremiah’s armpits is so specific, so human, so tender, that it stands as one of the most quietly moving acts of kindness in the entire Old Testament.

What emerges from these chapters is a portrait of covenant faithfulness under extreme cost. Jeremiah did not choose easy obedience. He chose the hard faithfulness of continuing to speak when no one wanted to listen, continuing to believe in restoration when Jerusalem lay in ruins around him. His courage was not the absence of suffering — it was persistence through suffering. That is the only kind of courage that ultimately counts.

Lamentations 3: Great Is Thy Faithfulness

The book of Lamentations is the Bible’s most sustained meditation on grief. Five poems of mourning over the destruction of Jerusalem, traditionally attributed to Jeremiah, written in the ashes of everything the nation had held sacred. The temple is gone. The city is rubble. The people are in exile. There is no political solution on the horizon.

And yet, at the precise center of this book of grief — in the third chapter, the middle of the five poems — comes one of the most luminous expressions of faith in the entire Bible:

Lamentations 3:22–23

“It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

The theological weight of this statement is enormous precisely because of its context. This is not faith spoken from comfort. This is not gratitude offered from prosperity. This is someone sitting in the smoldering remains of everything they loved, and choosing — deliberately, at cost — to say: God is faithful. His mercies are new every morning.

The verse does not deny the grief. Lamentations 3 begins: “I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath” (v. 1). The poet does not spiritually bypass his suffering. He names it fully, chapter after chapter, with unflinching honesty. But then, in the center of that grief, he finds an anchor: God’s mercies have not ended. The morning still comes. The compassions are renewed.

This is also why Lamentations belongs in the canon: it gives permission for grief. Many believers feel implicitly pressured to skip past suffering into testimony. Lamentations insists that grief must be named before it can be offered. The famous hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” (Thomas Chisholm, 1923) takes its title and its central verse directly from this passage.

Lamentations 3:25–26

“The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.”

The theology of Lamentations is the theology of the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter: the place where the temple has been destroyed and the resurrection has not yet come. Israel in exile knew that place intimately. So do many believers today. Lamentations teaches us that waiting in that space is not unfaith — it is, in fact, one of the highest forms of faithfulness.

Lamentations and the Book of Mormon

The spirit of Lamentations — honest grief held within a framework of covenant faith — appears repeatedly in the Book of Mormon. Lehi’s family left Jerusalem just before its destruction, carrying the plates of brass which contained much of what we know as the Old Testament. Nephi’s great psalm in 2 Nephi 4 follows the exact pattern of Lamentations: profound grief honestly named (“O wretched man that I am”) giving way to covenant affirmation (“Nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted”). Mormon’s lament over the Nephite destruction in Mormon 6 carries the same structure. Moroni writing alone at the end of the Nephite civilization echoes the author of Lamentations writing in the ruins of Jerusalem.

What Lamentations models, the Book of Mormon carries forward: the covenant community can grieve faithfully. Grief and faith are not opposites. They are, in fact, the twin marks of a soul that takes both reality and God seriously.

The Doctrinal Throughline: God Initiates, God Restores

Running through all these chapters is a single doctrinal conviction: the covenant initiative belongs to God. Israel did not earn the new covenant promise. Judah did not merit restoration after seventy years of exile. The prophet did not secure release from the cistern by his own wisdom. Morning did not come because the mourner in Lamentations summoned it.

In every case, the movement is from God toward the human being. “I will put my law in their inward parts” — not “they will eventually learn my law.” “I will be their God and they shall be my people” — not “they will finally become worthy of me.” The new covenant is an act of divine grace, not human achievement.

This pattern — God’s faithfulness exceeding human faithfulness, God’s initiative preceding human response — is one of the most consistent theological signatures of the entire Old Testament. It reaches its ultimate expression in the New Testament, where the Word becomes flesh not because humanity deserved it but because God’s covenant love is inexhaustible.

Doctrine & Covenants Connections

• D&C 84:57 — The Lord’s condemnation for treating lightly the New Covenant — directly echoes Jeremiah’s language
• D&C 88:63 — “Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you” — the relational core of the new covenant
• Moses 6:59 — The baptismal covenant as the outward sign of the inward law Jeremiah foretold

Practical Application: What Does It Mean to Have the Law Written in Your Heart?

The new covenant promise of Jeremiah 31 is not merely a theological abstraction. It describes a lived experience that every covenant disciple is invited to pursue: the transformation of the inner life such that righteousness becomes natural rather than effortful, desired rather than merely commanded.

Elder David A. Bednar has spoken of this as the difference between following the commandments because we have to and following them because we want to — a want that is itself the gift of the Spirit. King Benjamin’s people experience exactly this in Mosiah 5: after his covenant sermon, they declare that they have no more desire to do evil, but to do good continually. That is Jeremiah’s new covenant made visible in a single congregation.

To ask “Is the law written in my heart?” is to ask: Do I keep the Sabbath because I fear the consequences of not keeping it, or because I genuinely love what the Sabbath is? Do I serve in my calling out of obligation or out of love? Do I pray because it is a checkmark on my spiritual list or because I actually want to talk to God? These are not questions with easy answers, and the very difficulty of the questions is what makes Jeremiah’s promise so significant: God will accomplish what we cannot accomplish on our own.

That transformation is the work of the Holy Ghost. The sacrament prayer asks for the Spirit as the sign that the covenant is active. The Atonement of Jesus Christ makes possible the interior change Jeremiah foresaw. The new covenant is not a lower standard; it is a higher life.

Conclusion: The Indestructible Promise

Jehoiakim burned the scroll. Jerusalem fell. The temple was destroyed. Jeremiah sat in a cistern. The author of Lamentations grieved in the ruins. And yet: the promise endures. The new covenant was spoken. God’s word was written again, more complete than before. Morning came, with its new mercies. The captives returned. The Messiah came. The new covenant was established in His blood.

What Jeremiah’s story teaches us, ultimately, is that the faithfulness required of us is not the faithfulness of those who never suffer. It is the faithfulness of those who suffer and keep believing anyway — who buy fields in besieged cities, who rewrite burned scrolls, who sit in the cistern and wait, who write poetry about the faithfulness of God from within the ruins He let be built.

Great is His faithfulness. The mercies are new this morning. And the law — if we will have it — is being written, slowly and surely, in our hearts.