Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Hebrews 8:10

"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel After those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, And on their heart also will I write them: And I will be to them a God, And they shall be to me a people:" — Hebrews 8:10 (ASV)

From the failures of the past, Jeremiah turns his vision to the future. Again he sees a united people as he thinks of the covenant being made with “the house of Israel.” It will be made “after that time,” which clearly refers to the future, though he does not locate it with any precision. The repeated “declares the Lord” keeps before the reader the truth that a divine and not a human act is in mind. The first point is that the new covenant is inward and dynamic: it is written on the hearts and minds of the people. A defect in the old had been its outwardness. Although it had divinely given laws, it was written on tablets of stone (Exodus 32:15–16). The people had not been able to live up to what they knew was the word from God. Jeremiah looked for a time when people would not simply obey an external code but would be so transformed that God’s own laws would be written in their inmost beings. We should not distinguish too sharply between “minds” and “hearts” (note the poetic parallelism).

The second point in the new covenant is that there will be a close relationship between the God who will be “their God” and the people who, he says, will be “my people.” There is nothing really new in the terms of this promise, for in connection with the old way it was said, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Exodus 6:7). But “I will be your God” acquires fuller meaning in the light of Jesus Christ. His life, death, resurrection, and ascension mean that God has acted decisively to save a people. The God who saves people in Christ is the God of his redeemed in a new and definitive way. And when people have been saved at the awful cost of Calvary, they are the people of God in a way never before known.