“For thus says the Lord GOD: I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath in breaking the covenant, yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant. Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you take your sisters, both your elder and your younger, and I give them to you as daughters, but not on account of the covenant with you. I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the LORD, that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord GOD.”
Ezekiel 16:59-63 (ESV)
Ezekiel was a priest who had been taken to Babylon during one of the early deportations. God called him to be a prophet to the people of Judah. To those in exile as well as those still in their land.
In this sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, God charged Judah with spiritual adultery and prostitution. And He compared Judah to her sisters, Samaria (the capital of Israel) and Sodom. And He accused Judah of being even worse than her sisters (Ezek. 16:51-52).
Judah had broken their marriage covenant with God. And God had every right to divorce them and wash His hands of them. But He didn’t. God remembered the covenant He had made with them. And in the passage quoted above, God described an everlasting covenant that He would establish with them. A covenant that would replace the one that they had broken.
Under this everlasting covenant, God Himself, rather than a priest with a lamb, would atone for their sin. And there would be no question in their minds as to who was God. Idolatry would be a thing of the past.
This same everlasting covenant is described in Jeremiah 31:31-34 and in Hebrews 8. It is a covenant that was established through the atoning blood of Jesus. A covenant for faithful Israel and all of her children. Including Gentile believers.
