One of Kline’s most powerful arguments for Republication is the fact that the Old Covenant was breakable: “Behold, the days are coming, declares YHWH, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares YHWH” (Jer 31:31-32). Though YHWH was their husband, Israel was unfaithful, the covenant itself was broken, and YHWH divorced Israel (Jer 3:1, 8; cp. Hosea 1:9; 2:2). But if the Old Covenant was breakable, as Jeremiah plainly says that it was, how can it be the covenant of grace pure and simple?
Kline writes:
Paul was resuming Jeremiah’s classic analysis of the covenants when he contrasted the new covenant to the old (the old viewed in the restricted but distinctive terms of its typological dimension). In contrast to the new covenant which could not be broken, founded as it was on God’s sovereign, forgiving grace in Christ, the old covenant, according to Jeremiah, was breakable (Jer 31:32). Individual members of the new covenant community might prove false and be broken off as branches from a tree while the covenant tree remained intact, pruned and flourishing. But the old covenant’s typological kingdom order as such could be and was terminated. The axe of God’s judgment was ultimately laid unto the roots of the tree and the tree itself was felled. Jeremiah’s identification of the old covenant as breakable was the equivalent of an assertion that it lacked the guarantee afforded by the grace principle and was instead based on the principle of works (Kingdom Prologue, 322).
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