Hebrews 8:8

For finding fault with them, he saith, 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 lead them forth out of the land of Egypt; For they continued not in my covenant, And I regarded them not, saith the Lord.

This is from Jeremiah 31:31ff and is quoted by the author as scriptural proof that the abrogation of the old covenant is nothing which should shock his readers, since God long ago had prophesied in this very place that it would be abrogated and replaced with a new covenant. To be sure, the author could have quoted some very convincing and powerful words of Christ and his apostles as sufficient authority for hailing the old covenant as obsolete and abolished; but it should be kept in mind that he was addressing a group of people who had a strong emotional tie with the Old Testament, and it was therefore better procedure on his part to prove his proposition from the Old Testament.

For proper identification of the "covenant" Jeremiah had in mind, the one to be abrogated, see under Hebrews 8:1-7. Two basic reasons why the old covenant was abolished are: (1) God promised that he would make a new one, which he would not have done if the old one had been faultless. (2) Israel themselves had broken the old covenant by not continuing in it; and it is pertinent to observe that it was preponderantly the "moral" part of the covenant that Israel had so wantonly violated. The ceremonial was precisely the part of the law they kept best; and, since it was their breaking of the covenant that God made one of the reasons for changing it, it is most illogical to suppose God abrogated only the ritual, or ceremonial, or priestly part of the covenant. It would require a volume to recount the extent of Israel's rebellion, stubbornness, idolatry, murder, adultery, and wickedness of every description, and their perpetual unwillingness to honor the covenant God had given them. Rather than attempting it, we shall allow the words of one of their most illustrious prophets to stand uncontradicted to the effect that Israel certainly failed to keep the covenant. "For they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord."

In the KJV, the last clause of 9 reads, "Although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord" (Jeremiah 31:32 KJV). We shall leave it to the translators to choose between the renditions, but the thought from the KJV is quite significant. It stresses the tender and intimate relationship between God and Israel, as represented under the metaphor of a husband and his wife; and Paul shows that God honored that spiritual marriage to the extent of dying upon the cross (in the person of his Son) in order to bring about the legal cancellation of the marriage contract with Israel (Romans 7:1-4). After discussing God's law on marriage, Paul said, "Wherefore, my brethren, ye also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ" (Romans 7:4). Thus, sinful as Israel was, God did not dissolve his marriage with them except on the basis of his own death in the person of Christ.