Remember God’s Covenant

“Now the people came up from the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho” (Joshua 4:19).

You may be wondering what this verse has to do with remembering the covenant or promises of God?

The tenth day of the first month is extremely significant. It was on this day forty years earlier that God told the Jews to prepare for God’s final plague. And four days later, the day we commemorate as Passover, God delivered His people from their Egyptian bondage.

The day God told them to prepare to leave was the day they entered into the Promised Land.

The whole purpose was so that God could fulfill His covenant, His promise to Abraham Isaac, and Jacob that God told them to always remember.

“Remember His covenant forever … The covenant which He made with Abraham, and His oath to Isaac, and confirmed it to Jacob for a statute, to Israel for an everlasting covenant” (1 Chronicles 16:15-17).

Now, while we are to remember this covenant God made with the Jews for their release from their Egyptian bondage, the covenant God desires for us to remember today is His new covenant. It’s the covenant promised by God through the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

It’s a covenant the writer of Hebrews calls a better covenant.

“But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, inasmuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises” (Hebrews 8:6).

It was a better covenant because it was made on a better promise, that is, the Lord God Himself instituted and fulfilled it. All we have to do is to enter into it by accepting its Mediator, Jesus Christ.

Jesus gave us the memorial to remember this new covenant, its called Communion. It’s a symbolic act where through the bread and cup we remember what Jesus did and the new covenant He instituted in His blood.