your doings;
if ye thoroughly execute justice between a man and his
neighbor; if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and
the widow ... then I will cause you to dwell in this place,
in the land that I gave to your fathers, from of old even
forevermore. Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot
profit. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear
falsely, ... and come and stand before me in this house, ...
and say, We are delivered; that ye may do all these
abominations? Is this house, which is called by my name,
become a den of robbers in your eyes?"=

JEREMIAH'S MESSAGE OF A HEART RELIGION

It is clear that Jeremiah was fighting the same old battle that Amos
and the other prophets had fought against a religion of mere empty
ceremonies. But the battle had grown even harder, because the old
false practices had been accepted as though they were just the kind of
religion that Amos had preached. The people said, "We are keeping the
law of Jehovah," and so they were satisfied with themselves.

=The law to be written on the heart.=--Jeremiah saw that this mistake
had come from relying too much on a written law. Something more than
an outward law was needed before men could succeed in living together
as brothers. It is so easy to keep the letter of the law, or to think
one is keeping it, while we lose the spirit of it. What is needed,
Jeremiah said, is a changed heart. Again and again he cried to the
people, "Oh Jerusalem, cleanse thy _heart_." And in one of the great
chapters of the Bible, the thirty-first of the book of Jeremiah, he
looks forward to a time when Jehovah and his people should be bound
together in a new covenant--not a covenant written on tables of stone
like the one which Moses wrote at Sinai:

="But this is the covenant that I will make ... after those
days, saith the Lord. I will put my law in their inward
parts, and in their hearts I will write it."=

The apostle Paul saw this promise fulfilled by the love which Jesus
Christ awakens in men's hearts, so that they gladly and eagerly do the
will of God. On account of this prophecy of Jeremiah our Christian
Bible is called the New Covenant, or (from the Latin) the New
Testament.

JEREMIAH AND THE BABYLONIANS

In Jeremiah's time (a decade or so before and after B.C. 600) the
Babylonians had taken the place of the Assyrians as the rulers of the
world. There was a powerful king,