Last Sunday and at (some) CGs this week, we took a good look at Jeremiah 31:31-34 where the LORD promises to make a New Covenant with His people. I got pretty excited at CG studying the passage in conjunction with Hebrews 10:11-25, and it’s one of the units from Bible College that impacted me the most too. (It’s an unusual privilege when you actually enjoy writing an exam essay because the content is so fantastic!) Why so excited? All to do with how superlatively better the New Covenant is compared to the Old.
…but as we pointed out at CG, it wasn’t that the Old Covenant was a bad system in itself. God doesn’t institute bad systems; He’s not a bully for introducing something that He knew would ultimately ‘fail’. But it was a system that He knew wouldn’t be able to work perfectly because it was a Covenant made between Him (a perfect God with perfect standards of holiness) and a broken, sinful, and thus unreliable people. Namely, from Exodus 19:5, Israel was supposed to obey God fully and keep (or obey) His covenant – the process of which was fully described in the Old Testament moral, political, and ceremonial laws. If (or rather when) the people didn’t obey, they were to apply the procedures of the sacrificial system – as an animal died and its blood was shed on their behalf, the people acknowledged that the due penalty of their sin against God was the separation of death, but that an animal was taking this punishment upon itself in their place. A lot of sin was committed, and so a lot of animals died*.
But there was a bunch of other stuff – as we learned from the (translated!) Latin summary phrases in Sunday’s sermon, a fallen humanity is not able to not sin. So there remained this separation, this relational distance between a sinful people and an awe-fully holy God as they struggled to obey, yet kept failing. A new system was needed – one that didn’t depend on sinful people to ensure its success, yet one that didn’t compromise this awe-full holiness of God’s. What? How??
Enter the New Covenant.
Imagine if there were someone who could perfectly keep the human side of the Covenant, and then ‘lend’ this perfect obedience to the rest of humanity? And imagine if there were a blood sacrifice with blood so ‘potent’ it was sufficient to cover all sin for all time – so the animal sacrifices could stop? And imagine if there were a life of infinite worth that if sacrificed, would be sufficient to take the separation of death-punishment for all other lives?
Enter Jesus.
- the perfect Adam, and the perfect Lamb – the human who because of the infinite worth of his divine life, could represent all humans: as he both perfectly obeyed the perfect standards of God, AND as he offered himself as the perfect and final ‘animal’ sacrifice to completely take the punishment due all humans for all their sin.
So if he kept Covenant perfectly, and if God allowed this Covenant-keeping perfection to belong to sinful me, then … wow! Imagine all the benefits that would be mine! (Actually you don’t have to imagine – Hebrews 10:11-25 is a good start, and then you could read the rest of the New Testament to round it off!)
So this is why I get excited thinking about the New Covenant, and how it’s better – not at all because I’m better or more sophisticated than an Old Testament Israelite, but because a Better Person has kept it perfectly for me. And God by His stupendous grace, somehow sees fit to allow Jesus’ perfect Covenant-keeping righteousness to be MINE – so that God sees me as if I’d never sinned, and is changing and empowering me so that I sin less with time, and will one day perfect me so I can’t sin at all. Plus I get to have GOD as my friend, not a distant Creator or angry Lord, but as loving heavenly Father, and Jesus as my brother.
I’ve gone on for several paragraphs now, but I hope you’ve seen why this stuff makes me excited. It’s the Gospel – the heart of the Good News we believe as Christians – that God should be so good to me by including me in this New Covenant is too wonderful for words. I hope it makes you rejoice too, and if you haven’t yet experienced it for yourself, I hope it makes you want to. Find out how here.
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*Gory? yup. But a primitive system of blood and death by an anthropologically immature people that later became outmoded as they developed a more sophisticated religion? (this is how some schools of thought would describe it) no. Yes, this might seem to be a plausible explanation, but a careful reading of the whole Bible helps clarify why the system changed – and it isn’t due to a group of people becoming more sophisticated. Actually, keep reading above for the Bible’s explanation.
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