056 - How New is the New Covenant?

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink.

Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages. Welcome to More Than Ink. Hey, when you go in the grocery store, you see those boxes that are labeled new and improved.

What does that mean? Ah, new and improved. You know, they seldom are new and improved. No, it's the same old stuff, just in a new and improved box. But I do want something that's really radically new.

Really different. Yeah, well, today as we read about the New Covenant, we'll find out just how new the New Covenant is today on More Than Ink. Hey, good morning. This is Jim.

And I'm Dorothy. And we're delighted you're with us again. We are stepping into, in Hebrews today, I don't know about you, but for me, kind of the pinnacle.

Favorite, favorite, favorite. Yeah, this is a big, this is a super big deal today where we're coming to. And so we're glad you're with us because this paints such, you know, we talked last time or time before about better, better, better. You know, better covenant, better hope. And I think for a believing Jew, they'd think, well, what exactly are you talking about really? Well, I'm glad you asked because it'll be in living color today as we look at Hebrews 8. So hold on to your chairs. This is great stuff. Yeah, and actually we left off actually with the last verse of being verse 6, he has obtained a more excellent ministry by as much as he's a mediator of a better covenant based on better promises.

Well, what's better about it? So that's what we're going to see as we begin to dig into this passage. And we have so much we want to say, but our words are not the important ones. God's word is. So, you know, if you remember, we were talking about Melchizedek last time and the bottom line question I think in most Jews' minds would be, okay, so you've shown to me that Jesus is some kind of high priest. Okay, but not the high priest of the old temple, the old, you know, tabernacle and temple. That can't be right because that's Aaronic priests. So is there another temple you're talking about?

I mean, what's Jesus' role in this new high priest thing? It hints at something much bigger. And that's what he's saying, it's a bigger, better covenant. Yeah, the writer has already told us that there is a bigger, more concrete, real tabernacle. Real, yes. Built not with human hands, but one that God has built.

He's already said that a couple of times and he's going to kind of start unpacking that. Yeah, so in fact, last time he said in chapter 8, verse 5, he says, you know, all this stuff, they serve as a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. So what we're living right now and what they were living in the old covenant is a shadow of the real thing.

Well, today is the real thing. Okay, so saying that was a shadow is a pretty interesting statement because that was a monumental structure. I mean, the tent, the tabernacle was big and attracted attention.

But when they came around to building a temple that was attached to the ground in Solomon's time, that was an imposing structure. How can you say that's a copy and a shadow? That's a copy and a shadow of the bigger deal.

So in a really, in an ironic sense, what you saw there in the gigantic temple there built with all that limestone and stuff, that was the shadow. The reality is something in heaven and the reality of the something in heaven that we participate in, we participate in with a new high priest, not a son of Aaron, but a new high priest and that's Jesus. And that's the bigger reality. That's the bigger reality. The things you see are not so much the bigger reality of things in heaven. So today we step into that, okay, so what's the bigger deal?

If we've been talking up until now about shadow, about copies, what's the substance? And I think for a Jew too, they'd say, wait a second, I don't know anywhere in the Old Testament where there's a substance more than finding rest coming in the Promised Land. I mean, that's the promise, right? I mean, is there something else listed about there being more? I mean, what are you talking about, about the fact that there remains a Sabbath rest?

No, we came into the land, we're in our rest now. So they're probably wondering, is there anywhere in the Old Testament that even hints at this bigger, more substantial temple and hence nearness of God? Well, and the part that pertains to the temple, we're really going to get into next week in Chapter 9. Because today we're going to talk about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.

Right. And the promise that God made and the agreement to do life on certain terms. So we probably need to just remind people that a covenant is an agreement, a contract, an agreement to do life in a particular way in partnership or in a relationship with someone. When we make a covenant, we say, I am this for you and you are this for me. Probably the most familiar covenant to us these days is the marriage covenant, where we literally say that, I am for you and you are for me.

Two people agree. And day on, we agree to go forward together in this kind of relationship. And so that's really the core idea of God's covenant with mankind. So there is an old and a new covenant. That's what we're stepping into right now.

Because there's a new priest, a new high priest, Jesus, who's a priest in a temple context that's much larger and more substantial than the shadow of what we've seen up till now. Right. And this covenant is based on better promises.

Right. So he's thrown down the gauntlet. He says it's a better hope, it's a better covenant.

Yeah, like how much better and how much hopeful, how much more hopeful? Well, let's find out. So we better get into it because there's so much to say here.

Because he puts it out in black and white and it is so stunning, he hardly even comments on it. He just pulls it out of the Old Testament. But we will. There, take that. So we're coming into Hebrews 8 verse 7.

And you want to read for us? Yeah. He's going to, boy, he's going to hit us with this. He's just going to, after saying there's a better covenant based on better promises. Oh, yeah. Prove it.

Prove it. Now, here we are in verse 7. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. For he finds fault with them when he says, and now this is a direct quotation from Jeremiah 31.

Yes. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with 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. For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my laws into their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more. Wow.

And speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. Okay, I'm going to stop there. Yeah. Yeah. But I wanted to get that whole statement in. You just read all of Jeremiah 31, 31 to 34.

31 to 34. Yep. Yep. And he just plunks it out there and says, You want to see what's more hopeful?

Check this out. And this has been in their Old Testament over their entire generations. This has been sitting there latent, and they've not really quite known what to do with it. And he says, Well, you know this new priest in this more substantial covenant? That new covenant is what was mentioned 600 years ago in Jeremiah 31. Okay, but let's talk for a minute about the purpose of a covenant, when God makes a covenant with man. What was the purpose of God making a covenant? So that they would live as God's own people.

Right. To represent him to the world. He says to serve as priests to the world. This is in Exodus 19. He says, If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, and here it comes, you'll be my treasured possession among all the peoples.

You'll be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. So it's God's purpose to set apart a people to live in his name and represent him to the world. What life looks like. To model.

In right relationship with God. To model God's intention for all mankind. And, you know, I always call Israel the model nation in terms of like when they do development you have model homes.

They represent what the homes will be, what's offered for everybody. In a sense Israel was that model nation. They were supposed to exist in order to display in the shoe leather of the day what relationship with God at the center was like. And as a result then for all the nations to come and say we want to be part of this as well. Which they utterly failed. They didn't do a good job.

To do. And we do too when we try and live according to the old covenant. Which is, you know, we should probably talk about the contrast between the old covenant and the new. Because God said, this word here says the first covenant wasn't faultless. God finds fault with them because they didn't keep it even though he was faithful. Yeah.

Yeah. And in the same sense that this original old covenant is a shadow, it's not faultless in a sense because it's also not as substantial as the real thing. It was meant to really mimic and to display in our reality what it's like to be in relationship with God.

But we'll go back to the Jeremiah 31 passage. What's interesting as you read through the entire thing, there's nothing mentioned there about great houses to live in, great food to eat, great wonderful flowing streams. It doesn't mention any of that kind of circumstance of what we would call the best life ever. What's at the core of it is relationship with God. Relationship.

That's the best life ever. It's an issue of the heart. Which is why he's been talking all the way up to this about the nearness of God, the nearness of God, the nearness of God and going past the curtain, past the veil into the presence of God. That's where life is found. And that's what this Jeremiah 31 passage says.

You want to go back and we'll just kind of pick out a little bit? You know, I've done a lot of study and a lot of teaching comparing the Old and the New Testament or the Old and the New Covenant and really from where, as I understand it, it really boils down to three things. The Old Covenant was externally imposed, right? It was given from the outside, written on stone and said, you must do this and the people said, we will by their own power. But the New Covenant is internally implanted, written on our hearts and God does all the I wills.

I will do this in you and I will do this for you. So the contrast really is between something that's externally imposed to something that's internally implanted. It's a remarkable difference because there's Charlton Heston playing Moses coming down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandments, by the way, which are called the Tablets of the Covenant. Right. Right, of the Old Covenant. He's bringing those in and it's something that's applied to the outside of the Israelites' lives.

Right. But now he says here in Jeremiah, we're going way past that. Now instead of etching it by the finger of God on stone, God's actually going to write it on our hearts. You know, and symbolically, really strongly emphasizing the fact that it won't be something that we apply to our lives like the laws of speeding and stuff like that. There's something that our hearts actually love, that we embrace, that's part of who we are. So the very nature of this covenant is something that's written on our hearts.

Very internal. That's just a remarkable difference. It is. Yeah.

It is. And Paul actually unpacks that for us in 2 Corinthians 3. So I would say to you listeners, go to 2 Corinthians 3 and read the whole chapter by all means. But let me just read to you three verses where Paul says beginning in verse 3 of chapter 3, this is written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts.

Tablets of human hearts. And such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Well there it is. The better promise. There's our high priest too. Not that we're adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant. Not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. So that's an easy concept to grasp, that something written on stone is cold and dead and distant. Something written on your heart is living and warm and near. And that happens by means of the spirit.

And natural. When you read New Testament doctrine, you look at this idea of sanctification, where God changes our behavior to align with his law, with the things that are important, what goodness is all about. And that's actually an external evidence of the fact that God is changing our hearts. He's writing his law on our hearts. And so we see this in reality.

This is what he does. And this is a fulfillment of Jeremiah 31. And he says, you know, the original covenant was, he made it the fathers, when he took them by the hand, led them out of the land of Egypt, and he says, you're going to be my people. I'm going to be your God. They said, yeah, we want that.

We want that. And then in the end, they would not believe his promises for life in the promised land. So go back and read Exodus 24. Because that is where God, Moses had received the actual 10 words from God, read them to the people, and then they had this big ratification ceremony, where they slaughtered the animals, they sprinkled the blood, and the people say, we will, God said it, we'll do it. But they didn't. But they didn't.

Within a matter of days, they didn't. And in the Jeremiah passage, when you go look at it, in the Jeremiah passage, he includes a word that's like husbanding, and so he says that when God brought him, brought Israel out of Egypt, he was a husband to them, you know, it's the same picture as during their times, you know, a groom would would bring the bride out of the bride's home, and into a new house. He says, I was doing that with Israel, and I was a husband to you, that is, I fulfilled my side of the covenant, my side of the agreement between the two of us, but you messed up and you flew off.

And so that covenant was broken, not because my offer was bad, or somehow defective, but because you decided to go a different direction, like a new wife goes toward another man. And what's fascinating about this to me, this is a fresh insight from this last year or so, the point at which in the history of Israel, that God makes this promise of a new covenant. Well that it's written very specifically in Jeremiah, and it's reiterated in Ezekiel, but that was at a period of time in their history, when the nation was falling to the Babylonians.

Yes. 586 BC is when Jerusalem was leveled, and what remained of the nation of Israel was carried off to Babylon to live as exiles. That was 500 something years after David, and long, long time after Moses, that they had had all those hundreds of years to walk as God's people, and yet they had repeatedly failed, repeatedly turned to other gods, small g. Right, and we might emphasize it wasn't a failure to accomplish the law, it was a wayward heart toward other gods.

And actually it wasn't even a failure to follow through with the ceremonial ritual, because the temple was still standing, and there was still some semblance of something going on in there. And God says that all of the heart has drained away. And that's why it's such an operative model of this husband and wife, because it wasn't as though Israel as a wife didn't do the things a wife should do, it's because she preferred another mate, and Israel preferred another mate in their god, and chased after the gods of the Babylonians, and God said, great, you want another husband? Go for it. I'll let you have another husband. And I'll let you have it, and see how that turns out for you. And they lived hundreds of years, essentially well, 70 years for certain, but many never came back from Babylon, they stayed, because they became acclimated to life with another god.

It was a bad trade. But that's why you have this marital covenant, it almost sounds like that in the end of verse 10, where he quotes out of Jeremiah, where he says, I will be their god, and they shall be my people. That sounds very marital.

Yep, I will. Yeah, that's the mutual connection, that's the covenant, that's the promise from each. And even in that promise, that nearness of God, the interesting thing is, the mystery, because of the distance of God in the old covenant, you can't go past the veil and stuff, will be completely blown away, and so people won't say to each other, you need to know the Lord, because they'll all know me, that nearness, that presence will be universal. And it won't just be for the high and mighty religious authorities for the greatest, it'll be for the smallest, too. It's just a remarkable thing that everybody in this new covenant has an access to the presence of God and knowing the heart of God.

So not based on merit, not based on age, not based on accomplishment, not based on having completed your membership class, or got your card-carrying privileges. They shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest of them, firsthand. Because God gives himself. And that's why in this new covenant era that we're in, I constantly de-emphasize the need for having a religious intermediary in church, because we all have access into the holy of holies where God is, and we can all know him ourselves without actually relying on someone else to translate for us what that's all about. Our high priest now isn't your pastor at your church, it's Jesus himself, and he's made our way into the presence of God himself, so all of us, regardless of our status, we all can say, I know God, because God has ripped that veil, ripped that curtain away, opened the way up and said, come on in, and each one of us, from the least to the greatest, know who God is. And in that, find rest, and this pastor land, and the fulfillment of this promise from God that started way back before Abraham, and was prefigured with Melchizedek, the priest who would make it all happen, in Jesus. So you're putting that all, packing that all back into the context of the book of Hebrews here. So we actually skipped over something that doesn't show up in the text, but it shows up in the Exodus 24 passage of ratifying the old covenant. That is the blood of the sacrifice, and that is a primary difference between the old covenant and the new.

Under the old covenant, there was the constant sacrificing of animals, because the life is in the blood, and the blood was required in order to cover the sin. But under the new covenant, where's the blood, and what happens to it? Jesus said, this cup is the blood of the new covenant, or the new covenant in my blood.

Drink it. So there again is the external and the internal contrast, and the sprinkling of the blood under the old covenant, the blood gets sprinkled on the altar and then sprinkled on the people, representing that life that they've agreed to together, and it costs your life if you break it. Whereas Jesus says now under the new covenant, drink the blood, which was shocking, absolute prohibition to drink blood, but the symbol is so powerful that the old covenant was placed upon you from the external side, but the new covenant becomes you from the inside. If you want to look at that yourself, go to Luke 22. Luke 22 is the upper room where Jesus has the Lord's Supper in the middle of the Passover and stuff, and that's where he says that stunning phrase, that this is the new covenant in my blood. That word new covenant was not an accidental drop phrase. He's quoting from Jeremiah 31, the very passage that the writer of Hebrews is quoting right here, this new covenant is possible through a new blood, and that's the blood of our high priest and sacrifice, Jesus. So you know when it says a new covenant, that doesn't just mean the next one, it means totally new, completely different. It's like you used to drive a Volkswagen, now I'm going to give you a spaceship. It's two completely different things.

And the first one kind of hints at the second one, but it's incomplete in that sense, it's only hinting. It's a shadow, it's a copy, it's pointing you to that, and that's what the old covenant points us to as a substance. In fact, Jesus, boy Jesus dropped hints about this all the time, I had to go back and look it up, but there's that point where he says, you know, you don't take a new piece of cloth and sew it into an old piece of cloth, the new stuff will just tear away, so they got to be different. Or you don't pour new wine into old wine skin.

You don't put new wine into old wine skin. So he was doing the new old thing way back then. You can check that out, you can find that in Mark 2 or Matthew 9. I mean he's saying the very same thing, something is so radically new that's here now that you don't understand, that don't try and merge it with the old, because the old is incomplete as a copy and as a shadow, but it's pointing to this newer thing, this new covenant. And then in Luke 22, during the Lord's Supper, he says this blood, that's the new covenant, what I pay for you. Yeah, it's… And for the forgiveness of your sin. For the forgiveness of your sins, yeah. Under the old covenant, that blood never forgave your sin, but it covered sin.

Couldn't make anything clean. Right? And the writer of Hebrews is going to get into that in the next couple chapters.

The end of this Jeremiah passage, he quotes in verse 12 here, you know, I'll be merciful toward their iniquities and I'll remember their sins no more. It sounds like an end of all that blood. Right. Yeah, and it is.

It is. Because in Jesus' blood, it is an end of that blood. Once for all, shed blood, the sacrifice. Yeah, if you could go back in time and you could go with the Israelites to Jerusalem and see what goes on at the temple, you'd be shocked at the amount of blood. And it's all because of the sinfulness of the people. I mean that was just a constant reminder is that sin brings death. And even at that, all this blood, all this death of these animals isn't really cleansing anyone.

It's more of a reminder of that. But in the new covenant, in the new covenant, totally different. That pointed to the solution and the solution is the blood of Christ and now he remembers our sins no more. That's how new the new covenant is from the old covenant. So again, we never read the last verse in our section here. Well, we read part of it and speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete and what's becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. Because it's completely fulfilled, satisfied, made perfect, nothing more needs to be added in Christ. Yeah, and I want to emphasize that this obsolete thing doesn't mean that God made a mistake on the first covenant. But he put together something that was a shadow, it was a copy and a shadow, a representation of what the real, more substantial covenant between man and God is in heaven in that particular sense. In fact, the word he uses for obsolete, that's not a bad translation, but it's the same word that gets used when we talk about sowing a new cloth into old cloth.

You don't want to do that. A new wine into old wine. It's just gotten worn and old. It's gotten to the end of its usefulness.

It's not wrong, but it only will go so far and it prepares you for what's to come. So that's what he's talking about on the new covenant comes. The first one, it's getting sort of worn out is what he's saying here.

When it's growing old and it's getting so worn out, it's ready to just evaporate. It's been shown to be completely inadequate because it was based on human will and power to do what God had said. But it accomplished its role in terms of pointing us to the new covenant in the blood of Christ. Which is based on God's will and God's power in us. What God accomplishes on our behalf, what we try and accomplish for ourselves.

And the heart of both covenants is the same, I'll be your God and you'll be my people. And what's to dwell in the midst of his people. So this place of rest that's promised to us is a place of rest in the nearness of God. And yet the old covenant had that veil, had that curtain across the holy of holies. The symbolic place where God lives and it says can't come in, can't come in, can't come in. I'm holy, you're sinful, we got a problem here. But Jesus is our forerunner, went into that holy of holies on our behalf and sprinkled his blood for us so that we can now join him there. In the nearness of God, Jeremiah 31, the new covenant is knowing God. That's just mind-blowing. Oh, amen.

We have nothing more to say. Yeah and I think it's interesting, the writer of Hebrews could have dealt a lot of time commenting on this passage in Jeremiah 31. He pretty much just lays it out and says, well there you go, there it is, you've always known it. That was the thing that was to come. That's what he was talking about earlier in chapter four when he says, you know, even though Israel is in the promised land, there remains still a Sabbath rest coming, a restaurant is still coming, a better hope where we draw near to God and this is it, this is it right here.

It's a better promise because it's God's promise, not ours. So in order to amplify the contrast, next time he's going to go in and show us, he's going to walk us into the Old Testament temple and he's going to show it goes on, which was a gigantic learning tool for Israel and for us about, since it's a copy and it's a shadow of the true reality of what it is, this promise from God for nearness and for life and for rest in him. And so next time we'll dial back the time machine, we'll go back and we'll walk through the temple. He'll remind us what goes on there and in that we'll start building a greater appreciation for what this real temple, this real substance in heaven is. So you won't want to miss that.

That's really, read ahead in chapter nine because he does, he takes us on a time tour of the temple and helps us understand and appreciate what Christ has done for us. So anyway, so I'm Jim and I'm Dorothy. I hope you're as excited as we are. I still have goosebumps. We are so glad you're with us. Come back next week in chapter nine and we'll continue to talk about the marvelous thing about the new covenant as we contrast it with the old. So join us next week on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content. To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org. Okay, so that's not so hot, but we're on the right track. We're on the right track.