Salvation was the same in the Old Testament as it is in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit operated in the hearts of people in the Old Testament.
The Holy Spirit regenerated people in the Old Testament. Justification was by faith in the Old Testament, just as it is in the New Testament. We have spent the past two days considering the Abrahamic Covenant and the promises God made to Abraham. Well, today we are going to skip forward to the New Testament and spend two days examining the New Covenant.
And since, as R.C. Sproul just said, Old Testament saints were saved by faith alone in the Old Testament, what is new about the New Covenant? This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and it's great to have you with us for this study of covenant theology. By way of reminder, don't forget that tomorrow is the final day to request access to this complete 14-message series, The Promise Keeper, and receive a copy of Dr. Sproul's book, The Promises of God, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Lots of questions are raised when it comes to the New Covenant.
What's new about it? When did it begin? With the preaching of John the Baptist? With the public ministry of Jesus?
Or at some other point in time? Well, here's Dr. Sproul to begin this study of the New Covenant and to answer those questions. We know that the New Covenant is not something that comes de novo from the head of Zeus or from the head of God, but it is intimately related to the covenants that went before it. A New Covenant brings new dimensions, new aspects, but it does not completely denigrate the significance of those previous covenants that we've looked at already. Nevertheless, there are new elements and greater elements of the New Covenant as they stand in contrast to these previous covenants.
But all of these earlier covenants look beyond themselves to the future consummation of the promises that are contained within them, which promises are fulfilled under the terms of the New Covenant. We think back in the Old Testament time in the crisis of the exile, the prophecy of Ezekiel, when God says to him in the vision, Son of Man. He takes him to the valley of dry bones and he sees all these skeletal parts lying there in the arid desert, and God says, Son of Man, can these bones rise again? And then God commands Ezekiel to begin preaching the Word of God to these bleached bones in the desert, and you recall that when the Word of God came into the valley of the dry bones, there was movement, there was a rumbling as these bones began to move together and to knit into body parts and then were covered with flesh and God breathed into them new life. And of course the first application of that prophecy was the promise of the future restoration of God's people who had now been sent into exile. Now Jeremiah, writing basically around the same time after he gives all his prophecies of doom about the coming captivity, we read in the 31st chapter of his book these words where God speaks to him in verse 23. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, they shall again use this speech in the land of Judah and in its cities when I bring back their captivity. The Lord bless you, O home of justice and mountain of holiness, and there shall dwell in Judah itself and in all of its cities together farmers and those going out with flocks, for I have satiated the weary soul and have replenished every sorrowful soul.
And after this, Jeremiah says, I awoke and looked around, and my sleep was sweet to me. For behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and the seed of beast, and it shall come to pass that as I have watched over them to pluck up, to break down, to throw down, to destroy, and to afflict, so I will watch over them to build and to plant. And in those days they shall say no more that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. And then we read in verse 31 these words, Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when 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 out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God, and they shall be their people. And no more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they all shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Now the promise here, of course, is that there will come a day in the future when God will make a new covenant with His people. Now the terms of that covenant are a little bit problematic here in this text in Jeremiah because we're not exactly sure what he means when he says, I will put their law in their hearts rather than on tablets of stone, and he says, I will forgive their sins for this reason. But the promise here is that we understand according to the New Testament, both in terms of the author of Hebrews and Paul in his letter to the Romans, that salvation was the same in the Old Testament as it is in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit operated in the hearts of people in the Old Testament.
The Holy Spirit regenerated people in the Old Testament. Justification was by faith in the Old Testament, just as it is in the New Testament. But the promise here is that the sins are forgiven and that that's a vital part of the Mosaic covenant in the Old Testament, not to mention Abraham and others. So why is it such a big deal or so much new that their sins will be forgiven?
Well, here it's a difference in degree, I think, more than anything else. That's why I say the New Covenant grows out of the Old Covenant, but as the author of Hebrews tells us that the New Covenant is such a greater covenant, a better covenant, and it's not enough even to call it the New Covenant because the New Covenant is the final covenant. It's the last covenant. It's the covenant of completion, the covenant of consummation, which all of the other covenants pointed toward. Now we know, for example, that people in the Old Testament had the forgiveness of sins, and that was typified and symbolized in the feasts and particularly in the sacrificial system and especially on the Day of Atonement. But the Day of Atonement was an annual feast.
It had to be repeated every year. And not only that, but your other sacrifices, your animal sacrifices and grain sacrifices for sin, the sin offerings and so on, were done over and over and over again, where when you come into the period of the New Covenant, you have that offering that is made once for all, so that the remission of sins for the people of God in the New Covenant is accomplished forever. One time it's done, and it's completed, so there are no more sacrifices offered. The whole ceremonial system of the Old Testament comes to a screeching halt when all of its content is fulfilled in the ministry of Christ. And so, again, what I think we see in the promise made to Jeremiah is the greater fulfillment of these principles that will take place in the New Testament. And that's the way the author of Hebrews, who quotes this very passage, as we'll see in a few moments hopefully, understands the significance of the New Covenant. But we notice that the New Testament, the book of the New Testament, opens with the announcement of the birth of John the Baptist and then the birth of Jesus. And then the public ministry that begins is the appearance of John the Baptist out of the wilderness, calling the people to repentance because he's calling the people to a new and decisive moment in their history.
As I've said before, in my opinion, John the Baptist and his ministry is the most underrated dimension of New Testament theology because what John did was absolutely radical. Remember that the voice of prophecy had been silenced for 400 years between the close of the Old Testament with the prophecies of Malachi and the appearance of John the Baptist in the pages of the New Testament, where he comes out of the wilderness behaving very much like the ancient prophet Elijah, and he introduces a requirement to the Jews that was never a part of their covenant requirements in antiquity. In the intertestamental period, they developed the practice of proselytizing baptism for strangers, for Gentiles who wanted to become Jews. To become a Jew, if you were a Gentile, you had to make a profession of faith in Judaism, you had to be circumcised, and in addition to that, you had to undergo this ritual bath of purification because the Gentiles were considered to be unclean. They were strangers and foreigners to the covenant. And now, all of a sudden, here comes this prophet out of the wilderness, and he calls the Jewish people to undergo this bath. It's a preparatory baptism. It's not the same as the baptism of Christ that is instituted later, but he is baptizing Jewish people as a right of cleansing, and the officials in Jerusalem are outraged by this. You know, they're the children of Abraham.
They don't need to be purified. Why are you telling us to go there and take a bath? And basically the message is because you're unclean. And what makes this radical change in the requirements to the people is the radical nearness now of the breakthrough of the kingdom of God, of the fulfillment of these prophecies laden in the promises to Abraham and to Moses and to David and so on. And so when John comes, he calls the nation to repentance.
Why? Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. No longer is the kingdom some far-out, mysterious future event that's going to take place in the great by-and-by, but now it's about to happen. John uses the metaphor as what?
The ax is laid at the root of the tree. His fan is in his hand, and so he announces the breakthrough and the coming of the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God means a new dimension of the reign of God, and it really is a mention of the coming King, the Davidic King, where the fallen house of David will be righted and reestablished. And so when Jesus comes into his public ministry at the beginning, his message is the same. Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. But then there's a shift where he says the kingdom of God, some translations read, is within you.
I think that's a very, very poor translation. It's a possible translation from the Greek, but it gives the idea that the kingdom of God is some kind of ethereal, spiritual thing that occurs in the hearts of people. But that's not what Jesus is saying. A better translation is the kingdom of God is among you.
It's in your midst. And so much of the teaching of Jesus prior to the cross and prior to the apostolic exposition of the significance of the life and death of Jesus is Jesus' gospel. But what is the gospel of Christ? The good news that Jesus announces is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. When Paul talks about the gospel, he talks about the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the gospel which is the good news about Jesus, and it rehearses all the things that Jesus accomplished in our behalf. But when the term gospel is used by Jesus, it is the gospel of the kingdom. It is the good news that the long-awaited messianic kingdom is now arriving. And if you look, for example, at the parables of Jesus, if you would just go home and look up every parable that Jesus teaches in the New Testament and put them in a list and ask yourself the question, what is this parable about, what is this parable about, what is this parable about, you will see plainly that the overwhelming majority of the parables focus on one concept.
And what is it? The kingdom of God. Where our Lord says the kingdom of God is like unto this, or the kingdom of God is like unto that, and He's clarifying for the people. At the same time, He's very secretive about using the term Messiah because He knows that the people of His day have a completely distorted concept now of what the Messiah will be. And the one thing they can't imagine is a Messiah who is a shepherd king who is also a suffering servant. I mean, even the disciples were horrified when Jesus told them that He had to go to Jerusalem to die, to lay down His life for His people. I mean, they couldn't get it.
They're not going to be. You're supposed to be the Messiah. You know, Peter goes from the great confession in Caesarea Philippi, and they say, who do you say that I am? Jesus said, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus blesses him by saying, blessed art thou, Simon Barjona. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you. And then He says to him, and thou art Petros, or the rock, and on this rock I will build my church.
And it seems like only five minutes later that Jesus tells them that, okay, we have to leave now, and we're going to Jerusalem, where I'm going to be delivered into the hands of my enemies and suffer and die. And Simon Peter or Simon the Rock says, oh, no you don't. May it never be. This will never happen.
That can't happen. And the one Jesus just called Peter a moment ago, Jesus calls him Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan. So even the disciples did not understand the way in which all of the dimensions of the fulfillment of these covenants in the Old Testament would take place. We see in Jesus similarities to Moses. We saw that Moses was the mediator of the Old Testament, and Jesus is set forth in the pages of the New Testament as the mediator of the New Covenant. Moses was the great prophet of antiquity, and yet the Old Testament predicted that another one would come, a prophet like Moses. And that prophecy is fulfilled in Christ, who is the supreme prophet of all of Scripture. He's both the object and the subject of prophecy.
He not only speaks about future events, but the content of what he speaks about is himself. And not only is he the great prophet, but he also performs the work of the great priest, which again is part of the parcel of the New Covenant because the priesthood, not the Aaronic priesthood, not the priesthood of the Levites, but the greater priesthood, as the author of Hebrews tells us, the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek is fulfilled by Jesus. And so he's the supreme prophet, he's the supreme priest, and again he is the supreme king. He is David's greater son, David's son who at the same time is David's Lord. That's why Psalm 110 is so important to the New Testament because in that Psalm David says, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Lord said to my Lord, sit thou at my right hand. So that in that Psalm, David is acknowledging that God is apportioning a position of authority to one who is David's Lord.
The Lord said to my Lord, sit thou at my right hand. And that's why we see this line between David to Jesus and the fulfilling of the divinity covenant in Christ in the New Testament. One of the questions that is often asked about the new covenant is when does it start?
Well, we see the announcement of the coming kingdom during the ministry of Jesus, but the actual making of the covenant I think takes place not on the day of Pentecost, but it takes place in the upper room. Let me read the record from Luke's version in chapter 22, verse 13, They went and found it just as he had said to them, and they prepared the Passover. And when the hour had come, he sat down and the twelve apostles with him. And then he said to them, With fervent desire, I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And then he took the cup and gave thanks, and he said, Take this and divide it among yourselves. For I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread and gave thanks and broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you.
Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. At that point, Jesus changes the content of the words of the celebration of the Old Testament Passover. And in the middle of the liturgy that remembered the time before the exodus when the angel of death came and brought vengeance against the children of the Egyptians but passed over the houses of God's people who had the blood of the lamb on their doorposts and so on, and they survived the judgment of God on that occasion. And so God commanded that the people remember that and celebrate it on an annual basis. And so Jesus, being a Jew, celebrates the Passover.
He knows he's about to die, and he says, I earnestly desire one last time to celebrate the Passover with you. And so now when he gathers with his disciples, and they're going through the liturgy of the Passover, suddenly he changes it. And now the bread represents his body, and the wine represents his blood, and he pronounces a new covenant. That's when I believe it's initiated, but I don't think it's ratified in reality to the following day, where when he sheds his blood upon the cross, this is the blood sacrifice that ratifies the new covenant that he announced just the night before. And it's a new covenant for all of those who now are in Christ, who now participate in him, who are the ones who are the benefactors from this sacrifice that was a perfect sacrifice made once and for all and ratified on the cross.
But the story doesn't end with the ratification ceremony at Golgotha. That this new covenant has firmly been established and that receives the supreme blessing of God is shown in the resurrection, where we are told in the New Testament it was impossible for death to hold Christ, because in and of himself he knew no sin. And when we look at the relationship of the work of Christ to the covenant of works, and as the new Adam in our next section will draw out some more significance from that act of resurrection, but then even there the story doesn't end. After the resurrection, he sojourns on the earth for a few weeks with his disciples until that moment comes where he ascends into heaven. And what's the point of the ascension? I mean, he says, no one ascends into heaven except he who has descended from heaven. Well, he wasn't saying that nobody else ever went to heaven. Enoch went to heaven. Abraham went to heaven. The people, we suppose, went to heaven.
But ascension here takes on a technical meaning, where it means not simply to go up, but it means to go up to a specific place for a specific purpose. And the place to which he goes is the right hand of God, and the purpose for his ascent is to go to his coronation, to his investiture as the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant, where now God crowns him not just one more king in the line of Davidic kings, but he crowns him the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and to whom all the nations of the world are given beneath his authority and under his dominion. And his reign is announced by God in the new covenant, not to last for 400 years like the dynasty of David, but he shall reign forever and ever and ever and ever, to which the church cries hallelujah. And that's why it's such a terrible thing in our day when people think of the kingdom of God as exclusively something in the future. Yes, there's still another chapter to be written.
Yes, there's still a consummation. Yes, the kingdom is now invisible. And yes, there will be a time when our reigning king will make his kingdom visible.
We know that. But it's not that it doesn't exist now. It already has come in terms of its inauguration.
It hasn't been consummated in its full completion, but it's real right now. And every time we come together at the Lord's table, we not just look back to his death, but we also look to his ascension. We're at the table of the king, where we've been invited to sit down with the one who has sat down at the right hand of God in the kingdom. And with that is the promise that we will also sit with him and reign with him in the final consummation of that kingdom. And we'll look at more of these aspects of completion in our next session.
That was R.C. Sproul, the founder of Ligonier Ministries, on the new covenant and in what sense it was new. I just mentioned Ligonier, and it's this ministry that produces Renewing Your Mind seven days a week, 365 days a year.
We also produce a weekly Spanish edition, and this is all possible thanks to your generous support. So firstly, I wanted to say thank you, and second, to mention that if you make a donation today in support of the global outreach of Ligonier and Renewing Your Mind, we'll send you R.C. Sproul's book, The Promises of God, really a companion book to the series you've been listening to this week. Plus, you'll receive lifetime digital access to the entire 14-message series and the study guide, filled with study and discussion questions, recommendations for further reading, and message outlines. So please give your gift by calling 800 435 4343 or at renewingyourmind.org. Understanding the promises of God and his covenants brings clarity to the Old Testament, and it helps shine a light on just how gracious the good news of the Gospel is. So visit renewingyourmind.org or click the link in the podcast show notes while there's still time, as this book and teaching series offer ends tomorrow. We've seen today the newness of the New Covenant, but R.C. Sproul will continue to unpack what makes this covenant better, superior to the Old Covenant. So be sure to join us tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .
