A Superior Covenant (Part 2 of 2)

In the book of Hebrews, the writer explains how Jesus represents a fulfilled promise, a promise to replace God's old covenant with a new and better one. Even today, we can be encouraged that Christ's ministry as our High Priest continues to transform his people. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg teaches from Hebrews 8 in a message about the Superior Covenant. I want you to know, he says, that Jesus lives forever, and he has a permanent priesthood.

Now what does this mean? Well, he unpacks it in chapter 8. He points to the setup there in verse 2.

The setup. Also, I want you to notice that the High Priest, our High Priest, sat down. Christ's absence from earth—which is what they were concerned about, his absence from earth—is the necessary result of him being what he is, and of his having done what he has done. When the Lord Jesus offered one sacrifice for sins, he sat down. And he sat down on the throne of the majesty in heaven.

Why? Because the work was done. The finished work of Christ. Even the disciples had difficulty with this.

When Jesus said to them, as he approaches the time immediately prior to his death, he said, I'm going to prepare a place for you, and if I go, I'll come back. And the disciples are all up in arms, they're saying, Oh, Jesus, you mustn't go away from us. You can't go away from us. If you go away from us, we'll be stuck.

And Jesus gathers them around him, and he tells them about the Holy Spirit. He says, it's necessary for me to go away. If I'm here, I'm just here.

But when I go, I'm everywhere. When I send the Holy Spirit in all of his fullness, he will not only be in you, but he will be with you. And he will take the things that are mine, and he will make them precious to you. And he will take the pages of the Bible, and he will make it ring in your hearts and transform your lives. And he will manifest God to you. And the same chaps that couldn't get a hold of it in John 14 are explaining it within 40 or 50 years. Because the Holy Spirit has come and done exactly what Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do. There are many people who've got an external religion, an interest in a cosmic principle, a God who's way up there somewhere, and they've got into all kinds of things about this God.

But if you ask them, do they know God? See, the distinctiveness of this great high priest—this is not some arm's-length theology. This is the crux of life.

This is the issue of humanity. This is the apex of what it means for God to make himself known and for sinful men and women to be able to draw near to God. It is a radical distinctive in Christian living.

It's terrific! Even if I say so myself. Verse 3. Every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices, and so it was necessary for this one also to have something to offer. And what was he going to offer?

He was going to offer himself. You see, in Act 1, they always were going in there with something. You remember the story of Abraham and Isaac? Hey, Dad, we got the knife? We got the wood? We got the fire? It's just one thing.

Listen here! We don't have a sacrifice! And Abraham looks at his son, and he says, Isaac, the Lord himself will provide a sacrifice. Pointing us forward, because in that moment Isaac was a type of Christ. As he was laid upon that altar, he foreshadowed the reality which was to come in the giving up of the one who would offer his very life for sin. So notice the superiority of this new covenant in verse 6, the absolute necessity of this new covenant in verse 7. For if there had been nothing wrong with the first covenant, no place would have been sought for another one. Verse 8, because God found fault not with his covenant, but he found fault, interestingly, with his people. And he says, you know, the time is going to come when I will get a new covenant, and I'm going to write this covenant in the very center of their lives. Marcus Dodds, the Old Testament commentator, says, helpfully, the old covenant was faulty, because it did not provide for enabling the people to live up to the terms or conditions of it.

It was faulty inasmuch as it did not sufficiently provide against their faultiness. That's your external religion, Mr. Religious, this morning. What you've been holding onto is not necessarily all bad in itself, but it's faulty, and the reason is because it does not deal with your faultiness. And that's why you still feel the burden of your sin. That's why you still have no assurance that heaven is your home. That's why you still have a conscience that riddles you with guilt.

Because that which you are holding onto is insufficient to deal with your faultiness. The terms of the Mosaic covenant had been rendered null and void by the disobedience of the people. That's what he's saying in verse 8. And so God speaks in a new covenant. And this covenant can't be broken, because it's going to ensure the spiritual response of those with whom it is made, and that by providing for the internal renovation of their character. See, Christianity is not about the imitation of Jesus Christ. It is about transformation by Jesus Christ. And that's why many people who have embraced a Christian way of life still live in the guiltiness of their own sinful condition. Because they have never come in repentance and in faith to the Lord and Master Christ himself, the establishment of this new covenant, and trusted him to make real in their experience what he has made possible by his sacrifice. You see, when the people of God could not rise to the heights of his standard, the Lord didn't lower his standards to match their abilities.

He determined to transform his people. In other words, he didn't look out on them and say, You know, I can see that you're having a rough time with these Ten Commandments. Why don't I just make it five commandments? And you're sinning so much that this annual deal that we're doing is really not covering it all.

Why don't we make it a biannual event? No. He doesn't do that. He instead institutes his plan from all of eternity, which is to transform his people. The previous covenant that was established at Sinai, as verse 9 says, featured the promised blessings that were there in the land of Canaan, but the new covenant concerned blessings which were spiritual in nature and which were eternal in their duration. The old covenant couldn't take away sin, couldn't save, couldn't justify, couldn't make the people holy. Its obsolescence is clear for all to see in verse 13.

The contrast is obvious. What is there in Canaan in comparison to the reality of heaven? What in all these sacrifices and washings and liturgies in contrast to an enlightened mind, a pacified conscience, and a purified heart? There are so many religious people this morning who are holding on to that which is external to them. But they don't have an enlightened mind. You talk to them, and they talk absolute nonsense. If you'll pardon me, you sit down and have coffee with them, and they're all over the place. Well, I think maybe I believe this, and I believe a little of that, and I believe a little of the next thing.

You say, How in the world can anybody come off with all this stuff? It's because their minds have never been enlightened by the truth. You ask them, How about your conscience? Do you have a purified conscience? Is it pacified? They say, No, I wake up at night. I am bedeviled by things in my past. What about your heart?

Is it new and clean and changed? You say, No, I didn't know that was possible. Well, that's the whole point of this amazing quote from Jeremiah, which is verse 8 to verse 12.

Notice what is possible here. First of all, a knowledge of God. A knowledge of God. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. In other words, I'm going to make this transformation such that when I renew their hearts, I'm going to make their hearts the shape of my law, and my law will fit perfectly into their hearts. And so they will now say, I delight to do your will, O Lord. Previously, it was irksome to them.

Previously, it was only a condemnation to them. But now it has become a joyful reality. Now to live in purity and in wholeness and in faithfulness, in the same way as within the bonds of marriage, it has become a joy. It is not that it is impossible to break the bonds.

It is incongruent to break the bonds. When he puts his law in our hearts, it doesn't mean that we are perfect, but it means that now as he has transformed us and fashioned us in this way, it is absolutely incongruent that we would then fly in the face of his truth. And I'm going to give them a knowledge of myself, he says. All of those who are in my covenant will have their own intimate personal knowledge of God, and the reason they will is by means of my Word. The knowledge will not come by way of sacraments.

It will not come through a hierarchy of self-styled priests. Each will know God for themselves. That's the significance of verse 11. It's not negating Sunday-school teachers, Bible-class leaders, or pastors and teachers. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, Know the LORD. The reason is they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. A man may be able to talk about God, but only the Spirit of God can create that knowledge within the heart.

And this loved one stands in direct contrast to so much that is before us today. If you listen to National Public Radio and the exposee that they did on the Church of Scientology, it was very, very interesting—and for multiple reasons, but not least of all, on account of this whole aspect of knowledge. Because, as within other systems of religion, the key to progress in the Church of Scientology is making your way into different levels of knowledge. It costs you a lot of money.

You start at the street level in wherever you are—Santa Barbara, there's one there—and you can walk in there and just find out about yourself—just a kind of fifty-dollar introduction. Once you make the fifty-dollar introduction, if you want to go forward, that'll cost you a hundred and fifty dollars for stage two. Stage three may take you up to three thousand dollars, and if you finally graduate to the level of having the Church of Scientology explain to you their theory for the origin of the universe, it may be costing you as much as ten thousand dollars for the initiation to that knowledge.

One young couple on the radio confessed to the fact that in a period of four or five years they spent one hundred thousand dollars trying to gain the necessary knowledge to triumph within the church. It is the exact same as Masonic ritual. And those of you who are caught up in that ought to get out of it today. It's the same nonsense. It is blackness.

It is darkness. And you go through the stages. Stage one, everybody gets in stage one. Stage two is another handshake.

It's another little deal. Stage three is something else. And there are twenty-three stages, I think it is, before you get to a point where you have the knowledge necessary. The exact same thing in Mormonism. Listen to even a child tell you about Mormonism, and it is immediately apparent that the Mormons progress through certain stages of knowledge until they finally reach the priestly functions that allow them to know the real truth. What is it in Christianity?

This is for the boy or the girl, the man in the street, the whole deal. From cover to cover, with no price of admission. It is here for the youngest and the oldest to read their Bible and understand. There are no hidden passages here. There's no secret rooms.

There's no special place. It is all in the Lord Jesus Christ. And from the least to the greatest, from the youngest to the oldest, from the dumbest to the brightest, they will all know, he says, because it is from the same book, by the same Spirit, and the same truth. Oh, we can grow in maturity, and we can grow in our understanding, but there are no special passageways to special rooms.

Unlike the cults, there always are. So don't start this nonsense about, Oh, well, it's just your preference, and Jesus is just the same, he's, you know, he's one of a group, and the smorgasbord of religious preference—absolutely bogus. You call that tolerance? You want me to accept that as tolerance? There is legal tolerance, which ensures everybody's rights for which we need to stand, right? The freedom to profess, the freedom to practice, the freedom to propagate. That tolerance is part of the constitutional privileges of being an American citizen. As a Christian, I uphold it. Social tolerance that respects every person, irrespective of their background or their way of life or their approach to things, that recognizes that irrespective of their views, nevertheless, they were made in the image of God no matter how messed up I might think them to be, and within the realm of social life, there has to be a measure of tolerance. I uphold that. But the notion of intellectual tolerance, which cultivates a mind that is so broad that it can tolerate every opinion without ever detecting anything in it to reject, is not a virtue.

It is a product of a feeble mind. So when we talk about knowing God, we're not talking about, Well, just find a way to know him and come back and let me know, and that'll be fine, we'll fit you in some way or another. Because knowing God is directly related to my final point, which is the forgiveness of sins.

Isn't this wonderful here? And I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. He can't forgive a sinner except in a way that is consistent with his holiness, and therefore it has to be the innocent that dies for the guilty. Why did this Jesus die upon the cross? You say to yourself, After all, he never did anything wrong. And then the Spirit of God drops the penny in your head and says, Because you did everything wrong. In act one, the principle was established—the innocent for the guilty. And in act two, it is God himself in all of his innocence and in the fullness of his humanity who dies in my place on a cross so that me in all of my wretchedness may know forgiveness of my sins. Someone says, I don't need to know forgiveness of my sins. I've been doing very well lately.

How well? Let's just take one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. Have you for every day of your life, every hour of every day, every minute of every hour, loved God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength?

No. Okay, then you need a Savior. You don't have to admit to being a rapist. You don't have to admit to some heinous sin that you decided is the sin that really needs taking care of, but you have the sort of bourgeois, professional, nice little, you know, sins. Do you know forgiveness of your sins?

This is the amazing truth. The covenant, I will come, and I will mark it in your life, and I won't even remember your sins anymore. Buddhists don't know that.

Deliverance in Buddhism only comes as a result of self-effort, trying to abolish the desires in my life. If you meet a Buddhist, as I do from time to time—last time I was going up a ski ride in New York, the guy told me he was a Buddhist. I asked him how he was doing with his dukkha.

He nearly fell out of the chairlift. How would I know about dukkha? Well, I don't know a great deal about it, but I know that in Buddhism that's the deal—the dukkha. They can't deal with the dukkha.

That's the problem. And the only way to deal with dukkha is somehow or another by self-effort. That's why Buddha's dying words were, strive without ceasing. Because there's no forgiveness. Hinduism offers no forgiveness. All they have is karma. Everybody in Hinduism eats the fruits of their own wrongdoings, for which there is absolutely no forgiveness. They live their lives in an endless cycle, which they refer to as samsara, an endless cycle of reincarnations from which there is absolutely no escape. There is no possibility of forgiveness of sins. They read this, and it says, And I will forgive your sins, and I won't remember your wickedness again. They have nothing like this. That's why you need to speak to these dear people. Say, you know, do you have any answer for your sins?

Say, no! I believe in instant karma. Lenin was into that. The same in Islam. The Qur'an has no forgiveness of sins. No message for sinners who deserve nothing from God except his judgment, have no merit to plead.

They understand sin. What is the symbol? Scales.

Scales. The bad, the good, the good, the bad. Hopefully the bad will outdo the good.

Hopefully we'll make it there. What's our symbol? It's a cross. A cross!

A cross with no one on it. Why? Because he left. Why did he leave? To sit down. Why did he sit down?

Because his work was finished. If you don't know Christ, you ought to just fall down on your knees and ask him to save you right now. And if you do, we ought to be out these doors, going crazy with the good news. For many of our well-meaning religious friends who are dealing with copies and shadows and have never encountered the reality. Jesus said, I will forgive your sins.

I won't remember your wickedness again. That's an amazing invitation to receive forgiveness. And if you're hearing this truth for the first time, if you'd like to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, to understand that God's saving grace is nothing we can earn on our own, it's a free gift given to those who believe, we want to encourage you to go online to watch a helpful video presentation. You'll find it posted at truthforlife.org slash the story.

You're listening to Truth for Life. Please stay with us because in just a minute, Alistair Begg will conclude today's message with prayer. As you interact with friends and family, you have the opportunity to talk to others about the free gift of God's saving grace, we have a collection of books we think will help you communicate that truth more clearly.

The first book is called Have No Fear. It addresses the fact that so many of us feel a sense of insecurity when we're introducing others to Jesus. We're not always sure where to begin and we want to explain the gospel as clearly as we can.

This book, Have No Fear, guides us so we can talk to friends in an easy natural way. It gives us tips for staying on topic and suggestions for how to make the scripture the central focus of our conversation. The second book, titled The Word One to One, is a presentation of the first chapter of the Gospel of John.

It includes the text of John's Gospel along with discussion questions and notes that will be helpful for people who are new to the Bible. Now, because this book, The Word One to One, is designed for discussion, we're including two copies, one for you and one to share. So, when you give a donation to support Truth for Life today, you're going to receive this three pack of books, one copy of Have No Fear, two copies of The Word One to One.

You can give online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or if you'd prefer to call us, our number is 888-588-7884. Now, as we conclude today, here's Alistair with a word of prayer. Our God and our Father, I cannot tell why he whom angels worship should set his love upon the sons of men, or why as shepherd he should seek the wanderers to win them back.

I know not how nor when. It is a thing most wonderful, all most too wonderful to be, that God's own Son should come from heaven and die to save a child like me. Father, take the deafness from our ears and the hardness from our hearts and the pride from our minds, and lay us low at your cross, so that in taking hold, as it were, of the very feet of him who bled that we might be forgiven. We may rest in nothing else and no one else, that we may be able to say, I need no other sacrifice.

I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me. Remind us of your victory and of your triumph, that one day every knee will bow before you. Save us from arrogance and presumption. Give us tender hearts, soft eyes, genuine compassion, for our neighbors and our friends. For Jesus' sake we ask it. Amen. Tomorrow, Alistair continues our study in the book of Hebrews, teaching us what it truly means to cleanse our conscience. I'm Bob Lapine. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.