Vii. Conclusion
c.
The new δ
αθή
η
Underlying the early Christians’ use of the term ‘the new covenant’ is that same presupposition which led later believers to speak of ‘the Old Testament’ and ‘the New Testament’, and which leads us to accept unhesitatingly this division of our Scriptures. It is the conception that in Jesus Christ God has done a new work bringing about a radical alteration in man’s relationship to his Maker. Christ makes it possible for man to come to God in a way which is quite impossible apart from Him. Whereas hitherto men had tackled the problem of man’s sin by the way of the law, they now found it dealt with in a different way, so that they were free from both the penalty and power of sin. As Paul put it: ‘what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit’ (Rom. 8: 3, 4). This conviction that in Jesus Christ God has acted decisively for man’s salvation, thus bringing about an entirely new situation, is the master thought of the Christian faith. It underlies the entire New Testament.
When the writers speak of ‘the new covenant’, then, they are taking over a well-known concept (well-known, that is, to Jews and all those familiar with the Jewish Scriptures) to express an important aspect of this great new fact. The very fact that the expression ‘the new covenant’ is used indicates that the berîth of the old Scriptures is in mind and that the New Testament writers, when they use δαθήη are thinking primarily of a disposition of God along the lines of Old Testament models, and not the conception of a will. Nevertheless, in view of the universal use of the word outside the Scriptures and of the place they assigned to the death of Christ in the making of the new covenant, it seems probable that in most cases where δαθήη occurs there is the secondary thought of a death to be discerned with a corresponding benefit to those who were heirs.
αθήη are thinking primarily of a disposition of God along the lines of Old Testament models, and not the conception of a will. Nevertheless, in view of the universal use of the word outside the Scriptures and of the place they assigned to the death of Christ in the making of the new covenant, it seems probable that in most cases where δαθήη occurs there is the secondary thought of a death to be discerned with a corresponding benefit to those who were heirs.But it must be borne in mind that the New Testament writers conceived of the new covenant as in essential harmony with what was known of the nature of God in earlier days, particularly as He had revealed Himself to the patriarchs. There is an important difference in the ways in which they regard the Sinai covenant and that with Abraham, and we proceed to notice this difference.
(i) The new covenant and the covenant with Abraham. As we have already seen, the covenant with Abraham is referred to four times in the New Testament. In three of them it is regarded as of continuing force, the exception being Acts 7: 8, where ‘the covenant of circumcision’ is mentioned. Even here, however, it is possible to hold that what is emphasized is not circumcision, but the election of Abraham as shown in the covenant. Of the other passages Luke I: 72f. tells us that the essence of the covenant is that ‘we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies should serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days’. This overruling of God so that His people might serve Him is clearly thought of as continuing. The whole point of the passage is that, in the events which arouse Zachariah’s song of praise, God is remembering His covenant and acting in accordance with it. The covenant with Abraham is not burdensome, but one characterized by God’s ‘visiting’ and ‘redeeming’ His people, raising up ‘a horn of salvation’ for them, and ‘showing mercy’.
Less poetic, but equally definite, is the reference in the speech of Peter in Acts 3. Moses, and then ‘all the prophets from Samuel and them that followed after, as many as have spoken’, are cited as witnessing to Christ. Then the speaker says: ’Ye are the sons of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with your fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Unto you first God, having raised up his Servant, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from your iniquities’ (Acts 3: 25, 26). Here again, the Abrahamic covenant is thought of as being of continuing force, and the coming of Christ is seen in the context of the promise made to the patriarch.
In the fourth passage the covenant with Abraham is contrasted with the giving of the law, and the conclusion is: ‘A covenant confirmed beforehand by God, the law, which came four hundred and thirty years after, doth not disannul, so as to make the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no more of promise: but God hath granted it to Abraham by promise’ (Gal. 3: 17f.). Plainly the Abrahamic covenant shows us God’s permanent way of dealing with men, namely, by grace or promise, not by law. The Abrahamic covenant is of permanent validity, whereas the law is temporary. The law was ‘added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise hath been made’ (Gal. 3: 19).193 Again, it was ‘our tutor to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith is come, we are >no longer under a tutor’ (Gal. 3: 24f.). The whole passage stresses the subordinate place assigned to the law in the purposes of God (cf. also Rom. 3: 20; 5: 20; 8: 3; 10: 4; Gal. 2: 16, 21, etc.). The whole line of argument clearly assumes the permanency of the Abrahamic covenant. Because the covenant with Abraham has been confirmed of God, therefore nothing can be added to it nor can it be annulled, and the law can be interpreted only in the light of this fact.
Nor is this an isolated thought of the apostle. We find it again in Romans 4, where he is arguing that Abraham was saved by faith just as Christians are in later days. The continuity of the Christian revelation with the covenant with Abraham is assumed. The same basic assumption lies behind James 2: 21ff., although there the writer is concerned to establish the necessity for works rather than faith. But the point is that he assumes that the principles that determined Abraham’s position in the sight of God are the same as those which determine the Christian’s position. Again in Hebrews II the same thought is stressed, namely that Abraham was accepted with God in the same way as Christians are.
Thus it may fairly be claimed that the New Testament witnesses to a genuine continuity between the Abrahamic covenant and the Christian revelation, what was implicit in the former being revealed in the latter. God’s dealings with the patriarch were on the principle of grace, and he received the blessings through faith. It is not otherwise with the Christian; only for him the principle of grace has reached its fulfilment in the life and work of Christ.
(ii) The new covenant and the covenant on Sinai. We saw when we were dealing with the Sinai covenant that it is possible to discern there the principle of grace, but that the law, which the people solemnly undertook to obey, is an integral part of this covenant. Further, there are many places in the Old Testament where the prophets castigate the nation for failing to keep the covenant, which, in consequence, has become null and void. It is this legal aspect of the Sinai covenant on which the New Testament writers fasten their attention. It was just as natural for them to regard the Christian way as the antithesis of the Sinai covenant as it was for them to see in it the continuation and fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant. In particular, they see in the Christian way a better way than that of Sinai, and a fulfilment of that which Sinai foreshadowed but could not perform, namely the remission of sin. We deal with these points in order.
I. The auctor ad Hebraeos explicitly speaks of the new as a ‘better covenant’ (Heb. 7: 22; 8: 6) and goes on to point out that ‘if that first had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second’ (Heb. 8: 7). He proceeds to quote Jeremiah’s prophecy of the new covenant, significantly introducing it with the words, ‘For finding fault with them, he saith’ (Heb. 8: 8). He brings this section to a close by saying: ‘In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto vanishing away’ (Heb. 8: 13). There can be no question but what he conceived of the old covenant as having served its purpose194 and of having now passed into disuse, being replaced by the new relationship made possible by the work of Jesus Christ. He enlarges upon this in chapter nine.
Although Paul does not use the category of covenant as fully as does the writer to the Hebrews, he can yet give expression to essentially the same thought, as when he speaks of ‘ministers of a new covenant; not of the letter, but of the spirit’, goes on to point out that ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’, and contrasts ‘the ministration of condemnation’ with ‘the ministration of righteousness’ (2 Cor. 3: 6ff) Here again we have the old way contrasted with the new, and the new is thought of as immeasurably superior to the old. It is one of Paul’s leading ideas that before Christ men struggled to serve God by the way of the law, but that now it is the way of grace that has been revealed. Thus in Galatians 3 he argues vehemently that the way of approach to God is the way of promise or grace; definitely it is not the way of law. It is true that in this chapter (and in others) he reasons that Abraham received the blessing, but he presses home his point that he did so because of his faith. This becomes another point in favour of his thesis that not law but grace is the way. His thought is that God has always accepted men by grace, and the way of approach by law was never valid. The law he regards as of divine origin, but as limited in scope. It was no more than a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ. The covenant associated with the giving of the law was thus immeasurably less than the new covenant which makes it abundantly plain that the way is by grace and through faith. There can be no doubt that he would have accepted the thought of Hebrews 9: 15 that the death of Christ availed for the transgressions committed under the first covenant, for he is positive that the one way of putting away sin is through the work of Jesus Christ. It is clear that for Paul, as for the writer to the Hebrews and, indeed, for all the New Testament writers, the new way transforms everything. It is infinitely better than the old way.
Wherein does the superiority of the new consist? Basically in that ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ (2 Cor. 3: 6). This saying recalls the words of the Lord, ‘I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly’ (Jn. 10: 10). Indeed, it is characteristic of the New Testament writers that they stress the quality of the life that is possible for men now that Jesus has come and has wrought His great work of atonement. It is not that they despise the old covenant; on the contrary they regard it as of divine origin and appointment. But it was essentially preparatory and preliminary. The fulfilment of what it foreshadowed they find in the work of Christ. Thus the writer to the Hebrews assigns a subordinate place to the Jewish sacrifices: ‘In those sacrifices there is a remembrance made of sins year by year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins’ (Heb. 10: 3f.). But it is of the very essence of his argument that what the blood of bulls and goats could not do, the blood of Christ both could and did do.
2. The new covenant is essentially concerned with the forgiveness of sin. This contrasts with the covenant of Exodus 24 where the people readily acquiesce in the obligation to carry out the commandments of God. Through the years such obedience was seen to be impossible as generation after generation failed to live up to the standard set before them. It is significant that, when we come to Jeremiah’s great prophecy of the new covenant, it includes the provision ‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it ... I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more’ (Je. 31: 33f). This aspect of the new covenant comes prominently before us in the New Testament passages. Thus when the writer to the Hebrews quotes the passage from Jeremiah and applies it to the Christian fulfilment (Heb. 8 : 8f.), the words of the prophet are fully noted right down to the forgiveness of sin. It is at this point that the writer speaks of the new covenant as replacing the old which is ‘nigh unto vanishing away’. This connection is even plainer a little later in the Epistle, when the writer again refers to the passage in Jeremiah. This time his quotation is much shorter and he picks out only the words important for his argument, thus: ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws on their heart, and upon their mind also will I write them; then saith he, And their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more’ (Heb. 10: 16f.). Admittedly the ‘then saith he’ is an explanatory gloss of the translators, but it truly expressed the mind of the author, and it is significant that he couples the reference to forgiveness with that to the new covenant, though they are separated by several verses in the original. Obviously forgiveness was to him the essential part of the new covenant.195 His Epistle shows plainly that our author found a large place for forgiveness in his total view of things Christian. The above citations show that, not only is this the case, but that this forgiveness was present to his mind when he used the expression ‘the new covenant’. The element of grace, which, while present in the old covenant, was obscured by the necessity for keeping the law, he sees stressed in the new covenant. It is essentially a covenant based upon divine forgiveness of sin.
We see the same tendency towards associating the new covenant with forgiveness of sin in St. Paul’s only reference to the new covenant as having been foretold. Thus he quotes Isaiah as follows: ’There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer; he shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: and this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins’ (Rom. II: 26f.). There is no particular difficulty about the first part of this quotation which is a rather free citation of Isaiah 59: 20 (LXX). But the words about forgiveness of sin are not to be found in this passage; they come from Isaiah 27: 9. Here we see at work, and in a more striking form, the same process we have already noted in Hebrews. Paul is writing about the covenant, and as he wishes to express its essence, he adds to his citation from Isaiah 59: 20 other words, separated in the original by many chapters, but which bring out the central truth expressed by the new covenant.
Thus, each time the New Testament refers to the new covenant as having been prophesied it links an explicit reference to forgiveness of sin with the new covenant. This happens also in a number of passages where prophecy is not in question. Thus in Hebrews 9: 15 we have the interesting expression, ‘And for this cause he is the mediator of a new covenant, that a death having taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first covenant’, where the death that inaugurates the new covenant is seen as providing the way of forgiveness, even for those transgressions committed under the first covenant. The obvious inference is that such sins could not really be forgiven under the first covenant, and that therefore the new covenant was an absolute necessity. Probably it is this truth that is in mind also when the same writer says that Jesus is ’the mediator of a better covenant, which hath been enacted upon better promises’ (Heb. 8: 6). The better promises are those concerned with forgiveness and man’s reconciliation with God, as is seen from the following section.
This thought is not so prominent, but nevertheless it seems to be in the background, in two Pauline references. When Paul speaks of the two covenants, contrasting the Jerusalem that now is with the Jerusalem that is above, the aspect that he stresses is that of the freedom that accrues to those in the new covenant. He says of the present Jerusalem that ‘she is in bondage with her children’ (Gal. 4: 25), whereas ‘the Jerusalem that is above is free’. It seems clear that one aspect in this freedom is freedom from the power of sin, the freedom that comes to the believer because Christ has put away his sin. It is not otherwise with the passage in which Paul speaks of himself as a minister of a new covenant and proceeds to contrast ‘the ministration of condemnation’ with ‘the ministration of >righteousness’. For surely he means here that, whereas under the old covenant the outcome must be condemnation, under the new, man’s sin is put away so that he is righteous.
This aspect of the new covenant seems also to be indicated by those passages which refer to the ‘blood of the covenant’, for it is by the shedding of Jesus’ blood that sin is put away and the covenant established. There seems to be a linking of the two ideas, and this comes to the surface sometimes as in Matthew 26: 28: ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is shed for many unto remission of sins.’ Most commentators regard ‘unto remission of sins’ as a gloss; if it is, the expression shows what covenant blood meant to a very early Christian.196 The Marcan parallel lacks the reference to the forgiveness of sins, but it speaks of the blood as being shed for many. The corresponding Lucan passage runs: ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, even that which is poured out for you’,197 so that it, too, stresses the place of the shedding of Christ’s blood. While this does not demand for its interpretation that we understand the passage as referring to the remission of sins, at the very least it is quite consonant with such an understanding. The same may be said of the other passages where ‘the blood of the covenant’ is spoken of.
This is quite in accordance with what we saw in our treatment of the covenant of Exodus 24, and in particular of the significance of ‘the blood of the covenant’ in that passage. There we saw reason for thinking that the expression symbolized both expiation and consecration, as the people were cleansed for their new relationship to God. So, in the new covenant, the blood shed was a means of purifying the people by providing for the remission of their sins, and of consecrating them to their new relationship to God. If, as seems probable, we are to see in the New Testament references to ir si pas fermante plutot - Verifier la mise en indice - "?>‘the blood of the covenant’ allusions to Exodus 24: 8, then we must see in them also references to an expiatory and consecratory death, whereby men are brought into a new relationship with God.
It is, of course, just possible that the New Testament references to ‘the blood of the covenant’ point back to Zechariah 9: 11, rather than to Exodus 24: 8, and Vincent Taylor cites Joachim Jeremias as an exegete who adopts this interpretation.198 Twice in the Rabbinic literature the blood of the Passover victim is spoken of as ‘covenant-blood’, Zechariah 9: 11 being interpreted of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. Jeremias thinks that Jesus (who had this chapter of Zechariah in mind during His last days, as we see from Mt. 21: 5) was comparing His blood to that of the Passover lamb at the departure from Egypt. He maintains that Jesus is describing ‘His death as an atoning death which establishes the new and eternal communion of a humanity cleansed from sin >with its God - the communion of the Kingdom of God’. I agree with Dr. Taylor that this is not as probable as a reference to Exodus 24: 8, but, as the words last quoted show, even if Jeremias’ view be accepted, the significance of the covenant-blood is much the same. It still remains true that it is the means of cleansing and that it brings men into communion with God.
3. The rite described in Exodus 24 had the effect of bringing the people into such a relationship with God that they could be called a holy people, and this can be paralleled in the new covenant. Thus we read of ‘the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified’ (Heb. 10: 29), and of coming to ‘Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel’ (Heb. 12: 24). The reference to ‘blood of sprinkling’ seems to point to the sprinkling of the people recorded in Exodus 24 whereby they were consecrated to their new relationship to God and symbolically purified.1 We have another reference to sprinkling in I Peter I: 2, and here again we should see a reference to the covenant of Exodus 24 for, as Hort points out,199 there are only three examples of people being sprinkled with blood in the Old Testament, and there is no reason to see in this passage an allusion to either of the others. The writer is thus directing the attention of his readers to the fact that Christians are brought into a new covenant with God, and that they have been sprinkled with blood as the means of admission thereto. The significance of this is, if we may again cite Hort, ‘the sprinkling presupposed a shedding; the consecration of the New Covenant presupposed the antecedent sacrifice of the Cross’.200 The fact that in this context the writer speaks of obedience gives another point of contact with the Old Testament passage, for there the people agreed to obey the commandments of Yahweh. Though the men of the new covenant rely for their acceptance on the work of Christ, and not on any deeds of their own, yet true faith brings forth in their lives the fruit of godly living. These passages indicating the sanctifying aspect of the new covenant bring this out.
But the passages cited teach more than that a high ethical standard is set before Christians. There is a power given them to enable them to live the sort of lives they should. The quotation from Jeremiah 3 in Hebrews 8: 8ff. includes the words: ‘For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and on their >heart also will I write them.’ This activity within the people of the new covenant the early Christians found fulfilled in the activity of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. The empowering of the Holy Spirit of God is an integral feature of the new covenant, so that, while the standards are not relaxed one whit, the indwelling Spirit enables those in the new covenant to have a continual victory over the forces of evil.
4. A further aspect of New Testament teaching on the new 1
Cf. Delitzsch: ‘It is common to the blood-sprinkling under both Testaments that it is the medium whereby the apprehension of the promises proper to either covenant is realized’ (op. cit., p. 354). covenant is that which draws attention to the finality of the new arrangement. This might be held to be implied in the fact that the new covenant is based on forgiveness of sins, and of course its finality is directly prophesied with ‘their sin will I remember no more’ (Je. 31: 34). In the New Testament it comes to expression in such a passage as the benediction which speaks of the blood of the eternal covenant’ (Heb. 13: 20), the adjective reminding us that this covenant passes not away. Probably we are to deduce the same from the reference to the ark of the covenant in heaven (Rev. II : 19). The allusion is rather mysterious, but it seems to indicate that there is heavenly warrant for thinking that God’s new covenant is permanent.