The New And The Old Covenant
THE NEW AND THE OLD COVENANT
HEBREWS 8:8-13
Are you enjoying all the benefits Christ gained for you in the new covenant?
Students of the Bible are sometimes perplexed by the expression “the new covenant.” The Bible teaches that God does not need to work by trial and error, as though he had to try one covenant and when it did not work, substitute another. He sees the end perfectly from the beginning. Accordingly, when he makes a covenant, we expect it to be binding for eternity. Yet Scripture speaks clearly of a new covenant and our passage tells us unambiguously that the first is obsolete (8:13).
The answer appears to be that there is a sense in which any covenant God makes is unchanging and unchangeable. Nowhere in the Bible, for example, is there any indication that the covenant with Abraham is canceled. It still stands. God’s way is the way of grace and this is abundantly clear in the covenant with Abraham. It is implied, in fact, in the covenant with the people in Exodus 24 (see also Exodus 19:4 where God’s action in grace precedes anything the people do). But spontaneously the people offered to obey God (Exodus 24:3,7). Indeed, while the covenant is initiated by God’s grace, there is the clear implication that the people will live as the people of God (see also Exodus 19:5f.). Increasingly the people came to understand this in a legalistic way. And increasingly they failed to live up to their obligations to God.
Since then, they were unable or unwilling (or both) to respond to the grace of God shown in the covenant, the promise of a new covenant is spelled out for us in Jeremiah 31:31ff., quoted in this passage. There is a sense in which this covenant is the same one. It is still the expression of God’s grace. But there is also a sense in which it is radically new. It involves an action of the very Spirit of God within people (8:10). It involves their having a real and personal knowledge of God (8:11). And it involves their sins being really put away (8:12), something which happened and could happen only in Christ’s atoning work. Since Christ has made all these things possible, it is clear that any previous arrangement is out of date. The old is obsolete and ready to vanish (8:13).