Tag Archives: new covenant

Ratified In Blood

Bible Study, ,

RATIFIED BY BLOOD

For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance – now that He has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. In the case of a will, it is necessary to prove the death of the one who made it, because a will is in force only when somebody has died; it never takes effect while the one who made it is living. This is why the first covenant was not put into effect without blood. (Heb. 9: 15-18).

How amazing – that God does everything by the book! He is God, after all. Can’t He do anything He wants? No He can’t because He has committed Himself, by His own nature, to act justly. We must never forget that He has a hostile audience under condemnation and awaiting judgment for aspiring to take over His throne. They are watching His every move, waiting to pounce on Him for any tiny deviation from what is perfectly just.

God could not change anything arbitrarily, without acting within His own legal framework. Therefore, to change the covenant, He had to prove that the first covenant was obsolete and did not work, and He had to set up a new covenant only after the requirements of the first covenant were fully met. How could He do this and be true to His own nature? Man was God’s test case.

The terms of the Mosaic covenant were clearly stated and the penalty for failing to uphold it inescapable – death. Centuries of history proved that God’s people could not remain true to His covenant. They all fell short and they were all under the penalty of death.

God’s solution was to send His own Son, born into His human family as every other person is born, to live under the same covenant as the one which His people failed to honour, with the same penalty for failure as applied to them.

If He kept all the requirements of God’s covenant perfectly, and then died as though He had broken them, His death pay the penalty for all His people and do away with the old, incompetent covenant once and for all, making it obsolete and freeing God to set up a new covenant with better promises and better provisions. Jesus then became, not only the penalty for breaking the old, but the mediator of a new agreement with God based on new and better promises.

All this time, the enemy was watching, waiting, hoping that God would put one foot outside the requirements of His own justice so that they could blow His new covenant out of the water!

But why blood? Because blood is symbolic of death. The Mosaic covenant was ratified by the death of an animal.

Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.’ (Ex. 24: 8).

This blood symbolised the death of the testator so that his will could be put into effect. God’s will was expressed in His covenant and set in motion through the death of an animal.

In the same way, after the supper He took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’ (Luke 22: 20).

Jesus’s death put paid to the old covenant and set up the new covenant, ratified by His blood which was symbolised by the juice of the vine. After His death, the Father was free to establish His new covenant because the previous one’s requirements and penalty were fully met, once and for all.

God was now free to impute the perfect obedience of His Son to every person who puts his trust in Him. They receive, as a free gift, the nature of God and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is acceptable to God as a human being. Therefore every person who is “in Christ” is acceptable to Him as well on the grounds of Jesus’s righteousness.

God’s justice is flawless and Satan watched is vain. All he can do now is falsely to accuse God’s people in the hopes that he can convince them that they are still under condemnation and awaiting judgment. Paul has an answer for that!

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because, through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death (Rom. 8: 1).

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

A New Covenant

Bible Study, , , ,

A NEW COVENANT

But God found fault with the people and said: ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them,’ declares the Lord.

This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel after that time,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’

By calling this covenant “new”, He has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear (Heb. 8: 8-13).

Why did God give His people the Mosaic covenant if He knew it wouldn’t work? It seems a futile exercise, doesn’t it?

The covenant that God entered into with His people at Mount Sinai was never intended to be His final dealings with them. It was an interim covenant which was meant to serve a specific purpose.

When Israel came out of Egypt, they had behind them a long history of life in a pagan society and slavery to a cruel and oppressive nation. It would take many generations to establish a culture into which their Messiah would be born. They had to unlearn and relearn many truths about God, themselves and their world in order to understand the nature of God, especially His holiness, His righteousness, His justice and His mercy.

The pagan gods of the Egyptians were the product of human imagination, created in the image of fallen man and often reflecting the worst of human nature. They were heartless, unpredictable and demanding. They were takers, never givers, and they certainly did not have the well-being of their worshippers at heart. Of course, behind every pagan god lay the originator of the evil that they were, Satan, their creator.

God could not simply step in and take over. It would take many generations to teach the people about Himself and to win their trust and their loyalty. How would He do it? He built it into their culture and the national and personal lives. He created a way of life for His people that reflected Him. All 613 “laws” were intended to show them how to live in harmony with Him and with one another, teaching them the nature and seriousness of sin, how to deal with sin and how to love God with all their heart, mind, soul and strength and their neighbour as themselves.

God’s national constitution had a spinoff. It also showed up their impotence to obey God’s teachings. Instead of producing obedient children, it produced rebels. Every time God’s word said, ‘Don’t,’ they did, and every time His word said, ‘Do,’ they didn’t. This was also part of the preparation for the new covenant. Until God revealed their hearts by giving them instructions which they failed to follow, they would never realise how impossible it is to satisfy God’s perfection. They would never learn to rely on Him for the power to obey.

There had to be another way, a way which intervened so powerfully that their very hearts would be transformed. Their rebellion would need to go and be replaced by a new motive and a new internal direction. Rules did not work. They only incited rebellion. A prohibition was an invitation to break it. That’s the nature of the human being.

How would God solve this problem? It would take His divine power to overrule the natural inclination of man to go his own way. That’s what man chose in the beginning. He rejected the way of love and chose to make his own rules. Only God could restore him to what he was created to be. He needed a new covenant with new promises AND the will to obey.

That’s where Jesus stepped in. He became both mediator of, and the sacrifice that ratified God’s new covenant. But God added something else – the power of the Holy Spirit who withdrew when the first pair decided to go it alone. He is the key to the success of the new covenant. By removing sin through the sacrifice of Jesus, God could restore the Holy Spirit to the human race. He came at Pentecost to indwell and empower every believer who embraces and follows Jesus.

Jesus is the perfect fulfilment of God’s teachings. We no longer need laws and rituals. He shows us how to live as God’s beloved sons and daughters who resemble Him and reflect Him to the world. All we need to do is to watch and follow Him. He is the way. His word is in us by His Spirit, the Spirit of truth who leads us into all truth.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

Blood Poured Out For You

Christian Life, ,

BLOOD POURED OUT FOR YOU

“Taking the cup, He blessed it, then said, ‘Take this and pass it among you. As for me, I’ll not drink wine again until the kingdom of God arrives.’

“Taking bread, He blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them saying, ‘This is my body given for you. Eat it in my memory.’

He did the same thing with the cup after supper, saying ‘This cup is the new covenant written in my blood, blood poured out for you.'” Luke 22:17-20 (The Message).

Is it any wonder that Jesus longed to share this meal with His disciples? He had reached the moment that would become the watershed of all history, a simple meal that symbolised the greatest victory of all time and the event that exposed, disarmed and defeated the arch enemy of all humankind.

Bread and wine, picture of His broken body and poured-out blood, formed the core of the Passover meal. The lamb was sacrificed to provide the blood that protected the people from the angel of death. The bread was baked without yeast as a mute testimony to the sinless nature of God’s lamb.

No longer would Passover be the celebration of God’s daring rescue from slavery in Egypt. From this moment on it took on a new significance – a meaning Jesus had struggled for three years to communicate to His disciples. He had not come to effect another deliverance from human oppression. As long as we are alive and subject to human authority, there will always be those who exploit people for their own ends. It is part of man’s greedy and wicked nature.

Underneath man’s inhumanity to man lies a far more sinister power – the unseen dominion of a dark and relentless fallen angel whose desire is to enslave and destroy every unsuspecting soul who is deceived by his enticements and enslaved by their own choices.

Jesus’ passion was to expose him by willingly becoming the victim of his hatred without falling into his trap and being ensnared by his lies. Try as he may, the devil could not lure Jesus into submitting to his lying suggestions. All he wanted Jesus to do was to do what he wanted and so disobey and mistrust the Father’s love.

Jesus’ response was always the same. Whenever Satan set his traps, He was ready with the same answer, ‘Daddy didn’t tell me to do it. That’s not what Daddy said.’ Even when He was tested to the limit in the Garden of Gethsemane, His rested His soul in His Father’s will.

Jesus’ steadfast faith in His Father’s love proved once and for all that, in spite of all the pressure to doubt Him and heed the devil, it was possible for a human being to be a true son, to submit to the Father, even to an unjust and shameful death, and to come out unscathed because God promised that He would raise Him from the dead, and God is absolutely trustworthy.

And that’s what this simple meal symbolised. It was not a sacrifice to be repeated again and again as some teach. It was simply a reminder of what Jesus did. Deliverance from political oppressors pales into nothing compared with the greater deliverance from enslavement to the father of lies, and all the pain of broken lives that enslavement to him brings.

This meal is a celebration of the eternal truth that Jesus has set us free from the guilt, shame and condemnation of our sin and our failure to trust Him, and from the power of the devil to deceive us any longer. As sons of the living God, we have an elder brother who has gone before us to show us the way to the Father and who has provided us with the same person who enabled Him to persevere – the Holy Spirit who comes to live within us.