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.