A New Covenant

Recently, Annette told me she’d thought about downloading a game onto her phone but canceled the download after a message popped up that caused her to be concerned.

She couldn’t recall the exact wording of the message, so I asked her to start the download again and let me see the message when it came up.

What I saw was the standard fine print that we agree to just about any time we install new software, especially when it comes to free games and such.

They’ll monitor how much and how often you play. They’ll send you ads that are targeted to your Google search history. They’ll give you the game for free, but they’ll basically make it impossible to do well without buying extras as you go along.

My wife is very private — which is why she hates it when I tell these kinds of stories about her on Sunday mornings — and she doesn’t want Google or Facebook or anybody else trying to sell her stuff that she hasn’t specifically asked about.

She and Miss Lynn both have a love-hate relationship with Alexa, because they’re absolutely convinced that Alexa’s listening in on their conversations and tailoring our television commercials to what she’s heard.

Me, on the other hand — I’ve just kind of conceded that the big tech companies already know whatever they want to know about me.

hey’ve been getting info about me from the credit bureaus for 40 years. My television habits have been available from cable or satellite companies for nearly as long.

And I’ve always taken it pretty much for granted that anything I’ve ever written since the age of the internet can be searched, indexed and mined for personal data by anybody with the financial resources to do it.

So, whenever these terms-and-conditions agreements pops up these days, I tend to click the “Agree” button without much further thought.

I’m not saying I commend this as the wise response, only that I’ve given in. I don’t really feel there’s much I can do, short of smashing all my electronics and living in a cave somewhere.

Someday, perhaps, Congress will pass a law that protects consumers from these one-sided contracts, the ones where we get to use a piece of crummy software to entertain ourselves in exchange for what seems sometimes like a little piece of our souls. But I’m not holding my breath.

Now, it might surprise you to learn that the Bible is full of contracts. The whole Book of Deuteronomy is arranged around the format of an ancient contract or treaty between a greater power and a lesser one.

These treaties followed a basic pattern that we see in Deuteronomy. And the pattern of these treaties very much resembles the patterns of what we would now consider contracts.

In fact, contractual language and concepts can be found throughout the Old Testament. But we don’t call them contracts there; we call them covenants.

You’ve probably heard of the Abrahamic Covenant. That’s the one where God promised Abraham a land, a nation, a legacy, and a blessing. This was an unconditional covenant, meaning that God promised Abraham these things without requiring Abraham to do anything but act in faith that God would keep His promises.

There was the Mosaic Covenant, which was codified in the 10 Commandments and then expanded in the Book of Deuteronomy. This one was a conditional covenant. God promised Israel that they would be blessed in the Promised Land if they kept His commandments.

There was the Davidic Covenant, which was another unconditional covenant — this one made to King David. Very much as with the covenant God made with Abraham, He promised David a land and descendants who would rule over that land.

But He also promised David that His kingdom would never fail and that one of His descendants would rule over that Kingdom forever. In the New Testament, we learn that this promise refers to Jesus and to the eternal Kingdom He will rule from Jerusalem in the Millennial Reign after His second coming.

There are other covenants in the Old Testament, too, and you’ll hear more about them in my Easter message. But all of the covenants between God and man in the Bible have a couple of things in common.

First, much as with those ancient treaties I talked about a moment ago, these covenants described and qualified the relationship between God and man.

Those ancient treaties were designed to ensure peace between a greater power and a lesser one by describing how each party was to relate to the other and by describing how it would look for one party to honor the other.

In the same way, God’s covenants throughout the Old Testament describe both how HE should be honored by those with whom he made the covenants and how HE would bless THEM for honoring the terms of the covenant.

The second thing those covenants have in common is that they are initiated by God. As the supreme being, the creator of all there is, the very one whose breath sustains us all, only God is worthy of dictating the terms of our relationship with Him.

This is why Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by Me.”

And this, of course, has been the problem for mankind since the very beginning. Ever since Adam and Eve sinned against God in the Garden of Eden, we have been trying to set our own terms for dealing with God.

We have been trying to make ourselves the greater power, dictating the terms of our engagement with the sovereign God, seeking to put ourselves in His place.

We choose to pretend God doesn’t exist, right up until we’re praying for a good grade on that test, right up until we want direction for our careers, right up until we receive that cancer diagnosis.

Israel, God’s chosen people of the Old Testament, was no different. They cried out to God for deliverance in Egypt, but as soon as things got hard for them on the way to the Promised Land, they began demanding to go back.

God kept them safe and nourished for 40 years, and then He brought them into that land, and what did they do? They began to worship the same false gods the people of that land had worshiped.

They turned their backs on God right up until He brought the Assyrians and then the Babylonians to conquer them and haul them off into exile. And then they remembered God again and called on Him for rescue.

We see this cycle repeat itself throughout the Old Testament.

God makes a covenant with the people He loves, and they experience the blessings of that covenant, and then they turn from God and begin to experience the curses of life without Him, and so they cry out to Him once again for deliverance.

And all of these repeating cycles show us that we’re not very good at keeping our promises, not even to God. We’re not very good at being faithful and true.

But those are two of God’s defining characteristics. He IS faithful and true.

And so, He promised through the Old Testament prophets that He would establish a NEW Covenant with mankind, one that would be better than the old covenants. And we see the ratification of this New Covenant at the last supper.

Look at Matthew’s account of this event, in Matt 26:26-28

Matthew 26:26–28 NASB95

26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.” 27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

In his account of the last supper, Luke writes that Jesus said, “This cup which is poured out for you is the NEW covenant in My blood.”

Now, I quoted the Matthew passage during last week’s observance of the Lord’s Supper. We hold communion regularly as a reminder of what Jesus did to redeem us from our sins. And I repeat these verses each time in hopes that each of us will be renewed in our commitment to this New Covenant.

But two questions need to be answered about this next new thing promised by God for those who put their faith in Jesus.

First, what does Jesus mean when He says the wine represents “My blood of the covenant”? And then, what IS the New Covenant, anyway?

Let’s take those questions in order. What does Jesus mean when He says the wine represents “My blood of the covenant”?

To understand this, let’s look back at how the Mosaic Covenant was ratified.We’ll be reading from Exodus, chapter 24.

Now, at this time, Israel was in the wilderness. God had delivered them out of Egypt and brought them to the base of Mt. Sinai.

And God had descended upon the mountain with fire and smoke and earthquakes and thunder, and He spoke to Moses while the people cowered in fear. He gave them the 10 Commandments and other laws that they must follow to receive His blessings.

And Moses came back down the mountain and told the people all that God had said. Now, picking up in verse 4:

Exodus 24:4–8 NASB95

4 Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. Then he arose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain with twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel. 5 He sent young men of the sons of Israel, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as peace offerings to the Lord. 6 Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and the other half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar. 7 Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient!” 8 So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

Covenants and treaties in this time were sealed with the blood of animals. The blood represented the great cost — the price that had to be paid — for peace between the covenant parties.

Sprinkling the people with blood signified that they were being identified with the life that had been sacrificed to seal this covenant.

And the covenant itself demonstrated that this people belonged to God, that they were HIS chosen people.

So, when Jesus says at the last supper “this is MY blood of the covenant,” what He is saying is that He is ratifying this New Covenant with His OWN blood.

The unique and eternal Son of God would seal this New Covenant between God and mankind with HIS blood, which He would shed the following day on a cross at Calvary.

He would be the sacrifice Himself. And those who identify with Him through faith in Him demonstrate they belong to Him when they share the cup in every memorial observance of the Lord’s Supper.

So, all those things are behind what Jesus said about the cup representing His blood of the covenant.

So that leaves us with the second question: Just what IS the New Covenant?

Jesus gives us a clue in that passage from Matthew, when He says the wine represents His blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

From the time of the Mosaic Covenant, sacrifices were made to God for the forgiveness of sins. Sacrifices were made in the tabernacle — and later, the temple — each day, as individual Israelites brought lambs and other animals to be butchered there and burned, with their blood poured on the altar.

God had declared back in the Garden of Eden that the penalty for sin is death, but He had instituted this ritual of sacrifice so that those Israelites who had faith in Him could be spared from the spiritual death of eternal separation from Him.

The death of those sacrificial lambs and goats and bulls and pigeons would provide a substitute for them. And each new sin required a new sacrifice..

So how was the New Covenant different from the old?

To understand that, let’s turn to the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 31.

Now, Jeremiah was prophesying to a people under siege in Jerusalem and to those who already had been carried into exile from Judah by the Babylonians.

God had already said through Jeremiah that one day, He would bring those people out of exile and back to the land of promise, even though He warned that the Babylonians would conquer and destroy Jerusalem.

He promised He would return them to their land and out from under the oppression of their conquerors.

But then, God takes Jeremiah’s prophetic gaze and casts it further into time, and that’s where we’ll pick up, in verse 31 of chapter 31.

Jeremiah 31:31–34 NASB95

31 “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. 33 “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34 “They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

Now, the first thing I want to make clear about this New Covenant is that it is a covenant with Israel, with God’s chosen people.

And God makes promises TO ISRAEL that are connected to this covenant later in this chapter and in the writings of other Old Testament prophets.

But we know that the Church will SHARE in the blessings of this New Covenant, because Jesus ratified it in the last supper and because He instructed the Apostle Paul to pass along the tradition of the Lord’s Supper to the Gentile churches to which Paul ministered.

What God promised Abraham and David in his unconditional covenants with those two men was for Israel, not for the church. And Israel will receive the blessings of those covenants during Jesus’ millennial reign after His second coming.

But the Church — we who have been set apart for God by faith in Jesus — assuredly shares in the New Covenant blessings of this passage. And what are those blessings?

Look at verses 33 and 34:

First, God will write His law on our hearts.

For the people of Old Testament Israel, the Law was an external thing, written on stone tablets, the legal document that memorialized the Mosaic Covenant.

But for those blessed by the New Covenant, we have God’s law — His righteous requirements of us — written upon the new hearts we have received through faith in Jesus.

His righteousness is now a part of our nature. We now have the mind and will that we need to be the people God intends for us to be, because we have within us the Holy Spirit of God to enable us to be righteous.

Second, He will be our God, and we shall be His people.

This is the intimate relationship with mankind that God has desired since He created Adam and Eve. This is the relationship He had promised Israel would result from keeping their side of the Mosaic Covenant.

This is the relationship He STILL wants with mankind — a relationship of complete dependance upon Him in all things.

And when we follow Jesus in faith that only His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection provide a way for us to be reconciled to God, then He gives us His Holy Spirit. And then, this intimate relationship with Him can become a reality of our everyday lives.

The third blessing followers of Christ receive from this New Covenant is that we will know the Lord in a way that no living person but Jesus has ever known Him.

This is one of the places in Scripture where we see the already/not yet character of the Kingdom of Heaven.

We Christians ALREADY know God better than most of the Old Testament saints, because we continually have within us His Holy Spirit. But we DON’T YET know Him as we will in eternity, when we will learn more from Him about Himself with each passing day.

What a glorious thing that will be, to grow in the knowledge of God’s goodness and grace throughout eternity!

And fourth, we see the blessing that Jesus referred to, forgiveness of our sins.

But here’s how the New Covenant is better than the Mosaic Covenant: Under the old covenant, the people of Israel already knew that God is a God of mercy and forgiveness. But they still had to sacrifice animals each time they sinned.

And the nation was reminded of its sins each year on the Day of Atonement, when the priest would sacrifice a bull on the altar and sprinkle some of its blood on the mercy seat in the temple’s Holy of Holies. Scripture says the sprinkling of that blood was for the covering of sins.

But the sacrifice of Jesus, the spotless Lamb of God, was once for all. And His blood didn’t just cover our sins; His blood washes our sins away.

Under the New Covenant, God promises not just to FORGIVE our sins because of Christ’s shed blood. He also promises to forget them.

I don’t know about you, but I struggle with a constant dialogue in my head that serves to remind me of the many ways I fail to be the person God intended me to be. As David put it, “My sin is ever before me.”

And if God did not promise to forget my sins, then I could not imagine standing before Him in the shame I would feel as I stood there knowing He was remembering all the ways I’d sinned against Him.

But I know that He has promised He has chosen NOT to remember them. He has chosen NOT to see me clothed in my sinfulness, but rather clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

What a wonderful promise. What a wonderful covenant!

We agree to contracts all the time that make us feel like we’re giving up little parts of our soul for a little entertainment, for apps that monitor our heath, for cars and houses and all the other things that don’t have any eternal significance.

But God offers us a contract to SAVE our eternal souls. A contract that promises His righteousness as part of our own new hearts. A contract that promises an intimate relationship with Him that once was reserved only for Jesus. A contract that promises we will know Him like He was never known by mortal man. A contract that promises He will forgive AND forget. And He signed that contract with the blood of His only begotten Son.

In a world where contracts are punitive and burdensome, He offers a contract of grace and peace. And He asks only that you place your faith in Him through Jesus.

What will YOU do with THIS contract?