Hebrews 8: A Better Covenant

Introduction

Did you get sick of Melchizedek last week? You probably aren't alone. The author of Hebrews dedicated a lot of time to that guy and he wasn’t always clear. We slogged through it. At this point The original audience probably was yelling, “Get to the point, preacher!” (And maybe you were too!)

Almost like he was reading their minds, he starts out Chapter 8 with an answer, “The point we’re making...”

So what point is he making? Well, he spent the entire last chapter arguing that Jesus is a high priest (just not in the line of Aaron.) And accordingly, when there is a ‘changing of the guard’ (or priesthood) there must be a new covenant. “This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant.”

And that’s where he’s going to turn next - first Jesus is a better high priest, and his covenant is also better.

8:1-7: Location, location, location.

Christianity is unique in that we don’t place emphasis on physical locations. We worship in spirit and in truth. But that can be difficult for some people, and was probably difficult for the original audience. Their temptation was to return to the old system, the old covenant, which was very physical. They could go to the temple and physically see the high priest offer sacrifices.

But those high priests were only allowed into the ‘Most Holy Place’ once a year, and for a short amount of time, among other things.

How is Jesus a different high priest? He ministers in the ‘true tent’, that is the heavenly tabernacle.

Jesus sits at the right hand of God in heaven. This is a posture of completion. The earthly priests were constantly standing, always working, because their sacrifices never completely wiped away sin. Jesus does.

The ‘true tent’ (tabernacle) is in heaven, the very presence of God - not a tiny room that only ‘represents’ the presence of God.

The heavenly tabernacle is ‘set up by the Lord’ not by man. Sure, God gave the direction and blueprint for the earthly tabernacle, but it was ultimately build by humans. The heavenly tabernacle is built by God himself.

Every priest needs a sacrifice though (it’s literally part of the job description!) so Jesus also needs one as well - and his sacrifice is himself. The author will dive into this more later.

Shadows of shadows.

This all brings up a good question about the purpose of those priests and their offerings. If Jesus is the true high priest in the heavenly tabernacle, then what exactly was going on in the physical temple (and the physical tabernacle long before that?)

To put it plainly, it was like a stage where the heavenly realities were being played out on earth. They were a ‘shadow’.

Think about it this way: If I put on my Patrick Mahomes jersey and go out and play football in the backyard with my cousins, I could do all ‘cool throws’ and pretend I’m Mahomes as much as I want. But the ‘real thing’ happens up in Kansas City in Arrowhead Stadium. What I’m doing is just a (very poor) imitation of the real thing.

The author will go into detail on this more later.

The old system may have been a shadow of things, but God still instituted it. He gave Moses the blueprint and told Moses to make it precisely as he prescribed it.

The purpose was the point to the reality, so it needed to be accurate. Whenever Hollywood makes a movie adaptation of a book, we know that most of the time the movie is never better than the book. But we still expect the movie to be a faithful adaptation of the source material - so that when we watch it, we can have a reasonable understanding of what the book is about.

Well if the earthly tabernacle and the high priest were the movie adaptation, Jesus and the heavenly realities are the real deal that they were pointing us towards.

This all means something that the author has been trying to tell us for a the last two chapters: The old system, the old covenant, was flawed! But it wasn’t that the system itself was broken...

It wasn’t meant to be the ‘final system’. Only a shadow of the things to come.

The flaw wasn’t necessarily in the system, but in the people themselves (vs 8).

If a house has a cracked foundation, does that make the house unliveable? No. But certainly a house without a cracked foundation is better!

On top of all this, a new covenant shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise - the Old Testament itself testfied to it! This is most clearly seen in Jeremiah 31, which he’s now going to quote and exegete.

New, Better, Different

The fact that Jeremiah even talked about ‘a new covenant’ pretty much proves that the old covenant just wasn’t cutting it. Jeremiah prophesied almost 800 years after Moses gave the law, and if you read the OT, it’s pretty clear that the old covenant was not getting the people any closer to God.

1. Aside from about a 100 year period between David and Solomon, the Israelites routinely worshipped other gods all the way up until the captivity.

2. After the captivity they may have abandoned their chronic polytheism, but they replaced it with rigid legalism and hypocrisy, which persisted right down until the days of Jesus.

So if the old covenant was flawed (or rather, the people themselves were flawed), how on earth is this New Covenant going to be any better? Jeremiah breaks it down for us.

‘I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.’ Under the old system, the kingdom was divided, and in the end only the southern kingdom (Judah) really kept any semblance of the original covenant.

This New Covenant encompasses all of God’s children. Indeed, we see this with the Church, where everyone is included in Christ’s Kingdom.

‘Not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand’

The Old Covenant did a lot of hand holding. All the rules and regulations were because God was in a sense, dealing with children. And what do children need? Rules!

The New Covenant on the other hand still has some rules and regulations, but overall far less. Why? Because the New Covenant, like dealing with adults, focuses more on the spirit of the law. In particular, those of us under the New Covenant obey God because we love him.

Marriage is a good illustration of this - are there rules and regulations within marriage? Sure. But do spouses necessarily know every single one? No - but a good spouse will nearly ‘obey’ those rules by virtue of the fact that they love their spouse, and their actions will come out of that obedience.

Despite all the hand holding of the old covenant, the people still disobeyed and ignored it. And so God ‘showed no concern for them’. A Covenant is a two way agreement, and if one party doesn’t keep their end of the deal, why should the othe party? Despite this, God still showed the people A LOT of mercy.

‘I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts’

Under the Old Covenant, the laws were written on stone. The ‘laws’ of the New Covenant are written on our hearts and minds, which means real transformation occurs. It’s not just mindless rituals - it’s real heart (and mind) change.

2 Corinthians 3:3 “And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

‘I will be their God, and they shall be my people’

The Old Covenant intended to develop a relationship between people and God. But it didn’t always work out that way. As I mentioned earlier, the people often worshiped other gods besides Yahweh.

Under the New Covenant, The Lord is our God, and we are his people. And unlike people under the old covenant, we ‘know’ God - because we know Jesus. In short, the New Covenant is better because it truly creates a relationship between us and God!

‘And they shall not teach each other saying, ‘Know the Lord’

A major problem with the Old Covenant is that you could be a part of it but not actually know God. How is that possible? Because you only had to be born into it.

This is what the Jewish people bragged about - and what the pharisees often argued with Jesus over. The assumption was that because they were (physical) children of Abraham, that meant they were good. But just because they were born into the old covenant, didn’t mean they actually knew God. Indeed, they couldn’t even recognize Jesus, proving that they didn’t really have a relationship with God!

Because of this, the Old Testament commands that the laws and precepts of God constantly be taught everywhere so that the people might actually know and have a relationship with God. In other words, they had to teach each other to ‘Know the Lord’.

But the beauty of the New Covenant is that we aren’t born into it. We choose to enter into it. And if we choose to enter into the New Covenant, that naturally means that we know the Lord. And so ‘they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.’ When we choose to come to Jesus, and enter into this covenant by choice, we truly begin to know God.

‘I will be merciful toward their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more’.

Finally, the greatest and most beautiful part of the New Covenant: our sins are forgiven and forgotten.

The Old Covenant law is littered with constant reminders of the people’s sins. They were constantly having to make sacrifices in the hopes that maybe their guilt could be ridden of.

Under the New Covenant, God has completely done away with our sins through Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and he remembers our sins no more. Praise be to God!

Gerald Griffin puts it nicely: “The promise is not that new covenant people will not sin, but that God will not be bringing it up. It will not be an obstacle that it had been between God and the people.”

This falls in line with the rest of the New Testament, which suprisingly really doesn’t encourage us to ‘ask for forgiveness’. Forgiveness has already been granted, there’s no need to continue to ask for it!

On the contrary, John tells us in his letter to ‘confess’ our sins when they do happen. This confession is basically agreeing with God that what we did was sin, and it keeps our hearts soft and changeable.

If you don’t think the New Covenant is better than the Old Covenant, I don’t know what else to tell you - and neither does the author of Hebrews. Even Moses would know this is a better deal than what he gave the people!

And so, the only logical conclusion that we find in verse 13 is this: the old covenant is obselete. It was good when it was good, and it served it’s purpose. But anyone who wants to go back to it is just crazy. It’s like our cell phones. The first iPhone was pretty amazing. But it had it’s flaws, and each new ‘generation’ corrects those flaws, and is also a little different. Anyone who has the most current iPhone would be crazy to go back to any of the older versions - but especially all the way to the first!

Thanks be to God that he has redeemed us through Christ, and has instituted a New, Better, and Different Covenant. A covenant that allows us to have a direct relationship with him, and one in which our sins are remembered no longer!

Post: So what exactly do we do with the Old Testament/Covenant/Law?

The Old Covenant may be obselete (this is the Greek word we get ‘paleo’ from), but it’s still useful.

Paul encourages Christians not to avoid the OT or reject it. 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” makes clear it’s usefulness. In fact, we can’t really understand the New Testamant/Covenant without it!

In Galatians, Paul compares the Old Testament to a school teacher of sorts. In the ancient world, wealthy individuals would hire a servant to protect and teach their children until the father returned. To Paul, this is the role that the Old Testament Law played. It protected God’s people, and instructed them about Him until He came home - that is when Jesus came. Now that Jesus is here, we no longer ‘need’ that servant.

To the original Jewish Christians who had ‘grown up’ with the Law, and now found themselves under the better New Covenant with Jesus, the Law was obviously still a trustworthy ‘friend’ of sorts, whom they no longer needed for protection and instruction, but still brought much comfort.

To Gentile Christians (like us!), who didn’t grow up under the Old Covenant - the laws themselves may be strange and foreign, but they nonethless tell us A LOT about God, His character, and what pleases Him. It’s almost like talking to your father’s best friend and asking him to tell you his favorite stories that maybe you hadn’t heard about before. Do you really ‘need’ this person? No, we have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ - but nonetheless they are good and helpful things to know.

Speaking of relationship, this is the key differentiator - the Old Testament may be a useful, but it is no longer the basis for our relationship with God. This comes through Jesus Christ under the New Covenant, or as Paul says in Romans, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In culmination, the law is helpful in getting people ‘to Christ’ - which was always it’s intended purpose, and nothing more. It makes us aware of sin and teaches us about what pleases and displeases God. Paul discusses this more in Romans 7.

Conclusion

Take heart in knowing that the New Covenant has been established by the sacrifice and priesthood of Jesus Christ. Through Christ was have a better and different covenant - one in which we can know God personally, because we have chosen to know Jesus. And because of this, our sins are forgiven and forgotten. Amen!