A New Covenant Relationship

In this, the third and final part of our series on “Getting to know God”, I’d like, as a starting point, to highlight one absolutely staggering reality. The reality, that for all the appalling track record of humanity almost from the very beginning, and right to this very day, God has cherished the desire to bless the inhabitants of planet Earth.

Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 1:4–5, (ESV) where he says of God:“. . . he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. IN LOVE he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,”

And then in Romans 8:30, (ESV) he affirms: “. . . those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

God’s eternal purpose for mankind then, a purpose present even before creation, was to have us as His family. He wanted, and He still wants, us to be His sons and daughters, to be like Him, a reflection of Himself. And this determined desire of God has motivated what we refer to as the New Covenant.

Now the New Covenant of course, is a “covenant” – the clue is in the name! And because this one is referred to as “new” we know that there must be one or more previous covenants, that we can describe as Old Covenants. And Bible students will be well aware, as Pastor Scott reminded us a couple of Sundays ago, that there are several such covenants mentioned in the pages of the Old Testament, among them those given to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses and to David. Arguably, the most important of these was the one God made with Abraham since the New Covenant is often seen as simply a continuation or a reaffirmation of Abraham’s covenant because the benefits of both covenants are enjoyed solely by the exercise of our FAITH.

Now we need to point out too, that according to the scriptures, God has never actually made a covenant directly with Gentiles, like most or all of us. The New Covenant was made with Israel as it tells us in Jeremiah 31:31 (ESV) where we read: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a NEW COVENANT with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,”

Fortunately though, whilst the New Covenant was with Israel and will be received by them in the Millennium, BECAUSE it is a covenant available by grace alone through faith, ANYONE, Jew or Gentile, who will accept and believe its promise, can receive it ahead of time.

Now a covenant is like a promise, but better, and we’re all familiar with promises of course. We know that they can be tricky because they are only as good as the integrity and the capability of the person who makes them.

Some people make promises very easily but they don’t necessarily keep them. I remember, back in the mists of time, when I was a leader in a different church, people would sometimes say to me “See you Sunday, Barry” and then, come Sunday they were nowhere to be seen. To my shame, I have to say that sometimes when people said that to me, I got to the point where because of their past track record, I would be thinking, “Well, that means we’ll certainly not be seeing them on Sunday!” And sadly, I was often right. The moral of course is that promises are important and we certainly shouldn’t make promises if we don’t intend to keep them.

Promises are very much dependant then on the integrity of the person who makes them. And if we make them, we must be the sort of person who will do everything we can to fulfil them.

But we have to recognise too that sometimes things happen that we can do nothing about so that we fail to fulfil our promise. It’s not that we didn’t bother or that we changed our minds on a whim, but something happened so we simply were not able to do as we had promised. Promises then are also always dependent on our capability.

So my point here is that while our promises may sometimes be subject to our human frailty, God’s promises are rock solid as God’s Word affirms in Numbers 23:19 (NIV84) where we read that: “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he PROMISE and not fulfill?”

We can count then on God keeping His promises – absolutely and always, because God’s integrity is faultless, and His capability is unmatched, since He has the power to fulfil everything He promises to fulfil, so we can really know that He will deliver.

This is what makes the New Covenant a rock solid basis for our faith. It is not dependant on fickle humanity in any way. It is not down to us, it is down to God who has infallible integrity and incomparable capability. The promises of the New Covenant are therefore absolutely secure. We can depend on them without reservation of any kind.

But there is also another key aspect of this New Covenant that is suggested, in a totally different context, when Paul speaks of the covenant of marriage when it is between a believer and an unbeliever in 2 Corinthians 6:14 (NIV84) where he declares: “For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”

And this raises the question, that while the New Covenant may be rock-solid secure as a basis for our faith, how can a Holy God have anything at all to do with sinful mankind? How can we as sinners be able to receive anything but judgment from an awesomely holy and righteous God?

We need to understand that the New Covenant is not a random promise from God. It is not just that God is choosing to overlook our sinfulness and simply bless us anyway. He cannot do that. It is an impossibility for a holy and a righteous God.

Now we know, that God acts in grace – yes, but He cannot ever put aside His Holiness and His righteousness in order to accommodate sinful man, so there is a crucial dilemma here for mankind.

The New Covenant therefore is NOT just a display of God’s grace because God had to provide a way for sinful man to be rescued from the eternal penalty for our sins without at the same time compromising His own holiness.

And to make that provision, He had to meet the righteous requirements of the Law, which meant there had to be a perfect sinless sacrifice for ALL sinners and for ALL sins. A requirement that we now know was met perfectly through Christ’s sinless life offered as a willing sacrifice, a sacrifice that we remember and celebrate whenever we come to the Lord’s table for communion.

But here is another mind bogglingly amazing thing. As well as dealing with our sin, the New Covenant also restores our inheritance and enables us to receive a whole raft of breathtakingly wonderful spiritual blessings.

Listen again to Paul in Ephesians 1:3 (ESV) “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed US in Christ WITH EVERY SPIRITUAL BLESSING IN THE HEAVENLY PLACES” And he then goes on to elaborate in Ephesians 2:12–13 (ESV) “remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having NO HOPE and without God in the world. BUT NOW in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

And fellow Apostle Peter puts it this way in 2 Peter 1:3 (ESV) writing: “His divine power has granted to us ALL THINGS that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence,

It is very important then to understand just how much blessing the blood of Jesus has brought us. In fact the blood of Jesus provides the LEGAL FOUNDATION for the covenant between God and man. It is the blood of Christ that enables us to JUSTLY receive forgiveness for our sins, for as Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:7, “In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, “ So ALL spiritual blessings are given to us because of the blood which is the basis on which the New Covenant is made available to us.

So the New Covenant is not just a matchless promise, secured on the absolutely unassailable integrity and capability of God, it also UNIQUELY satisfies the need for us, the benefactors of the Covenant, to be forgiven for our sins and to be made holy in God’s sight.

It’s the blood that makes US, the unworthy recipients of New Covenant blessings, entirely worthy to enjoy those matchless blessings.

And as if this weren’t enough, wonderfully, there is also a whopping great cherry on this New Covenant cake! Because since God Himself has secured both sides of the Covenant, when we ask boldly according to the covenant, we are actually asking for things which already legally belong to us. We are claiming by faith what God, at inestimable cost, has provided and covenantally underwritten for us; things He wants us to have.

The New Covenant, sealed with Christ’s blood, allows us to claim BY FAITH all that God has provided for us, and, He actually wants, desires and is waiting for us to do so.

The book of Hebrews has a focus on making clear what the New Covenant is – especially Hebrews chapters 6 to 13 and in Hebrews 9:15 (ESV) it says: Therefore he (that is Jesus) is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. That word mediator here means one who guarantees something that would otherwise not be provided and therefore covers the role of what we would now refer to as an “Executor” who sees that the provisions of a Will are carried out.

Hebrews 9:16–17 (ESV) then go on to say: “For where a Will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a Will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive.” Now the word “Will” here is in fact the very same word as the word used for “covenant”.

So the New Covenant is in effect the Will of the Lord Jesus since it provides those who receive it by faith with the inheritance that His sacrificial death has purchased. In legal terms therefore Jesus is also the “Testator” of the Will, the one who makes the Will, or in this case, the New Covenant.

The inheritance left to us through the Will of Jesus Christ, that is, the provisions of the New Covenant, are referred to in Hebrews 8:10–12 (ESV): where we read: “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”

If we receive an inheritance, we receive something that we did not previously own or earn. We did not work for it and there is no sense that deserving it was in any way the reason we received it. We were just named as the benefactor by the Testator.

Jesus though, since He rose from the dead, is also the appointed Executor of the Will, or New Covenant, and is the one through whom the provisions of the Will are distributed to the benefactors. And you and I, as benefactors, are entitled to every bequest in this amazing Will.

And what are those bequests? Well, we’ve mentioned some already this morning and there are many more, but right now I’ll just highlight two others very briefly.

First under the New Covenant God agrees to forget our sins.

Hebrews 8:12 (ESV) tells us the amazing truth that God not only forgives our sins, but He actually forgets them too. It says:”For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and i will remember their sins no more.” God has made a covenant commitment, grounded securely in His matchless integrity and capability, not only to forgive our sins but also to forget them.

This is not some extra little nicety thrown in for good measure, this is a mind blowing, life transforming blessing in its own right. Remember, what we’ve said about God’s promises - they are ABSOLUTELY guaranteed because of God’s perfect and unmatched integrity and His unrivalled capability. God actually promises to forget our sins, to remember them no more, and He means it!

Think of the security, the release and the relief in that for us. Whilst we can tend to allow ourselves to wallow in guilt feelings because of our sinfulness, God declares that under the New Covenant He really will both forgive and FORGET our sins! Indeed, once forgiven, our sins ARE also forgotten. We have God’s word on it!

Second, and perhaps best of all, the New Covenant offers us a personal relationship with God.

Spectacularly, BECAUSE Christ’s sacrifice has dealt with our sins which would otherwise eternally bar us from contact with God, and because through the new birth we have received a new quality and type of life, we have become God’s own people. We have become His family.

So personal is this relationship that whoever we are, wise or foolish, rich or poor, we can live our new life with one-to-one parenting by God Himself. No-one teaches us, only God Himself. Don’t believe it? Well the Apostle John puts it this way in 1 John 2:27 (ESV) “But the anointing that you received from him abides IN YOU, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.”

We do not need to be taught because individually we each have the Lord’s anointing abiding in US. And as though God’s integrity and His capability were not assurance enough for us, the scripture underlines it by saying that this is “no lie”!

We all need to take in and truly assimilate this truth that we each have a ONE-TO-ONE personal relationship with God Himself, an inheritance that is surely second to none.

Now the Bible indicates that there are three ways in which we can know God. We can know Him through His acts, we can know Him through His ways and we can know Him through a personal relationship.

Under the Old Covenant Psalm 103:7 (ESV) says of God that “He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.”

The people of Israel knew God through what they saw Him do – the plagues sent to force the Egyptians to let them go; holding back the waters of the Red Sea to let them pass over and then releasing them to drown the chasing troops; providing miracle manna to feed them in the wilderness and water to drink in the desert when Moses smote the rock. They saw God through His acts. While Moses, their leader, had a closer relationship with God so that he knew what God was like. He was familiar with God’s ways.

When Moses met God at the burning bush and when he communed with God on the mountain and received the Ten Commandments, he had one-to-one contact and saw the glory of God manifested. He saw and felt what God was like.

Remember that incident recorded in Numbers 16 when following Korah’s rebellion the earth opened up under their feet to swallow them, and the terrified people then rebelled against Moses and Aaron, but Moses was able to instruct Aaron to take a censer with incense and make atonement for the people who would otherwise have been annihilated by God’s righteous anger. Why? Because Moses knew what God was like and therefore he knew what must be done to turn away His wrath.

But our New Covenant provides a better way of knowing God. It makes it possible, through Christ’s atoning sacrifice, for us not just to acknowledge God because of what He does, or just to know what He is like, it opens the way for us to know Him personally!

This was the crux of Phil’s excellent message on accessing God last Sunday. This is the treasured inheritance we have in the New Covenant. We get to walk in fellowship with God as His sons and daughters.

It’s a privilege summed up in a very precious verse of scripture that Trevor gave me last week as I was washing up after communion. I think it is a verse we should all hear. The verse is Psalm 25:14 and in the Amplified Version it reads: “The secret [of the sweet, satisfying companionship] of the Lord have they who fear (revere and worship) Him, and He will show them His covenant and reveal to them its [deep, inner] meaning.”

The real joy of the New Covenant then is seeing that God underwrites both His part of the covenant, as the Holy and Righteous God that He is, and our part, by providing by His wonderful grace for our righteousness through Christ’s sacrificial death and triumphant resurrection so that we can enjoy the matchless privilege of a personal relationship with God.

And the key to the release of all this New Covenant blessing is simply faith, a faith that amazingly God also supplies us with as Ephesians 2:8 (NIV84) tells us: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through FAITH—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God”

So our mission this morning folks, should we choose to accept it, is just to act in faith on God’s every promise because now we know that He will certainly deliver!