What’s new about the new covenant? - 26 August 2009 |
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We had a brief look at the important and much-debated ‘new covenant’ passage in Hebrews 8 on Sunday morning, but nothing like enough to do it justice. So here are a few other bits and pieces that might be useful.
1. One of the first questions to arise is the sense in which the New Covenant is unbreakable. Whatever this passage says about this subject, there are lots of NT passages that, at least at face value, seem to teach quite clearly that the New Covenant can (in some sense) be broken. John 15:1-6; Rom 11:17-24; Heb 2:1-3; 3:7-42; 10:26-29; 12:25; 2 Peter 2; etc.
2. Hebrews 8:8-9, on the other hand, contrasts the covenants at precisely this point: the New Covenant, unlike the Old, can be broken in some sense. However, a closer look reveals that it is the people as a whole, not individual believers that Hebrews has in mind. In particular, Jer 32 (immediately following the text in Jer 31 from which Heb 8 quotes) is all about the exile of Israel in 586 BC, which resulted from the apostasy of the nation. There were some faithful individuals even at this dreadful time. Heb 8 can be reconciled quite easily with the covenant-breaking texts in the New Testament in this way: it does not teach that God will never break covenant with individual New Covenant believers; rather, it teaches that God will never forsake the New Covenant church as a whole.
3. An important pastoral point flows from point 2. Since God has committed himself irrevocably to the New Covenant church, one important way to deal with the problem of lack of assurance is to ask yourself this question: are you a faithful member of a faithful church? Remember: the Lord will never abandon the church. Take your eyes off yourself for a moment. Remember, if you’re in a faithful church (one where the Bible is rightly taught, the sacraments rightly administered, and discipline rightly maintained), and if you’ve not been excommunicated, that means that the elders are (implicitly) saying to you, ‘If our judgment, you’re a faithful member of the community of God’s saved people here on earth – the people whom the Lord has promised that he will never abandon.’ So whaddaya worried about?
4. So then, what about the apparent differences between the New and Old Covenants mentioned in Hebrews 8? Well, the first thing to remember is that not everything mentioned here does in fact represent a difference between the covenants. God’s Old Covenant people had the law on their hearts (v. 10, cf. Deut 6:4-6; 30:11-14; 2 Ki 23:25; Ps 37:31; 40:8; 119:11, 111), and also experienced the forgiveness of sins (v. 12, cf. Ex 34:6-7; Ps 32; 51; 103). Hebrews doesn’t actually say that the New Covenant will differ in these respects – indeed, there’s a near-quote in Heb 8:10 from Gen 17 (I will be their God, and they shall be my people, cf. Gen 17:7, 10) which points in precisely the opposite direction.
5. Perhaps there’s a different in our experience of the assurance of forgiveness under the New Covenant.We no longer have any need of repeated sacrifices, which previously served as a ‘reminder of sin’ (10:3); instead, Christ has made one perfect sacrifice, so our sin is (from the experiential point of view) decisively put behind us.
6. Similarly, there’s a greater intensity in our knowledge of God under the New Covenant. The privilege of drawing near to God, previously reserved for the priests alone, is now enjoyed by all God’s people (Heb 4:16; 7:19; 10:22; 11:6). As a result, there is now no special priestly class within the believing community, uniquely able to teach their brothers to ‘know the Lord’ (Heb 8:11; cf. the job of the priests in Deut 33:10; Mal 2:6-7) from the perspective of personal experience. Instead, all believers have been granted sanctuary access in Christ, and all ‘know the Lord’ personally.
7. Finally (related to 6), ‘they will all know me’ apparently means all-without-distinction, not all-without-exception, since it is elaborated in what follows: ‘from the least of them to the greatest’.
Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Bible, Minister's Blog