Covenant and Baptism: Parts 10 - 12


Introduction

Jeremiah 31:31-34 can be divided into two main portions – vv. 31-32 and vv. 33-34. Each portion begins and ends with the words “says the Lord.” Then there is an added explanation at the end of v. 34 beginning with the word “for.” So we have two main portions, bracketed by the words “says the Lord” and then the final word of explanation after the explanatory word “for.”

In the first portion of the passage, (vv. 31-32), Jeremiah announces the covenant negatively: “I will make a covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,” but it will not be like the covenant I made with them as in the days of Moses. There is a new covenant coming, and while some may hear that and not see that as a good thing, Jeremiah makes sure that it is understood as a hopeful thing by saying that it will not be like the Mosaic covenant. It will not fail like the Old Covenant; it cannot be broken and annulled, and it therefore cannot fail to bring wondrous blessings on God’s people.

In the second portion of the passage (vv. 33-34), Jeremiah clarifies the covenant positively: the reason this new covenant will not fail, as Jeremiah insisted in the first portion, is because God will do two things to ensure its success: God will write His law on the minds and hearts of His people, and God will establish a bond of loyalty and intimacy between Himself and His people in such a way that they all without exception will know Him.

All of these wondrous things would raise an immediate question for Jeremiah’s first listeners: how could this be? How could God overcome such sin and such aggravated lawlessness and wickedness in His people that has brought such curses on them? The answer comes at the end of v. 34: this is so because God will “forgive their iniquity and their sin [He] will remember no more.”

In vv. 33-34, essentially, the Lord promises a heart renewal, an internal transformation, effected by God Himself on His people so that there is a union between Him and them in Jesus Christ that cannot fail.

First, God promises heart renewal for His people through implanted law.

Jeremiah promises first that in the New Covenant He will put His law in His people’s minds and write it on their hearts. The law being in the heart in itself is not new to the New Covenant. In the Old Covenant, there was an expectation that the law would reach the hearts of God’s people. See Deuteronomy 4:8-9, 6:4-6, 11:18, and Psalm 119:34.

God’s plan has always been for His law to be placed in the minds and hearts of His people. What does it mean for the law to be placed in the heart? We think of the heart as the seat of the emotions and the feelings. But in the Hebrew mind the heart was the seat of the will. And it was more than that. The heart was the source of the affections, the place where your loyalties and your commitments arose from. So to place the law in your heart was to conform your own will to the will of the Lord. It was to have a pre-commitment to God before any decisions were made so that when it came time to make decisions, there was no decision to make. The heart was already bent toward the Lord. His law is my desire. His righteousness is my bent. I am loyal to Him first of all. See Psalm 40:8. For the law of God to be in the heart of an Old Testament saint was for that saint to delight, to find joy and gladness, in doing the will of his covenant Head.

Bu there’s a contrast: in the New Covenant God Himself will place the law in the hearts of His people in such a way that the covenant will not and can not be broken. In Deuteronomy 4:8 Moses spoke of “putting the law before” the people, and then the people had to take the law and place it in their hearts. The law was external and had to be made internal. The law was engraved on tablets of stone. It had to enter the heart as God’s people placed it there.

But think about how the New Covenant promise is phrased: I will put my law in their minds – I will write my law in their hearts. God is the one doing the action here. God will do the putting and the writing. There is an immediate, direct action of God to place the law within His people. God Himself will work an inward transformation that will shape our inner man toward the law of God. God Himself will cause us to delight in the law, and God will cut away what is opposed to Him. God will effect a direct transformation by the Holy Spirit. God will put a new heart and new Spirit in His people. See Ezekiel 36:25-27.

Second, God promises heart renewal through immediate knowledge.

Jeremiah’s New Covenant prophecy did not stand alone in Jeremiah’s thinking. It was part of a larger set of prophecies that concerned the future of Israel and that were delivered to Israel as the nation prepared to be sent away into exile as a covenantal curse from the Lord.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 is part of a series of three prophecies that concerned Israel, beginning in 31:27 and stretching forward to the end of the chapter in 31:40. Each of the three sections begins with the words “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord.” vv. 27, 31, 38

*31:27-30 – future planting of Israel in the land

*31:31-37 – future New Covenant that God will make with Israel in the land

*31:38-40 – future rebuilding and permanence of the holy city Jerusalem

So the New Covenant promise fits into a threefold scenario for the restoration of Israel after their captivity in Babylon. Israel would return to the land, receive a New Covenant, and the holy city of Jerusalem would be restored. These are three words of hope for God’s people.

We can see from this that, as I said, the prophecy of a New Covenant did not stand alone in Jeremiah’s message. It was not a development merely from failure to success or from corruption to purity. Jeremiah’s new covenant was a part of a scenario that included a full inheritance for God’s people and the permanent establishment of the people in the holy city of God, under the Davidic king. In short, the fulfillment of the new covenant promise depended on the fulfillments of the other predictions in Jeremiah 31.

But there is still a larger context, an even larger set of predictions that this New Covenant message from Jeremiah fits into. Last week, I directed your attention to Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 31, in which the Lord spoke to Moses and predicted that Israel would indeed nullify the covenant by their rebellion and idolatry. That is true, but that is not the whole story. See Deuteronomy 30:4-6. When sin increased to intolerable levels, God would send His people out of the land. He would temporarily reverse His covenantal purpose for them to be a blessing to the nations and send them out among the nations. They who were clean would be treated as unclean.

But failure would not be the end of God’s plan for His people. Instead, He promised to bring them back from exile and then bless them more than ever before (vv. 5-6). These words of hope created a basic theological outlook for Israel from the days of Moses onward. There would be forgiveness, refreshment, restoration, renewal, and blessings that would come to the sinful people of Israel only as they renewed covenant with the Lord God. There was an expectation built into the psyche of the nation of Israel through their history that there would be restoration after exile. God will be true to His promises. Yahweh will be merciful. He will not abandon His people. It is in this framework that Jeremiah’s promises and their fulfillment have to be understood.

How did the authors of the New Testament see the New Covenant as being fulfilled? When the New Testament authors wrote of Jeremiah’s New Covenant as being fulfilled in Christ, they were gathering together all these predictions of Jeremiah, and all these hopes for covenant renewal, and showing that they are all fulfilled in Him. The land, the new covenant, the restoration of Jerusalem under the Davidic king – the New Testament writers saw all these promises of restoration as being consummated in Christ.

So all the prophecies of restoration after exile are fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ. But these fulfillments took place in a manner unforeseen by the prophets. Instead of happening all at once, as the prophets expected, the predictions of restoration have been fulfilled and are being fulfilled over a long period of time. There was an initial fulfillment of the promises when Israel was restored to the land after 70 years in exile. Jerusalem was indeed rebuilt. But these were only faint glimmers of what was to come. The fullness of the promises was yet future. The promises would only be fulfilled in the Messiah, who would come to Israel and finally deliver on these hopes. The Messiah did indeed come and fulfill these promises. The New Covenant has arrived – Jesus Himself and the New Testament authors make that clear. But the fullness of the New Covenant is still coming even now. Everything is still awaiting consummation in Christ. In the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31-32, Jesus explained that the kingdom of God would begin small and grow slowly, but eventually it would reach full maturity. The New Testament sees three stages in the fulfillment of these prophecies of restoration:

*Inauguration of their fulfillment at the first coming of Christ

*Continuation of their fulfillment between Christ’s first coming and His second coming

*Final consummation of their fulfillment at the return of Christ

The final consummation of the New Covenant awaits us in the future when Christ returns and the full realization of this prediction will take place. When Christ returns, every man will know the Lord. No longer will be any need for teaching at all. All God’s people, from small to great, will know the Lord. There will no longer the even the possibility of disobeying God and violating His covenant.

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Introduction

Abraham, Moses, and David would have recognized the terms of the New Covenant, because the covenants they had with God had the same goals. The Old Covenant believer knew that a heart turned toward the law of God, intimate knowledge of God and His ways, and God’s gracious forgiveness of sins (all things Jeremiah promised would come in the New Covenant) are the very heart of the covenant. Old Covenant believers experienced the same union and communion with God that we experience. They knew real forgiveness, they had the law of God in their hearts, and they knew God. They were redeemed by grace through faith in the Messiah.

But the New Covenant believer is taking part in God’s covenant after the fullness has come. We know Jesus by name. We know what He did for us. We know how He rose from the dead. We don’t look forward to the coming of the Messiah. We live in light of His incarnation and cross as an established fact. Yahweh has become our God, and we have become His people in Christ.

The New Covenant is the covenant of maturity. All of God’s purposes come to fruition and realization in the New Covenant. What is new about the New Covenant is that the entire covenant story must now be seen in Christ. The union with God foreseen in Jeremiah 31 is union with Christ. The people of God are the body of which Christ is the Head. The law written on the heart is the law of Christ. Knowledge of God is communion with Christ. The forgiveness of sin is the costly forgiveness won by Jesus Christ on the cross. Jesus has taken the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you.” His blood has sealed the covenant of God and all the divine favor it promises and provides.

So the Old Covenant is fulfilled and consummated in the New. And it all hinges on Jesus. Jesus is the New in the New Covenant. This is the perspective of the New Testament writers as they recorded the meaning of the coming of Jesus. Jesus is the Christ, the one in whom all the consummation of God’s covenant purpose is realized.

In the New Covenant, Jesus enacts a final covenant.

For God to effect the union with His people whereby He will be their God and they will be His people, God would send His Son, the only Messiah, to achieve this New Covenant, permanent relationship. Jeremiah and the other prophets foresaw that the pervious covenants would terminate in this New Covenant. But that presents a problem. The New Covenant, as it is effected and sealed by the Messiah, would supersede the previous covenants. But what about those other covenants? Weren’t they eternal covenants? Was God abandoning His promises?

All God’s previous covenants are described as eternal or everlasting:

- God’s promise to Abraham: Genesis 17:7 (see Ps 105:9-10)

- God’s promise to Israel: eternal priesthood (Ex 40:15); eternal atonement (Lev 16:34); eternal Sabbath (Lev 24:8); eternal covenant (Is 24:5)

- God’s promise to David: 2 Sam 7:13, 16 (see Ps 89:3-4)

- The New Covenant is described by the prophets as an everlasting covenant (Is 61:8) and a perpetual covenant (Jer 50:4-5). See Ezek 37:26.

How is it that all the previous covenants are eternal, and yet they can be superseded by the new covenant, which is also eternal? The answer is that God’s covenants with Abraham and Israel and David are still being honored as God fulfills them in the New Covenant. All those previous promises are yes and amen in Christ Jesus.

A theologian named P.R. Williamson wrote these words:

The new covenant is the climactic fulfillment of the covenants that God established with the patriarchs, the nation of Israel, and the dynasty of David. The promises of these earlier covenants find their fulfillment in the new covenant, and in it such promises become “eternal” in their truest sense.

But it is more even than that, significant as that is. There is not just this eternal aspect of the New Covenant through which the previous promises are continuing to be fulfilled. The New Covenant is also the final covenant, the last covenant. Because the New Covenant will bring to fruition all that God intends to accomplish in redemption, it will never be superseded by another covenant. Indeed, it cannot be. The New Covenant in Christ is the covenant of eschatological fulfillment. It is not that all of God’s promises are completely fulfilled now. They are not. But they have begun to be fulfilled. The kingdom is coming in its fullness, for the King has come.

So there is an already-but-not-yet tension in the fulfillment of the New Covenant. All of God’s promises are already fulfilled in Christ because He sealed the blessings of the New Covenant by His blood, but they are not completely consummated yet. The full realities of the New Covenant await their complete consummation at the return of Christ. There is an eschatological fullness that we are still awaiting, even as we experience the blessings of the New Covenant in the Messiah here and now.

In the New Covenant, Jesus embodies the true covenant partner.

The standpoint of the New Testament, as it witnesses the first coming of Jesus Christ, is this: in the coming of the Christ, the end times have already begun. A new era has been initiated, the era of the New Covenant and Jeremiah’s promises, the era of consummation. From the perspective of the authors of the New Testament, all of this fulfillment hinges on Jesus Christ. From the beginning God’s intention in the covenant has been union and communion between Himself and man. God has sought a covenant partner, with whom He could share an intimate relationship of love with Himself. God has sought out a people to be His partner who is married to Him in a loving covenantal bond. After the presence of sin in the world, God has persisted in this great purpose, and in great love He has dedicated Himself to overcoming all sin so that it will be realized. Throughout covenantal history, from Adam to Malachi, God has sought this covenant partner. By the time we come to Jeremiah, and then to the time of the New Testament, we find a covenant partner who is utterly faithless. See Jeremiah 2:11-13.

So what did God do in response to this great wickedness? Here is the essence of grace. God did for us what we were unable and unwilling to do for ourselves. In covenant faithfulness God sent His own Son to be the true covenant partner. This was certainly not something Jesus had to do. By virtue of the Son’s divine nature and His essence as a member of the Triune Godhead, the Son already shared a perfect covenantal bond of love with His Father. But when Jesus became man, He took on full humanity so that He could fulfill the role of perfect covenant partner for our sakes. Matthew particularly displays this theme of the fulfillment of the true covenant partner. While Matthew uses the word “covenant” only in reference to the cup of sacrifice that Jesus offers at the last Passover, covenant themes abound in his gospel.

Look at Matthew 1:1 – right up front Matthew presents Jesus as the true son of Abraham and the true son of David. Matthew’s genealogy is selective. It is specifically calculated to show how Jesus is descended from Abraham and from David so that it will be obvious that Jesus fulfills all the promises made to Abraham and David. The story of the birth of Jesus in 1:18-25 shows how Jesus is the Messiah who is at the same time the son of man and also the Son of God. He is the son of man because He had a human mother who was a descendant of Abraham, and He is the Son of God because He has God for His Father, who sent the Holy Spirit to cause Mary to bear Jesus. Only if the Messiah is man and God can He do what God sent Him to do, which was, on the one hand, to embody the true human covenant partner and to die as a man for the sins of men, and on the other hand to be a perfect covenant partner and to die as the Son of God who could give infinite value to the sacrifice and atone the infinite wrath of an infinitely Holy God against men. Only the Son of God could be this Savior because He is the only one to whom the Father said, “Sit on my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool.” Only the Son of God could fulfill the promises made to David.

The angel made a promise to Joseph in 1:21. Jesus’ name in Hebrew was Joshua, a name especially chosen because it reflects the mission and person of God in the flesh as Savior and Suffering Servant. Here is the new Joshua, who delivers God’s people into the land and gives them the only true Sabbath rest. He will save His people from their sins, as Jeremiah predicted in 31:34. Jesus alone accomplishes this forgiveness.

When we come to Matthew chapter 2, we see salvation history re-enacted. Just as the Lord had called Abraham out of Ur to the east and brought him to the Promised Land to worship, so now God brings magi, Gentiles from the east, to worship God in the flesh in Bethlehem, the city of the Messiah. The promise made to Abraham is fulfilled in Jesus. All nations are blessed in Him, the true seed of Abraham. Here is a foretaste of what the prophets predicted – all the ends of the earth are seeing the salvation of the Lord and are being filled with the knowledge of God. He is the one whom the Gentiles seek. He is the Savior of all men, both Jew and Gentile.

The magi’s worship of the Lord Jesus angered a jealous pagan king ruling God’s people unjustly. This is just as it was during the time of the Pharaoh, when Pharaoh rose up and ruled over God’s people unjustly. God alone what the rightful King of His people, and He acted in righteous jealousy to rescue His people. God delivered His children from the murderous rage of the Egyptian king then, and He delivered His Son from the Judean king as well. God sent His Son into Egypt. While Jesus was in Egypt, Herod massacred the children of Bethlehem in his murderous rage and his serpent-like desire to crush the Son of the woman. This is the counterpart to Pharaoh’s murderous rage in Egypt when he sought to crush Israel and murder their children. After Herod’s massacre of the children, the one who would deliver many children of God was recalled from Egypt. In Matthew 2:15, Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1 and applies it to Jesus. Jesus is the true Israel, the true people of God. Like Israel of old who was baptized in the sea, Jesus passed through the waters of baptism. He is the exodus of God’s people. In Him is found deliverance from the murderous wrath of the prince of the power of the air. His heel was bruised by the serpent, but in the waters of baptism He crushed the head of the serpent.

Then suddenly in Matthew 3:13 the Messiah Jesus appears and presents Himself to John to be baptized. After John initially resists, Jesus prevails on him by saying that it is necessary because “it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness” (3:15). Jesus submits Himself to baptism not because He needs to repent of any sin, for He has none. He submits to baptism in order to signal that He will obey all the obligations of the Mosaic law and thus will fulfill all righteousness on behalf of His people. He would assume the obedience of God’s people as the true covenant partner, their representative who obeyed God in perfect righteousness.

At the close of Matt 3:17 we hear the Father speak to the Son in the presence of all and say that He is well-pleased with His Son. Finally, the Father has found a covenant partner, a true Son, with whom He is perfectly pleased. Here, in Jesus the God-man, is a fitting representative for the people of God.

In Matthew 4 we witness Jesus being driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, where He will be tempted by Satan with all the guile and charms the serpent offered Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Garden is no longer a lush Garden, however, for it has been transformed into a wilderness by sin. The first Adam failed miserably when he was offered something he could not have at the price of his very soul and at the price of the souls of his descendants. But now Jesus comes as the second Adam to do what the first Adam could not do. Jesus now succeeds and resists when He is offered something He could very well have at His own bidding. But unlike the first Adam whose choice resulted in the enslaving and death of a race, the second Adam brought life and freedom to a new race. Matthew is showing us Jesus as the second Adam who restores what the first Adam corrupted and ruined. The first Adam brought condemnation; the second Adam brought redemption. The first Adam failed as a covenant partner in the infancy of the covenant; the second Adam is the mature man who succeeded gloriously and overcame the serpent, whom He is now crushing under our feet.

What an amazing picture! Here is the true covenant partner. Here is the grace of God in action, with God sending His Son to do for us that which we could not do for ourselves and binding us, His bride, His covenant partner in Christ to Himself forever.

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In the New Covenant, Jesus accomplishes the perfect sacrifice for His people and inaugurates a new age.

The New Testament authors did not see Jesus fulfilling the New Covenant promises simply in His incarnation alone. It was not simply in order to appear in human flesh and do good deeds that Jesus became incarnate. Jesus came not just to make Christmas a reality. He came to make Easter a reality. Jesus came in the flesh to die on the cross of Calvary and then to rise again. In the biblical witness, the cross and resurrection are the focal point of the incarnation of our Lord. So, as the New Testament writers reflect and teach what it means that Jesus came in the flesh, it is the cross that captures their attention. According to the New Testament, it is the cross that seals the covenant purpose of God. It is the cross that consummates the Old Covenant and secures the promises that had been made for millennia. It is the cross that fulfills the types of priest and sacrifice and blood and temple. It is the cross and resurrection that secure the victory of the Son of God over the serpent’s rebellion. It is the cross and resurrection that seal the redemption of all those who are placed in Christ by faith and are given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

So the cross is the critical connection point between the Old and the New Covenants. At the cross the Lord Jesus enacted a perfect and final sacrifice for His people that seals God’s covenant purpose for all time. From the very beginning of redemption God’s covenant has been based on sacrifice.

In God’s covenant with Abraham, the idea of blood sacrifice is very prominent. Blood sacrifice is found in the animals that were sacrificed when God made His covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15; there the blood of the covenant represented an oath – as the Lord passes between the halves of the animals, He says, “Let what is done to these animals be done to me if I do not keep these promises that I am making in covenant with you.” And the idea of blood sacrifice is found in the bloody rite of circumcision in Genesis 17, by which God shows that sin must be cut off. And ultimately the idea of blood sacrifice is found in the great events of Mt. Moriah in Genesis 22 when Abraham went to shed the very blood of the son of promise, and by God’s provision sacrificed a ram instead.

Of course it was in God’s covenant with Israel that we see the idea of blood sacrifice most clearly displayed. When God first made His covenant with Israel in Exodus 24, He had Moses go through a procedure to formalize the covenant. After delivering the law and writing the law in a book and the people said, “All the Lord has said we will do,” Moses made sacrifices to the Lord and then took half the blood and sprinkled it on the people and said. See Exodus 24:8. The pouring out of the life blood of the animals signifies the only way of relief from the obligations of the covenant. O. Palmer Robertson writes that a covenant is a bond-in-blood, so it commits the participants to loyalty to the covenant on pain of death. “Once the covenant relationship has been entered,” he writes, “nothing less than the shedding of blood may relieve the obligations incurred in the event of covenantal violation.”

But then beyond that initial ceremony of sacrifice formally sealing God’s covenant, God in His law instituted the sacrificial system first in the tabernacle and later in the temple. The significance of the blood sacrifice system so elaborately detailed in the book of Leviticus was to show the severity of sin and the holiness of God. Sin cannot be tolerated in God’s people, and since God is holy, He requires that there be a penalty for sins committed. But the sacrificial system also signified grace to the people of God, for God made a way for there to be a continuing relationship between a Holy God and a sinful people. In the sacrificial system, the sinful people’s mediators – the priests – can interpose the blood of an animal to substitute for their own blood that should be shed for violation of the covenant law. So the covenant relationship can stand and continue because of the grace of blood sacrifice. God can have a people for His very own, even if that people is sinful, because blood is shed to cover and atone for their sins. This sacrificial system was at the very heart of Israel’s national life. It sustained Israel’s covenant relationship with a Holy God. The people lived by faith in their God, who promised to forgive their sins. That promise was visibly displayed to them in the blood of the animal sacrifices.

But as Israel’s history progressed, and it became increasingly clear that Israel’s evil heart of unbelief and lawless ways and idolatrous lives were driving her far from her covenant Head. A sacrificial system could atone for sins accidentally committed, but the sacrifices of bulls and goats could not change hearts. And a loyal and loving heart was what God was after all along in the covenant. God pursued Israel not so that He could bless her and then she could enjoy those blessings on her own terms and for her own sinful heart’s desire. But God pursued Israel like a suitor pursuing a beautiful bride so that Israel could truly be the people of the Lord, so that Israel could love the Lord God and cling to Him as redeemer and display His grace and kingly rule to the nations. The sacrifices could atone for sins committed along the way, but they could not change the hearts of the people of Israel.

And so as Israel grew hardened in sin and spiraled downward and eventually annulled the covenant, the prophets began to preach that a day would come when there would be one final, grand sacrifice that would replace all the old sacrifices and that would effect the ultimate forgiveness of sins that would indeed change the people’s hearts. That is the context for reading Isaiah 53, the greatest Messianic text of the Old Testament. A Suffering Savior would come and make His soul an offering for the sins of the people, and God would remember their sins no more (see 53:10-12). Jeremiah predicted in His great New Covenant prophecy – “I will forgive their iniquity, and their sins I will remember no more.”  Jeremiah foresaw this full forgiveness as the capstone of a new, unbreakable covenant. It would center in the work of the Messiah who would offer Himself as a sacrifice to the Lord in order to accomplish this amazing forgiveness.

This is what the Lord Jesus came to do on the cross. The authors of the New Testament understood that, and they called the death of Jesus on the cross a blood sacrifice, an atonement, a Passover lamb, a sprinkling of blood, a propitiation – all words that self-consciously connect the death of Jesus with the sacrifices of the Old Covenant. There is certainly no New Testament book that explains this more fully than the book of Hebrews.

According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jesus and His blood inaugurated the New Covenant. God had always required covenant mediators, but Jesus is God’s new mediator, and He unleashes a new power for forgiveness of sin and the transformation of hearts. Jesus does not just temporarily cover sins that were accidentally committed; He covers sins for eternity and changes men’s hearts so that they love Him and cling to Him in humble faith and obedience. Hebrews 7-10 describes how Jesus and His blood are essential elements of the New Covenant. The author quotes Jeremiah’s New Covenant text from 31:31-34 at length and declares that the New Covenant was fulfilled by the death of Jesus, for He was at the same time the great High Priest and also the sacrifice of atonement.
 
There were several inherent shortcomings in the Old Testament sacrificial system. First, the priests were sinners who had to offer sacrifices for their sins as well as for the people. But this weakness is addressed in the New Covenant. See Hebrews 7:24-27.

A second shortcoming, the sacrifices were really just tokens lacking any inherent power to cleanse or forgive the sinner. See Hebrews 10:4. So in Hebrews 7:18 the author describes the old covenant sacrifices as “weak and unprofitable” and in 9:13 as able only to accomplish ceremonial cleansing. The sacrifices of animals did not take away sin; they were powerless to do so according to Hebrews 10:11. The sacrifices only passed by sin, promising that someday God would cover the token. God, the sacrifices were saying, was making a promise to pay, but the promise was only as good as the money in the bank account. Christ Jesus is the fullness of the divine bank account. He is the One who came to make payment on all the tokens of sacrifice given under the Old Covenant.

A third shortcoming, the book of Hebrews shows us how the very structure of the Old Testament tabernacle served to keep sinners away from God rather than provide a way for sinners to come into His holy presence. Old Testament believers did not have the direct access that we are so comfortable with.  See 9:6-8. But now see 4:16 and 10:19-22.

Fourth, the constant repetition of sacrifices served only as a reminder of sin. Every time sin was committed, there had to be a new sacrifice offered. But once again, Hebrews shows us how the Lord Jesus made one final sacrifice of infinite value to atone for all sins both past and future. The death of Jesus on the cross was a sacrifice of infinite worth to atone for sin. See Hebrews 10:1-3.

The author of Hebrews includes three exhortations in chapter 10 that are fitting challenges for us in response to these truths:

First, let us draw near. This is an act of faith. In the New Covenant, God is no less holy, and we are no less sinful and defiled. To be in covenant with God is a fearful thing. It means obligation and obedience to God’s law. It is to have taken an oath that is broken only on pain of death. But consider the God with whom we are in covenant. His purpose in establishing the covenant is not to curse us but to bless us. He condescends to enter into relationship with us in order to redeem us from our sin. He knows we are weak. He knows we are prone to wander. He knows we are sinful. And in covenant faithfulness He has sent His Son to be a sacrifice for our bodies and souls. What more can He do? What more can the Father do than to bruise His Son in our stead?

Second, let us hold fast. If you are in Christ and in covenant with God, you must continue in the faith. Jesus said that “He who perseveres to the end will be saved.” To be in covenant with God means to persevere to the very end in covenant faithfulness. There is nothing magical about bearing the name Christian and being in church Sunday after Sunday. If you depart from the Living God and persist in a hard heart of unbelief, you will come under the curses God has promised. This is what Hebrews 10 goes on to say in 10:26-31. Blessings and curses are a necessary part of God’s covenant in every expression of it in Scripture.

But, again, God does not initiate His covenant so that He can curse unsuspecting, goodhearted people. God initiates His covenant so that those with evil hearts who hate their sin will be redeemed from their sin. In the New Covenant God has done everything necessary for His people to be fully saved until the very end. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ seals our salvation and provides everything we need to be completely saved – justified, sanctified, and glorified.

Finally, let us consider one another. Being in covenant with God has always been a corporate reality. That is, to be in covenant with God is not something you experience all alone. It is to be part of a people. Christ did not give Himself “just for you.” He gave Himself for His people. When Christ died and rose again, He began a new chapter for the people of God on earth, the chapter of the New Testament church. You are a part of that blood-bought, Spirit-empowered body, even now, 20 centuries after Christ. And to be part of the church God bought with His own blood is to draw near not by yourself but with a people drawing near, and to hold fast not by yourself but with a people holding fast.