Once again in Hebrews 8, now our second time in verses 6 through 13. Last week we looked at the covenant idea. And next week Lord willing we'll look at the promises of this chapter. And so what we did is we noted that in verse 6 the writer says, and this is a theme for the chapter, but as it is Christ has obtained a ministry that is much more excellent than the old.
As the covenant he mediates is better since it is enacted on better promises. Lord willing next week the better promises, though you'll hear a hint of that this evening. Last week the better covenant, Part 1, today the better covenant, Part 2. So we'll do a bit of review and we'll press forward on the subject of the old covenant and the new covenant and how they are similar and different and how it's better for us that Jesus has come.
So let's hear the word of God in Hebrews chapter 8 verses 6 through 13. And then we'll ask the Lord to bless us. Hear now the word of God. But as it is Christ has obtained a ministry that is much more excellent than the old.
As the covenant he mediates is better since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second. For he finds fault with them when he says, Behold, the days are coming to clear us the Lord. When I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.
For they did not continue in my covenant and so I should no concern for them to clear us the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days to clear us the Lord. I will put my law 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, No the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest.
For I will be merciful toward their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more. In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. Amen.
This is God's word. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we ask that you would be our teacher. We ask that you would help us by the Holy Spirit that you would enlighten the eyes of our hearts and the knowledge of Christ.
And so then help us to know the good we have in him. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. Our writer here quotes Jeremiah 31 at life, the prophecy of Jeremiah about the new covenant.
Now Jeremiah prophesied in the 600s. He was born after the Assyrian destruction of the northern tribes of Israel that happened in 722. And he prophesied before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. Remember where Daniel got taken by Nebuchadnezzar to the courts.
And he's looking ahead to that in much of his work, looks ahead to those horrible, terrible days. When people, his families will be ripped apart, people will be involuntarily exiled to other places and enslaved. And many will die in war. And it's just, it's just a terrible destruction that will come even to Jerusalem and to the temple that then had been built.
But he also prophesied of the new covenant that God would make with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. So what he does is he tells them that times are going to be terribly difficult, but God hasn't given up on you. And God will do something far better for you in the future. And that promise of the new covenant then was designed, among many other things, to reassure them.
And so give them hope in that better future. And hope is extremely important when you're slogging through the muck of life. I was reading that during a study at Harvard in the 1950s. Dr.
Kurt Richter placed rats in a pool of water to test how long they could tread water. On average, they give up in sync after 15 minutes. But right before they gave up due to exhaustion, the researchers would pluck them out, dry them off, let them rest for a few minutes, and put them back in for a second round. In the second try, how long do you think they lasted?
I mean, remember, they just swam to failure in a few short minutes, 15. So how long did they go the second time? 15 minutes? 10 more minutes?
Five more minutes? Well, 60 hours. 60 more hours of swimming. The researchers concluded that the rats came to believe that they would be rescued.
And so they were able to continue far beyond what they had first imagined. Now, I'm not suggesting that you and I are lads in an experiment, nor that the Lord leaves us to ourselves to live the Christian life, only popping in when we're sinking. But that when we're convinced that we are cared for, that the Lord is paying attention to us, is faithful to sustain us, and that he is faithful in his relationship to us, that he resources us with all that we need to go on, and that he has a better, brighter future for us, it helps in our weakness to persevere to the end. Hope does that.
And God's covenants point us to this faithfulness of God, the preserving grace of God, his sustaining and conquering grace, and his determination, despite his people's failures, to fully accomplish all his saving purposes. So we want to review a bit then, some of what we saw last week and also add to it in our study here of God's covenant, the way that he binds himself to his people. Now, last week we saw on verses 6 to 13 that the covenant Christ mediates is better, and that's the point of verse 6 as well, right? The new covenant mediated by Christ is better than the old covenant mediated by Moses.
That is different than saying the new testament is better than the Old Testament, because the old covenant, the writer speaks of here, is not the whole of the Old Testament. The old covenant he speaks of here in verse 9 is the covenant that, notice what he says, God, I, I made with their fathers on the day when they took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. So it's not that covenantal relationship he had with Adam and Eve after they fell and rebelled and he promised them a Redeemer. It's not that covenant relationship he made with Abraham when he promised that the Redeemer would come through his offspring.
It's 400 years later after Abraham that he's speaking here of the covenant he made with Israel with Moses as mediator. And that mosaic covenant, the old covenant, was never intended to be final. The prophets in fact told them, as Jeremiah pointedly does, and others do, that it was not final, that a new covenant was coming. That old covenant of course with Moses expanded true religion from the household, think of the households of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the nation, a whole nation of people that came out of Egypt and were established as a nation.
It transitioned things from the patriarchs to the people of Israel, but the new covenant is even more inclusive and it's for all nations. And the contrast the writer is making is not between the way of salvation in the Old Testament and the way of salvation in the New Testament. It's not that anybody was ever saved because of some flawed human priest offering animal sacrifices in their place in a tabernacle tent that traveled around with them. Nobody was ever ultimately truly spiritually saved by that entire ministry.
Hebrews 10, 4 says it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Nobody ever had their sins taken away because they killed all those beasts. Now, the contrast is between the administration of the way of salvation under Moses with its ceremonial law versus the administration of the way of salvation. Now that Christ has come under Moses, the ceremonies were shadows and types of the true reality, but not the true reality itself.
We saw that in verses one to five. Under Moses, salvation was offered by promises and pictures and copies of the true reality, which has always been Jesus. Think of the cross as something lifted high in a mountain in the middle of history. We look back upon Christ on the cross with the full light of God's finished revelation shining upon Jesus at his cross.
And his work looks forward and covers our yet future to him since. Where does the shadow then fall? It falls on the other side of the mountain and the shadow of the cross is what people had before Jesus came. His crosswork worked backwards and covered their sins.
We look ourselves back upon Christ. They look forward to Christ as all those pictures and promises pointed in beyond the copies and shadows they had before them. So we, of course, see more clearly than them. Our assurance has completed coming of Christ.
And once for all thetonement gives us a greater assurance than they had. Our invitation to come to God through the Lord Jesus is to come with greater boldness and confidence because access is in Christ. They did a very throne room of heaven where he has now ascended and been seated. There's a wider extravagance to the grace of God to the nations, not just to the Jews.
A greater power for each believer, a brighter clarity about the gospel. There's so many things that are better for us on this side because Christ is better. The promises are better. The covenant, the new covenant is better.
And so the point of the author of Hebrews, of course, was to remind them, don't turn away from Jesus. You've got nowhere else to go. And every point, Christianity is better than Judaism. Now, that seems arrogant to say to modern ears, I understand that.
Some people simultaneously want to say that all religions are equal and that none is necessary or true. Or believe whatever it is you want to believe or believe in nothing, it doesn't matter. But what you just can't say, some would say, is that something is true and real and better than anything else. The secular people think that's humble and the Christian position is arrogant.
But the reverse is actually true. How? Well, the Christian position would be arrogant if it was built on the opinions of people like me and you. But this isn't our idea.
This is God's idea. The church didn't make this stuff up. God revealed it in his word. And it's therefore humble to submit ourselves to his judgment on this issue.
If God says Jesus is better, it's humble for us to agree with him. The modern secular view is actually arrogant because it isn't actually listening to God in his word. Or even the religions he claims are all the same. I mean, you wouldn't find a believing Muslim agreeing that their way is just identical to and the same as and no better than the way of Christians or the way of Jews.
No, they wouldn't say that. So to say that all our equally valid is to close our ears to what God is actually saying and to reject Jesus is to say that God is wrong. And the writer here, that's not arrogant for him to say because everything is better in Jesus. So we speak in terms of the better ministry, the better covenant, the better promises because God speaks of this way.
Now, let me highlight again some of the things we saw last week and just push it forward and fill it out. Some of the things that he says about this first covenant and second covenant about ways that they're the same and different. In verse seven, notice this language. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.
Then having spoken of a first covenant in verse eight, he speaks of a new covenant. Notice that language, behold, the days are coming to close the Lord. When I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant. I made with their fathers on the day when they took them by the hand of bringing them out of the end of Egypt.
So God will establish a new covenant. And it's not like the prior covenant made with Israel when he rescued them from Egypt. So there's a first covenant, a second covenant. There's an old covenant and a new covenant.
The first covenant here mentioned is the covenant with God's chosen people through the mediation of Moses. It's all the old covenant and the mosaic covenant. The second is the new and it's the covenant God makes with all his chosen people, Jew and Gentile through the mediation of Jesus. And it's the one depicted here in Jeremiah 31.
So what the Bible here in Hebrews eight calls the first covenant or the old covenant, just to underscore, is not the covenant of grace. First announced to Adam and Eve, nor the covenant of grace, given to Abraham. God promised to them a redeemer. But the old covenant is that particular covenant God made 400 years after Abraham.
And it was good in its own way, in its own time, but just for a time. He doesn't say it was bad and the new is good. He says the new is better because the old was good for its season. That old covenant was a tutor to bring the people to Christ.
But what we have in Christ is better by far. So we can say that the new covenant then is actually the renewal of the covenant of grace made before the mosaic old covenant. And the new is the renewal of that covenant grace, which was increasingly portrayed and promised and depicted in God's covenant with Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham and Moses and David. And then in the prophets and then come finally in Jesus.
So there's an overarching continuity in the covenant of grace. Even while he can say it's better to have the new. We saw that last time. Then notice also here, some other things about this covenant, verse seven, if that first covenant had not been faultless.
There would be no occasion to look for a second. He says the first wasn't faultless. That's the mosaic. It wasn't faultless in the sense that it failed to do what God intended it to do.
It was a flawed that way. It faithfully delivered the moral law of God. And it graciously gave them the ceremonial laws about sacrifices by priests pointing to Christ. The point is that God never intended for all those rituals to be the ultimate thing upon which the people trusted.
They pointed to Jesus. Now second, notice that the old covenant had faultless that invited the longing for a second covenant. If that first covenant had been faultless, it would be a location to look for a second. In other words, even in the giving of it, the people were to look for, long for and expect something even better, something more.
Jeremiah spells it out. And so the writer is saying there's all kinds of advantages. And the people of God who believed God for hundreds of years from the time of Jeremiah had this greater, better hope. It's also that the fault isn't so much with the covenant itself, but with the people, verse eight.
He makes this very point, for he finds fault with them and of verse nine, for they did not continue in my covenant. The faultiness of the Mosaic covenant was not that God gave bad commands, but that the people had bad hearts. That the problem was not God or what he told them. The problem was the infidelity, the spiritual adultery, the idolatry of the people, always running after other gods, always seeking their satisfaction elsewhere, always seeking security of other people or nations or gods, other so-called gods because of the evil of the human heart.
And the Mosaic covenant didn't write the law of God as the author notes on their hearts. It wrote the law of God on tablets of stone. The central feature of the covenant God made with Israel through Moses was the revelation of his holy law. Not that it was given for the first time, not that it came into existence, but it was articulated in ten commands with very specific, appointed instructions and put on tablets of stone.
In Deuteronomy chapter 14, verse 13, it says this, and God declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the ten commandments, and he wrote them unto tablets of stone. So that one way to think about the Mosaic law as a covenant is that the covenant was the giving of the law. It was the giving of the ten commands. Mercifully you remember immediately after giving the ten commandments, and actually this 20 amount Sinai, the people heard the voice of God.
They saw the earthquake and the fire, and they feared, and they all stepped back from the mountain because when they heard the commandments, what did they hear? They heard guilty, guilty, guilty. I mean, whether they knew how they had broken these commandments themselves pointedly or between them and everybody else they looked at, they knew everybody had broken the commandments, and God says, this is my law. And so what did they do?
They stepped back and they said, Moses, you go up on the mountain and talk to God for us. Moses, you be our mediator with God. Moses did. God called Moses up and talked.
But immediately after the giving of the law, what did God tell them to do? Same chapter, I said, it's pointing. Immediately said, now I want you to build an altar. Why would they build an altar?
What's an altar for? It's for sacrifices. Why would you have sacrifices? Because you need the death of a sacrifice in substitute for you who are guilty and deserved that.
And so there was grace given, even as the law was given, and that whole system of priests and sacrifices in the temple was gracious pointing to Jesus. But there is this underlying theme in the giving of the law that is spelled out in other places across the scripture that speaks of the importance of obedience to the law and what you have if you do, in fact, perfectly obey the law. Remember that Adam in the garden had been warned of death if he disobeyed about the tree. So he was told to obey with the implication that you will continue to live in the garden of God as you continue to obey me.
Now listen to Leviticus 18, verse 5. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules if a person does them, he shall live by them. I am the Lord. Where is Ezekiel 20?
21. But the children rebelled against me. They did not walk in my statutes and were not careful to obey my rules by which if a person does them, he shall live. So you have this running theme about the law is good.
It's not bad. The problem is the heart and our inability to keep the law. But if you did from the heart in every way, keep the law. What I mean like Jesus did, loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and loving your neighbor as yourself, which is what the law is.
Well Paul in Romans 10, 5 says this, for Moses writes about the righteousness that's based on the law that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. The problem is there is not a person in the world outside of Jesus who does the law and therefore can have life by the law. Now we'll have to get our life, we'll have to get righteousness, we'll have to get acceptance for God in the righteous law keeping of another Jesus, accounted to us so that we might be clothed in his righteousness. Remember how Jesus spoke to the lawyer in Luke 10, behold the lawyer stood up and put him to the test saying, teacher, what should I do to a heritage or life?
And he says, what's written in the law? How do you read it? And he answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said to him, you have answered correctly, do this and you will live.
What's Jesus doing? He's not setting up an alternate form of salvation. He's telling the man to do that what she knows he can't do and hasn't done in order to cut him off with the knees. He's saying to the man, don't you see that you haven't done the law?
What you need is me. What you need is my grace. The law tells you how to live and be righteous, but the law can't declare you righteous if it breaks, if you break it. And it can't give you new life to help you and you deserve death because of breaking it.
And it can't give you power to keep it. So everyone was guilty before the law and helpless before the law as we all are. But in the new covenant, the covenant of grace, pardon is provided in Christ and power provided by his spirit in the law. So we'll see next week is not written on tablets or stones written on the heart.
But then also, notice this. The old covenant was more exclusive and the new covenant is far more inclusive. The old covenant was established with who? God's chosen descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph, whom he brought out of slavery in Egypt to his holy mountain.
That language of God made it with his people and he constituted as a nation Israel. Yes, outsiders could be brought into Israel and some were, famous examples of course, is that some of the Egyptians and probably other slaves of other nations went out with Israel when Moses led them out of slavery and into the Promised Land. We know many, many others went with them. They said, yeah, let's get out.
Pharaoh's a cruel taskmaster. Other examples are Rahab, the prostitute, Ruth, the Moabites. But still, Moses said, you need to become Jewish. If you want to join in the people of God of the Old Testament, well, you need to get circumcised, you need to practice all of our customs and everything else.
Now notice who the new covenant is directed to, verse 8. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord. When I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel, with the house of Judah. Now, as you may or may not recall it, one time the nation of Israel was united.
However, after Solomon's death, his worthless sons took over and the next thing he knew, the nation of Israel had split into the northern tribes and the southern kingdoms. Ten northern tribes called Israel, two southern kingdoms called Judah. As we said by the time of Jeremiah, the Assyrians had decimated the ten northern tribes, nearly a hundred years prior. You've heard of the ten lost tribes of Israel, because most of the people were exiled and never returned, they simply disappeared into the Assyrian Empire.
Those who remained were actually purposefully left in the north by the Assyrians and were intermarried with the pagans of Samaria. They became a nation of, well, half-breeds, so to speak, not pure blood in Israelites, and the quote unquote pure blood despised them for it, such that the Samaritans were the enemies of the people of God in the days of Jesus. And not only were they quote unquote not pure blood, but they became idolators, mixing pagan religion with bits of Judaism. And so what does Jeremiah do?
He records a promise here, look to the day when the new covenant will be established with who Israel and Judah and Israel, that's already been decimated and disappeared. And where they are identifiable, they're half blood. In other words, Jeremiah looks to the day when the pure bread and mixed breeds will be reunited. True Jews and non-Jews, God-worship-person-indolators, Jews and pagans.
We might say Jews and Gentiles, people from every tribe and tongue and nation and language. This is why missions are so important. The new covenant is inclusive. It's inclusive of all the nations.
We'll see more on that next week. And then lastly, notice this. And next week again, we'll look at all the promises in particularity. But notice lastly that the old covenant he says verse 13 is obsolete, but the new covenant endures.
Notice that language verse 13. And speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete, and what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. So the old and the new overlapped for a season during the early decades after the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus until the year AD 70 when history confirms to us the Roman army invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, killed the priests, ended the sacrifices. And without a temple and a priesthood and its sacrifices, there could be no old covenant.
It was finished. It's a remarkable fact of history that the Jews since that first generation after Jesus have never practiced their religion in the way Moses commanded. They're simply incapable of doing so. Yet when Hebrews was written, the temple had not yet been destroyed, so the priests continued to offer animals.
And so some of the people, the authors writing to, would be tempted to go return to that, tempted to return because it's still happening within sight, within the sound of their ear, within the smell of their nose. They had a far stronger temptation to turn back to Judaism than you and I probably have ever faced. The Old Testament commentator, Dalich says this, yet the temple service, though to continue it may be a few years longer in Outward splendor. He says, is only a bed of state on which a lifeless corpse is lying because it no longer was effective for its original purpose because Christ came in fulfillment of it all and put it into it.
And so what a glorious thing is to live on this side of the cross. There's tremendous liberty for us. I don't think we can even conceive of how free we are in Christ by comparison. No involved ritual ceremonies, no exacting demands for unblemished animals, no bloody offerings in death, no constant repetition of sacrifices for the same sins year after year after year.
No need to distrust the very human priests representing us to God who might be chumps since Jesus, the God man is wholly innocent, undefiled and our true great high priest. No wonder if God hears the intercessions of our priest for ours is in heaven, God in the flesh. It would be difficult to overstate how radically different the practice of the Christian religion is from that practice of the people of God under the old covenant and how much more we enjoy. The new continuous, the old, is obsolete because our new covenant mediator lives forever and is able to say to the uttermost any and all who come to God through him.
Let's pray. Father, thank you for the gift of your son, our great high priest. We thank you for his once offering himself for all, each and every one of our sins. Help us to know there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
In his name we pray. Amen. Amen.