Hebrews 8:7-12
The New Covenant

As a preparation for the Lord's Supper I direct your attention to a scripture we read for Wednesday Bible Study. Here, the Hebrew writer quotes an OT scripture from Jeremiah 31 where God promised through the prophet that he would one day make a new covenant with his people. Anytime an OT scripture is quoted in the NT it suggests that here is a scripture that is an extra important one, significant enough to be quoted twice in the Bible. Here is the longest OT scripture quoted in the NT. Let's see what we can briefly learn from it and relate it to the Lord's Supper.

Observe that God says that the new covenant he will make with his people will not be like the one he made with them at Mt. Sinai, the one called the Law of Moses. It is a very important and often unknown fact that God says his new covenant is distinctly different from the old one. The new covenant system Jesus brought is not like that old one God gave through Moses. Too many Christians today do not recognize the true distinction, exactly what is the distinction and that the distinction between the old covenant and the new one is the difference between day and night. Too many think of the NT as just a new set of rules to replace the old ones and the new covenant to be a new set of laws to take the place of the old ones. But God who made both covenants and initiated both of them said that the new one would not be like the old one. And he lists the differences.

First, under the new covenant, the law would be written on or implanted in their hearts. This means more than that his people would memorize his word. They could do that and were encouraged to do that under the law of Moses. Under the new covenant something would happen to the heart, inside, in the inner man. God would write or stamp his word and his will and his character on the heart, on the very soul of a man so that it would be a part of the person himself. The motivation for doing God's will would not be a mere external commandment written on stone, but it would be an inner urge coming from within his own heart.

Now how does God go about writing his will on our hearts? First, he touches our hearts with the gospel of Jesus Christ which they did not have under the old covenant. There is something about the gospel that affects our hearts and creates love (the summary and the fulfillment of the law) in our hearts and which therefore as it were writes God's law upon our hearts. Under the new covenant, therefore, God puts his law inside us so that there is something inside us that has the desire to obey God do his will. Second, God gives us the Holy Spirit to dwell in our hearts. Read Ezek. 36:36-27; Romans 5:5; 2 Cor. 1:22; Gal. 4:6; Eph. 3:17. The law was externally written. The motivation came only from external sources. But under the new covenant, God is able to make his law and his will a part of our hearts. God provides an inner motive and natural urge to obey that wasn't given to those under the old covenant.

And God mentions a second distinction between the old covenant and the new. This second distinction has to do with the knowledge of God, knowing God. Now, even under the old covenant, there was hardly anything more important than the knowledge of God. Jeremiah himself stresses this fact. See Jer. 9:22-23. And under the old covenant, it was at least to some extent possible to come to know God.

But under the new covenant this knowledge would not depend so completely on human communication and external teaching... Under the new covenant the knowledge of God, getting to know God seems to depend less on men and more on God. God himself enables his saved people to know him just by virtue of what he does through the gospel of Jesus. Immediately, we come to know God just by virtue of what he has done. And then he also gives us the Holy Spirit which is a divine help to getting to know the word and the person of God. And further, under the new covenant, this knowledge of God would be universal... and extend to all God's people. Jesus said... Jn. 17:3... So when we are given eternal life, this is the key to getting to know God. And all who become Christians receive this knowledge.

There is a third distinction between the covenants... Hebrews 8:12. Under the new covenant God will... Under the law of Moses, there was a type of forgiveness, but it was an imperfect and incomplete forgiveness. Read Hebrews 10:1-4. There was a remembrance of sin every year. Could it be said that God remembered the sins of the people again every year because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin? Here is a tremendous difference between the two covenants. Under the new covenant there was full and complete forgiveness while under the old one there wasn't.

Here we see more clearly why God could say that the new covenant would not be like the first one. And the reason he says it would not be like the first one was because they did not keep the first one (8:9). God had to find some solution for their sins and infractions and law breaking under the first covenant. His solution was to provide a way to forgive our sins. He did that of course, by sending Jesus who lived a perfect life and volunatarily died as a payment not for his sins but for the death penalty we owed for our sins.

The old covenant was human oriented and performance oriented. It required a perfect performance from each of us. Lev. 18:5.

The new covenant was much more God oriented. It explained what God was going to do for us and how he was going to provide a forgiveness for us... Paul describes it as a righteousness from God that gives us forgiveness when we trust in what God has done through Jesus. And he describes it this way... Gal. 3:10-13...

The night Jesus was betrayed the Bible says... Mark 14:24. Jesus was announc- ing that the new covenant predicted by Jeremiah was about to begin. It is a better covenant with better promises, the promise of a new and changed and empowered heart, the promise of the knowledge of God, and the promise of the forgiveness of sins. We should remember this as we partake of the Lord's Supper.