Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. In Hebrews chapter 8, we see how Jesus, as the high priest, mediates a better covenant based on better promises. What happens is that it renders the old Mosaic covenant obsolete. But you know that Pastor Paul isn’t going to stop there. Here we go. Hebrews chapter 8: A Primer on God’s Covenants.

Hebrews chapter 8 seems like the right time to stop and talk about a key idea in this letter, throughout the Bible really, expressed by the word covenant, which is used about 20 times in the book of Hebrews, for one place here in chapter 8, verse 6, where it says, Now Jesus, our high priest, has been given a ministry that is far superior to the old priesthood, for he is the one who mediates for us a far better covenant with God, one based on better promises. Twenty minutes. I’m going to try and summarize this big biblical concept, thus the title, A Primer on God’s Covenants. Wish me luck. Overall, depending on the translation you’re reading, the term covenant is used about 300 times in the Bible, but it’s not really a word much in use anymore. A covenant is usually defined as a binding agreement between two parties regarding a common goal.

When it is used in our modern world, it’s usually in the context of marriage. Marriage is a covenant, or should be, a binding agreement between a man and a woman regarding the goal of creating a family. That covenant requires each party to promise certain things. These are stated by the marriage vows and is sealed by a sign, commonly the exchanging of rings and the signing of a document. It’s a personal binding agreement between a husband and wife. In the Bible, we see lots of examples of covenants, not just in marriage, but in friendship, as between David and Jonathan, for example, between kings with treaties of cooperation and defense, but also, interestingly and most significantly, covenants between God and people.

Some of the covenants we see in the Bible between God and people were conditional, while others were unconditional. In a conditional covenant, the success of the agreement is dependent on both parties holding up their end of the bargain. But in some cases, God made unconditional covenants, which were solemn promises He vowed to honor regardless of the faithfulness or unfaithfulness of men. People who like to try and systematize God’s relationship with man as it unfolds throughout the Bible often do so through these different covenants, implied or expressed. For example, at the very beginning, when God first created humans, He placed them in a beautiful garden called the Garden of Eden. There was a covenant then between God and Adam and Eve that was conditional.

Some theologians call this the Edenic covenant. The first man and woman had certain responsibilities and prohibitions if they wanted to stay there and in that close relationship with their Creator. They broke that covenant with God, as you probably know. There’s also the covenant God made later with Noah after the great flood. That one was unconditional because God promised Noah and his descendants He would never destroy the earth again that way, and gave them the perpetual sign of the rainbow as a seal of His promise. Maybe you’re familiar with the Abrahamic covenant, this time between God, Abraham, and certain of his descendants, the line that ran through his son Isaac and grandson Jacob and became what we now call the Jewish people.

Importantly, this was an unconditional covenant. God chose this one man, made huge promises to him, namely that he would make his family into a great nation, that he would give them a specific piece of real estate as an everlasting inheritance, that is the land of Canaan, even spelling out its borders, and also, most importantly, that he would bless all nations on earth through them. We understand that part to be a reference to the fact that Jesus, the Messiah of the world, the Savior, came from this family, the Jewish people. This all was a very solemn covenant God made with Abraham around 4,000 years ago, sealed by sacrifices and the ongoing sign of circumcision to his descendants. You can find this covenant described in full in Genesis chapters 12 through 17.

Another major and consequential covenant mentioned often in the Bible, and again in view here in Hebrews especially, is the Mosaic covenant, a later binding agreement between God and the nation of Israel as they prepared to enter their promised land. This one was a conditional covenant. God promised the Jewish people he’d bless them like no people had ever been blessed before if they honored its terms, but if they didn’t, that they would be driven from that land and suffer serious consequences of judgment. You can read the terms spelled out very clearly in Deuteronomy chapter 28. When he had finished reading the terms, Moses told Israel this. Today I am giving you a choice between life and death, between prosperity and disaster.

For I command you this day to love the Lord your God and keep all these commandments, decrees, and regulations by walking in His ways. If you do this, you will live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you and the land you are about to enter and occupy. But if your heart turns away and you refuse to listen, and if you are drawn away to serve and worship other gods, then I warn you now that you will certainly be destroyed. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you are about to make. Oh, that you would choose life so that you and your descendants might live. And all the people answered with one voice, We will do everything the Lord has commanded us.

Of course, we know in time they didn’t, which centuries later led to the nation of Israel being driven from their land. And even worse, when a remnant returned and were occupying the land again, that generation, which was the generation that witnessed the coming of Jesus, most of them rejected Him as their Messiah, and Israel ceased to be a nation shortly thereafter. It wasn’t a nation in their promised land again until the middle of the 20th century, in fact. And all that happened during that long period was a result of their breaking the terms of that conditional covenant we call the Mosaic Covenant. Once it was broken beyond repair, that conditional covenant was finished. The writer of Hebrews uses the term here, obsolete, in our chapter.

It no longer has any application. Some imagine that was the end of God’s relationship with the Jewish people, but it wasn’t. One of the reasons for that is right here in chapter 8. For most of this chapter, the author is quoting the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who lived in the 6th century BC and who recognized Israel’s failures and saw their awful coming consequences. But even then, he assured the Jewish people that God would not permanently forsake them. Listen as he quotes from the prophet Isaiah: The day is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah.

This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt. That’s the conditional Mosaic covenant. They did not remain faithful to that covenant, so I turned my back on them, says the Lord. But this is the new covenant I am making with the people of Israel after those days. Then I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people, and they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will anyone need to teach their relatives, saying, You should know the Lord, for everyone from the least to the greatest in that generation will know me already, and I will forgive their wickedness and I will never again remember their sins.

Question: Why is the author of Hebrews quoting that Old Testament passage right here in the middle of his arguments about Jesus and what he accomplished being far better than the Old Testament religion of Judaism, Jesus and his once-for-all sacrifice being far better than the continual sacrifices that had to be offered in the temple, Jesus and his eternal priesthood being far better than the temporary human kind of priesthood at the heart of the Jewish religion? Answer? Because it’s all very connected. Many Christians do not understand or respect this connection. It’s for some reason becoming very acceptable to say that the Jewish people are not special to God anymore, that they have been permanently rejected by Him and replaced by the church as God’s special people.

More alarming, I’m beginning to see and hear downright anti-Semitic language and attitudes coming from people who call themselves Christians. In some extreme cases, the exact kind of poisonous language and attitudes used in Nazi propaganda, which led to the horrific Holocaust last century. It’s amazing to hear this stuff. There’s always been an undercurrent of anti-Semitism brewing just below the surface, right? But when Israel was attacked in October 2024 by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, who killed 1,200 people at a music festival and nearby kibbutzes and carried off 250 more as hostages, the nation of Israel responded with force, and rightfully so, just as Abraham did when his family was attacked long ago, as we saw last lesson. That operation in Gaza really ignited the current flare-up of anti-Semitism that’s gotten open and loud today.

If you’re paying attention at all, you’ve no doubt heard them spouting conspiracy theories about secret cabals of Jewish bankers who run the world and claiming the people in Israel now are not even really Jews, but some kind of mongrel pretenders. You’ve had to have seen the big demonstrations on American college campuses, making martyrs out of Hamas terrorists and chanting, Death to Zionism. Zionism has been the movement to reclaim the land of Israel for the Jewish people, if you’re unfamiliar with that term. The new anti-Semitism is just as demonic as any in the past. And if you know anything about biblical prophecy, you have to wonder, where is this all leading? Those of us who take biblical prophecy seriously know the Jewish people will again be targeted in the last days by the Antichrist.

We’ll learn all about that when we get to Revelation chapter 12. Is that what we are seeing set up here today? Are we seeing the beginnings of that movement? Man, it makes me wonder. And it’s the reason that I wanted to address this today. No real Christian should ever get anywhere near this twisted ideology.

Our Savior came from the Jewish people. All the apostles and all the founders of the church were Jewish men and women. Israel is the center of the earth as far as God is concerned, and Jerusalem, He declares, is His own city forever. Yes, the failures of Jesus’ generation and those before, especially the religious leaders in the first century, threw wide open the gates of the kingdom to us Gentiles. But remember, even from the cross, Jesus prayed for His enemies, Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.

And on the church’s birthday, Peter preached in Jerusalem that the nation’s leaders had acted in ignorance and urged them to repent and accept Jesus as their Messiah, imagining if they would, the kingdom of God on earth could have somehow dawned then. They didn’t, for the most part. So since then, we have been in a period when God is building the church. Believers, both Jews and Gentiles, something distinct from the nation of Israel, but not opposed to it, nor certainly replacing it. The apostle Paul, writing on this very subject in Romans chapter 11, says, Some of the people of Israel have hard hearts, but this will only last until the full number of Gentiles comes to Christ, and then all Israel will be saved. As the Scriptures say, the one who rescues, that is, the returning Messiah Jesus, will come to Jerusalem, and he will turn away Israel from its ungodliness.

And this is my covenant with them, that I will take away their sins. Don’t miss his reference to God’s covenant with Israel there. Then he goes on, Many of the people of Israel are now enemies of the gospel, as Paul himself had been, and this benefits you Gentiles, he says. Yet they are still the people God loves, because he chose their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. Irrevocable. Paul is underscoring the unconditional nature of God’s promises made to the Jewish people long ago, that God, who always keeps his word, will honor.

So listen, this anti-Jewish nonsense that’s going on right now has no place in the heart of any real believer. Going further than that, the author of Hebrews here in chapter 8 is reminding first-century Jews what God had promised them through the prophet Jeremiah. The day is coming, he says, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. We tend to think about the benefits of the new covenant as being for us Gentiles, at least for the people who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ. But that is far too narrow. Jesus was and is the Jewish Messiah.

When he sat with his Jewish disciples eating the Jewish Passover, the night before he went to the cross, he told them that what he was about to do would inaugurate this new covenant. That’s the same covenant Jeremiah is promising to the Jewish people. When Jesus passed the cup of wine among them, he told them, This cup is the new covenant between God and his people, a covenant confirmed by my blood. Whenever we celebrate communion today, it’s a renewal of vow ceremony. It’s a reminder of the fact Jesus inaugurated the new covenant when he died for sins on the cross, when he died as the final and complete Passover sacrifice. The ramifications of that new covenant are many and profound.

Yes, it means, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, that the sacrifices and priesthood and Old Testament religion are over, and that the far better promises of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus, the complete forgiveness of sins, the inward transformation of our hearts, and now direct access we have to God through Christ have come. These and many more benefits of the new covenant are now available to anyone who will accept Jesus Christ. But, but, it also guarantees the ultimate fulfillment of all God has promised to his chosen people, Jeremiah is saying. At that Last Supper, Jesus told his very Jewish disciples, The next time we sit down together like this for a meal, it will be in my Father’s kingdom. And he was talking about the kingdom promised to the Jewish people, where he would one day rule as king, the future millennial kingdom.

That will be the fulfillment of another covenant, actually, one with King David I didn’t even mention before. Another unconditional covenant made with the Jewish people that a day would come when one of King David’s descendants would be a king forever and rule in righteousness and justice. I kind of hate to point this out, but most of the covenant promises in the Bible are to the Jewish people, and at best, we Gentiles are co-beneficiaries of them. For example, this new covenant Jesus inaugurated through his death and resurrection, we can become co-beneficiaries of it through receiving Christ as our Lord and Savior. And then, as the Apostle Paul describes it, we will be grafted into the historic people of God. Israel is like a tree God has been tending forever, he reminds us in Romans 11.

So we Christians should not have some kind of attitude toward the Jews. Through faith in Christ, we too can, these are his words, receive the blessing God promised to Abraham and his children, sharing in the rich nourishment from the root of God’s special tree. I’m talking now from Romans chapter 11, where Paul uses that metaphor of Israel being like an ancient olive tree that God has been tending for a long time. But you must not brag, he writes there, about being grafted in to replace branches that were broken off. You were just a branch, not the root. The reality is God’s love for the Jewish people runs very, very deep.

He’s made big, irrevocable promises to them, one of which is that the land of Canaan belongs to them as an eternal inheritance. I hope you realize that, as we’ve witnessed the Jewish people returning to that land after thousands of years of exile, the Aliyah, as it’s called, there’s nothing short of a miracle happening. It’s just been since 2023 that once again the majority of Jews on planet Earth live in their ancient land. That’s the fulfillment of promises God made through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other Old Testament prophets who wrote that Israel would return there again, even after their judgment and exiles. It’s what Ezekiel’s vision of the resurrected dry bones was all about. It’s the Great Shepherd calling back His sheep in Ezekiel 34, where it reads, For thus says the Lord God, behold, I myself will search for my sheep and seek them out.

I will deliver them from all the places to which they were scattered. I will gather them from all the peoples and gather them from the countries and bring them again to their own land. And the promise is that when they are back in their own land, according to Amos chapter 9, I will bring my exiled people of Israel back from these distant lands, and they will rebuild their ruined cities and live in them again. They will plant vineyards and gardens, and they will eat their crops and drink their wine. I will firmly plant them there in that land. They will never again be uprooted from it.

I have given them my word, says the Lord God. True, the book of Revelation does tell us about a brief time in the future, tribulation era at the end of this age, when the Jewish people will become targets and scapegoats again for the world’s problems, become the object of the Antichrist’s hatred and persecution. But that’s when Jesus, their Messiah, will make his promised return to rescue them, the second coming of Christ. And then all Israel will be saved, Paul wrote. All the living Jews on earth at that time will embrace Jesus as their Messiah and Savior, Savior literally. And that’s when the kingdom of God on earth will dawn, and God will fulfill all the promises he has made to them since the time of Abraham.

Jesus the Messiah will rule over the nations from the city of Jerusalem then, from the throne of his father David, and all the nations of the earth will go up to Jerusalem to worship. That will be the millennial kingdom era, a time when prolonged peace and justice will reign over the earth. And that will be the fulfillment of the new covenant the writer of Hebrews is reminding his readers here is coming. Then says the Lord, I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts, and I will be their God and they will be my people. They will not need anyone to teach them about God, nor will they need to tell their relatives, You should know the Lord, for everyone from the least to the greatest will already know me, and I will forgive their wickedness forever, and I will never remember their sins again. That’s the happy ending.

That’s the ultimate fulfillment of all God’s covenant promises. Thanks for listening. This has been Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. Covenants. You know, we’ve lost sight of the importance of the covenant, marriage for one.

It was never intended as a conditional covenant, but as our vows do say, till death do us part. As Paul said, most of the covenants were made between God and the Jews, but even though as Gentiles we’re promised to be grafted into the historic people of God, we often stand like a defiant child who, although was picked last for the team, allows pride to hinder the joy of playing and being part of the team. The question is, are you one of those? You see, a covenant is a contract, it’s a pact, it’s an agreement, it’s a deal, and it’s an arrangement. How does your life fare when it comes to your word? Because you see, God keeps His word.

Do you?