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#25: A New Covenant

Isaiah 25

Jul 26, 2015


by: Jack Lash Series: Isaiah 25 | Category: NT books | Scripture: Hebrews 8:8–8:12

I. Introduction
A. This morning we are examining a portion of Hebrews 8, but it is entirely a quote from Jeremiah 31.
B. Read Hebrews 8:8b-12
C. Review
1. Hebrews is a long letter written to a group of Jewish converts to Christ whose faith is being tested. They are showing signs of losing their grip on Christ, and the author is working very hard to convince them not to let go.
2. Their situation can be illustrated by a story of three teenaged boys who had an old rickety sailboat they would take out to sea. One day when they were several miles out, a Coast Guard cutter came by to warn them that there was a bad storm coming and the only way to escape it is to hop aboard and be taken to safety. One of the boys was scared by the storm report and happily climbed aboard the cutter, but his two friends refused and began to beg their friend to come back to the boat and not worry about the storm: “It’s a nice day, where’s this bad storm? And we don’t want to lose our boat! It’s never failed us yet. Come back and don’t be such a wimp!”
3. That’s the dilemma these Jewish Christians find themselves in as their old friends pressure them to come back to Judaism. And the author has been telling them just how foolish that would be. By returning to Judaism and its old covenant, they would not only be reverting back to an inferior vessel, but they’d be climbing back into a vessel that was about to sink.
4. The author has been contrasting the old covenant and new covenant, warning them that if they fall away from Christ they will be reverting not only to an inferior covenant, but to one that’s about to expire.
D. Background of Jeremiah 31
1. Historical situation: after many years of rebelling and idolatry, Jerusalem is about to fall to the Babylonians. God had raised up this vastly superior nation to bring judgment on His people.
2. The people are still resisting, but the prophet Jeremiah is calling them to give up.
3. The situation was very bleak, gloom and doom were in the air. It looked like it was all over.
4. To encourage the faithful, this is when God utters those famous words in Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Mainly He has the new covenant in mind.)
5. When Jerusalem finally fell and the city and its temple were destroyed, the Book of Lamentations was written as an expression of the misery they experienced.
6. You can see this despair also in Psalm 137:1–5, written in Babylon by those who were exiled there: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion (Jerusalem). On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill!”
a. They had lost the temple and the priesthood and the ceremonies and the sacrifices, and yet it was as if they had lost God Himself!
E. The Hebrew Christians to whom the letter to the Hebrews was written were being tempted not by some worldly or fleshly indulgence. They were being tempted by OT religion. They were being tempted to go back to things God instituted for the time before the coming of Christ, but were now expired.
1. How very clever Satan is!
a. He was, of course, eager to undo what God had done in subduing these Jews to Himself.
b. But he did not try to do so by tempting them to do things they recognized as evil. He did it by tempting them to do things which seemed right, which were Biblical, things God had said.
c. This is similar to his temptation of Jesus, using the Bible to try to trip Him up.
2. Satan still attacks Christians by appealing to the Bible — in wide variety of ways.
3. The answer the Holy Spirit inspires in Hebrews is also telling. The author doesn’t argue against from the NT against the OT. He argues from the OT itself against OT religion. He points to a passage in Jeremiah where the prophet predicts the coming of a new day and a new covenant, a covenant better than God’s covenant through Moses.
II. Explanation of Hebrews 8:8b-12
A. 8b “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 9 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 showed no concern for them, declares the Lord.
1. “they did not continue in my covenant”
a. One of the reasons the old covenant failed was because the people didn’t keep it.
b. Judges 2:10 “All that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.”
c. And they kept doing this. He kept giving them second chances and they kept failing.
d. Finally, God’s patience ran out...
2. “so I showed no concern for them”
a. You can see the divine exasperation in Jeremiah 15:1 “Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet My heart would not turn toward this people. Send them out of My sight, and let them go!”
b. This was the pattern of the OT, the old covenant. The people kept breaking God’s covenant. And after almost a millennium of it, God finally said, “I’m done with this. I’m going to make a new covenant, a different kind of covenant, one that will work.”
c. “What was needed was a new nature, a heart liberated from its bondage to sin, a heart which not only spontaneously knew and loved the will of God but had the power to do it.” – Bruce
d. And that’s exactly what God gave in the new covenant.
B. 10-12 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 11 And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. 12 “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”
1. Here we see several distinctives of this new covenant over against the old.
2. First, the law written on the heart
3. Second, the widespread knowledge of God
4. Third, the forgiveness of sins
5. But first I want us to notice this sentence in v.10: “I will be their God and they shall be My people.”
a. This is an expression of intimacy and bondedness.
b. On the surface in this context it seems as if this is a distinctive of the new covenant. But then we notice that this is the covenant formula even in the OT: e.g. Gen.17:7-8; Lev.26:12. How can this be explained?
c. Though the various covenants are different from one another, they are working toward one great goal of reconciliation between God and people. You can see it finally come to fruition in John’s vision of the new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21:3, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
C. The law of God written on the heart — “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts.”
1. What does it mean to have the law of God written on your heart? It doesn’t mean that our hearts are no longer deceitful and desperately wicked (Jer.17:9), but can be trusted to tell us what God wants us to do.
2. It’s referring to the change of heart God brings about by the power of His Spirit, when He causes us to love His law and His ways and His will.
3. Ezekiel 36:26-27 (prophesying about the new covenant, around the same time as Jeremiah) “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” (Cf. Ezek.11:19)
4. This doesn’t mean there was no ministry to the Spirit to write God’s law on people’s hearts in the OT (Who would dare to say that the author of Psalm 119 did not have the law of God written on his heart but that we do?). It matter of degree: the OT is characterized by little of this whereas the NT is characterized by much.
D. The knowledge of God — v.11 “And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”
1. Also a matter of degree. Only a few in the OT community really knew God, whereas many in the new covenant do — because of the new heart given by the Holy Spirit.
2. God was known not just by the prophets and a few others here and there, but the knowledge of God would be widespread.
E. The forgiveness of sins — v.12 “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”
1. This description of the new covenant raises the question: Wasn’t there forgiveness in the old covenant? Well, there was ceremonial forgiveness in the sacrifices, which pointed ahead to the forgiveness of Christ. But OT sacrifices were incapable of bringing about true forgiveness (this is covered in more detail in chapters 9 and 10).
a. All real forgiveness in the OT came from looking forward in faith to true sacrifice of the promised lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
b. Real forgiveness is found in the new covenant, the covenant of Christ, the covenant of the cross.
2. The point for the Hebrews was this: forgiveness cannot be found by leaving Christ. Even those in the OT who found it did so by looking forward to Him.
III. Attached to religion instead of to God
A. There were many obstacles to belief in Christ among the Jews.
1. One we don’t talk about often is their attachment to the old things and hesitation to let go to the religious patterns and structures that had meant so much to them.
2. This is what Jesus was talking about in Luke 5:38–39 when He says, “New wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”
3. Have you ever been offered a drink and replied, “No, thanks. I’m happy with what I have.” That’s is the analogy Jesus uses here to describe the Jews who wouldn’t accept Him.
4. Most first century Jews clung to their religion but not to their God. And when God showed up and announced that He was changing the religion, they refused to go along with it.
5. They were unwilling to give up their circumcision, their food laws, their ceremonies, their temple, their sacrifices, their priesthood, their sense of superiority over the other peoples of the earth.
6. They preferred their religion to the living God Himself!
B. We also can get attached to our religion instead of getting attached to God (they’re not the same thing).
1. There are many serious, devout Christians who love the Christian religion, but don’t love Jesus. They love the wineskins but not the wine.
2. They even believe the truth about Jesus, they just don’t know Him. (They’re not the same thing.)
3. One day there will be no more baptism, there will be no more Lord’s Supper, no more church officers, no more Sunday morning weekly services, or hymnals or SS or ladies’ Bible studies or youth groups. They will all be replaced by things much better, much to the chagrin of some who loved them too much.
IV. Comparative value
A. The key to making wise choices is being able to assess the various values of the differing options.
1. In Matthew 13:44-46 the pearl merchant knew that the value of the pearl of great price was far greater than the combined value of everything else he owned. The man who found the treasure in the field knew that the treasure was worth far more than all the rest of his possessions. And so they made the wise choice.
2. That’s why Paul prays in Eph.1:16-21 that the eyes of their hearts would be opened that they might see what hope and riches and power are theirs in Christ.
B. These Hebrew Christians had become unsure of the comparative value between Christ and all that they had possessed before having Him in their lives.
1. Paul had the opposite feeling. He was happy to let go of his Judaism in order to know Christ: Philippians 3:5–8 “...circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”
2. And so the author of Hebrews writes to his readers to remind them of the superior value of Christ.
3. And in chapter 8 he quotes from Jeremiah 31 to show them what they will lose if they go back: a new heart — alive to God, the personal knowledge of the living God, the forgiveness of sin.