New Covenant

Just yesterday, I preached about the New Covenant. Some church traditions celebrate Covenant Thursday on the day before Good Friday, which would be 09 April this year. I chose to hold our celebration before Palm Sunday, to kick off the Easter season. This way, before the Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter services … we remind ourselves what’s so special about the New Covenant.

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Putting Some More Passages Together

Deuteronomy 30 describes a time when God Himself will convert His people:

“If any of you are driven out to the farthest parts under heaven, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you.

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Read the series.

We all know that sin stops us from inheriting the kind of world God the Creator envisaged for us—a world of peace, joy, righteousness, justice, and glory, not to mention communion with the Lord Himself.

God set the world in motion, permitting the Fall and the devastation that it has brought in its wake. He made covenants with man, signposts and promises to the better world that He still intends to bring about:

Read Part 1.

When we examine the clear New Covenant passage in Jeremiah 31:31ff, we see that verses 31 and 32 name Israel and Judah as parties. We see also that it concerns the future (“the days are coming”), and that the NC will supersede in some way the Sinai Covenant. It is crucial to ask what the main promise of this covenant is, which is not difficult to ascertain. The New Covenant in the chapter concerns an internal or spiritual change in the elect of Israel.

I have been thinking for a while that it might be a good idea to write about the New Covenant. Although there seems to be little confusion about it in the minds of Jeremiah, Paul, or the author of Hebrews, it has become something of a bugbear among Dispensationalists. In this series I want to interact a little with their issues, but I also want to provide my understanding of the New Covenant, which, as it happens, adds one more alternative to the dizzying list already occupying the thought of many good men and women.

Biblical dispensationalism is not the easiest way to understand the Scriptures—but it is God’s way.

For example, the easiest way to “understand” the Book of Revelation is to spiritualize it, as literally thousands of Bible students have done for centuries. The more difficult way, and the way that guarantees God’s promised blessing to those “who [read] and those who hear the words of this prophecy” (NKJV, Rev. 1:3) is to recognize that Revelation is the capstone at the very top of the pyramid of written revelation, and that it builds upon and presupposes the truths revealed by God in the previous 65 books.

Revelation 2 and 3 can only be understood in the light of the book of Acts and the epistles, which offer God’s plan and purpose for the church. Revelation 4 to 19 deals with the application of the New Covenant to national Israel and her relationship to Gentile nations during the seven years that precede the second coming of Christ. Revelation 20 gives us the timing and duration of events during the kingdom that was offered to Israel by John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus in the light of numerous Old Testament promises.

Revelation 21 and 22 give us absolutely spectacular glimpses into the eternal state, which follows the 1,000-year kingdom of Christ upon the earth. Significantly, dispensational distinctions between the church (cf. Rev. 21:14), Israel (cf. Rev. 21:12, 13) and the Gentiles (cf. Rev. 21:24-26) are identified and confirmed.

So here is the divine challenge for understanding such complexities as the New (Abrahamic) Covenant: “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15). In this regard, it is no wonder that many Bereans “believed” and proved to be “more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica.” The reason? “They received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things [that Paul taught them] were so” (Acts 17:11, 12).