Heb. 8:10-13 – The New Covenant vs. The Old (Part 2 - Promises)

Translation & Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church of Manhattan, KS, 21 Apr. 2019

Omitting Greyed-out Text should bring presentation time down around 45 minutes.

Intro:

• Pearl S. Buck is probably best-known for her novel The Good Earth. What is probably lesser-known about her is that she was a missionary to China for some time. Later in her life, however, she resigned from missions. She wrote, “My conscience moved me to return to my parents. I did not want to be a missionary for I knew I could never preach or persuade people to change their religion. I had not the spiritual attitude which could make it possible for me to proclaim my religion superior to all others.” The same theology that changed her mind toward the equality of all religions has infected our whole nation such that sharing the good news about Jesus is considered in our culture today to be an act of intolerant bigotry on the level of a hate crime.

• Is there any integrity in saying that Christianity is better than any other religion? The Bible says, “Yes there is!” and the book of Hebrews gives us reason after reason why this is so. The reason that is introduced in chapter 8 is based on the superiority of the New Covenant.

• Last week, I tried to provide a general overview of covenant theology. The following quote from the famous Puritan commentator John Owen might be one way of summarizing it: “Every covenant between God and man must be founded on and resolved into promises… The being and essence of a covenant lies in the promise; hence they are called the ‘covenants of promise” in Ephesians 2:12… The covenant of God is founded on grace, and consists essentially in a free, undeserved promise… This covenant... confirmed by the blood of Christ, doth not depend upon any condition or qualification in our persons, but on a free grant and donation of God…”

• This week, I want to get more into the details of the New Covenant as prophecied by Jeremiah and as instituted by Jesus.

• At the same time, we have to limit ourselves to what the author of Hebrews was trying to do with this quote from Jeremiah. For instance, there are folks who try to get their doctrine of baptism from this passage, but I see no indication that either Jeremiah or the author of Hebrews were even thinking about baptism when they wrote these passages, so I want to be careful not to try to make this passage carry more weight than it was designed to carry.

• Hebrews 8:8-12 seems to me to be an original translation into Greek of the Hebrew text of Jeremiah 31:31-34, with a couple of nuances that add emphasis to the author’s point without actually being an unfaithful translation.

• The main point of Hebrews is to talk folks out of the notion that Christianity was a passing fad or that Jesus was inferior to the Old Testament priests. This is a call to commit to Jesus rather than to a Christless Judaism.

• This is approached in chapter 8 through the labels the Bible gives to God’s covenants. The apostle explores the implications of the fact that, in the prophecy of Jeremiah, God used the word “New” when speaking of making a “new covenant” even though there was already at least one covenant in force at the time. This becomes yet another argument in favor of Christianity over Judaism¹.

• We’re starting back in at the middle of chapter 8, so let me start reading from v.7 for a little context: “7 For if that first [covenant] were problem-free, no occasion would have been sought for a second one, 8 yet when He identifies the problem He says to them, “Look, days are coming, the Lord says, when I will complete with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah a new covenant, 9 not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers during the time of me grabbing their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, which, as for them, they did not remain in my covenant, and as for me, I was unsympathetic toward them,” says the Lord….” (NAW)

v.10 “such that this is the covenant which I will contract with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord, giving my laws into their understanding I will indeed inscribe them upon their hearts, and I will be to them for a God and, as for them, they will be to me for a people.

• God begins describing the terms of this new covenant positively in v.10, beginning with three things He promises to do, the first two of which are in parallel. This is followed by three terms which the people-group of the new covenant would fulfill, the last two of which are in parallel, forming a chiasm:

1. God will give His laws into their understanding

2. God will inscribe His laws upon their hearts, and

   1. God will fulfill the role of God to the people

   2. They will fulfill the role of a people for God

1. They will not tell their neighbor to do research on God

2. They will know God

• The final verse quoted in the covenant passage offers two more parallel promises from God to “be merciful… and remember their sins no more.”

• Notice the prominence of knowledge and understanding as a basis for God’s covenant.

  • God starts with a body of data which He composed – His “law” – and “gives” it to His people, putting it into the part of their “mind” that understands things and “writing” it on their “hearts” – like a laser onto a hard drive – so that God’s way of thinking about things – His laws – become part of their thinking processes too.

  • (Nowadays we think of the heart as being the seat of feelings separate from the intellect, but in Bible times, it was not so much that way, so I think it’s barking up the wrong tree to look for differences in meaning between these two parallel phrases about God’s law in the “mind” and “heart.”)

  • God promises to put His “code” into all the thinking and feeling of His people group such that they will know Him – so well that they don’t have to inculcate that knowledge in each other! This is pictured as the essence of being God’s people and having Him for a God.

    • cf. Ezekiel 36:26-27 “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.” (KJV)

    • “[B]y the laws of God are meant – not the precepts of the ceremonial law, which were now abrogated, but – either the moral law... or else, since the word "law" signifies sometimes no other than a doctrine, an instruction, the doctrines of grace, of repentance towards God, of faith in Christ, and love to him...” ~John Gill

    • “He makes no mention of any difference of ordinances, but points out the mode of its being given: for ‘no longer,’ he says, ‘shall the covenant be in writings, but in hearts.’ Now, let the Jew show that this was ever carried into effect; he can’t, for it was made a second time in writings after the return from Babylon. But witness that the Apostles received nothing in writing, but received [it] in their hearts through the Holy Ghost. Wherefore also Christ said, ‘When He cometh, He will bring all things to your remembrance, and He shall teach you.’” (John 14:26) ~Chrysostom

v.11 And they shall never teach - each one his fellow-member and each one his brother - saying, ‘Start gaining knowledge about the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the little one among them up to the great one among them.

• At first blush, it seems odd that the New Covenant would be one in which the members don’t encourage one another to “know God,” but, upon further study, the Greek language behind this verse explains a bit which is obscured in the English translation. There are two different Greek words for “know” in this verse, and they are in two different tenses and moods as well.

  • The first is what the members of the New Covenant emphatically won’t say to one another, and that is, “gnwthi/Know/Get information about - the Lord.”

    • This is in the Aorist tense which would imply that the hearer has no information about God and is being exhorted to start gathering data.

    • I find it interesting that in the Greek O.T., Eliphaz says it to Job (Job 5:7), David says this to Solomon (2 Chr. 28:9), and Solomon says it to his son (Ecc. 7:9), but in the new covenant this will not be what members of the covenant say to one another.

  • The second word for “know” (eidon) has more to do with experiential knowledge, and it is in the perfect tense, indicating that this personal knowledge is already there.

  • Classic Greek scholar Marvin Vincent contrasted the two in this way, “γνῶθι [is] the recognition of a stranger; εἰδήσουσιν of an absolute acquaintance as of one born under God's covenant.”

  • If God, through the Holy Spirit, is putting direct infusions of knowledge into the hearts of His people, it would be just as silly for me to tell a member of New Covenant that they needed to find out about God as it would be for me to tell Dr. Linville, an accounting professor, that he needs to learn how to add and subtract. Been there; done that.

  • So, this is not saying that Christians should not encourage and exhort one another to grow in their relationship with God (Hebrews elsewhere commands us to do that: “...encour­age one another throughout each day... in order that some of y'all might not be hardened by means of the deceitfulness of his sin…” ~Heb. 3:13, NAW “...strengthen the hands which hang down... Pursue peace with all and holiness… looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God...” ~Heb. 12:12-15, NKJV)

  • It’s just that we don’t have to see our words as the only way others will know God. God Himself will be investing in relating to them and imparting His ways to them to their hearts as well. (It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.)

• Also, this knowledge of God will not be unevenly distributed, with some among God’s people knowing Him well and others among God’s people being ignorant. That kind of in-equity was in the Old Testament, but in the New Covenant, all members will “know” God!

  • “From least to greatest” is a Hebrew figure of speech that just means “everybody.²”

  • It’s interesting that the book of Jeremiah starts off using the same figure of speech to say how hopeless mankind was: Jer. 6:13 “For from the least of them even to the greatest they have all committed iniquity; from the priest even to the false prophet they have all wrought falsely." But, by the unilateral, gracious action of God, salvation can come just as comprehensively to the people as sin and guilt did!

  • Adam Clarke: Under the old covenant, properly speaking, there was no public instruc­tion; before the erection of synagogues all worship was confined at first to the taberna­cle, afterwards to the temple. When synagogues were established they were used prin­cipally for the bare reading of the law and the prophets; and scarcely any such thing as a public ministry for the continual instruction of the common people was found in the land ‘till the time of John the Baptist, our Lord, and his apostles. It is true there were prophets who were a sort of general teachers, but neither was their ministry extended through all the people; and there were schools of the prophets and schools of the rabbins, but these were for the instruction of select persons. Hence it was necessary that every man should do what he could, under that dispensation, to instruct his neighbor and brother. But the prophecy here indicates that there should be, under the Gospel dispensation, a profusion of Divine light; and this we find to be the case by the plentiful diffusion of the sacred writings, and by an abundant Gospel ministry: and these blessings are not confined to temples or palaces, but are found in every corner of the land; so that, literally, all the people, from the least to the greatest, know and acknowledge the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Almost every man, at least in this land, has a Bible, and can read it; and there is not a family that has not the opportunity of hearing the Gospel preached, explained, and enforced.”

• This New Covenant promise of the knowledge of God is predicated upon the removal of problem that brought brokenness to our relationship with God in the first place. In the new covenant, God says, “They will know me… [WHY?] because...

v.12 For I will be gracious toward their unrighteousnesses and I will never again remember their sins” or their crimes.

• Depending on what translation you’re reading, there are two or three words that define what broke mankind’s originally-good relationship with our Creator-God:

  • Unrighteousness/iniquities/wickedness – The Greek word a-dikiais focuses on what you have failed to do right (and it is plural, so it is all the good things you should have done but didn’t do, and all the good things you have done, but done with the wrong attitude.)

  • Sins – The Greek word hamartiwn denotes wrongdoing, error, and the guilt that results.

  • and Lawless deeds/crimes – The Greek word a-nomiwn describes violations of the law; doing what God forbids.

• Make no mistake, the new covenant is no carte blanche to commit offenses against God; all unrighteousness, sin and lawlessness will be punished:

  • Ezekiel 18:24 “...when the righteous man turns away from his righteousness, and commits iniquity... none of his righteousness which he has wrought shall be at all remembered: in his trespass wherein he has trespassed, and in his sins wherein he has sinned, in them shall he die." (Brenton)

  • Hosea 8:13 “...the Lord will not accept them... He will remember their iniquities, and will take vengeance on their sins” (Brenton, cf. Hosea 9:9, Jer. 14:10)

  • Jesus said, “The Son of Man will commission His angels, and they will gather up out of His kingdom all the scandalous ones and the ones who practice lawlessness, and they will throw them into the fiery furnace; weeping and gnashing of teeth will be there.” (Matthew 13:41-42, NAW)

• And yet, in God’s mercy, He provides a way in His covenant to pardon these crimes, sins and unrighteousnesses!

  • In the O.T., the way was through animal sacrifice: Lev. 16:16 “[H]e [the high priest] shall make atonement for the sanctuary on account of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and for their trespasses in the matter of all their sins..." (Brenton)

  • In the New Testament, the way is through Jesus’ sacrifice: Titus 2:13-14 “...Jesus Christ... gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.” (NKJV, Mt. 1:21)

  • “There was nothing wrong with the Law. It was a good Law. The weakness was in the flesh. There is something wrong with you and me. We cannot keep the Law. We cannot obey perfectly or love Him with all our hearts. We cannot love our neighbor as ourselves. ‘For what the law could not do, in that it was weak the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh’ (Romans 8:3). What the Law could not do, God did do!”~Frank Barker

• The point of this whole quote from Jeremiah is that if God makes a covenant and calls it “new,” then it stands to reason that the covenant He made before it is old, and when things get old, they fade away. This forms yet another Biblical basis for the New Testament church to abandon the ceremonies of Judaism, even though those ceremonies were probably still going on at the time this book was written.

v.13 By saying, “new,” He has made the first one old, and what is being made old - and is aging-out - is nigh to disappearance.

• The Greek words for “old/obsolete” and for “vanish/disappearance” would jog the memories of those who had read the Old Testament in Greek:

  • The Greek word geraskon (from which we get our word “geriatric”) was what O.T. saints like Isaac, Joshua, Naomi, Samuel, and David said when they gave their last words before they died, “I am growing old/aging out, and I can no longer lead; I need a replacement.”

  • The last word in the sentence: a-phainismou (translated “vanish/disappearance”) was, in the Greek O.T. almost exclusively used to speak of God’s judgment wiping out a nation:

    • It first occurs in Dt. 7:2 to describe the annihilation of the Canaanites for their wickedness,

    • and just about all the other 46 instances of this word in the Bible describe God bringing the land of Israel to desolation for their idolatry.

    • That word-choice here in Hebrews was probably intended to be a harbinger of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70AD. The Old Testament temple is just about to – not merely vanish, but to – be destroyed in God’s wrath!

    • When this prophecy was fulfilled in 70AD, it became much more obvious that this change of covenant was from God, and that His judgment was upon those who dismiss Jesus.

CONCLUSION

• So, our sins separated us from God and distorted our understanding of His law and removed us from truly knowing Him and left us looking to our fellow human beings for the information we needed to know instead of to God and thus left us without a relationship of belonging with God.³

• But God was not willing to leave us all in that situation because communication and salvation are integral to His nature: He will not not speak⁴ and He will not not save! In the new covenant, God unilaterally offers to forgive our sin and restore communication – and make sure we really get it, and to act like we belong to Him as His people.

  • Cf. Isaiah 59:21 “‘And as for me, this is my covenant with them,’ says Yahweh, ‘My Spirit which is upon you, and my words which I placed in your mouth will not depart from your mouth or from the mouth of your seed, or from the mouth of the seed of your seed,’ says Yahweh, ‘from now until forever!’”

  • Do you believe this? Have you placed your faith in Jesus to atone for your sins and bring you into a good covenantal relationship with God?

• As I have meditated on this passage for a few weeks, I have struggled with what the actual differences are between the Old and New Covenant. I’ve read dozens of commentaries on it, and have been a bit disappointed with how often writers waxed eloquent on points which were really not essentially different between Old and New Testament saints. For a while, I was of a mind that there were no real differences, but I have come down on three things which seem to be real differences between the Old and the New:

1. Noticeably absent from the new covenantal formula is a reciprocal condition “if you do such-and-such then I will do thus-and-so”

• Compare this new one with the following old covenantal formulas:

  • Gen. 17:10 “And this is the covenant which you [Abraham] shalt fully keep between me and you... every male of you shall be circumcised.” The Abrahamic covenant was valid as long as Abraham and his descendants performed the human action of circumcising their male household members. Stop circumcising and you’re no longer keeping covenant with God and you are therefore no longer God’s people.

  • Ex. 19:5 “... if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine.” (NKJV)

  • Leviticus 26:14-17 “But if you… do not perform all My commandments, but break My covenant... I will set My face against you...” (NKJV)

  • Deuteronomy 28:9 "The LORD will establish you as a holy people to Himself, just as He has sworn to you, if you keep the commandments of the LORD your God and walk in His ways.” (NKJV)

• Jeremiah 31 says they broke that covenant, but it promises a new covenant without such conditions, removing from God’s people the responsibility for the continuance or discontinuance of their relationship with God!

  • If you read on in Jeremiah past the end of what is quoted in Hebrews 8, it becomes clear that the new covenant design was such that it could not be broken again – at least not as long as the moon and stars and the sea exist!

  • The reason for this is ostensibly that God would be the one who does all the qualifying, “I will put… I will write… I will be God… I will be merciful.” God is promising to do all the work of keeping the covenant relationship valid!

  • To quote John Owen again: “[T]hose who are taken into it [the new covenant] shall be preserved from breaking it by the grace which it administers. Nothing but effectual grace will secure our covenant obedience [for even] one moment, and therefore, in the new covenant, this grace is promised in a peculiar manner...”

• Do you understand what a gift the New Covenant is? Are you receiving and resting upon God alone to make you all-right through Jesus? Are you thanking God every day for giving you the grace to walk in fellowship with Him and not leaving you on your own to keep yourself attached to God? Praise God!

2. A second difference I see between the old & new covenants is in the breadth of membership:

• The membership base has exponentially increased from a small Jewish family in the old covenant to a worldwide, pan-national movement with over a billion adherents in the new.

• John Gill: “The persons with whom this covenant is promised to be made, are the houses of Israel and Judah; which being literally taken, had its fulfilment in the first times of the Gospel, through the ministry of John the Baptist, Christ, and his apostles, by whom this covenant was made known to God's elect among the twelve tribes; but being mystically understood, includes both Jews and Gentiles, the whole Israel of God; Israel not after the flesh, but after the Spirit; such as were Jews inwardly; God's elect of every nation…”

• John Chrysostom commented in the 4^th century: “[W]hat is ours [that is, the new covenant] is manifest: but theirs ... had been shut up in a corner… for it is said, 'their sound went out into all the earth and their words unto the ends of the world.' (Ps 19:5, Rom 10:18) That is [the meaning of] 'they shall not say each man to his neighbor, Know the Lord.' And again, 'the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as much water to cover the seas.'" (Isa. 11:9) Even by the time of Chrysostom in the year 400AD, Christianity had exploded out of Judaism’s little “corner” of the Levant into Europe, Africa, Arabia, and even Central and South Asia! [Show map.]

• It used to be you pretty much had to move to Jerusalem and get circumcised if you wanted to be among God’s people, but now you don’t. Praise God that you are part of the New Covenant because of how much wider the gates have opened for membership that it is easy for us Gentiles to get in! There’s no excuse now for not walking in this covenant of blessing.

3. The third difference I see between the old and the new covenant is the amount or degree of revela­tion from God to His people.

• To know God because His own Son walked with our mentors is certainly a new degree of revelation, even though the propositional truth God communicated in words to Moses is just as truly true.

• Matthew Henry: “The old dispensation was shadowy, dark, ritual, and less understood; their priests preached but seldom, and but a few at a time, and the Spirit of God was more sparingly given out. But under the new dispensation there shall be such abundance of public qualified preachers of the gospel, and dispensers of ordinances statedly in the solemn assemblies, and so great a flocking to them, as doves to their windows, and such a plentiful effusion of the Spirit of God to make the ministration of the gospel effectual, that there shall be a mighty increase and spreading of Christian knowledge in persons of all sorts, of each sex, and of all ages.”

• Frank Barker, my childhood pastor wrote, “Under the old administration, God taught Moses, Moses taught the priests, and the priests taught the people. There was no direct teaching from God to each individual “child.” The relation and the revelation were hazy. The emphasis was on God’s holiness and on our sinfulness. Under the new administration we have, first, God becoming incarnate. This is full revelation. The invisible God is made visible in Christ. In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. What is God like? Look at Jesus… If John [The Baptizer] were to walk in right now and were still under the old covenant, and you, who should be experiencing the terms of the new, should offer to explain this passage to him (‘John, here is what it means’) he would say, ‘Really? My goodness, why didn’t I see that?’ Even a child, under the new arrangement, could teach John Scriptural truths He didn’t understand under the old arrangement... You should also offer to show John what Jesus is doing in your life. ‘John, let me tell you about the ministry which the Lord has given me and what He is doing through my life...’” ~Frank Barker⁵

APPENDIX A: Misinterpretations of the Jer. 31 New Covenant

• One imbalance I’ve seen is when people take this passage and assert that is only talking about the first coming of Christ. Actually, this prophecy in Jeremiah is set primarily in terms of the reconstruction of Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah in the Old Testament.

  • The phrase “Behold days are coming” comes in Jeremiah 31 both before and after the passage we see quoted in Hebrews, and both of the other times it is clearly referencing events that happened centuries before the birth of Jesus - “Behold the days are coming when Jewish homeland will be repopulated… Behold, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel… Behold the days are coming when the wall of Jerusalem will be rebuilt.” (my paraphrase)

  • And the promise that God would be their God is frequently repeated in the later prophets speaking of those Reconstruction Jews and hardly anywhere else in the Bible. (The Greek Old Testament is word-for-word the same as Hebrews 8 only in Zech. 8:8; Jer. 24:7; 38:33; 39:38; Ezek. 11:20; 14:11; 34:24; 37:23.)

  • Did these prophecies have anything to do with the time of Christ? Yes, of course, but only as a secondary, antitypical fulfillment.

  • Now, since I’m preaching on Hebrews 8 and not on Jeremiah 31, I’m going to leave it at that, because the writer of Hebrews is mostly just picking up on the word “new” from Jeremiah and applying it in terms of the secondary fulfillment of that prophecy.

• Another way that I’ve seen people take this too far is by overstating the weakness of the first covenant as though nobody in the Old Testament had a real relationship with God, nobody had the Holy Spirit, nobody’s sins were forgiven – as though New Testament believers are the first to experience such things. Anyone who has read the Psalms should be able to see plainly that that such exagger­ations would be a false characterization of the Old Testament:

  • David experienced true “forgiveness” of sin (Ps. 32:5);

  • David had God’s word in his “heart” (Ps. 119:11)⁶;

  • David was inspired by the Holy “Spirit” (Ps. 51:11),

  • and David taught his son to “understand” God’s law (Prov. 4:1-7).

  • God said that David was a man after His own heart (Acts. 13:22).

  • These things listed in Hebrews 8 as the essence of the New Covenant were certainly present during the time of the Old Testament.

Puritan commentator John Gill wrote: God promises a ‘new covenant;’ so called, not because newly made; for with respect to its original constitution, it was made from eternity; Christ the Mediator of it, and with whom it was made, was set up from everlasting; and promises and blessings of grace were put into his hands before the world began: nor is it newly revealed, for it was made known to Adam, and in some measure to all the Old Testament saints, though it is more clearly revealed than it was; but it is so called in distinction from the former administration of it, which is waxen old, and vanished away... and on account of the time of its more clear revelation and establishment being in the last days...”

APPENDIX B: Side-by-side Greek Text & English Versions of Heb. 8:1-6^A