This morning I am reflecting on quite a few verses from the Letter to the Hebrews. It is always important to remember that this was written to Jewish believers, who were struggling with the issue of the Old Covenant of the Law and the New Covenant instituted by Jesus. The Old Covenant was their complete foundation for understanding their relationship to God. To come in a replace this with a new covenant was definitely unsettling to all they had been taught, and there were many questions as to what to keep, what not to keep. The verses I am reflecting on today lays the theological underpinning for why God replaced the Old Covenant with the New. Here are the verses - Hebrews 8:6-13 NIV":
[6] "But in fact the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs (priests of the Old Covenenat) as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, since the new covenant is established on better promises. [7] For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another."
[8] "But God found fault with the people and said : “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. [9] It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord." [10] "This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel after that time", declares the Lord. "I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. [11] No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. [12] For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
[13] "By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear."
It is very interesting to me that God had spoken of His plans some 600 years earlier, and these were clearly well-known verses to the Jewish believers, yet they did not understand what they meant or how they were going to be fulfilled. The author of the letter is walking them through the basic understanding that God had planned this all along, and it was now a Covenant of real relationship, existing internally in the people, written in the minds and hearts. It will be a Covenant of "knowing" God.
The Hebrew word that Jeremiah originally used for "know" is the word 'yada'. It is one of their primitive roots and is defined as follows (I am listing the just the first several entries as there are about 30):
1) to know
a) (Qal) to know 1a
1) to know, learn to know 1a
2) to perceive 1a
3) to perceive and see, find out and discern 1a
4) to discriminate, distinguish 1a
5) to know by experience 1a
6) to recognise, admit, acknowledge, confess 1a
7) to consider
The definition continues on but these sufficiently describe what I believe God was communicating to the Jews. He wanted the new covenant to be individually experienced and centered. This was not a Covenant of a nation or people, but of individuals, each in their heart and mind. A knowing of God, perceiving Him, knowing Him by experience, and it is only possible if it accomplished in the heart and mind of each person!
This is such a radical departure from what they knew, it is clear they were going to struggle with understanding what it meant. Their whole religious system of worship and calendar of life with the festivals and celebrations were based around the Old Covenant Law and now that was passing away, and they struggled to understand the radical shift.
As an example of what his must have been like, I had an interesting conversation with a Chinese young man who had been raised under the teaching of Mao all his young life. At some point after he finished school, the official Chinese doctrine moved on from Mao-ism, and his generation were told that Mao's teachings were wrong. I was asking about what he believed and he responded that he didn't believe in anything, or know what to believe as everything he had been told was true was now considered false. He really wanted to believe in something, but now was jaded in his beliefs, or even his ability to believe.
I imagine this is similar to what those Jewish believers experienced as they tried to understand this New Covenant, and what it meant for them. We see from the scriptural record that many were choosing to grab hold of some of the law, some of the traditions and were trying to make those as requirements in this New Covenant (See Galatians 1-6 for Paul's defense against this push). I am sure that it was such a significant paradigm shift that it required much discussion, and thought. My heart does go out to those that were confronted with this massive shift of thinking, for change is never easy, but it is always an opportunity to grow.
So, regarding our present day walking out of this New Covenant, we also must look to our thoughts and teaching and make sure that we are not carrying over some of the traditions and thinking of the Old Covenant. It was a Covenant with rules, regulations and works. The New Covenant is about relationships! We must resist the urge to go back to the previous rules and works mindset and allow the God, who lives within us, to gently lead us on the path of relationship. This requires us to recognize that we are all under the same New Covenant, one of relationship and knowing God.
For those of us that are task and goal oriented, our difficulty with this is that it is hard to keep track of our progress. We have a hard time allowing others to walk a unique relational path, that while similar to ours cannot be compared to ours. We are so used to judging and being judged on progress and achievement, that we feel more comfortable with a set of rules and regulations to tell us what to do, not to do, and how we can progress forward. We tend to fall back to what is understandable and comfortable, and in many cases this is not the path of relational based faith.
Additionally, from a very early point in the church the enemy was busy sowing seeds of deception and heresy into the church. There were several times that the true teaching of Jesus was being deafened and defamed by the newest ideas of people like Marcion, Montanus, and the Gnostic teachers, in addition to the Circumcision Party. Paul and John both wrote several pieces specifically against these "false" teachings, and the organized church later had several councils to define the true beliefs of the church, and establish the creed, which was transmittable via simple sayings to the uneducated. The effort was to help keep people on the rails of right relationship with God. At times these efforts were embraced and turned into a "new" set of rules and regulations, and the church slowly lost the idea of relational faith, instead replacing it with learned (head-knowledge only) faith. This seems to be where many of us exist today with faith that was taught, but is not relational in our minds AND hearts!
Oh Lord, that we would learn to walk in true faith in real relationship, knowing You intimately as You know us. Help us to see in our lives the residue of the Old Covenant, and embrace Your love for us, and for each other. Help us to pursue You in relationship, knowing that this is the true expression of the New Covenant! As You said in the letter to Hebrews, "..if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another." We have the better Covenant available to us, and we should avail ourselves of this invitation to relationship with You, the living God!
Amen!
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