“A Guaranteed Superiority”
Hebrews 8:6-13
There are many types of guarantees. There are lifetime guarantees, good for as long as you live. There are limited guarantees, good for only certain things or times. There are ‘hopeful guarantees’ – such as an athlete guaranteeing victory. There are ‘hopeless guarantees’ – such as predicting the day and hour of Christ’s judgment or return. So when the author of Hebrews mentions, in 7:22, that “…Jesus has become the guarantee of a better covenant”, and in 8:6, that “Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises” we need to understand just what He means.
First of all, consider THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE OLD COVENANT. (8:7) “For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.” So what was wrong with the first covenant? For one thing, IT WAS CONDITIONAL. It was a two-sided affair. Just before Moses received the 10 commandments, God told him to make a covenant with the Israelites (Ex. 19:5-6): “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites." GOD OFFERED BLESSINGS and privileges to the people. They would be a treasured possession and a nation of priests – his special servants. But notice - “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then…” There was a condition; the people had to be obedient in order to receive the blessings. (Ex. 19:7) “So Moses went back and summoned the elders of the people and set before them all the words the LORD had commanded him to speak. The people all responded together, "We will do everything the LORD has said." So Moses brought their answer back to the LORD.” GOD’S PEOPLE PROMISED OBEDIENCE.
The same cycle was repeated in Exodus 23:22-31. Once again God offered blessings, and the covenant was conditional. And once again, the people promised obedience (Ex. 24:3&7): "We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey."
The conditional covenants had a shortcoming because the blessings depended upon the obedience of the people. And the covenant itself WAS POWERLESS to help them. The covenant itself was wonderful; the 10 commandments were outstanding; but human will – the flesh – was weak. Repeatedly the people failed to uphold their end of the bargain. Within days of agreeing to do everything God had commanded, while Moses was on Sinai receiving the 10 commandments, the people were belly dancing around the golden calf. And you know what that means (Verses 8-9): “But God found fault with the people and said: "The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers 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.” IT’S A CYCLE THEY REPEATED many times.
And it is a cycle we have repeated, in our own lives, many times. Upon professing our faith in Christ, we make all kinds of earnest promises – only to fall short. We then experience a spiritual renewal and make all kinds of earnest promises – only to fall short. As the late F. B. Meyer put it: “As well might a paralyzed man undertake to climb (a mountain), or a bankrupt man pay his debts. We soon learn that sin has paralyzed all our moral motor nerves.”
That sounds just like Paul, doesn’t it? (Rom. 7:14-24): “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do… For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing... So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The old covenant just could not empower people to be faithful.
The other shortcoming of the old covenant was that IT WAS INEFFECTIVE. It could not empower people to do the right, but it also could not relieve their guilt when they failed to do the right, In other words, it pointed out sin but IT COULD NOT DO AWAY WITH SIN.
So Hebrews lays the new covenant alongside the old. Again, verse 6: “But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.” In what follows we discover THE SUPERIORITY OF THE NEW COVENANT. Hebrews lists five ways the new life in Christ is superior. First, the new covenant has an INNER POWER (10b): “I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.” It INFORMS THE MIND. God will feed and fill our minds; He will address our intellectual capacities and thought patterns. God’s thoughts will become ours. God will guide us from the inside – as Proverbs, and Jesus, said, we are what we think and we do what we think. God also INSTRUCTS THE HEART. God will empower the seat of our emotions and will motivate our will. It fulfills the prophecy of Ezekiel (11:19 ff.): “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” The New Testament pulls it all together when it talks about “Christ in us, the hope of glory.”
The second reason the new covenant is superior to the old is that it has KEEPING POWER (10c): “I will be their God, and they will be my people.” God will be our God – no matter what. It’s a DIVINE PROMISE. No ‘ifs’, no conditions; He will be our God – period! Everything God is will be used for His people; everything God has will be available to His people – no matter what! God will keep being our God!
And, we also have God’s DIVINE GUARANTEE: we will be His people – nothing will break us off from Him, no one can steal us away, and nothing will separate us from Him. Our relationship with God does not depend on our grip on God but on His grip on us. God will keep us for Himself. The covenant has keeping power. As Paul wrote, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The new covenant is also guaranteed to be superior because it has INCLUSIVE POWER (11): “No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” Under this new covenant there are NO EXCLUSIONS – “…they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” This was fulfilled on Pentecost. Remember Peter’s sermon (Acts 2): "'In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”
And the promise is that all God’s people will have an INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE of God. God dwells within us through the Holy Spirit. Knowledge no longer deals with just the mind – it deals with the soul. In the Old Testament, the word for “to know” denoted sexual intimacy – the deepest kind form of knowing, After Pentecost, God’s people had that same, intense, intimate soul-to-soul oneness with God. Remember Jesus’ prediction and promise? John 14: 16 ff: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever--the Spirit of truth … he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you... On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” At Pentecost, the promise was fulfilled.
ELIMINATING POWER is the fourth reason the new covenant is superior (12): “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." Under the new covenant THERE IS FORGIVENESS. Our sins need not haunt us forever; through the cross of Christ our sins have been taken away. Jesus is the Lamb of God who took away our sin. Notice I said He took them away – far away – as far as the east is from the west – never to return again: “…will remember their sins no more." GOD PROMISES FORGETFULNESS. The repeated promises in the Qur'an of the forgiveness of a compassionate and merciful Allah are all made to the meritorious, whose merits have been weighed in Allah's scales, whereas the gospel is good news of mercy to the undeserving. The symbol of Jesus is the cross, not the scales. There was a Catholic Priest who lived in the Philippines. He was much loved, but carried a secret burden of a long-past sin he had committed while in seminary. He had repented of it, but suffered many years of remorse for it. No one else knew of it. There was a woman in his parish who claimed to have visions in which she spoke with Christ. The priest was skeptical so decided to test her claims. He said to her, “Let me ask you a favor. The next time you have on of these visions, I want you to ask Him what sin your priest committed while he was in seminary.” The woman agreed. A few days later she returned to the church. The priest asked, “Did you visit Christ in your dreams?” She replied that she had. “And did you ask him what sin I committed in seminary?” She indicated she had asked. “Well,” asked the priest. “What did He say?” Responded the woman, “He said, ‘I don’t remember.’” Eliminating power.
Fifthly, all of this is possible because of EXTERNAL POWER. Verse 6: “But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.” Our SECURITY IS IN JESUS. On the night of His betrayal, with the memory of the night of the Passover fresh in their minds, Jesus passed the cup to His disciples. Jesus said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The blood of Jesus secures the new covenant. Nothing can ever break it.
And the SOURCE OF THIS SECURITY IS TWO FOLD. First, Romans 8:1ff. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us…” JESUS DIED FOR US. As our high Priest, Jesus stands before God on our behalf. He is the reminder to God that the price has been paid and we have been declared “Not guilty!”
The second source of this security is that THE HOLY SPIRIT EMPOWERS US. We can live godly lives through the Holy Spirit. Romans 8: “And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us… who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit… if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you…”
Yubis was filled with grief and didn't know where to turn. Yubis' husband--a pastor--was brutally murdered as a martyr in Colombia for his faith and teachings of Jesus Christ. As a result, their two-year-old daughter was despondent--and she stopped speaking. She would only draw pictures with each one just saying one word ... "Daddy." With the help of The Voice of the Martyrs, Yubis was able to receive practical assistance along with counseling for her daughter. Taking it a step further, she is now enrolled in Bible school. In a recent interview she told VOM ... "I wanted vengeance on those who killed my husband--I know who they are. But God has shown me that the best vengeance would be for me to tell them about Jesus. So that is what I plan to do."
That’s the power of the new covenant, the power of the cross, the power of the blood. It’s guaranteed. Let’s pray.
