Theme: Christ priest of the new covenant
Text: Deut. 6:2-6; Heb. 7:23-28; Mark 12:28-34
Covenants established by blood sacrifices, from the beginning of the Scriptures in the Garden of Eden to its end in heaven, are a constant testimony of God’s grace. Just as fallen man was clothed with the skin of animals whose blood was shed by God Himself for such provision, so the blood of the Lamb was shed to clothe in the righteousness of God every human being who would accept God’s grace. The author of Hebrews explains the difference between the sacrifices offered by the priests in the Old Testament – that is under the Old Covenant, and the sacrifice offered by Christ in the New Testament – that is under the New Covenant. The priesthood under the old Covenant was a material one, with material adornments of gold and precious stones, a material tabernacle, and material sacrifices. The priesthood under the New Covenant is a spiritual one, with spiritual adornments of divine love, wisdom, patience, and obedience, a spiritual tabernacle and spiritual sacrifices. Christ the Priest of the New Covenant offered Himself as a spiritual sacrifice on the cross. He did not offer the blood of animal sacrifices on the altar in the temple as Aaron and his descendants did for the covering of sins but His own body and blood on the altar of the cross for our spiritual cleansing, forgiveness, and justification. Concerning this event the author of Hebrews declares, “For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.” Perfected and forever depict a sacrifice that comprehends every need of the entire human race and its effects extend throughout time and into eternity. A single sovereign act of God brought together all the guilt and suffering of humanity and offered one all sufficient solution. To receive God’s solution we must all make our way to the cross where the New Covenant was established. It is a new and better Covenant because it allows us to go directly to God through Christ. We no longer need to rely on sacrificed animals and mediating priests to obtain forgiveness for Christ is priest of the New Covenant.
Scripture teaches us that every human relationship with God is based on a covenant. Only God Himself can initiate such a covenant and He is the One who determines the terms and the obligations of the relationship. The basis on which God makes a covenant is always a sacrifice. Without a covenant there can be no relationship with God and without a sacrifice there can be no covenant. And wherever there is a sacrifice there must be the shedding of blood. God always keeps His Word and the Covenant bound the party involved to obey the requirements of the Covenant.
The Bible has come to us in the form of two testaments, the Old Testament and the New Testament, also referred to as the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The Old Covenant established between God and Abraham and his descendants was dedicated with the blood of sacrificed animals and sealed by circumcision. As a result of this covenant God delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt and when Israel became a nation God gave them the Law as part of the covenant. The covenant bound Israel to obey the requirements of the covenant. God also made provision in case the requirements of the Covenant or the Law was broken whereby the blood of sacrificed animals could be offered to atone for the sin that had been committed. Under the Old Covenant, a person who had sinned was required to bring his sacrificial offering, a sheep, a goat, a bull or some other animal to the priest. He would confess his sin over the offering and the priest would symbolically transfer the sin that had been confessed from the person to the animal. Since the wages of sin is death, the animal would then be killed to pay the penalty for the sin that had been transferred to it. In the foreknowledge of God, all this was designed to foreshadow what was to be accomplished by the single, all sufficient sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The Old Covenant was the shadow of the New Covenant. The earthly Tabernacle and Temple were nothing but shadows. A shadow has no independent substance or existence. When a shadow exists, it is evidence of a reality that created that shadow. When you walk down the street with the sun behind you, your body casts a shadow in front of you that precedes you. Similarly the Old Covenant preceded the New Covenant. Your shadow is like a prophecy foretelling your coming. It foretells something about your form. If someone looked at your shadow, they would get an idea of your size, height and the shape of your body. Your shadow is not substance; it only outlines your substance. Your shadow is not an exact dimensional likeness of your body. But you can see enough to know the approximate size and shape of the substance forming the shadow. The Old Covenant foreshadowed what Jesus would do. It was a prophetic forecast of the saving, redemptive work that Christ would accomplish for us by His blood. No sinner can come into the presence of a Holy God. He first has to be cleansed from all sin and only Jesus can do this. He did this when He shed His blood and no one can add to what Jesus did to save us. Our past, present, and future sins are all forgiven. Jesus Christ has paid the price for our sins once and for all but His forgiveness is only available when we accept Him as our Lord and Saviour.
The Old Covenant was not perfect for had it been perfect there would have been no need for a New Covenant. As our High Priest, Christ has a much more excellent ministry to God than the High Priest under the Old Covenant. He does not offer the blood of bulls and goats, which cannot take away sin. Instead He pleads our case to the Father on the merit of His own blood. The New Covenant is better than the old because it was enacted with the eternal blood of Jesus Christ. Under the New Covenant all believers may come into the presence of God at all times. When the blood of the New Covenant was shed, the veil in the Temple separating unholy man from a Holy God was torn from top to bottom. This showed that the rending was an act of God and that man had been given unrestricted access to God.
The New Covenant is a new agreement and a new promise ratified, enacted and sealed in the blood of Jesus Christ. The shedding of blood was necessary because according to the Scriptures “life is in the blood”. Since the wages of sin is death and God desired to give us life, blood had to be shed to prevent death. The blood of the Passover lamb smeared on the doorposts and lintels of the homes of the Israelites saved the lives of their first-born because the blood made atonement for their sin. Blood sacrifices therefore served as a constant reminder of God’s way to deal with sin and death. It also served as a reminder of the terrible nature of sin. Every time a person sinned, he or she was required to offer up a blood sacrifice to made atonement for the sin that had been committed. But the blood of animals could not take away sin. The only link between the sacrificed animals and the sin that had been committed was that the sinner owned these animals. These animals had nothing to do with what was going on in the lives of their owners and their blood could not forgive anybody. But God used the blood of animals to help us realize that there would come an Ultimate Blood Sacrifice that would remove all our sins, and that ultimate blood sacrifice was the blood of Jesus. The reason Jesus’ blood had the power to remove sins was because it was His Blood. It was because whenever we sinned we were sinning against God. When we sin against a fellow human being we are sinning against God because that person was created in God’s image and likeness and belongs to God. In offending them we were offending God and the penalty for sin was death. But because God desired that we are forgiven and spared the death penalty He paid the penalty for us by shedding His own blood. Unlike the blood of animals that had nothing to do with the sin of the sinner, the Blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us because He has the right to forgive us because we sinned against Him. Without shedding His blood there was no possible way Jesus could have cleansed us from sin and given us constant access to God. Under the Old Covenant only one man could approach God in the Holy of Holies once a year. This took place on the Day of Atonement. On that day the Jewish High Priest, after many washings and purifications and with the blood of sacrificed animals, went into the Holy of Holies where he sprinkled the blood on the mercy seat to make atonement for his sins and the sins of the nation. This only covered the sins of the nation for one year and had to be repeated yearly. This is the reason why the High Priest never sat down while performing the ceremony. In the foreknowledge of God all this was designed to foreshadow what was to be accomplished by the single all sufficient sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ after offering His blood sat down at the Father’s right hand signifying that no sacrifice would ever be needed again. The blood of Christ had accomplished eternal redemption for all mankind. Jesus Christ does not come before the Father once a year – He is seated at the Father’s right hand. As our High Priest, Christ is our advocate, the mediator between God and us. He looks after our interests and intercedes for us with God. Christ wants us to enjoy the blessings of the New Covenant by living a life that is pleasing to Him.
The New Covenant results from God’s great love for us. When we understand the love of God, the love that led to our redemption, the only response is to return that love – “to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength.” To love God this way means He becomes the most important person in our life. We cannot say we love God and not love our neighbour. When we love God we will also love our neighbour, who is in the image and likeness of God, as ourselves.
The New Covenant is a better Covenant because the participant in the New Covenant has something that the believer of past ages never had. He has living within him the Holy Spirit who is able to transform him. The New Covenant is a better Covenant because it includes all people. Whereas the Old Covenant focused upon the land of Israel and upon the sacrifices that took place in Jerusalem, the New Covenant looks outward to the world to invite all people to enter the Kingdom of God. The New Covenant is a better Covenant because it forgives sin. The New Covenant is a better Covenant because it is not written upon tablets of stone but in people’s hearts and has within it the means to fulfil its obligations by trusting in the One who fulfilled them on our behalf. The greatest failure of the Old Covenant was it could not forgive sins, only temporarily cover them. Christ is the only One who can come between a righteous, holy God and lost sinful men and reconcile the one to the other. The blood of Jesus is both the means and the price by which reconciliation has been achieved. Just like the sin offering, the sin of the whole world was transferred to Jesus. When Jesus became identified with our sin, it was inevitable that He should also experience the death that is the outcome of sin. By His sacrificial death, Jesus made atonement for the sin of the whole human race and made it possible for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. This is not about any kind of righteousness that we can achieve by our own efforts, but about God’s own righteousness, a righteousness that had never known sin. Under the New Covenant we are to live a life led by the Holy Spirit. We are to trust in the power of Christ and walk in obedience to His commandments. Love should be the top priority in our lives. We must live a life that reflects a love for God and a love for others.
The priestly duty did not only involve the offering of sacrifices but also the dispensation of gifts. For Jesus to be a priest meant that He also had to offer a sacrifice. But He did not offer an animal. He offered Himself. He is the high priest of the New Covenant who sacrificed Himself to enable us to lead transformed lives. Some people have tried to ridicule the cleansing power of the Blood of Christ by arguing that blood itself is a stain-producing agent. How can it then cleanse the soul when it can ruin many of the things it comes into contact with? All of us use different types of soap and cleaning materials in our homes. We use mild soap for washing our hands and dishes, but require stronger detergents for stains that are more difficult. The Bible tells us the most powerful cleansing agent in the world is blood. In fact, God created blood to be a cleansing agent. In our body blood takes oxygen and other supplies to the cells and removes waste and impurities from those cells. Blood literally cleans out the filth from our body. That is one of its major functions. There is no other cleansing agent known to man that can purify our bodily system as well as the blood that runs through our veins. So also there is no other cleansing agent known to man that can rid our soul of its filth and shame than the Blood of Jesus. Through the blood of Jesus we are redeemed out of the hand of the devil. Through the blood of Jesus all our sins are forgiven. Through the blood of Jesus we are continually being cleansed from all sin. Through the blood of Jesus we are justified and made righteous just as if we had never sinned. Through the blood of Jesus we are sanctified, made holy and set apart to God. Through the blood of Jesus we have boldness to the presence of God. Let us therefore avail ourselves of what Christ has made available to us by confessing Him as our Saviour and Lord. Amen!
