A New Covenant and a New Heart
Have you ever watched a documentary on the opening of the American west in the mid-19th century? It’s all very fascinating and exciting – the story of the gold rush of 1849 and all the rest. But one cannot help but feel a sense of gratitude for the luxuries of the 21st century. Nowadays, if a person wants to travel west to California, a plane ticket can be purchased almost instantly through the internet. The flight itself is quite luxurious when compared with the experiences of the Americans who first went to the West in caravans and suffered from diseases like the flu or dysentery, attacks, and the perils of the harsh mountain elements. Our age is hardly perfect but, in many ways, we’re incredibly privileged to live in this age. In Hebrews 8, the writer wants to remind us that we live in a new age of relating to God – the age of the New Covenant. And he wants us to delight in the privileges of that.
A “covenant” is a binding agreement between two parties – an arrangement that sets out how those two parties will relate to one another. In the days before Jesus came, the people of Israel were bound in relationship with God through the Old Covenant that He gave to Moses at Mount Sinai. The Old Covenant was never going to be sufficient: “For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.” (Hebrews 8:7). The Old Covenant could not deal with the root problem of sinful hearts and a guilty people. And so, written right into the Old Covenant was the promise of the new : “’Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt” (Hebrews 8:8-9). This promise was fulfilled through Jesus. God established a New Covenant with his people through the death of Jesus, sealed in His blood, and set out for us in the New Testament.
In the world of medicine, a fascinating new development has emerged: viruses are being designed to combat cancer. As opposed to blasting cancer with radiation from the outside, specially-engineered viruses potentially go in and attack the cancer from the inside. It’s thought that these viruses not only attack the tumor cells directly, but stimulate the immune system to fight the cancer as well. In parallel fashion, when the sinful human heart is bombarded with rules from the outside, the sinful heart reacts by just sinning more. But in the New Covenant, God does something radically different: He brings His law within His people, by the power of His Spirit, and He writes it on their hearts and minds to combat sin. As Hebrews 8:10 explains, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts…”
If we’re at all honest with ourselves, we’ll be constantly aware of our failings in sin. But we can rejoice in the fact that, if we belong to Jesus, God has changed our heart. He has put his Spirit within us, and He has written His truth within us. God will show us how to obey, and these won’t be external words to civvy and to chide, but internal words, by the power of the Spirit, to transform.