THE TWO COVENANTS
God…said,
“The days are coming… when I will
make a new covenant with the people…This is the covenant: ‘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; I will forgive their wickedness and will
remember their sins no more.’ ” Hebrews
8.6-13
“The
days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the
people of Israel and Judah…”
Jer.
31.31
There are two ways that God interacts with us. First, He faces us with the reality that
without Him, all mankind will always “sin
and fall short of the glory of God,” and that “the wages of sin death.“
We all have a conscience which is God-given and is used
by the Holy Spirit to bring us to seek God for forgiveness and a new life, a
life free from sin and empowered for righteousness.
The Holy Spirit convinces us of sin, righteousness, and
judgment.
sin—We
do what is not right and good;
righteousness—We
don’t do what we should do;
judgment—the
consequences of our faults and failures.
The “Law,” as given to Israel has only one purpose—to
help us identify and understand sin and its consequences.
The Holy Spirit uses the Law to show us quite clear
exactly what is wrong with us and the consequences thereof.
And, that is the “end” of the Law. The purpose of the Law--its only purpose--is
to show us how weak we are and how hopeless it is to try to be “good enough” to
meet the requirements of what we know is wrong.
The Law tells us we are out of touch with the realities
of the way of the way of truth that leads to life.
When we face failure, despair, destruction, and death,
God offers us the opportunity to choose to seek salvation by turning to Him for
righteousness and holiness. The
“consequences” of faith in God are the promises and provisions of eternal life
which God determined for us before time began.
The New Covenant/Testament is offered to all men just like
the first Covenant/Testament was offered—by a choice, by a decision.
At some point of awareness of our inadequacies,
weaknesses and their growing consequences, our conscience is used by God to
offer us the chance to choose to believe, to trust, to seek, and to follow a
path of righteousness, truth, and goodness.
Our choice to believe and obey God carries the same
power of determining the outcome of our lives that eating the fruit of a
forbidden tree did for Adam.
The reality of facing this crisis of decision looms
before us at often unexpected moments and we must choose--right or wrong, good
or bad--we choose, and our choices set the course for our eternal future.
The bottom line of such a choice is ultimately an issue
of whether we believe and trust the universe, world, life, and ourselves to be
important to the reality of the God of all Creation.
By faith we understand that
the Universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out
of what was visible.
And without faith, it is
impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He
exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.
Hebrews 11.3, 6
