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