Tag: Hebrews 8

“Jesus is Better” Continued

OLD TESTAMENT: Isaiah 22-24

POETRY: Song of Songs 2

NEW TESTAMENT: Hebrews 8

“Jesus is better” talk continued…

Jesus is a better high priest because the Lord set it up, not man. He was chosen. The Lord (Yahweh) chose Jesus to be high priest of his New Covenant due to his loving obedience, as opposed to being appointed by men after their predecessor in lineage died (like in the Levitical priesthood). Jesus’s place as high priest is in heaven itself, not on earth as it was under the law of Moses, where there could only be a mere copy of the sanctuary.

Jesus wasn’t in the priestly line of Levi, he was in the line of Judah – whose line was chosen to be the king-ly line (after Saul (Benjamin’s line) screwed up and another (David) was found who chose God). It was after this chosen man (David) set his heart on choosing God that God swore his oath regarding the new priesthood that was to come in Psalm 110:4. God was going to make his new forever priest one who chose him, after the order of Melchizedek (chosen to be both king and priest; no lineage that made him so). And through him (the new high priest Jesus), he made a New Covenant with people who chose him from their hearts and had God’s laws in their minds.

The Old Covenant promised Israel that they would be God’s people – a kingdom of priests and a holy nation among all the inhabitants of the earth (Exodus 19:6). To serve God in this way, they had to know God’s will in how to live rightly, or at least better than how the rest of the world had been living (and hurting each other). God gave them laws to help them become holy, for their own good and the good of the world. But not all of them were faithful to uphold their end of the deal.

Although God chose them, some didn’t choose God back based on their actions. The law was not in their hearts. If it was, they would have trained themselves to distinguish between good and evil (to stop the evil and do good). They didn’t, hence, the need for a new covenant made with chosen people, through a perfect high priest.

The New Covenant through Jesus is written on the minds and hearts of God’s chosen people. To be chosen means that God chooses us because we choose God. We choose God by obeying him from the heart because we know that he loves us and sets up his commandments for our good, and for the good of the world through us. He’s a good father who establishes our ways for us so that it will be well with not only us, but those whom we affect by following God. We are the people who want that. We want it so badly, that we train for it. 

I understand that God set up the Old Covenant for the people’s own good – because they needed it to live well in their time – to be the people that God wanted them to be for their own good, to affect the lives of those around them positively as God’s holy people. But they didn’t want it (based on their behavior). God says of them, “For they did not continue in My covenant, And I did not care for them, says the Lord.” We know that God cared for his firstborn son Israel. He showed them mercy time and time again. But eventually, their continuously evil actions caused God to cease from his pleading with them to be faithful – until the better man Jesus inaugurated the better covenant based on his faithfulness.  

In this better covenant, all will know God, because they are people who choose to know him. In this better covenant, God will be merciful to them, because they will choose to repent. In this better covenant, God will not remember their sins, because they will choose to ask for forgiveness and do better, in the name of their high priest Jesus, because God’s laws are in their minds and written on their hearts (because they chose to put God’s laws in their minds, and on their hearts for their own good, and for the good of those around them). Don’t let Calvin persuade you otherwise.

There is usually a good reason people are chosen. They aren’t generally going to be randomly selected when it comes to matters of importance. And if they were chosen, they generally have to maintain the qualities that got them chosen in the first place to remain chosen. Throughout our bible history, some did, some didn’t. When God chooses someone, it almost always has to do with that someone choosing him. If God is choosing you, I pray you choose him back.

-Juliet Taylor

Reflection Questions:

1. Do you think God cared for the Children of Israel, even though he’s quoted from an Old Testament statement that he did not (Hebrews 8:9)?

2. Do you think God puts his laws into our minds and writes them on our hearts under the New Covenant (which would take away our autonomy) or do you think action on our part is involved?

3. Hebrews 9:13 says, “When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. What does obsolete mean here?

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The Best Covenant

Hebrews 8

Monday, September 26, 2022

In verse 6 of Hebrews chapter 8, it states that Jesus has now obtained a superior ministry and therefore is the mediator of a “better covenant” with “better promises.” What then follows in verses 8-12 is the longest consecutive Old Testament quotation in the New Testament. The quotation comes from a section in chapter 31 from the Prophet Jeremiah.

Now, when the author of Hebrews says that Jesus is the mediator of a “better covenant,” it doesn’t mean that the covenant is just a little bit better. It is indeed better, but how much better? Is there a way that we could quantify the degree of “betterness” that characterizes the new covenant? I don’t think so.

The new covenant is greater and better than the old covenant to such a degree that a comparison is nearly impossible. Perhaps we might say that the distance between the two covenants is like the difference between the height of the earth’s atmosphere and then the height of the universe. As glorious as the old covenant was, it was still imperfect. But, the new covenant brings the perfection that the old covenant pointed toward and prefigured in a typological way.

And with Jesus mediating a new covenant, this indicates that the old covenant is obsolete and no longer needed since the new covenant has totally eclipsed its purpose and function. Everything that the old covenant stood for and provided—the ways that it conveyed God’s law to his people, revealed the knowledge of him, and made provision for atonement for sin—has been fulfilled and superseded in the new covenant by Christ himself.

The new covenant promises which surpass anything that the old covenant offered was prophesied by Jeremiah when he wrote, “I will put my laws into their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And each person will not teach his fellow citizen, and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, and the least to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their wrongdoing, and I will never again remember their sins.”

Therefore, it might help to think about the new covenant as being the “best covenant” because there will not be another covenant. There will be no “new covenant 2.0” or the “new revised covenant.” Nothing that can improve the new covenant any further. God’s law is in the hearts and minds of his people, he instructs them in his ways, all God’s people know him, and he has forgiven their sin completely, never to remember it.

The light of the new covenant is so far greater than the light of the old covenant that the old covenant simply pales in comparison. The well-known colloquial idiom, “It doesn’t even hold a candle to it” seems apt to apply here where if we imagine the new covenant having the glory and radiance of the sun, then what source of light can compete with it. The old covenant is like the moon, when reflecting the sun, the moon provides just enough light to walk around at night and see most objects near you. But it is still dark, and the potential to stumble or trip is very real. However, the light of the new covenant is like noon day where everything is illumined, and we now walk with full vision of what is before us.

The new covenant is better in every way, and we are able to receive and experience all of these better promises it has to offer. Let us count ourselves blessed to have a Savior who mediates this superior covenant that we can enjoy.

-Jerry Wierwille

Application Questions

  1. What are the differences between the old covenant and the new? (You can find several differences in this chapter alone, but
  2. Why do you think the all-knowing God didn’t just start out with the best/new covenant?
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What Kind of Heart Do You Have?

Hebrews 8

Hebrews 8 10

The messes people get themselves into.  Moses had gone off to the top of the mountain to be with God.  Out of that mountain God called out to Moses and laid out a wonderful plan for his people.  God told Moses that He had done wonderful things for His people, Israel, and that His people had seen with their own eyes what He had done to those miserable Egyptians.  Through those terrible trials with the Egyptians, God had been like an eagle and had bore His people, Israel, on His wings and had brought His people to Himself.  They were safe.  They were free.  They had a wonderful future ahead of them.  He described those blessings to them.  Israel would be His very own treasured possession, they would be a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.  Oh, the life, safe in the arms of the God of the universe!  It was theirs.  All they had to do was…. if only…why couldn’t they have done what He asked?  Oh, the messes we get ourselves into (Exodus 19:3-6)!

It would have been simple.  Very simple.  If only.  Instead they decided to build that stupid calf.  Not only did they build a calf, but they used their own treasured possessions to build it.  They gave up their own treasured possessions of gold to build a calf which would cause them to lose their position as the most treasured possession of God Himself.

All they had to do was simply obey God’s voice.  Instead they decided to obey the voice of sin.  Aaron described them well.  He told Moses, “you know these people.  All they think about is evil.”  (Exodus 32:22).  All they had to do was simple…simply listen to the voice of God Who had delivered them out of the worse mess they had ever been in while they were in Egypt.  All they had to do was listen to the voice of Him who loved them the most and keep His commandments.

God’s anger burned hot against His people! Moses’ anger burned hot against the people!  Then things really turned crazy!  Moses came down that mountain with his hands full carrying the commandments of God, written by God Himself, on two stone tablets front and back (Ex. 32:15-19).  It doesn’t say, but I think Moses’ might have thought he could straighten out the people by showing them those stone tablets containing the commandments of God.  Instead, they became part of the carnage.  When Moses saw what the people were doing, dancing and singing and worshiping a stupid calf, he threw those tablets made of stone and they broke in a million pieces.  He then took that golden calf, burned it and ground it to powder, then scattered it on the water and made the people drink it!  Their precious golden calf made by their precious golden jewelry was gone forever!

But God was not through with them yet.  God sent a plague on the people because they (correction – Aaron) made the calf.  We reap what we sow.  (Exodus 32:35).

End of story, right?  Nope.  God was not through with them yet.

Let’s fast forward to Hebrews 8.  Amazingly God was not through with the house of Israel and the house of Judah yet.  Here, Paul tells us that God is establishing a new covenant with them and with us.  The first one, written on tablets of stone long ago, will be replaced with one written in our minds and on our hearts.  Until the commandments and promises of God are written on our hearts and become flesh, we cannot become new people.   We are simply stone people. This new covenant, of which Jesus is the high priest, will not be displayed on tablets of stone which can be broken into a million pieces, but will be in our hearts and minds. Our old heart of stone will be removed, and a new heart of flesh will be given to us (Ezekiel 11:19).  This new covenant will change our minds and hearts because Jesus, the new high priest, is able to save us to the uttermost (completely and at all times).

What kind of heart do you have?  One of stone which serves sin and will break in a million pieces when sin is exposed?  Or one of flesh which loves and serves God who considers us His most treasured possession?

Luke Elwell