This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to day three of our look together through Hebrews
chapter eight. We're going to look at verses six to nine today. In these verses, in
fact in verse eight, we're going to see that a quote starts from Jeremiah 31, 31 to
34.

It's a quote about a new covenant that's coming to this world. It's a quote
about a new thing that God is doing in this world. Let me read for you these
verses, six to nine.

But the ministry of Jesus, the ministry that Jesus has received is as superior
to theirs as the covenant of which he is a mediator is superior to the old one.
And it is founded on better promises. For if there had been nothing wrong with
the first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.

But God found fault with the people and said, the time is coming declares the
Lord. When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the
house of Judah, it will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they did not
remain faithful to my covenant. And I turned away from them declares the Lord.

Here is this new covenant that God has brought into our lives. Now we're going to
talk about this in the next few days and in beginning to talk about this, I
want to remind you of something. It might open your mind in a new way to what God
has done through this new covenant.

The word covenant is the same word as the word testament. A covenant is a
testament. A testament is a covenant.

It is this agreement, this binding agreement. When I say testament, obviously
the first thing you and I think of is the Bible. The Bible has a new testament
and an old testament.

Did you ever wonder why? How did they come to be called the new testament and
the old testament? Why not just one long book?

Why not part one and part two? Or why not God and God the sequel for the new
testament? Why not the story of Israel and then the story of Jesus?

Why new testament and old testament? Many of us realize that the new testament
contains something different and then it contains the story of Jesus, the
beginning of the church, but why is it called the new testament? Just to make
this really practical, if somebody was sitting with you at lunch and they said,
why is a new testament called the new testament?

What would you say? I think most of us would say, well, because it's not the old
testament, it's the new testament. But what about the testament part?

What does new testament mean? Well, as we just said, the idea of testament is
the idea of a covenant. It's an agreement.

In Luke 22, 20, Jesus talks about the cup of the covenant or God's promise, a
new agreement. 2 Corinthians 3, 6 talks about the servants of a new covenant, a
new agreement, commitment between us and God. These verses that we're looking at
right now, Jesus is told to be the mediator of a better covenant.

There are different Greek words that are used to express the idea of a contract,
a marriage contract or a business contract. And this idea of testament, it
really comes into our day. It's the time that we use the word testament.

We use it with the Bible, but we also talk about somebody's last will and
testament. We use this word in regard, and they did too, to a will, a will. The
new covenant is not a mutual agreement, it's not a contract between two people,
like a marriage or a business, it's a will.

It's God's will given into our lives. A will is an agreement made binding, it's
decided upon by one person. God decided to offer this binding agreement, and
it's an agreement that's either accepted or rejected by the other person.

Somebody could leave something to you in a will and you could decide to accept
it or reject it. That's your decision. It's set up by them.

God made a will in which you and I are offered the promises of life and hope and
peace, and our decision is whether to accept or to reject what's offered. Now,
of course, all of us realize that in order to put a will into action, somebody
has to die, and all of us realize that Jesus did die. That's exactly what Jesus
did, so that God could offer to us his promise.

When you look at this, you begin to see clearly the difference between the Old
Testament and the New Testament, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The Old
Testament is an agreement that was more like a contract, so we read here in
these verses that they didn't keep up to the contract. They weren't faithful to
the contract that God had made.

You keep my laws, you be my people, and so God turned away from them. That's the
inevitable result of the contract that they'd made of this law. There was this
mutual responsibility that they had, and they weren't able to hold up their end
of the bargain.

God certainly did, but they weren't. In the New Testament, we have an agreement
that's more like a will. God has taken the responsibility, and we have to choose
whether to accept it or reject it.

Now, somebody on our research team asked what I thought was a good question. Why
did God then even have an Old Covenant? I mean, if the Old Covenant wasn't going to
work, I mean, God knows everything.

He knew they weren't going to follow those laws. Then why not just move straight to
the New Covenant? Right after Adam and Eve sinned, why didn't Jesus just come
and die on the cross right then?

Why wasn't he the first one born, the first birth be a virgin birth? Why
wouldn't he do it that way? Well, let me say a couple of things about that.

First of all, I do not know all the answers to the timing of God's plan. I don't
know the answers. I do know the Bible says that at the right time Jesus was
born, so it was in God's timing that this happened.

I don't know all the answers to the timing, but I do know that the Old
Testament, the Old Covenant, does show us all the ways that will not work to
establish a relationship with God. In one sense, the entire Old Testament is a
teaching guide to us of the ideas we might have of what would get us close to
God that shows us clearly those won't work. One idea we might have is if you
just start perfect, if you start perfect in a garden and everything's perfect
there, then you're going to have a perfect relationship with God.

Well, that's where Adam and Eve started. They had one opportunity to do the
wrong thing and they took it, so that doesn't work. Another idea that people
have is we'll just start again.

Find the one faithful best family and the whole earth, wipe everybody else out
and just start again with that one family and we'll all be fine. And that's what
happened with Noah. And they were a faithful family, but it didn't change
everything.

And God said, I'll never send a flood again. Another idea people have is just
show powerful miracles. If you show people miracles that are powerful enough,
they will inevitably follow God the rest of their lives and get everybody else
to follow God.

So you see the 10 plagues in Egypt, you see the dividing of the Red Sea and the
people walking through on dry ground. It wasn't weeks, even days after that
great miracle that they were grumbling against God again. Now, if you think you
would do any different, if I think I would do any different, I'm just lying to
myself.

These are examples of just how we act as human beings. We forget the miracles.
We might start again, but we go back to where we were.

You could set up everything to be perfect, but we still have a struggle that's
within us. There are some who think if God would just give us the perfect
directions, then we would know what to do. So God did that, he set out his law.

He said, here's exactly how to live. You live this way, you will be blessed
beyond measure. And they couldn't live that way.

They just kept falling away from God's laws. Just as you and I struggle to
follow God's directions in our lives. And they didn't have the Holy Spirit in
their lives empowering them.

They were trying to follow God's laws based on human energy and power, and it's
impossible to do. They're an example to us of this. Other people say, well, if
God would just speak like in an audible voice, then we'd know what to do.

And so he sent the prophets and he spoke to them in an audible voice and nobody
listened. As you look through the entire Old Testament, it's really an example
of all the ways that we think might cause us to reach to God, but there's one
problem with all of them. We don't have the power to live it out in ourselves.

The problem is me, the problem is you, the problem is us. Problem is our own
hearts. We need a new kind of agreement.

We need a new testament, we need a new covenant. One of the questions behind
this study is the personal question. Am I trying to live as an Old Testament
person or as a New Testament person?

Old Testament, New Testament, Old Covenant, or New Covenant? You see, the truth
is we don't meet God on equal terms. That's Old Testament.

I'll meet your God halfway. I'll do the best I can. I'll meet you like a tenth
of the way.

You do nine tenths, I'll do one tenth. We don't meet God on equal terms in any
sense. We meet him on his terms or not at all, and that's fine with me because
his terms are grace and love and peace and freedom and eternal life.

His terms are this New Covenant that offers us a new life through the gift of
what he's done in his son and offers us a new power we're going to talk about later
this week to live out that new life through his Spirit sent into our lives.
Let's take a moment to pray together. And as we pray, I just want to encourage
you, if you've never accepted this New Covenant, to say, Father, instead of
living life on my agreement on how I'm going to get close to you, whatever that
idea might be, going to church, doing good, reading books, whatever it might be,
instead of my covenant, I accept your covenant.

You gave your life for me, and in your will, you've offered me this inheritance
of eternal life. I accept the gift of what you've given, the gift of forgiveness
and life. I accept that gift now.

I accept that gift in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow, we're going to look together at
the daily new that the New Covenant brings into your life.