Highlights in Hebrews
(with Roger Kirby)
Part 19 - Hebrews 7:17-22
A better covenant
. For it is declared: “You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.” The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.
And it was not without an oath! Others became priests without any oath, but he became a priest with an oath when God said to him: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: ‘You are a priest forever.’
Because of this oath, Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant.
Promises are important, particularly when they are God’s promises, but covenants are even more important. God made a great promise to Abraham (Genesis 12:2, 3). Then 24 years later he turned that promise into a covenant (Genesis 15:8 - 19) in what seems to us a very curious ceremony but was the way they did it in those days.
The idea of a covenant was that there was a high king and lesser kings (in more modern terminology we should perhaps say a king and war-lords). The high king would make a covenant with a lesser king. He would promise to come to the aid of the lesser king if he was attacked. The lesser king would agree to send armed men to the high king, if required. to defend one of his other lesser kings. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.
A promise is a promise, particularly when it is God who is promising. But a covenant is even stronger. If we promise someone they will have our house when we die that is one thing but if we go to see a lawyer and get it all written down in what we call a will that is quite different. So God is doing something to increase our confidence in what he is doing, not to ensure that he actually does it. Once a will is made the only person who can change it is the person who made it in the first place. In this chapter and the next 3 God is explaining how it is that he has changed his will (covenant) for us into a new and better one. All the covenant with Abraham still stands. It is the bits that were later added to it at Sinai to Moses which are being changed.
The great prophet, Jeremiah, was given a prophecy in which he said “The days are coming,” declares the LORD,
“when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. …
This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
Our writer quotes these words at length in Hebrews 8:8-12. The critically important statement is in 8:10, ‘I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.’ Jeremiah did not know how that would be done. He probably thought it would be by an intensification of the laws of Sinai and a tighter control of the people. He did not know. He could not know, how it would happen. When the Messiah, God on earth, came to establish his new covenant he would have a sort of secret weapon which would enable all those things to happen. That great secret was the gift of the Holy Spirit of God and Jesus who would enter the lives of his people. Ezekiel gets closer to what would happen when he says in his 36:26, 27 “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
That is the great difference in the new covenant by which the Lord God would establish his people, his new people of every tribe and nation. What is the difference because this is a covenant and not just a promise? The answer is that this is a two-way event where promises are only one way. But we will leave that thought for another day.
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