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PRAYER FOR TODAY
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Wednesday October 16 - New covenant foundations
...the new covenant is established on better promises. Hebrews 8:6
It’s not obvious to us, but the writer naturally and smoothly shifted from priests, sacrifices and sanctuaries to talking about the covenant. Media people would call it a seamless segue. The concept of ‘covenants’ isn’t so familiar nowadays. Using the word in the marriage service gives us a clue – albeit one that’s increasingly undermined in practice. A covenant is a solemn agreement between two parties. It’s more open- ended than a contract, even if the parties agree to conditions and to behave in particular ways. The traditional words, where two people covenant for life, ‘for better or worse’, gives us the sense of it.
The foundation of any covenant lies in the promises made. If people don’t keep their promises, the covenant fails. Sometimes the promises made were well-intentioned but inadequate. So it was with the covenant God made with Israel through Moses (the terms are found in Deuteronomy 28-30 and elsewhere). Good as it was, it only touched the surface of people’s lives and didn’t change them thoroughly enough. So, instead of leading to life and harmony with God, it led them to death and alienation from him. Jesus said that he inaugurated a ‘new covenant’ (see Luke 22:20), one based on ‘better promises’, accessed through faith. What they were is explained in what follows. For now, though, we rejoice that we don’t live under the old agreement but have an altogether superior one in Jesus.
Thank you, gracious God, for Jesus’ new covenant, a covenant of life and peace. Amen.
Thursday October 17 - Old covenant shortfalls
If there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. Hebrews 8:7
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we say. The New Testament repeatedly argues that the Old Covenant, delivered through Moses immediately after the Exodus from Egypt, was broken and needed replacing. It had been useful in its day but was never designed to be permanent. It was a temporary expediency. Someone has described it as a railway siding, which has a valuable, temporary role but isn’t the main line. Abraham’s story (Romans 4) showed that the main line was always that God’s covenant was based on promise and faith, not keeping of laws.
Its replacement by Jesus’ new covenant shouldn’t have surprised anyone, since prophets like Jeremiah (31:31-34), quoted here, predicted that this would happen. The old covenant was broken because it couldn’t do what was needed. Hebrews argues that it didn’t empower people to keep God’s law. Rather than changing them from the inside, as was needed, it was merely external. In 2 Corinthians 3 Paul adds that, despite good aspects, it proved fatal when mixed with sinful human beings – like some chemicals that might be beneficial on their own but mix them together and... bang!! The old covenant could only result in condemnation and death. So it was deficient, and Jesus enacted a new covenant to enable God’s people not to fail but to be faithful to him, following their greater deliverance through Christ.
Forgiving God, thank you for not holding me to a covenant where I'm bound to fail but giving me a new way of being transformed through Christ. Amen.
PRAYER FOR TODAY