Hebrews 8:10-12 speaks of the covenant between God and His people in the New Testament: “For this is the covenant which I will covenant with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will impart My laws into their mind, and on their hearts I will inscribe them; and I will be God to them, and they will be a people to Me. And they shall by no means each teach his fellow citizen and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for all will know Me from the little one to the great one among them. For I will be propitious to their unrighteousnesses, and their sins I shall by no means remember anymore.” The Lord has made a covenant with us. In this covenant there is no need for others to teach us to know the Lord, because we will all know Him, even the least among us.
In human terms a covenant is an agreement or a contract. The Lord is so willing to be our God and to have a relationship with us that He has made a covenant, that is, a contract, an agreement, with us. Whatever is written in a contract is certain. Once a contract is made or an agreement is signed, there is no margin for any change and no possibility of any choice.
God, the faithful, almighty One, has signed a contract with us. The center of this contract, or covenant, is the law of life. Every contract needs to have certain terms, without which there can be no contract. In the divine contract made and signed by God, there is only one term, one condition: God has said that He will put His own law into us. He does not ask us to keep any kind of terms or conditions on our side. According to this one term, He said that He will be God to us and we will be a people to Him. This one term, this one condition, makes the new covenant a very brief and simple contract. In contrast, a business contract may contain term after term, condition after condition, each with many sub-terms and sub-conditions. However, the new covenant is a divine contract with one simple term, indicated in this statement: “I will impart My laws into their mind, and on their hearts I will inscribe them; and I will be God to them, and they will be a people to Me.” Actually, this one term is all-inclusive.
However, although it may seem that God has made a simple contract with only one term, God Himself is not simple. Hence, the contract made by God, in reality, is not simple, because in the one term everything is included. God comes into us all-inclusively as life to us, and this life is the law mentioned in the divine contract. In fact, God Himself is the law within us, but not directly. He is life to us directly, and this life works within us as a law. This life has the function of regulating; it works within us all the time to regulate us.
We need to be impressed that God, the all-inclusive Lord, has come into us to be our life and that with this life there is a function, a law, that continually regulates us according to its nature and element. Included in this life are the divine nature, the human nature with the human living, death and the effectiveness of death, resurrection and the power of resurrection, glorification, ascension, and enthronement. Furthermore, in this life there is the headship, lordship, power, and authority. All these things are the elements of the divine life with its law.
Before the incarnation, in the Triune God there were only the three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. If at that stage the Spirit of God had come down to man, within the Spirit there would have been only one element, the element of divinity, because the Spirit of God was only God Himself. One day the Son of God was incarnated to be a man. This means that the Son of God came into man to put man upon Himself. In this man He lived on the earth for thirty-three and a half years, passing through the experiences of the human life. After living the human life, He entered into death, remained in death for three days, and then entered into resurrection, in which He was glorified (Luke 24:26, 46). He was just like a seed that dies when it is sown into the earth but subsequently grows up and blossoms. The blossoming of the seed is its glorification. By His resurrection Jesus was glorified. In His resurrection and glorification, Jesus ascended to the heavens and was enthroned as the Lord and Christ to receive the headship and the lordship (Acts 2:36; Eph. 1:19-22). Then on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit came down upon man (Acts 2:1-4, 33). At this stage the Holy Spirit of God came down upon man not with only one element but with a number of additional elements, including the human nature, the human living, the all-inclusive death with its effectiveness, and the resurrection with its power, as well as glorification, ascension, enthronement, the lordship, and the headship. This is the Holy Spirit who is within us today. This Spirit is the Spirit of the One who, as the embodiment of the Triune God, was mingled with man, passed through human living, died, resurrected, entered into ascension, and was enthroned and given the lordship and the headship.