The ultimate, highest, greatest, and most beautiful covenant in the Bible is what we commonly refer to as the new covenant. The Lord Jesus came and accomplished redemption for us, and based on this God made the new covenant with us.
The Bible speaks of this covenant in many places. In Matthew 26:27-28, when the Lord Jesus established His table, He said that it was a new covenant established in His blood. First Corinthians 11:25 says the same thing. Hebrews 8:6-13 says that God consummated a new covenant with His people. Hebrews 7:22 says that this covenant is a better covenant. Hebrews 13:20 says that this covenant is an eternal covenant.
The Lord Jesus shed His blood for redemption on the cross, and in this blood He established a new covenant with God.
The establishment of the new covenant is based not only on the blood of the Lord Jesus; the Lord Jesus Himself is the Mediator of this covenant. To be a mediator means that one bears the responsibility of both parties; as the Mediator, Christ bears responsibility on God’s side and on man’s side. In other words, as the Mediator, He is the One who executes the covenant to make it a reality. The Lord Jesus established this new covenant in His own blood, and He also executes this covenant through His incorruptible life.
The law of the old covenant was outward and in letter; it was engraved on tablets of stone and kept by man’s strength. The law of the new covenant is inward and in life; it is inscribed on the tablets of man’s heart and kept by man from within through its spontaneous power. The center of the new covenant is the law of life.
Since God has put the law of life within man, man has the capability to spontaneously know God. This knowing is not related to the teaching of knowledge; it comes out of the sense of life. Consequently, anyone who has a part in this covenant, from the little one to the great one, has no need for anyone to teach him. Instead, he is able to know God by himself.
For example, even though a newborn infant does not know what is bitter and what is sweet, he will spew out anything that is bitter. But he will quickly eat some honey when it is fed to him. Although he has no knowledge of bitter and sweet in his brain, the knowledge of life within causes him to spew out the bitter and eat the sweet. Today, everyone who has been saved has the life of God, and this life within is a law with a natural capacity for us to know God. This is a particular characteristic of the new covenant.
The prophecy in Jeremiah 31 is the covenant God made with the Israelites, and is concerning the time in the future after they have been restored and saved by God. God brought the Israelites out of Egypt and made the old covenant with them at Mount Sinai. In the coming millennial kingdom, God will call them out of all the nations again, and at that time God will enact this new covenant with them. Thank God that He has applied this covenant in advance to us, the believers, because the Lord Jesus shed the blood of the covenant, resurrected from the dead, and became the Executor of this covenant in the resurrection life. God has given us a foretaste of the blessing of the new covenant because of the Lord Jesus and His redemption.
Hence, according to God’s ordination, the time of the new covenant has not yet fully arrived; the new covenant still involves something related to the future, but based on the fact that the Lord Jesus shed His blood, was resurrected, and now dwells in us in life, God can apply the function of the new covenant to us who believe so that we may have a foretaste of the blessing of the new covenant. In the future the Israelites will all participate in the blessing of the new covenant; this is revealed in Jeremiah 31 and Romans 11:25-27.
These nine covenants are a history of the dealings between God and man. All the dealings between God and man are included in these nine covenants. The first divine name Elohim means a strong and powerful One who binds Himself with an oath. This includes God covenanting with man by His faithfulness after He created all things and human beings with His might. God is a God who keeps His word and abides by His covenants. We will briefly go over all the covenants again, from the first to the ninth.
Immediately after God created man, He came and made the first covenant with man, wanting man to be fruitful and multiply and to have dominion over all the creatures of the sea, the land, and in heaven. He ordained that man would be sustained by the plant life. God came in to make a second covenant because man fell.
In the second covenant, God promised man that a seed of the woman would come and deal with the enemy who had damaged him; at the same time, He ordained that Satan, who had damaged man, would be forever at enmity with the woman and the seed of the woman. God also ordained that the woman with such a fallen and sinful nature would suffer pain in childbearing and that man would toil in labor. He also ordained a proper order for the man and the woman after the fall. In this covenant He showed forth the salvation He would accomplish for man; that is, He clothed man with the skin of a sacrifice to cover his shame. Therefore, even though man fell, he still had a standing before God in this covenant. On the one hand, man could be justified and stand before God through the substitution of the sacrifice, and on the other hand, he could overcome the enemy through the coming of the seed of the woman. Man also needed to learn to accept the sufferings arranged by God for his salvation, keeping his place to live on the earth. In this covenant, God also ordained that man would suffer physical death. From that time until today, this covenant has not changed.
When man became filled with evil and violence, God wanted to destroy the earth. But He set apart a group of people from among those He intended to destroy and made a third covenant. God commanded them to enter into the ark and to bring some of the living things with them to preserve their lives. After the flood was over, Noah and his family came out of the ark and offered sacrifices to God on the new land. When God smelled the satisfying fragrance, He immediately made another covenant with the new human race. In this covenant and because of the fragrance of the offerings, God promised that He would keep order in the universe as is fitting for the existence of human beings and all other living things. God also promised to never again destroy the earth with a flood, giving them a rainbow as a sign. In this covenant, God also ordained three ancestors of the new human race, who were divided into three races. Finally, in this covenant God restated that man should be fruitful and multiply and rule over everything.
However, these people soon fell into a rebellious condition and began to build a tower in Babel whose top was to reach the heavens, thus declaring their rebellion against God. Therefore, God judged them. After the judgment, God believed that the created race had fallen beyond hope, and He initiated a new beginning by calling out Abraham, the father of the called race.
God made an extraordinarily great covenant with Abraham, which is called the covenant of promise or the covenant of grace. This covenant is full of God’s promise; everything in this covenant is grace. This covenant contains the kingdom and the blessings. We can participate in all of God’s blessings only if we receive the life of God. The blessings of God’s creation, the blessings of His redemption, the blessings in heaven, the blessings on earth, the blessings of this age, and the blessings of the next age, everything of God Himself and everything outside of God that can be counted as blessings, all have come to us. The kingdom is a matter of authority and blessings are a matter of life. The kingdom is for God’s reigning while the blessings are for God’s expression. Moreover, the kingdom and the blessings, through the seed of Abraham, will extend to all the nations so that all people will be blessed. This is the covenant God made with Abraham.
In addition, God also promised Abraham countless descendants—the descendants of faith are heavenly and are as numerous as the stars in the heavens, and the descendants in the flesh are earthly and are as numerous as the sand on the seashore. God also promised Abraham and his seed a land, the land of Canaan, that they might dwell in it and that He would establish His throne among them, gain His dwelling place, exercise His authority, and express Himself.
God made this covenant with Abraham, and God restated this covenant with Isaac and Jacob. God also extended this covenant to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God desired that their descendants would become the seed promised in this covenant to inherit the land of Canaan and become a nation, having the temple of God and the throne of God, so that on the one hand, they would be full of God’s presence, and on the other hand, they would have the ruling of God. This is God’s intention.
However, they fell into Egypt. By His grace God delivered them out of Egypt. God’s giving of the passover was grace; God’s use of His mighty hand to bring them out of Egypt was grace; God’s bringing them to the wilderness as an eagle bearing its young was grace. God hoped that they would know themselves and know grace, but they did not know themselves. They proudly said to God that they would listen to Him and keep His words, that is, that they would do all the words which God had spoken. Because they did not know themselves, God was forced to insert a covenant, the covenant of law.
When God made this covenant with the children of Israel at Mount Sinai, His attitude was altogether different. When God spoke to them previously, He was like an eagle bearing its young and a loving mother talking to her child. However, because they did not know themselves, the scene at Mount Sinai changed completely; thunder and lightning were present. It was altogether solemn, holy, and righteous. The solemnity was so dreadful that the Israelites trembled and said to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak with us, so we do not die” (Exo. 20:19).
In this kind of condition God decreed the law. The law includes the Ten Commandments and various statutes and ordinances. While the Ten Commandments were being written on the mountain, the children of Israel were violating all of them down at the foot of Mount Sinai. When Moses came down with the Ten Commandments and saw the condition of the transgression of the children of Israel, he burned with anger and threw the tablets, shattering them. This signified that the law had been utterly and completely broken by the Israelites.
But thank God, He did not just decree the law, He also included some ordinances. God knew that the children of Israel could not live in His presence if they only had the law; so, along with the law, He also gave them the ordinances and instructed Moses to build a tabernacle, prepare priests, and prepare offerings because only through these could the children of Israel approach Him. Even before they broke the law, God prepared the ordinances pertaining to the tabernacle, the priests, and the offerings on Mount Sinai. So even though the children of Israel worshipped the golden calf, God allowed them to live on account of the offerings. He also gave them the law again so that they would live under the old covenant.
On the one hand, the children of Israel were Abraham’s sons of promise according to the covenant God made with Abraham; on the other hand, they lived under the old covenant that entered alongside because they did not know themselves. These two covenants were separated by four hundred and thirty years. Whereas the earlier covenant was altogether according to grace, the covenant that entered alongside was altogether according to law. On the one hand, they were people of promise under grace; on the other hand, they foolishly put themselves under the law because they did not know themselves. Today we are also like this at times. According to God’s ordination, He wants us to live under grace, but because we do not know ourselves, we foolishly put ourselves under the law.
However, when he is tested, man can only fail under the law. Due to the weakness of man’s flesh, the law cannot accomplish anything except to condemn man, manifest man’s impotence, and bring man to the point of needing grace in Christ. Even though it may have seemed that grace was cut off after a period of four hundred and thirty years, God’s promise of grace was not abolished by this covenant, which came alongside four hundred and thirty years later; the covenant of grace was still in effect. The diagram below illustrates this matter.
At the foot of Mount Sinai, the children of Israel seemingly came under the law, but in reality they were still under grace; God prepared the ordinances for them, which are in the principle of grace. They had the temple, the priests, and the offerings in their midst. David was a godly man, a man of God, but he committed murder and took another man’s wife, committing a great sin; he utterly broke the law. According to the law, he could not live before God. However, Psalm 51 shows us that he could approach God through the offerings, the temple, and the priests of God. Even though the Israelites were under the law, they still lived in the promise of grace; they were still connected to grace.
God then made a covenant with David, His anointed, to build him a house, produce a kingdom from this house, and bring forth a seed out of this house who would build a temple for God to bring in God’s presence and who would reign for God. This strengthens the aspect of the kingdom in the promise of grace God made to Abraham.
This covenant and the preceding covenant it supplemented extend all the way to the new covenant. All of the main points in Abraham’s covenant and David’s covenant were fulfilled in the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus came and shed His blood as the price to meet the requirements of the old covenant, and He resurrected from the dead to carry out the new covenant in us by the power of His resurrection life. Now He is executing this covenant so that we can be before God, have God’s life, receive every blessing that God has given us, become God’s kingdom, be built into the dwelling place of God in this ruling realm, and have God’s presence.
When these conditions are brought together and extended, the ultimate result will be the manifestation of the New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem includes all these things. It includes the house, the kingdom, the temple, the throne of authority, God’s presence, God’s life, the heavenly and earthly blessings, and many other kinds of blessings. At that time God will fulfill everything according to the covenants He made in His dealings with man throughout the ages and dwell with man eternally.
Finally, there are a few points Bible readers should know concerning the covenants. In God’s covenants, a great part of them involve promises. For example, in the first covenant He promised that man would be fruitful and multiply; in the second covenant He promised the seed of the woman; in Abraham’s covenant He promised many descendants.
However, the covenants do not merely contain promises; they also contain facts. For instance, in the new covenant, God said that He would forgive our sins and take away our unrighteousnesses; this is not a promise but an accomplished fact. Today our sins are forgiven not because God promised to forgive us but because He has forgiven us already. To be saved is to accept the fact of being forgiven. In the new covenant, the taking away of man’s sins is not a promise but a fact. Long ago the Lord Jesus accomplished the taking away of man’s sins; therefore, God put this fact into the new covenant to assure man that he only needs to accept what has been accomplished already.
In Greek, covenant and testament are the same word. The new covenant God made with us is a covenant and a testament. Hebrews 9:15 speaks of the Lord Jesus being the Mediator of the new covenant, and verse 16 also speaks of the Lord being the One who made the testament. Here, covenant and testament are the same word in Greek. What is a covenant, and what is a testament? The emphasis of covenant is on promises, and the emphasis of testament is on facts. The covenant was established with us by God, and the testament was accomplished for us by the Lord Jesus. Furthermore, as far as a covenant is concerned, promises are adequate; no facts are necessary. But a testament must have facts. So from the perspective of the testament, the Lord Jesus had to die. If the Lord Jesus had not died, none of the facts would have been accomplished; they would merely be promises in a covenant. But thank the Lord that He died for us and resurrected and ascended. He is now seated on the throne and is our High Priest and our Head. Every fact has been accomplished. The Lord Jesus fulfilled the testament, having accomplished all that was written down and then bequeathed them to us. God made a covenant with us concerning all these things, and every fact that the Lord Jesus accomplished is a portion for us to enjoy.