THE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN
AND
BRIEFLY CONSIDERED.
Bv R. F. Kingscoat.
Part 4 - THE NEW COVENANT
THE NEW -COVENANT.
I Cor. xi. 25, 26.
WISHING to bring before you the truth of the new covenant a little, I have just read these verses to connect this subject with what we have had on previous occasions. It is most remarkable that the Lord should have introduced the new covenant in connection with the cup, and this but shows the importance which He Himself attached to the knowledge of the truth of the new covenant. So it is very important that all God’s children should get a scriptural idea of the new covenant and of the reason, too, why the Lord Jesus connected it with the cup. As we have already seen, when we take the bread, we are set free from ourselves before God, in order that, as His brethren, we may be able to think of the love that brought Him down into death for us. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Then in the cup we have more what Paul so beautifully prayed for in 2 Thess. iii. 5 : the Lord directs our hearts into the love of God. In Rom. v. we have the love of God shed abroad by the Spirit— and the Spirit is the only power by which divine things can be made good in our souls —but the apostle here puts it: ” The Lord direct your hearts into the love of God.” Does not He know the love of God ? As God, He Himself is love: and as Man, He lives in the full, uninterrupted enjoyment of the love of God. ” He liveth unto God”; He knows what life is, the full knowledge of God and of all His love.
Now we will look first at what I may call the terms of the new covenant and its blessings, and .hen at what scripture calls the Spirit of the new covenant. And first read the passage in the Old Testament that is quoted in the New (Jer. xxxi. 31).
Now, with whom is the new covenant primarily made ? With the house of Israel and the house of Judah. We, as Gentiles, are neither one nor the other, and so may well ask what application it has to us. Why did the Lord speak of the new covenant when revealing the truth of His supper to Paul ? What has it to do with us Gentiles r The answer is found in 2 Cor. iii. 6 : ” God, who also has made us able ministers of the new covenant”—not exactly of the doctrine of it, but of its practical reality and present application ; look at what comes next: ” not of the letter, but of the spirit.” The letter is what we have literally, in Jeremiah. The spirit of what underlay God’s mind and the principles on which He will deal with Israel when they are restored in the new covenant, He applies to us now. And it is an interesting point—I do not know if all have got hold of it —that all the blessings that Israel will have in the future are to be known now in a spiritual way by us. The new covenant is one example. It will be actually accomplished in the millennium (a human name this, showing merely its duration of 1,000 years), or, as scripture calls it ” the world to come,” a name which shows its contrast with this present age. The expression occurs four or five times in the Bible, e.g., Heb. ii. 5 ; Mk. x. 30, etc. We get all the blessings of the new covenant now, in the spirit, but not in the letter.
The scriptural thought of the new covenant is given us in 2 Cor. iii. Read on from verse 6: ” For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” to verse 17 : “Now the Lord is the Spirit” (New Translation). Of what ? Why, the Spirit of the new covenant. Nobody can possibly understand the chapter, if he does not see that verses 7-16 are a parenthesis; read verses 16 and 17 straight on together and what connection do you see between them ? None at all; but you do, of course, by leaving out the parenthesis and reading on from verse 6 to verse 17. The Lord, then, is the Spirit of the new covenant; it is not Christ or Jesus, but the Lord, the One who has been down into death, but who now is risen and exalted to the highest place in glory and, as Lord, administers all the blessings of the new covenant He, as Lord, is the Spirit of the new covenant, which might be summed up in one word—Love. ” For hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us ” (1 John iii. 16).
Now let us look at the terms of the new covenant and see how they apply to us, since what Israel will have in the future, we have and enjoy now. First of all, it is “not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers.” It is of great importance to see the negative side, for God would impress us with the fact that the new covenant is quite unlike the old, and does not depend at all on what we are or do. It has been well said, that the old covenant was comprised in the words : ” Thou shalt ” ; but the new covenant is: “I will,” all from God’s side. That is the difference, but, important as it is to be clear about it, many Christians are still on old covenant lines. Titus iii. 4, 5, was written not to the unconverted but to Christians: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.”
“This shall be the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord “;— and then follow all the ” I will’s.” After what days ? Why, all the days of the failure in responsibility, of their murmurings and resisting of the Holy Ghost, of their rejecting and killing the prophets and messengers of God, and, finally, of their murder of the Just One, when you would have thought that nothing but judgment could fall on them. Then it is that God comes out to act on His own account and for His own glory, not according to what we are at all.
There are three distinct parts of this new covenant : (1) ” I will put my law in their inward parts and write it on their hearts”—that implies a new nature, new birth; (2) ” They shall no more teach every man his neighbour, . . .but they shall all know mei.” In Heb.viii. (New Translation) it is “know me in themselves” —that is conscious knowledge: we cannot get beyond that; and (3) ” For I will forgive their iniquities and I will remember their-sins no more “—that is the knowledge of God revealed in grace. The law in our hearts, the knowledge of God who is love, and ” no more conscience of sins,”—such are the terms of the new covenant. Are not all these blessings ours to-day by the Spirit ? If you believe, however little you may enter into them, they are yours. None can say he knows them perfectly; how can you know God perfectly ? But many can say they know enough to see how little they really do know, or they know enough to want to know
more.
The first of these terms will, of course, be fulfilled in Israel in the world to come; the law will be written in their hearts, as in Psalm cxix. How does this apply to us to-day ? Have we the law written in our hearts ? Yes, and we, too, have Christ written on our hearts. How is this ? Well, the heart is the seat of the affections. But what is the law? Not the ten commandments merely, but, as the lawyer answered rightly, in Luke x. 2b, 27: “Thou shalt love . . . ” Is that in the ten commandments ? No. The first is quoted from Deut. Vi and the second from Lev. xix. 18, and yet the two sum up the whole law: “Thou shalt love.” Add to this the support of Romans xiii. 9, io, “Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” and turn to Rom. viii. 4, where, after sin in the flesh has been condemned, the apostle says : ” That the righteous requirement of the law . . . might be (New Translation) fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” “Righteous requirement” is a remarkable expression. Is it not perfectly right that God should require love from His creatures in return for the great love wherewith He has loved us ? And the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in us, for we love Him because He first loved us, and we love the brethren, and love is the fulfilling of the law. (Rom. xiii. 10.)
Secondly, “They shall all know me.” Of course, love is the way to know God. ” Every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God” (1 John. iv. 7). Cannot each one of us say :”We love Him, because He first loved us?” Such are His wonderful purposes and ways of love towards us, that we cannot help loving Him. ” Everyone that loveth . . . knoweth God.” Why ? It is because, as verse 8 tells us, l! God is love”; love is His nature. As fallen children of Adam, we were in darkness and utter ignorance of God; every thought of God the unconverted man has is all wrong, and we knew and cared nothing about God. Added to this is what we get in 2 Cor. iv. 3, 4, the blinding of men by the god of this world. How beautiful it is that God wants us to know Him! And how can we ? Only as revealed in the Son, who is ” the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person,” and came to earth to make Him known. Look at the leper in Matt. viii. 1-4 : Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth His hand and touched him, and said, ” I will; be thou clean.” That leper might have said, ” I have known what it is for God to come so near to me as to touch me, and then my leprosy was healed in an instant.” That is only a picture of how the Lord has touched us, when He came in contact with sin on the cross, and put it all away.
” They shall all know me, from the least to the greatest,”—not ” the greatest to the least ” —that is, Israel will know God not nationally but individually. Is there not an immense deal of truth in the new covenant ? In the knowledge of God we have the love of God, and that is why Paul prays : ” The Lord direct your hearts into the love of God.”
Thirdly, we get what in Hebrews is called ” no more conscience of sins.” Have you ever noticed that this is quoted just before the passage about ” having boldness to enter the holiest ” ? Before we can enter the holiest, we must be set free of ourselves to enter into the wonderful counsels of God. ” The worshippers once purged . . . have no more conscience of sins,” is in contrast to the day of atonement, when God raised the question of sins every year (Lev. xvi. 34.), but now He says, ” Their sin -. and iniquities will I remember ” (not once a year but) ” no more.” Can you say, ” The question of my sins has been gone into and settled between God and Christ on the cross; and God says, I will never raise the question of your sins again ” ?
Now the love of God is the essence of the new covenant, and though no verse actually says as much, yet we can get pretty near it in Jer. xxxii. 39-41. ” I will rejoice over them to do them good . . . with my whole heart and with my whole soul.” This is all in connection with the everlasting covenant spoken of in verse 40. So it actually gives God positive joy to bless us, as if He said, ” You don’t know what joy it gives Me to bless you.” Does it not show the heart of God ? This is what comes out in Luke xv. I do hope all have got hold of this, not merely doctrinally, but in all its intense practical reality.
To return now to 2 Cor. iii.: In the third verse, Christ was written not in tables of stone, but in fleshy (not “fleshly” but “fleshy”—i.e. soft or sensitive) tables of the heart.” It is very clear that Paul had in mind the old covenant when he spoke of the tables of stone. The latter, which Moses brought down (from the mount, were a picture of man’s heart by nature, dead, unimpressionable and irresponsive. Such were our hearts once, but they have by the Spirit’s power, in spite of their natural hardness, been made sensitive to the love of God in our Lord Jesus Christ. And He is the Spirit of the new covenant, the perfect expression of the love of God, which was perfectly set forth in His death. In that way love is the spirit of the new covenant.
Now turn to Exodus xx. for a moment. After the giving of the law in the earlier part of the chapter, God evidently has the new covenant in view in verse 24, where unconditional blessing is promised. It was as good as saying that they were certain to fail under the old covenant and God would have to fall back on His sovereign right to bless on the ground of the sacrifice of Christ. The altar of earth is there, speaking of nothing of man, but of what was entirely of God. If the altar was of stones, it was to be of unhewn ones: ” If thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” This blessing was to be entirely on the ground of the sweet savour of the sacrifice on the altar, and all from God’s side. That is chapter xx. ; what do we get in chapter xxi. ? The Spirit of the new covenant. Who was the servant ? Why, the Lord Jesus Himself, the Spirit of the new covenant. So the Lord Jesus, the One who assumed a servant’s form, might have gone out free, gone straight back to heaven from the mount of transfiguration, but He would have gone alone. But now He has plainly said—and how plainly, too !—” I love my master, my wife and my children,” or in New Testament language : ” I love the Father” (John xiv. 31); “Christ loved the Church” (Eph. v. 25); and He loved His earthly people Israel. That is what is seen in the new covenant, the love of God manifested in all its fullness in Christ. For in 2 Cor, iv. 4. we see that Christ is “the image of God,” the One who perfectly represents all that God is, and He is the Spirit of the new covenant.
Have you ever noticed that last verse, so often quoted, and seen that it is connected with the new covenant ? It is the Lord, as the Spirit of the new covenant, whom we behold with unveiled face, (he One who, as we have seen, has displayed all the fullness of God’s love. The One who could say so plainly, ” I love,” and that love perfectly displayed in going into death for us. And as we contemplate Him, and get to know more of His love, we ” are changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Lord, the Spirit,” and we become more and more morally like Him, and we love, and by love serve one another (Gal. v. 13), even as He took the form of a servant that He might serve us in love for ever.
We have only touched on a few points of this wonderful and marvellous subject, but we have seen what value the Lord Jesus must have attached to it to speak of it in connection with the cup at the supper, and as we come together and He gives us this cup of the new covenant in ” His blood,” we are reminded afresh of all the love of God, and delight to pour out our praise and worship to Him who has so delighted to bless us.
May the Lord direct ” our hearts into the love of God,” for His Name’s sake!