The New is not like The Old

"But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, inasmuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second. Because finding fault with them, He says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they did not continue in My covenant, and I disregarded them, says the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”In that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." Hebrews 8:6-13

For many Christians, the Christian life can be described as finding ways to improve their quality of life as can be measured by what benefits they can receive in the flesh. For example, if they have more money to spend, better food to eat, are free of illness and so on, then they can believe God is blessing them for the manner in which they are living. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, what it does say is that people are looking at the Christian life as an opportunity to indulge the flesh. Despite the fact that Jesus said, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal (Matthew 6:19)," many Christians live their lives in an attempt to store up treasures on earth and even use the Bible as justification for it. The Word of God is full of scriptures referring to the promises and blessings of God. And when these people point to the scriptures to justify this pursuit, they often turn to the Old Testament rather than the New Testament. You may even hear them use words like "appropriate" or "claim" when it comes to these Old Testament promises and blessings. Many books have been written and ministries created that teach that all of the promises and all of the blessings offered to the nation of Israel are things that we can now experience, embrace and profit from today. God can most certainly bless His children in the ways described in the Old Testament. However, to assume that He is obligated to do so or that we can somehow earn these blessings by our behavior is a false belief. The promises and blessings of the Old Testament all had to do with the issues of the flesh and relied upon the individual's ability to live up to the standards of the Old Testament in order to receive them. However, the New Covenant deals with the issues of the heart. The promises and blessings of the New Covenant are not based on what we do, but on what God has chosen to freely give to us through our faith in Jesus Christ. When God gave the Old Covenant, He said nothing about knowing who He is. Many Christians are fine with that because they only want God in their lives for what He can give them that will benefit their flesh and their pursuit of gaining the world. For those people, perhaps that is a good thing because someday they may reach the point where they realize the emptiness of that pursuit in life and finally turn to God for what He truly desires for them to have; Himself.

What is better about the New Covenant, its promises and blessings, is that we now have the opportunity to truly know our God. Through the New Covenant, God has promised to forgive our sins and that He will no longer remember our sins. This gives us the opportunity to get to know Him for who He is because our sins no longer separate us from Him as they did under the Old Covenant. It is no wonder that under the Old Covenant, the most we could hope to get from God is blessings of the flesh. He, in essence, becomes a spiritual Santa Claus. We know He exists, but the most we can hope to obtain from Him is the occasional gift based on whether or not our behavior was good or bad. His love for us boils down to the size of the gift and whether or not we feel He accepts us. Under the New Covenant, God has given us Himself; the ultimate gift. Through Jesus Christ, and His indwelling Holy Spirit, God has met the deepest desires of our heart for unconditional love, total acceptance, meaning and purpose to life. We now have our God. Under the Old Covenant, you could never have your God. You could be identified with Him, but you could never have a relationship with Him. It had to do with you trying to live in obedience to something you cannot. And in trying to live that way, you will come to realize that there is something wrong with you and not with God. There is nothing wrong with the Old Covenant, the commandments, the promises or the blessings. One of the main reasons God gave the Old Covenant was to show us our sinfulness and inability to live up to its requirements. That was so we would realize that we are spiritually dead to God and in need of His life being restored to us in Christ. So, if the covenant you are living under looks like the Old Covenant than it is not the New Covenant. The Old Covenant has no relevance in the life of believer. Yes, we can study it to see that mankind is incapable of living up to its demands and that it increases the sin in our lives and how it presents the foreshadows of Jesus Christ and how God would accomplish His plan of salvation, but it is not the Covenant we live by as Christians. That is why the Old Covenant is said to be obsolete and growing old. However, it is not obsolete in that we can use the Old Covenant to show the lost their need for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Through our faith in Jesus Christ and the New Covenant we now live under, we have been given everything we need for life and godliness and been given every spiritual blessing. God has left nothing out. If you have everything you need and every blessing, there is nothing else you need and nothing else He needs to promise. It is time to stop trying to live a life you cannot, that God isn't asking you to live, in order to receive the promises and blessings of the flesh He has not promised to give and start discovering the promises and blessings of your heart and spirit He has freely given to you through your faith in Jesus Christ.