God versus God

The pastor at my church is currently taking us through the book of Hebrews. The past few weeks, we have been spending a lot of time on the Tabernacle and the Old Covenant versus the New Covenant. His position is that the New Covenant is superior to the Old for lots of reasons (I'll go into some of them below). When he first started talking about that, I was really confused - how could one be superior to the other if both were made and put in place by God Himself? Certainly they were both under His divine sovereignty. Is our pastor saying that God somehow made a mistake with the first Covenant?


I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and God, in His infinite grace and patience, has been leading me through my confusion holding my hand. I think I've finally come to see just how this can be true without questioning God's omniscience and omnipotence. 


First off, lest you think I am making things up about the New Covenant being better than the Old, a few scriptures (all the emphases are mine):

"Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?" - Acts 15:10 (Peter, in regards to a demand that the Gentiles who believed in Christ be circumcised and keep the Law)

"Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin." - Ro 3:19-20

"For if those who are of the Law are heirs, faith is made void and the promise is nullified; for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation." - Ro 4:14-15

"For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, because the whorshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have had consciousness of sins? But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year by year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." - Heb 10:1-4

If you skipped over all the scripture references, like some of us are wont to do, I'll paraphrase: the Bible says that the purpose of the Law was to make man aware of his sin. There was no way for everyone to keep from breaking the Law all the time; if there were, God wouldn't have had to spend Leviticus and Deuteronomy outlining what sacrifices should be made for such-and-such a sin, and how to obtain forgiveness if you did this or that. Along with the Law came prescribed punishments because God foreknew that man would not be able to keep the Law.


The only problem is that the sacrifices weren't permanently cleansing. Over and over, every year, another goat and herd of cattle and several sheep met their deaths to atone for the sins of the Israelites. As my pastor put it this week: in order to receive their inheritance from the covenant (interesting fact: the Greek word for covenant - diathēkē - is also the word for "will," as in your Last Will and Testament), something had to die. But the Law cannot change who we are; the sacrifices made could not keep the Israelites from sinning again. It is only Christ's blood that can do that. The difference between the two? Jesus Christ was God incarnate. He came and died, but - here's the important part - he didn't stay dead. Christ rose again, and His Holy Spirit is alive  in us, changing us from the inside out.


But here we are again, back at the same question: did God make a mistake when He handed down the Law to Moses? Did He not realize that the people would continue to sin, that we would need a true Savior? May it never be! (Sorry, I've been reading a lot of the book of Romans lately.)


But seriously: God didn't just one day decide He'd had enough and change the plans He'd made at the beginning of the universe. We know this because He told the Israelites long before Jesus was born that the Old Covenant wouldn't be enough:

"'Behold, days are coming,' declares the Lord, 'when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,' declares the Lord. 'But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,' declares the Lord, 'I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord," for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,' declares the Lord, 'for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.'" - Jer 31:31-24

Yes, that bit about the law (lower-case "L" this time) being within us and written on our hearts refers to the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of the living God. Rest assured: He is not flying by the seat of His pants, nor did He make any mistake. The Maker of the Universe knew just what He was doing.


So why did He go about it the long way, you ask? I don't presume to know the heart of God, but it seems that there have been at least a few good consequences that came from going His way:

1) If God didn't first give us the Law, we wouldn't know we needed forgiveness. 

2) If we didn't try over and over to atone for our sins in our own strength - by sacrificing bulls and calfs and lambs - we wouldn't know that we couldn't do it. It is just another manifestation of that great verse that says, "when I am weak, then I am strong." (2 Cor 12:10) It is only when we recognize our own helplessness that we truly rely on God, and thus see His strength. And only when we have seen His strength can we praise it fully.

Amen.