Two Covenants One Story

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to His disciples and said, "Take, eat, this is My body." And then He took the cup and He gave thanks and He gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it all of you, for this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." (Matthew 26:26)

How the Old Testament and the New Testament fit together as one story—the prequel and the sequel of God's redeeming work.

One Story, Two Covenants

It has been said that The Force Awakens was the most anticipated sequel in box office history. When the first trailer dropped online almost a year before release, people stayed up until midnight to watch it, and it instantly drew millions of views. When the film finally opened on December 14, 2015, there were lines out the door, and within twelve days it had already made $1.1 billion—on its way to nearly $3 billion. Disney paid $4 billion for the franchise, confident they would get it back.

The important thing about a sequel is that it is just that: the same plot line, the same universe, the same characters whose story continues from where you left off. When we come to the Bible, we must remember the same truth. Though there are different books, it is ultimately one consistent story.

There are 66 books in our Bible, divided into two sections. The Old Testament is the first 39 books, the first two-thirds; the New Testament is the last 27 books, the final third. The word testament is actually a King James word—every place the older translation says "testament," we would say covenant. So we have the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. But though there are two covenants, there is one story.

Here at Cross Connection we have spent most of our years in the last third of the Bible, the New Covenant. As a result, we can forget how important the first two-thirds is. Without the Old Covenant, the stage is not set. Some Christians never read the Old Testament, saying, "I'm a New Testament Christian." But we cannot lose the cohesive nature of the story from Genesis to Revelation. As we come to the book of Hebrews this year, we are reminded that those 39 books set the groundwork for everything that follows.

The Call of Abram

The story began to pick up steam about 4,000 years ago with a man named Abram. He lived in what is now Iraq—Ur of the Chaldees, near Babylon. When he was 75 years old, God began to speak to him, recorded in Genesis 12, probably through a vision in a language he could understand—what we call special revelation.

The text reads in an interesting way: "Now the LORD had said to Abram." Apparently the message began before the words of Genesis 12, perhaps before Abram was even 75. And God's word was specific:

Get out of your country, from your family and from your father's house, to a land that I will show you. (Genesis 12:1)

Leave everything common, everything familiar, everything secure. In that age, to leave your people was a dangerous proposition. And the plot thickens, because at 75 Abram had no child—though his name ironically means father of many. Every time someone called his name, it was like a twist of the knife. His wife Sarah was ten years younger, and they were long past hope of starting a family.

We know couples today who have struggled with infertility, and the pain and frustration are real. But that pain pales in comparison to what Abram and Sarah faced 4,000 years ago in the Middle East. It was not just painful—it was a shame and humiliation. They would have been looked down upon in their society, Sarah especially.

Yet God said, "Come follow Me out west to a land I will show you. I'm not even going to tell you where you're going." Some of you left what was familiar to come to California for school or a job or the military—but you knew where you were going and had a way back. God told Abram to leave everything and simply pointed him in a direction.

Why would Abram do that? Because of God's promise:

I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing; I will bless those who bless you and curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:2–3)

So Abram completely trusted God. He took his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, his servants and goods, and traveled about 400 miles west to the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, and all the other "-ites"—the place we now call Israel. He experienced pain, difficulty, famine, and fear, but he followed God because he was looking forward to the fulfillment of the promise.

The Promise Reaffirmed

Turn a page in the Old Testament and you often turn many years. By Genesis 15, about ten years have passed. Abram is 85, Sarah is 75, and they are still childless. Worse, in defending his nephew Lot, Abram had picked a fight and made enemies of the people around him. This little thing in the land of Canaan, surrounded by enemies, is nothing new. Every president in modern history has come into office promising to fix it, but they never will. Only the true Messiah can—and He will not be voted into office, because He is already King of kings and Lord of lords, and when the Prince of Peace returns, He will bring peace.

Abram was afraid, and we know it because of the word that came to him:

Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward. (Genesis 15:1)

You only tell someone not to be afraid when they are afraid. And I appreciate Abram's honesty in his reply: "Lord, what will You give me, seeing I go childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?" There is real frustration there. He had left everything, and the one set to inherit was a servant born in his household.

This one shall not be your heir, but one who will come from your own body shall be your heir. (Genesis 15:4)

Then God brought him outside and told him to count the stars: "So shall your descendants be." And here is the word Abram is famous for: "And he believed the LORD, and He accounted it to him for righteousness." God established a covenant with Abram—a contract, a treaty, a testament between the two of them—assuring him he would have a son.

God Works Through the Impossible

Another fourteen or fifteen years pass. By Genesis 17, Abram is 99 and Sarah is 89, still with no children. Along the way they had tried to help God out—a servant named Hagar bore Abram a son. Anybody ever try to fix the fix you're in? When you do, God has to introduce another fix to fix the fix. For 4,000 years the world has lived with the fallout of that one.

But God comes again. He tells Abram, "I'm going to change your name. You will no longer be Abram but Abraham, father of many nations. And your wife will be Sarah, because next year she will have a baby." Abraham laughs. So God says, "We'll name that son laughter—Isaac." At 100 years old, Abram becomes the father of Isaac by Sarah, and God passes the covenant down to Isaac.

This brings us to our first point: God enjoys working through impossible circumstances. Why? First, because in impossible circumstances we are forced to trust. We can't fix it on our own; Abraham already tried. God loves to work through impossible situations because it is there that we trust Him. Second, it is there that He receives the glory. If you could fix it, you'd say, "Look what I did—look how intelligent and industrious I am." God will have none of that. That is why Abraham's attempt produced the child of the flesh, while the true son was the child of the promise.

From Abraham to Egypt

Abraham begot Isaac, the covenant passed to Isaac; Isaac begot Jacob, and the covenant passed to Jacob. God changed Jacob's name to Israel, and Israel had twelve sons who became the twelve tribes. Through many twists and turns in Genesis, this family ends up in Egypt, where the book of Exodus begins.

Turn from Genesis 50 to Exodus 1 and you fast-forward 400 years. The one man Abram now has hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of descendants in Egypt—but they have become slaves under severe taskmasters. So they cry out:

So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them. (Exodus 2:24–25)

God sent a deliverer, Moses, to tell Pharaoh, "Let My people go." Through many plagues, He brought the descendants of Abraham out of Egypt by His power. This is our second point: God always makes good on His promises. Sometimes it takes a decade, or two, or forty—but God always keeps His word.

The Law and the Fatal Flaw

God brought them to Mount Sinai and established a covenant, not only with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but now with their descendants. Moses went up the mountain and received the conditions of the covenant—the law of God. He brought them down and said, "Fulfill these and you will be God's covenant people, and He will bring you into the promised land." And the people said, "All that God has said, we will do and be obedient" (Exodus 19).

But almost as soon as they entered the covenant, they broke it. God makes good on His promises; we don't. Some people conclude, "Those Israelites just weren't very good at it. I would have kept the covenant." You don't know your own heart. As you read Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, it becomes clearer with every page that humanity has a fatal flaw that God's law cannot fix.

The whole story of the old covenant is the story of people doing their best to keep God's law—and failing. From Moses to Joshua, through judges like Gideon, Barak, Samson, and Ehud, to Samuel, and on to the kings—Saul, David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Jeroboam, and all the rest—every one of them failed. The nation succumbed to idolatry, gluttony, greed, drunkenness, and immorality. God sent prophets—Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Obadiah—to call them back to repentance, but they kept turning away.

The Promise of a New Covenant

Eight centuries of failure, repentance, and subjugation pass. Finally, in the sixth century BC, the Babylonian Empire rises, destroys the temple, and carries Israel into captivity for breaking the covenant. As the nation is dismantled city by city, God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah:

Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, that 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... My covenant which they broke... I will put My law in their minds and write it on their hearts... For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more. (Jeremiah 31:31–34)

Under the old covenant, you would bring your sacrifices to God to deal with your sin, but you could never do it well enough. So God says, "I will bring My sacrifice to deal with your sin"—because God always keeps His promises where we don't. And when God Himself offers the sacrifice, He can say, "Your sin and iniquity I will forgive and remember no more."

This is our fourth point: God's law under the old covenant exposes our need for Christ and the new covenant. There are two covenants, but one story. The old points us to the new. It shows that there is nothing we can do in ourselves to fix the fix of sin. All our sacrifices will always be insufficient—but Jesus comes and offers the sacrifice that deals with it all.

Hebrews 10: The Shadow and the Substance

That brings us to Hebrews 10, which I'll read from the New Living Translation:

The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves. The sacrifices under that system were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide a perfect cleansing... if they could have provided a perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped... But instead, those sacrifices actually reminded them of their sins year after year. For it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. (Hebrews 10:1–4)

That is why, when Christ came into the world, He said to God, "You did not want animal sacrifices or sin offerings. But You have given me a body to offer... Look, I have come to do Your will, O God." ... He cancels the first covenant in order to put the second into effect. For God's will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time. (Hebrews 10:5–10)

That is the rest of the story. Two covenants, but one story—and the first points to the second. It is the prequel. The old system was only a trailer; Christ is the good thing itself.

The New Covenant in His Blood

On the night He would be betrayed, the night before He would be crucified, the Lamb of God was observing the Feast of Passover with His disciples—the remembrance of the first covenant, the leaving of Egypt. As they ate, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and said, "Take, eat. This is My body, given for you." Then He took the cup and said, "Drink from it, all of you, for this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the removal of sins."

So today, as we do every seventh Sunday, we will partake of communion. This is the theme and focus of the book of Hebrews: the old covenant was insufficient. It couldn't do it. Jesus is better. He comes to fulfill what the old covenant could not, so that you and I could be forgiven.

When we partake of the bread, we remember His body broken for us, and His blood shed for us—because Hebrews 9 says that without the shedding of blood there is no removal of sins. He had to die. For more than 1,400 years, sacrifices were offered every single year, more than we can fathom, and none of them ever dealt with sin. But Jesus came and offered one sacrifice, once for all, so that as we—like Abraham—put our faith in Him, He accounts it to us as righteousness. That, my friends, is good news. That is why we call it the gospel.

Receiving Christ

It may be that this is the first time you have heard or understood this good news, and I want to give you the opportunity to put your trust in Jesus, just as Abraham did 4,000 years ago, to receive a right standing with God. If you want to receive Christ as your Savior today and be forgiven of your sins, pray with me where you are: "Dear Jesus, I recognize that I need You. I've tried to fix myself, but I confess I can't do it. I pray that You'd come into my life, forgive me of my sins, and help me to follow You by faith all the days of my life. In Jesus' name."

Closing Prayer

Lord, I thank You for Your great grace toward us. Even though many of us can remember trying in our own efforts to make ourselves clean, no sacrifice we could offer would ever be sufficient. But Jesus, You came 2,000 years ago, the just for the unjust, the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world by laying down Your life. We thank You that You gave Your body to be broken for us and Your blood to be shed for us, that we might experience the forgiveness of sins that Jeremiah prophesied 2,500 years ago. As we put our trust in You, You forgive us, pardon us, and remember our iniquity no more.

Father, we thank You that You are a good Father, that You have loved us with an everlasting love, and that You demonstrated Your love toward us in that while we were still sinners, You sent Your Son to die for us.

Jesus, on the night in which He was betrayed, He took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, "Take, eat. This is My body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me." In the same way He took the cup and said, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." We remember Your body broken for us and Your blood shed for us, knowing that without it there is no removal of sins. We thank You that because of what You've done and our trust in You, You have cast our sin as far as the east is from the west, never to be remembered again.

I pray, God, that we would walk in that confidence, fully assured of Your goodness and grace, and that this full assurance would be a witness to those we interact with this week. We don't have a high view of ourselves; we have a high and holy view of You. We don't boast in what we have done; we boast in what You have done. May that be evident in us. Thank You for Your saving grace. Amen.