One of the most misunderstood ideas concerning the Bible is that which assumes the God of the old covenant has somehow changed when revealed in the new covenant. This is totally wrong. There are some differences between the old and new covenants, but those differences are not found in God.
Moses wasn't presenting one God under the old covenant, and then Jesus reveal a different God to us in the new. He is the same God who never changes. It's impossible for Him to be other than He is; and He was like that from before creation, and remains unchanged.
What does that mean? It means His very nature has always been and always be the same, and the standards He has as revealed in the law also remain the same. There were of course changes made after the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but those changes weren't in what most would identify as the moral law. The changes were primarily in relationship to ceremonial law and the law of the priesthood. There were some other changes in the law, but we won't get into them in this article.
Let's put it another way; in language many so-called teachers us today. I'm talking about cheap grace. To assert, as many do, that grace somehow lowers who He is or His standards, is a great deception.
After all, what does grace have to do with the holiness of God? What does it have to do with His righteousness. These are who God is. Grace can never change that reality, and in the thought and person of God was never expected to. That's why the difference between the old and new covenants should never be taken as a change in the nature of God as a result of the shedding of the blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins.
So what is one of the key differences between the covenants then? It's the mediators themselves. Moses, as great as a man as he was, still had to offer sacrifices for his own sin. Jesus, on the other hand, was the perfection of God revealed in His humanity. He totally embodied who God was and met all His standards as a man. The importance of that is under the new covenant, we start from a different position in God than those did under Moses.
Jesus, as the perfect representation and representative of God, fully realized the entire standard of God, answering it in full obedience. In Him was the Godhead revealed, expressing exactly who He was and what He wanted by living it out before those He came in contact with while on the earth, and further revealing it after He ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to dwell in His people.
This perfect man is now the Mediator of a new covenant, a covenant that starts from a position of perfection in the man Jesus Christ, but includes the same God who revealed Himself under both covenants.
In other words, when we place our faith in Jesus Christ, we start from a position of His perfection, not Moses' imperfections, or our own. This is the position we start from when we repent from our sins and believe in Jesus Christ.
All of this is to say while we are saved from God's wrath because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and by grace we are saved and not by works, the requirements of God are still in place, and He has given us the Holy Spirit to help us to walk in obedience to His moral laws and commands.
The God of the old covenant is the God of the new covenant, and e doesn't change.
No comments:
Post a Comment