““‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the LORD: I will put my laws upon their heart, and on their mind I will write them.’ He then says, ‘And their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more’” (Hebrews 10:16-17 NASB).
By John David Hicks
Our God is a covenant God; He keeps His word. Similarly, the Christian life is one of covenant. The foundation of a covenant relationship is trust or faith. This is not a contract of law, but a relational covenant. We are a “covenant people.”
Without a commitment to the covenant, you will be insecure and defeated in your Christian life. With the covenant you can be bold and victorious in life. The authority of covenant allows God’s power and grace to flow through you. Only those who are in covenant can have the benefits of the covenant.
In the Bible a covenant means a sacred agreement, a testament of mutual promise between God and a person or a group of people. From the beginning, God made covenants with chosen people—Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David. God is the one who initiates the covenant.
The Hebrew word for “covenant” (berith) means to “cut, or divide,” referring to the fact that blood had to be shed to bind the parties involved to the covenant (Genesis 15:10; Jeremiah 34:18-19). A blood covenant was a formal, solemn, and binding agreement—an oath or pledge—between two parties: promising all of their rights, possessions, and benefits to the other.
This covenant is a relational commitment to be faithful to one another. It joins your lives together in every way. God said, “I will be your God and you will be My people.” God made promises of provisions, guidance, and help and gave Israel the law to teach them how to live in covenant with Him. The people’s commitment was to be one of faith and obedience.
Covenant is both give and take. If you choose to obey the covenant, you will receive the promised blessings. If you break the covenant, the blessings are withheld and in some instances a penalty is given. But the nation, the covenant people struggled and did not keep the covenant. So God promised to make a new covenant.
At the Last Supper before His death on the cross, Jesus announced a new covenant. “When He said, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear” (Hebrews 8:13 NASB). The old covenant was fulfilled by Christ and was no longer valid and therefore no longer needed. Jesus knew that within a generation, Jerusalem and its temple would be destroyed with every stone thrown down. The old covenant with its sacrifices and priesthood would disappear forever. The old covenant was sealed with the blood of a lamb, and the new covenant is sealed with the blood of Jesus Christ.
Because Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, He is the sacrificial offering for our sins. “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29 NASB). Jesus’ death on the cross, the resurrection, and His ascension to the throne laid the foundation for the new covenant. The price has been paid; redemption is complete, the new covenant has been established.
Salvation (sozo in Greek) means to save, heal, or deliver. Christ’s redemptive work is prophesied in the book of Isaiah, and His threefold atonement—spirit, soul, and body—is recorded in chapter 53: “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed” (verse 5).
1. “He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities.” This refers to Christ our sin-bearer and the forgiveness of our sins (the spirit).
2. “The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him.” This refers to emotional healing and our deliverance (the soul).
3. “And by His scourging we are healed.” This refers to physical healing (the body).
The new covenant provides for forgiveness of sins, emotional deliverance, and physical healing. “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass” (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24 NASB). Unless you are aware of the finished work of redemption, you will never appropriate it and be complete in it.
The Lord’s Table comes from the Passover supper in Egypt. The night before the children of Israel left Egypt they celebrated the Passover. They killed a lamb and put the blood over the doorpost so the death angel would pass over them. They prepared and ate the lamb they killed. That lamb represented the body of Jesus. When they ate it, Scripture says the next day, there was not one feeble person among them (Psalm 105:37). There was a multitude of people there and not one person was feeble or sick.
They had a covenant with God and kept the Passover. Today, like the Passover supper in Egypt, when we take Communion we are putting our faith in God’s salvation just as they did.
At the Communion Table the bread and wine is a symbolic picture of Christ’s work on the cross. “In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me’” (1 Corinthians 11:25 NASB). “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace” (Ephesians 1:7 NASB).
The bread is a symbol of the body of our Lord, “by whose stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24 NKJV). When we eat the bread and by faith believe in the salvation God has provided, we are healed. Remember the Syrophoenician woman who came to Jesus for the healing of her daughter? Jesus called this healing/deliverance “the children’s bread” (Mark 7:27). It is the children’s right in the covenant.
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul tells the Corinthians that many are weak and sickly among them because they do not discern the Lord’s body. They did not understand all that Jesus did for us at the cross. They knew that He shed His blood so that they could be forgiven of their sins. But they did not discern that God wants to heal our bodies as well. The bread was for healing and divine strength. Paul goes on to say that many have fallen asleep (died) because they did not discern the Lord’s body.
Remember, the new covenant provides for the forgiveness of your sins, your emotional deliverance, and your physical healing. At the Lord’s Supper, Jesus wants us to accept, receive, and assimilate the meaning of His death and resurrection. When you partake of Communion, understand what you are doing and by faith believe God for His provision. Jesus said do this “in remembrance of Me.” And Paul adds, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:25-26). There is no set time a person should receive Communion. And there is no scripture that teaches that it has to be given by a minister. You can take it yourself.
I know of two people who were so sick that the doctors could not help them. One had cancer and the other a bladder infection that would not go away. They were sick and feeble, but as they took Communion day after day their condition improved and soon they were completely healed. “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves’” (John 6:53 NASB). “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him” (John 6:56 NASB).
Eating and drinking are two powerful examples of a shared life. Apart from Jesus’ life, you are dead not only in your sins but have no salvation—to be saved, healed, or delivered.
Communion should not be viewed as a magical formula for your healing, but as a spiritual act of worship and thanksgiving as you meditate upon His redemptive work:
“Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits; who pardons all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases; who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion; who satisfies your years with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle” (Psalm 103:2-5 NASB).
When you take Communion you are remembering that “This cup is the new covenant in My blood.” This new covenant was the subject of prophecy in Jeremiah 31: “‘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…for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more’” (Jeremiah 31:31-34).
In this new covenant God pledges to forgive our sins, to put His laws within us, to write them on our hearts, and to be our God and to make us His people. To accomplish this, God gives us the Holy Spirit; we are “born again” and made a “new creation” in Christ. The certainty of this is seen in God’s covenant commitment. God has dealt with two big problems:
The first is the problem of guilt and shame because of sin. By Jesus shedding His blood He took our sin, our guilt and shame on Himself: “I will forgive their iniquity” and “This cup is the new covenant in My blood.”
The other problem is rebellion—our sin and failure causes us to run away from God and follow the destructive suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil. God solves the problem of rebellion by writing His law on our hearts so that it is not imposed from outside, but His will is experienced from the inside as our own will (Galatians 2:19-21; Romans 6:22).
Hebrews 10:16-17 quotes the promise of God: “‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws upon their heart, and on their mind I will write them.’ He then says, ‘And their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.’”
1. God will remember our sins no more. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12 NASB).
2. Israel would not stop sinning so God will write His desires on our hearts. Have you ever tried to change somebody? Change must come from the inside out and so “it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13 NASB).
3. He will put His Spirit in us, we become His temple, and we will walk in His ways. Ezekiel 36:27 puts it like this: “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances” (NASB). God secures it—with the promise of the Holy Spirit to be our helper, teacher, guide, and source of power.
God seals the covenant by giving us His Holy Spirit. We seal the covenant by giving Him ourselves (Romans 12:1-2).
To understand the new covenant you must understand the difference between a contract and a covenant. A contract is based on law and a covenant is based on relationship.
Let me illustrate this with the difference between government and marriage:
In the realm of government, if I do what the government wants, then I will have no problem with the government. If I pay my taxes, for example, and obey traffic laws, and in general don’t cause trouble, the government leaves me alone. But if I break the law and don’t go along with what the law says, the government will give me problems.
In the realm of government, there is no expectation of us having a relationship with a government official. The law is the law.
Sometimes our relationship with God drifts into this type of relationship. We think: “If I keep the rules I will have no problem with God.” God does not want a relationship like that. He wants a personal relationship.
In a marriage covenant, you make a commitment to be true and faithful to your spouse to the exclusion of others. Our covenant with God is like that—it is relational. Your word is a commitment that is binding and sacred. It joins your lives together in every way. We are called the “bride of Christ.” Because God loves us, He wants to make a marriage covenant with us.
The blessings promised of the covenant is that we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9 NASB). We cannot do it without God, and God will not do it without us.
In Hebrews 13:20-21 God equips us to minister: “Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord, equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
When Sir Henry Morton Stanley was sent from England to Africa to find David Livingstone, the explorer and missionary, Stanley came in contact with a powerful war-like tribe that controlled that whole region. Stanley was in no condition to fight them. The wealthy king’s strong army was undefeated in battle. Stanley’s interpreter suggested he make a blood covenant with the king. But Stanley did not want to make any commitment; the thought was even repulsive to him. His interpreter, however, said, “In covenant, all the king has is yours, and all you have is his.” This appealed to Stanley.
After several days of negotiation, they exchanged gifts to seal the covenant. The king wanted Stanley’s white goat. But Stanley was in poor health and needed the milk. Although he did not want to give up the goat, at length he agreed. The king gave Stanley his seven-foot-long copper-wrapped spear. Stanley thought the king had taken advantage of him.
When he left the king to continue looking for Livingstone, he was loaded down with provisions. A few days later he found himself surrounded by 300 warriors. The warriors looked like they were going to kill them all. Stanley lifted his spear, and in amazement he watched as they all bowed down to him. Then they helped him any way they could. Wherever Stanley went in Africa with that copper-wrapped spear, everyone bowed and submitted to him. It was like he had the king’s scepter. It gave him authority and power everywhere he went! Stanley was a blood brother to the king. If you messed with Stanley, the king would mess with you.
Years later, the German explorer Emin Pasha was cut off from civilization by warring tribes and all who were sent to rescue him were killed. The kaiser of Germany asked Queen Victoria to send Stanley to Africa to find him. Stanley took his scepter, the copper-wrapped spear, and brought Pasha back.
“‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, and the righteous scepter is the scepter of His kingdom’” (Hebrews 1:8 NASB). Jesus in the new covenant has given us His scepter of righteousness. You can go anywhere in the power of the Holy Spirit with that scepter of righteousness. All that the King has is yours—all that you have is His!
Remember how God seals the covenant? By giving us His Holy Spirit (John 14:26). We seal the covenant by giving Him ourselves (Romans 12:1-2). Stanley almost missed it by trying to hang on to that old goat. Let go of your “old goat” and receive the scepter of righteousness and be victorious. You are in covenant!
That’s why the hymn writer sings, “His oath, his covenant, his blood support me in the whelming flood.” In your covenant relationship with God, He has taken the divine initiative: He chose you, bought you, called you, justified you, and put His Spirit within you. He wrote His law on your heart, and is working in you that which is pleasing in His sight, and will glorify you in heaven. That is what supports you in the whelming flood. “When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.” It’s His oath and His covenant commitment, His blood, and His sovereign grace—that is all my hope and stay.
We have seen God’s part in the covenant relationship; now what is yours?
First, you should recognize that all you have belongs to God. Ask Him if there are any areas where you have rationalized sin, or you have incomplete obedience.
Second, recognize you are purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ; all that is God’s is now yours. Explore the Word of God for all your benefits. Study the power, the love, the patience, the revelation, the wisdom He has given.
Third, every Communion you take should be entered into with faith that expects to receive the blessings of the new covenant: forgiveness, cleansing, healing, and the very life of Jesus Christ.
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