The Old and New Covenants

What is a covenant? A covenant is a promise or agreement between two parties binding them to undertakings on each other’s behalf. Throughout the history of humanity, God has related to man through His covenants.

The Old Covenant: The Old Testament deals essentially with the Old Covenant. The Covenant of Abraham reveals God’s plan to save a people and take them into His land. The Old Covenant neither brought, nor brings justification to anyone. Justification and salvation could be obtained only in the way of faith. So Abraham and all Old Covenant saints were justified by faith, and the Old Covenant was merely to illustrate that law. The Old Covenant with the nation of Israel and the promise land is a temporary picture of what is accomplished by the New Covenant where Jesus actually purchased a people and will take them to be with Him forever in the new heavens and new earth. The Old or Mosaic Covenant is a legal or works covenant that God made with Israel on Mount Sinai that is brought to an end or fulfilled at the cross. It was never intended to save people but instead its purpose was to increase sin and guilt until the coming of the Savior. The version of law in the Old Covenant era was the Mosaic Law, which included the Ten Commandments. The version of law in the New Covenant era is the law of Christ, which includes the commands of Christ that pertain to the New Covenant era and the commands of his Apostles.

The New Covenant: The New Testament deals essentially with the new covenant. However, the new covenant does not actually begin with the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For the most part, these four books deal with the life of Jesus before the Cross. The new covenant begins after the resurrection of Jesus, and represents God’s grace and unmerited favor. The New Covenant is the covenant of grace in which Jesus purchased a people by his death on the cross so that all those for whom he died will receive full forgiveness of sins and become incurable God-lovers.

To understand the New Covenant we look the entire Bible as a progressive revealing of the Covenant of Grace, and that includes the Old Covenant. It carries over the old order into the new in the sense that it is understood that the Old Covenant laws are not done away with (made null and void); rather they are fulfilled or completed (for the believer only) in Christ. In this way, the old conditional promise has become new and unconditional. The scriptures also teach that the Old Covenant laws are still binding, but we can only fully keep them in Christ Jesus. In Him alone we keep them perfectly. In other words, He is our Sabbath of rest that we will keep forever, and He is our daily or continual sacrifice, our Lamb of atonement. Jesus taught that what He came to do in His life, and the work that He accomplished, was the fulfillment and the true substance of all the Old Covenant 'shadows or types' that merely prefigured it. Those laws are all still kept in Him. Are you living under the Covenant of grace or are you living under the Covenant of the Law?