GYC SE 2009: More

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GYC Southeast

The Myths and Reality of the Old and New Covenants

Skip McCarty

The Myths and Reality of the Old and New Covenants, Part 1

The Myths and Reality of the Old and New Covenants, Part 2

All right, we're gonna go ahead and begin.

So we can spend some time on this particular model.

First what I wanna do, I'm gonna explain the model to you and then we're gonna go back and We're going to take at least 2 of those very difficult passages we looked at.

We're going to take Galatians 4, and I hope we can do 2 Corinthians 3, which are 2 very difficult passages that directly refers to Sinai in a very kind of derogatory way.

And we're going to look at how that fits in this model and helps us actually get this model.

And you have here a chart that also occurs in the book.

And what we're going to do now is just kind of explain the whole process here.

But I wanna go back before the creation of our world and just think with me for a moment.

If we could zoom back the video or DVD and keep going back in segments until it was before the creation of anything.

Before there were any planets or any universe or any angels.

What would we have as far back as you could conceive?

If the Bible says God is love, how do we understand God?

We understand God in terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right?

I'm gonna kind of accelerate this just a little bit.

And if we could somehow observe Father, Son, and Holy Spirit interacting before they brought anything into creation, we would have, you would be watching, you'd be observing for the first time the concept of covenant.

Because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were in covenant relationship with each other.

And what that means is they were totally given to the welfare of the other.

The statement Jesus made that all the law and the prophets is summed up in this, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that essentially is the nature of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

That's the way they relate to each other.

And so that's the origin of the everlasting covenant.

And as they began to bring creation into being, They just essentially enfolded creation into the covenant relationship they had with 1 another.

They made that same commitment to their creation, to the angels to begin with, and then ultimately to mankind, to humankind.

When Adam was created, Adam and Eve were created, God was in covenant relationship with them.

And so covenant isn't something that just began with Adam, it began eternally back.

That's why it's called in scripture everlasting covenant.

There are a couple places in scripture that refer to everlasting covenant.

I mean, there are 13 places, but 2 or 3 of them are very clearly referring to this primordial covenant, even before this earth.

And you have Adam, and this is the period I call this little thing here is the covenant of creation, where God's in covenant relationship with Adam and Eve, and then you have the fall.

And at the fall, you have God instituting or just adapting his everlasting commitment to the welfare of the human family into what theologians refer to as The covenant of grace.

The everlasting covenant is the covenant of grace, which is God now dealing with sinful creation.

This is the first time that we know of this ever happened in the universe.

That you have beings coming into existence.

But now Adam and Eve's children come into existence with sinful natures.

And as far back as we know, that's been revealed to us, in eternity past, this has never happened before.

And so God has a totally new situation, not something he didn't think about prior to that, not something he hadn't made provision for, but it's a totally new environment now where God has children coming into existence and it's just gotten worse as time goes on.

It gets even worse yet in some areas of, even in a city you have areas where you have children born into wonderful families and children born into ghetto situations where as Sebastian has been telling about, you're thinking gang from childhood up because that's the way you survive and it's just life.

And his covenantal commitment to his human family deals with all of that.

And These promises that constitute the new covenant, this is the promise that God made.

And the Bible says in order for a will to take effect, someone has to what?

And so when Jesus dies, essentially this becomes, Jesus' death is the center of gravity.

The effect of his death reaches all the way back, the forgiveness it provided reaches all the way back to the beginning and all the way forward.

And the death of Jesus, in a sense, we could say the new covenant is God's will.

And we are not only benefactors of that will, but Once we come to faith in Christ and are baptized, we become benefactors of that, not only benefactors of that will, but we become administrators of the will, become executors of the will.

And the first job that an executor has is to contact the people who are in the will.

If you had a relative died and left you in their will, you would get a notice from the executor of that will that you were in the will.

It wouldn't spell it out yet exactly what that's about.

They have to go through a legal process where they can reveal the details, but that's what an executor does.

Part of our mission is to let people know that God has these promises has made to them.

There's many people in the world today who do not know this.

They do not know that God has left them this.

Because of his covenantal commitment, every human being has this birthright.

Now we have to buy it just like someone can be, can have a provision in the will, but if they're never notified about it, if they never know anything about it, and people, and they can't find them anywhere, so they can't notify them, they can't claim their portion of the will, they could be billionaires and not know it and die in poverty.

So that's why God says, I want people to know it.

I'm inviting you to be an executor and go tell them.

Well, that's what's going on during the covenant of grace.

And then you have these various other, He makes a covenant with Noah and a covenant with Abraham and a covenant with, then it's Sinai.

And with each covenantal relation, with each covenant that God makes with his people, he's revealing a little bit more and a little bit more than the covenant that he revealed at the fall.

In the fall you have in Genesis 3.15, you have the, where God is addressing the serpent and says that I'm gonna put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed, and you're going to harm the heel of her seed, but her seed will eventually crush your head.

And that's essentially, these provisions are encapsulated in that first revelation that he gave.

And then with Noah, you have the first reference to everlasting covenant comes in Noah in Genesis 9.

And then you have with Abraham, you have even more revealed the role of faith, and God makes certain temporal as well as eternal promises to Abraham.

And then you have, when you have Mount Sinai, when God gave the covenant at Mount Sinai, this was the fullest revelation of his character he had ever given to the human race.

It's the first time that the Bible records where God tells people he loves them.

Doesn't mean they didn't know that, doesn't mean it wasn't passed on orally, but it's not explicit until Sinai.

He tells them he's a gracious God at Sinai.

And for the first time, he tells them he's a merciful God at Sinai.

So the covenant at Sinai was a huge revelation of the character of God.

And you just have a greater and greater revelation of the character of God until you come to Jesus, who is God, and his revelation, of course, is enormous.

So we have, and during the period of the development of the covenantal revelations that God's giving, we have the historical Old Covenant and the historical New Covenant.

And what determined the difference between the historical Old Covenant and the historical New Covenant?

Yes, that Jesus Christ came in the middle.

Jesus comes in the middle, and that makes everything new.

It makes the commandment to love God new and to love 1 another, makes that new, makes the promises new, makes everything new.

That's why these are better promises after Jesus comes and we actually see them fulfilled in his life.

They're the same promises, but they're even better promises.

Hebrew talks about the new covenant promises being better promises.

And often that is thought of as the promise that Israel made that I'm gonna keep your law as opposed to the new covenant that God's gonna put his law in our hearts and minds.

But God made this same promise to Israel that he would put his law in their hearts and minds.

Series

The Myths and Reality of the Old and New Covenants

The Myths and Reality of the Old and New Covenants, Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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