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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Eric Walsh

Conflict of the Covenants

We'll read a verse of scripture and then we'll pray to go into the message.

We're going to read from verses 6 to verse 13.

Hebrews chapter 8 and verse 6, the Bible reads and says, but now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant which was established upon better promises.

For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second.

For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when 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 in the day when I took them by the hand to lead out of the land of Egypt, because they continued not in my covenant and I regarded them not, says the Lord.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days saith the Lord.

I will put my laws into their mind and write them in their hearts and I will be to them a God and they shall be to me a people." Our message this Sabbath is entitled, The Conflict of the Covenants.

Father God, we thank you Lord for bringing us into this house of worship on this your holy Sabbath day.

Father God I ask that I be not seen or heard today.

Father God Instead I ask that the Holy Spirit would speak through me.

The presence of your spirit would fill this place.

So that Father God we don't leave this place the way that we came.

But we leave with a more serious desire to serve you.

Recently I ran into a store owner locally and was purchasing a larger ticket item.

And in my interactions with the store owner, I found that he was a former Seventh-day Adventist and seemed to still hold some bit of a grudge against the Adventist church.

He began to try to convince me, not knowing that I preach, tried to convince me that the law, the seven-day Sabbath, was done away with, that it was a part of the old covenant, and that we were now under the new covenant.

And so the idea of keeping the 10 Commandments, and specifically, and probably the only 1 that they really don't want you keeping, the Fourth Commandment, he came at me and began to produce documents and entire textbooks and websites and web pages and even an organization that meets regularly here locally and has now an annual conference to come against God's remnant church and to try and destroy the fundamental beliefs that gird our denomination.

I found it interesting that what was used was the concept of a new covenant.

The idea that somehow when Jesus came to earth he had done away with all of the things of the Old Testament.

And so in doing so there was nothing about the Old Testament that was left valuable.

An interesting theological debate when you consider that Jesus spoke from the Old Testament and more importantly continued in all of the ways of the Old Testament, especially in keeping the Sabbath, and also of course, Jesus made sure to speak to the concerning law that he had not come to do away with the law, But that he had come to fulfill the law.

Fulfillment and doing away with are very different.

But here lies our dilemma as Adventist Christians.

Because those who would come against us and who would teach us contrary to what we have been taught and what we believe based on sola scriptura, based on the Bible and the Bible alone, how do we now give a defense for what we believe?

Unfortunately, many of the things that we would normally use to gird our beliefs cannot enter into this argument.

Because those who are well-versed in the spirit of prophecy and in the writings of Ellen White, you need to understand that when you leave the corridors of such a place as this, where the school and universities physical therapy program blend with our worship services even this morning, and you have to go back into the real world, people don't want to necessarily hear or believe the spirit of prophecy as we understand it.

So you have to be able to make your defense based only on the Bible.

And a lot of Adventists are handicapped because we we have gotten such a good understanding of the spirit of prophecy that we have failed to get an adequate understanding from the source of the spirit of prophecy, which is the scripture.

It's important that we balance those things because as our church comes under attack you will not be able to even defend Sister White if you cannot do so from the scriptures.

So this gentleman comes at me and I begin to read this week and of course come to this great text in the New Testament.

From the book of Hebrews where Paul seems to be trying to denounce the Judaism of, Judaizing of Christianity and this new religion that has been born, he's trying to put the Old Testament in its proper place, the Old Covenant in its proper place, while at the same time explaining the difference of the 2.

He's trying to show them that all of the types of the Old Testament had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ and so many things have been done away with.

Yet Paul is clear in his writings that certain key things were never abolished and he does this in normal speaking and so if you're looking for a reason not to keep the 10 Commandments you can easily falsely find them in Paul's writings.

Because you can confuse the 2 sets of laws in Paul's writings.

Now, 3 questions that you'd have to be able to really answer that I don't know that I'll have time to answer today but I'll throw the questions out there and first was the old commandment, old, was the 10 Commandments, sorry, was the 10 Commandments a part of the Old Covenant?

Were the 10 Commandments and the Old, or are the 10 Commandments and the Old Covenant synonymous?

So when Paul is speaking in Hebrews and he says that that 1 had to vanish away and he says that later in the chapter, does it mean that then the 10 Commandments had to vanish away?

I'm always, What always cracks me up with this, especially since I grew up being affirmed in Adventism on street corners in projects and ghettos across the country, that's where I learned Adventism.

I learned it on the corner of the streets of Hartford and Brooklyn and Miami, listening to people pitch tents and fight drugs and crime to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, not in air-conditioned concrete structures, but in the very vulnerable confines of a canvas tent.

And so I got a very different view of Adventism because you had to know what you were talking about to go up in that pulpit.

The nation of Islam would come and the 5% nation would come and all of these different of the Hebrew Israelites and the Church of God in Christ and the Pentecostal, Everyone would come to denounce what we were preaching.

And I had heard men who were seasoned in the scriptures defend from the scriptures what we believed.

I saw it in a very pure and raw form being preached To people who otherwise had no good reason to accept it, yet I watched in 1 tent effort in Miami where over 700 souls were baptized to Christ on a street corner in the ghettos of Miami.

So I know that there's power in what we preach.

There's something about what we preach, because I don't think there's a Catholic priest who could pitch a tent and baptize 700 people into the Catholic church.

I don't know that there's any other denomination that has such a unique and powerful message that when it is preached, it rattles the cages of everything understood in that neighborhood.

The other thing of course is, if the 10 Commandments are not a part of the Old Testament and the Old Covenant, what about the old feasts and Sabbath days of the Old Testament?

As a matter of fact, I've had that conversation in this very room with individuals, that somehow we should continue to keep the Passover or maybe Ramadan or, well Ramadan is Muslim, maybe that's not what they're talking about.

Or I'm trying to think of the Jewish, I had this as a holiday growing up in Connecticut, but the high days of Israel.

Maybe we should still be keeping all of those days and maybe we should still have a Passover lamb Maybe we should be putting blood on our posts of our homes and and sacrificing a lamb annually for Passover Was that part of the old covenant Does it continue into the new?

And I guess the key question of the morning is, what covenant do you fall under?

If there are 2 covenants and there are those who fight to keep the old covenant alive, the question then becomes, what covenant are you under?

Now I got a lot of verses so let's move speedily through the next 15 minutes.

Exodus chapter 19 is the is at the crux of what we're dealing with.

I'm gonna read verses 3 through 6, so I'm gonna have to move fast.

So Exodus 19 verse 3, And Moses went up on to the mountain, and the Lord called him out of the mountain saying, thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob and tell the children of Israel, you have seen what I did unto the Egyptians and how I bear you on eagle's wings and brought you unto myself.

Now therefore, covenant is coming, If you will obey my voice indeed and keep my covenant then you shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people for all the earth is mine.

Verse 6 says and you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation.

These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.

Now, I want you to go to verse 24, chapter 24, sorry, of Exodus.

And let me read how they respond to all of this.

I don't have time to read this 3 different times at least that they respond this way so I'll just read this 1 to make the point.

Exodus chapter 4 and verse 3 after Moses gives them the the cups, speaks the covenant Here in verse 3 of chapter 24, Moses came and told all the words of the Lord and all the judgments and all the people answered with 1 voice.

This is critical because a covenant must have 2 parties.

All the people with 1 voice said, all the words which the Lord had said, we will do.

They ratified the covenant in their voice by saying in 1 voice just like they said, and this is why it's so powerful, just like they said in almost 1 voice when Pilate had Jesus standing before them, his blood be upon us and upon our children.

Later on their ancestors would almost speak with 1 voice and denounce Christ.

Here in 1 voice they accept the covenant.

Moses then takes blood and sprinkles it on them.

And the key words that I want you to get from the old covenant is in chapter, in verse 3.

They say, all the words which the Lord hath said, they said, will we do?

They agreed to keep their end of the bargain.

Did Israel keep their end of the bargain?

Israel messes up more times than is imaginable.

I mean they make more mistakes, more blunders, more setbacks.

So many times you look at the book of Judges, it's just 1 story of them failing God after another.

Because the covenant, and I'm going to jump to my point fast here, The covenant was ratified in blood, but they never asked God for his assistance in keeping the covenant.

The failure of the first covenant, and see you got me rushing my sermon, I gotta jump, you know I like to build a climax and say, I can't do that this morning.

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Conflict of the Covenants

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