What is the relationship between Christians and the New Covenant?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2002.
The first thing to notice about the new covenant is that it has already been established. Hebrews 8:6 explicitly says that the new covenant has already passed into law. It is not true to say that the covenant will be made with Israel and Judah in a day to come. It has already been made. A covenant in scripture is made when the covenant-sacrifice is offered. The sacrifice that validates the new covenant is, of course, the sacrifice of Christ. The covenant was made when he poured out the blood of the covenant at Calvary. That is what Christ himself was indicating at the Last Supper, when he handed them the cup of wine and said, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood.'
The second point to notice is that the Hebrew Christians, at the time when the Epistle to the Hebrews was written, lived in the benefit of this new covenant. Martha, Mary, John and Lazarus, Paul, Peter, James, etc. were all members of the house of Judah and Israel. The covenant was made with them; and they, incidentally, were members of the church. Paul says in Romans 11, 'I am an Israelite', and not 'I used to be an Israelite.' The Epistle to the Hebrews is explicit as it addresses Hebrew Christians: the forgiveness that they enjoy is on the basis of the covenant-sacrifice which Christ has offered once and for all (Heb 10).
If the new covenant were not already in force, Jewish believers would still be under the old covenant, and obliged to carry out all the observances that the old covenant demanded. You can't keep the old covenant in force and simultaneously abandon the Aaronic priesthood, the Levitical sacrifices, and the temple. Jewish believers are free from all that, precisely because the new covenant is now in place, and that has abrogated the old covenant (Heb 8:13). It would be a very odd thing if Hebrew believers in the church were under the new covenant, but Gentile believers were not. Ephesians 2 makes it explicitly clear that, whereas we Gentiles were once strangers from the covenants of promise, we are not so any longer. In Christ, God has taken both Jew and Gentile, and not simply added Gentiles to Jews, but made of the two one new man. But that means we are no more strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God (Eph 2:19).
The hermeneutical principle that, when the Old Testament said Israel and Judah, it meant Israel and Judah and not the church, is a sound principle. But it seems to me it overlooks what Ephesians 2 is saying, namely that, in this new man that God has made in Christ, Gentiles are fellow-heirs of the covenants of promise. The promise of the new covenant made by God through Jeremiah was necessarily a covenant of promise, because in Jeremiah's day it was not fulfilled, but it has been fulfilled in Christ. And Gentiles are as much partakers of that covenant as are Jews.
Moreover, there is no more Gentile epistle than is 1 Corinthians, and there the instructions given to believers about the celebration of the Lord's Supper explicitly tell this Gentile church that the cup from which they drink at the Lord's Supper is the cup of the New Testament. When the Lord Jesus hands us the cup, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood, this do ye as often as ye drink it in remembrance of me', it is a very curious thing for theologians to turn round and tell us, contrary to what the Lord Jesus says, that the cup for us is not the new covenant.
When Paul explains to the Corinthian church in 2 Corinthians 3:2–3 what exactly it was that happened at their conversion, he points out that Christ was using him as his pen, to inscribe in the Corinthians' hearts God's law in fulfilment of the terms of the new covenant itself.
Yours sincerely in Christ,
