Crash Course: Covenant

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Crash Course.

Uh this is an episode, or this is an episode, this is a podcast.

A sub-podcast.

A sub-podcast underneath the no.

We this is a crash course.

We talk about different concepts that are part of our faith as Jesus followers to hopefully get people caught up to speed on the gist of what these things mean.

Sometimes we maybe we're new in our faith.

Maybe we are someone who's been a Christian for a while, but we just haven't really studied much or whatever.

And we feel like we're behind.

We feel like we're lost.

We hear people say things in church, or we hear other Christians talk about concepts, and it just seems like it's a foreign language.

We don't understand it.

Well, what do we need?

We need a crash course.

We need someone to take us aside and say, hey, let me get kind of caught up to speed.

That's what we try to do.

Um and you know, this podcast for us, it's part of our church podcast at His Hands Church here in Woodstock, Georgia.

Obviously, this is something that you can listen to regardless of what church you go to, or if you don't even go to church, if if if you're just thinking about Christianity and Jesus and learn something about God.

Hey, that's totally cool.

Um, we just want to give you a crash course.

We're not claiming that we're gonna exhaustively cover everything.

There will definitely be people who will listen to this and be like, you know, you really should have talked about that.

Okay.

We're trying to make these you know short, we're covering concepts that have been had volumes of books written about for thousands of years.

We're trying to cover it in about 15 minutes, just to give you the gist.

That's the point.

Uh we're gonna talk right now about the concept of a covenant.

Uh, it's a word you'll see in the Bible a good bit.

Specifically, we want to talk about what's commonly in Christianity called the old covenant and the new covenant.

This is basically a way to sort of divide the Bible pretty cleanly and divide what God is asking us to do, how he's asking us to relate to him, and it's a gr and it's a vital thing as a Christian to understand so that you can sort of um reconcile the the some of the things you see God maybe do in the Old Testament that seem really like, whoa, that doesn't seem like Jesus.

And some of the things you see in the New Testament.

Sometimes people are like, it's like two different gods, angry God, happy God.

Not true at all.

Same God, different covenants, and those covenants really matter, and they they definitely they they fall into each other.

The old covenant is designed to sort of set up the new, so that that's kind of the gist of that, but obviously I haven't covered really anything in detail.

So, Scott, let's start with the old covenant.

What's your understanding of the old covenant?

Yeah, and I tell you what, there is so much in the old covenant versus the new covenant.

Oh my gosh, there's so many implications behind each one of those.

But think of it like this: think of the old covenant as the way we we related to God before Jesus paid the price for our sins, before we could be born again, before he sent the Holy Spirit to live on the inside of us.

And then the new covenant, a covenant basically just means a contract, an agreement that God made with us.

Uh, the new covenant then is how we relate to God after Jesus went to the cross, paid the price for our sins, changed our nature, sent the Holy Spirit.

How we relate to God be because, and a great way to understand covenant in our terms would be marriage.

So, you know, marriage is a covenant relationship.

It's even deeper than a contract, you know.

And even in the government's eyes, once you enter into the covenant of marriage, you're you're treated differently.

You're treated differently tax-wise, you're trying you have different rights.

You know, husbands have have rights um as far as their wives go that a boyfriend doesn't have, you know.

Um and so, you know, it when you enter into a new covenant, a new kind of agreement, there's there's a new way to relate to someone.

Right.

And God has has has created covenants with people really from the get-go.

And so the old covenant basically um man had sinned, man had fallen, God had created man in his image, man sinned, he had rebelled against God, his nature changed, he be developed the nature of sin instead of a God nature on the inside of him.

And from that point forward, man basically tried to earn his way to God.

And God eventually issued the law, which basically said, do this, do this, do this, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this.

Now, was did God give the law so that people could be saved?

Did God give the law so that people could become righteous?

No.

But what God was trying to show people was, you can't get to me on your own.

He was trying to point the way to say, listen, when when people would compare their behaviors to the perfect standard of this law that God had given, they would look at it and go, I can't do this.

God, you've got to do something.

I can't do this.

And so under the Old Testament, you might think, or the Old Covenant, you might uh think of it in terms more of Jesus had not taken the judgment for our sin.

So God would judge people for sin.

Sometimes you see God wiping out entire races that had become just so sinful, they were like a cancer on the earth, so evil in their behavior that out of love for other people around them, God would have to wipe them out.

And so a lot of people say, well, you know, God was just, as you said earlier, this very angry God back then.

No, he wasn't.

God has always been a God of love.

And things that looked like maybe God was angry, no, there was actually a motivation of love behind it.

But the problem was basically uh sin still needed to be judged.

Yep.

Then we get to the new covenant where God did judge sin, one time in the person Jesus.

And from that point forward, it's been a matter of living in God's grace.

It's been a matter of accepting what Jesus did for us.

And I think why this is important, Justin, to really understand the differences here.

Man, I thought there's so many Christians that walk around with this sense of condemnation, this sense of I'm just not good enough.

I'll never be good enough.

And the good news is you're right.

You're not good enough.

You will never be good enough.

But the good news is you don't have to be, because Jesus was good enough.

And so because Jesus took the price for all of our wrongdoings, Jesus paid the price, God judged Jesus for everything we had ever done wrong.

All we have to do is receive it, accept it.

And now that's how we relate to God.

You know, when I pray, I pray in the name of Jesus.

I don't pray in the name of Scott.

I don't go, you know, God, I read my Bible this morning, so you should answer this prayer.

I'm good enough.

Now I pray in God, Jesus paid the price for me.

Thank you so much.

Right.

And God looks at me as his son based on that.

So that's really the difference between the Old Testament or the Old Covenant and the New Covenant is that the Old Covenant, you might say, was a covenant of law.

It was a covenant where God would judge sin in people.

The new covenant, it's a covenant of grace, and where God gives us uh his righteousness, and that'll probably be the source of a another topic of another podcast, but where it's a matter of receiving what Jesus has done for us, receiving God's mercy, not earning favor from God.

Right.

Yeah, and obviously, I mean that's a great, a great summary and a few things I'll just kind of piggyback on.

You know, number one, this is a small thing and a side, and I I do think I we're getting to the point now where we're we're starting to promise multiple podcasts every other podcast, because I'm sitting there like, oh, the idea of God's judgment should probably be its own podcast at some point.

But you mentioned, you know, in the Old Testament, you'll see God wipe out whole civilizations.

And we go, as people, we go, oh man, that's God shouldn't do that.

Like, what come on, God and one thing you gotta remember is number one, um when you read the Bible, sometimes you turn a page and 400 years has gone by.

Right.

And some of the cultures, by the way, that doesn't happen very often.

I think it's important to note that sometimes people act like God's doing that left and right in the Old Testament, doesn't actually happen very often at all.

It's all kind of concentrated, you know, to a few specific spots in scripture.

But these cultures, if you study like history, um, like one of the cultures, child sacrifice was was their main way of worship.

They literally sacrificed living children uh by fire.

And like that was socially acceptable.

That's the way that culture is.

We're talking about uh only words I can think of would be like depravity that we don't understand.

And in our world, we see you know nations sometimes, you mean the classic example would be like Germany in World War II.

No one ever says, I really think it was wrong for us to you know get involved in World War II, because everyone recognizes that Germany as a country crossed so many lines that action had to be taken.

And the action was severe.

You know, you look at the Holocaust and you look at the invasion of other nations, and it's like, man, we got to stop this.

Um, well, in the Old Testament, you will see times where lines were crossed so hugely uh that the only way for God to deal with it was that that culture has to go because it is like a cancer and it will spread.

Um so you know, that's just a small, I guess that's a kind of an aside, because sometimes people have a hard time with that, and it's like it becomes a holdup.

But you know, to piggyback on your stuff on the covenants, when we say old covenant, we're talking about generally there were several covenants in the Old Testament, the covenant of Abraham, the covenant God had with Noah.

Um, but God makes a covenant with Moses and the people of Israel, and it's called the law, like you mentioned.

And that's really not unique to Christianity, to Judaism, which is what was was before Christianity.

Um, the idea of here's a list of religious rules that you need to do so God is is pleased.

Um the you'll see that in a lot of different religions and faiths in the world.

What makes it different in Christianity is the why behind the law that was given.

Because it's kind of the great twist in the story of the Bible is that all these laws, you know, people think it's there because God actually wants us to do it to make him happy.

Right.

You know, and God knows us so well.

He knows our nature, he created us, and we the whole thing that got us into the mess uh of sin in the Bible is that we we believed we could do better than God.

We could make a better decision than God.

We didn't need him, we could do it our own way.

God knows that's how we are.

And he knew that when it comes to fixing this world, to fixing ourselves, to fixing the brokenness in it, even if you don't believe in Jesus and God, uh, you don't have to look very hard at the world to see brokenness.

And then you've got to figure out how are we gonna fix this.

Well, we're as people, naturally, we believe we got this, we can do it, we can find a solution, we're smart enough, we're we can solve the world's problems.

And we live in a world right now where everyone's trying to solve the world's problems, and the world's problems don't seem to be being solved.

They're growing at least as fast as they're they're they're going away, it seems like sometimes.

And obviously, you know, some have been solved greatly in some parts of the world, but not everywhere.

And so the law was given for God to say essentially, hey, you guys wanna you you you wanna you wanna you want the rules?

Here's the rules.

And we asked for it, by the way.

You know, we we said we just want the rules.

Yeah.

Um, you want the rules, here's the rules.

Do do the do this and I'll be we'll be good.

And we tried and we failed.

And we tried and we failed, and we tried and we failed.

And God allowed that to continue on for a long time, for centuries and centuries.

Every every person born in in Judaism trying their best to follow the law.

And and we can just look at the Ten Commandments as an example.

That's the basis of the old covenant.

I heard a pastor say once that I thought was great.

It's not like the Ten Commandments are the pinnacle of human achievement.

Right.

It's not like it's saying, give all your money to the poor, donate all your time to charity, you know, feed hungry people.

Uh no, it's like don't kill people, don't lie to them, don't cheat on your wife, don't it's it's like the basic human behavior, and we still find there's not one person that can say I've kept all ten.

Right.

And so it's almost like God had to we had to get to a breaking point.

I see this in my children.

They will try to do things they cannot do.

And I'll say, Can I help you?

No, I do it.

Now, once they they try it so many times and they can't do it, then they'll ask for my help.

Right.

Well, God had to let us do that.

He knew us.

He knew that if if the second that we sinned, he would have sent Jesus to say, Hey, I'm here to fix this, they'd have been like, we don't have a problem.

We wouldn't accept it, we don't accept Jesus.

Yeah, you don't accept a cure if you don't believe you have a disease.

Right.

So first it's like God had to let us become totally and utterly convinced of our disease.

And so for for hundreds and hundreds of years, we're trying to follow the law, we're trying to this old covenant, the law that God gave, hey, do it this way.

This is the agreement.

You want to interact with me, follow these rules.

We couldn't do it, we couldn't do it, we couldn't do it.

Finally, Jesus shows up.

And it's like, hey, you guys, do you guys need some help?

Because you've been trying this for hundreds of years.

Doesn't seem to be working.

Are you at a place where you can finally admit that maybe maybe you need you need someone to do it for you?

And that's the new covenant, like you said.

The new covenant is Jesus did for us what we couldn't do.

He he lived a perfect life.

He died on the cross to pay to pay the price for our sins.

He died as a ransom, the Bible says, for our sins.

And now the new covenant is uh Jesus.

It's living under the grace and forgiveness and mercy that comes through accepting Jesus.

When you accept Jesus, you accept you accept the forgiveness that He He won for you.

So now you don't relate to God as you no longer relate to God as a sinner whose sin needs to be dealt with.

You relate to God as a sinner, a former sinner, whose sin has already been dealt with.

You know, it's it's it you're you're forgiven.

Now you can operate out of that.

And by the way, the Bible makes it really clear that this was God's intent from the get-go.

Yeah.

I mean, it says, I mean, in Ezekiel, long, long before uh Jesus came, God said to Ezekiel, one day I'll establish a new covenant.

And he says, I'll wipe out people's sins.

I I will it will no longer be an issue, and I'll be their God and they'll be my people.

This is something God was longing to do, but but he had to wait for the right time.

Otherwise, we would have just looked at Jesus and said, Who needs you?

And you know, that's that's the thing that religion does to us, Justin, is I really want to earn, you know, what I get from God.

I really want to feel like I got this, I I deserve this, and that's it.

Because this whole thing with Jesus and grace, it just doesn't seem fair.

Right.

And there's something about human nature that just says, I want to feel like I've earned what I got.

I deserve what I got.

It wasn't given to me.

You can't brag about forgiveness.

You can't you can't go, um, let me tell you, I got forgiven so awesome the other day.

You can't that's why Paul wrote in the New Testament, I I boast only about the cross, because as a Christian, what what can I brag about?

Well, and you know, it's funny you say that because I've even heard people brag about their salvation experience.

Oh, yeah.

And the whole emphasis was on them, not on the fact that Jesus saved them.

I remember I was talking to this one guy one time, and uh I I I didn't know him, but I was in a crowd of people, and I heard other people make comments to him.

And I said, So I'm just curious, tell me your story.

He goes, Brother, you don't know me?

And it was like, what's wrong with you?

You know, I'm famous for how I got saved.

And you know, we want to earn it, we want to deserve it, and it's not fair.

But the thing is, as long as we want to be fair and earn it and deserve it, we're always going to know we've fallen short.

Right.

We're always going to know we don't deserve it.

And that's where we've got to learn to just accept what Jesus did for us.

And here's the thing, here's a place people have to get to.

If you never give another penny to the church, if you never pray again, if you never read the Bible again, God will not love you any less.

Right.

And if you read the Bible every day, you fast, you pray, you give half your money to the poor, God will not love you anymore.

Because God's love for you is not based on what you do.

It's not performance-based.

It is based on what Jesus did, and we need to just get over it, accept it, and enjoy it.

Yep, and I think the disconnect where it really kind of gets wrapped up, and we'll wrap up, is if if you don't understand that the old covenant was given for a time to prepare us for the new covenant, right?

If you don't understand that, then you're gonna be really confused when you read the Bible.

Yeah.

Because you're gonna think you're you're reading like two different gods.

You're gonna think that, oh, God can't make up his mind.

No.

God is doing something for a reason, for a purpose.

There's this idea called progressive revelation.

And it's it's like God He can't just show us Himself and His way in one in one moment.

He has to progressively reveal Himself to get us to where He wants us to be.

And we do that as parents, you know, like my children eat food, as most kids do.

And our youngest child, Judah, he can eat with his hands, we don't care.

He's just put if he's putting food in his mouth, we're pretty happy.

Um, we expect Lily, who's a little older, to try to like she she needs to use a fork for things, you know.

Liam, we expect him to use a fork or spoon and to not make a huge mess.

You know, Lily's just using the spoon.

But if if Liam's got food everywhere, we're like, son, come on, you you can do this.

One day we will expect him to sit at a table with proper table manners, use a knife, a fork, a spoon appropriately.

But we're not asking Judah, our two-year-old, we're not handing him a knife, I'll promise you that.

Um, and we're not we're not even handing him a fork.

Like that's gonna be dangerous.

But we don't are we hypocrites as parents because we let one child eat with their hands and we're making the other child use silverware and napkins and be clean?

No.

But over time, we have progressively revealed the the right way to eat to our children, and then we expect them to act accordingly, right?

Well, God is progressively revealing himself through the Bible.

So don't read the New Testament and then flip over to the Old Testament and act like this is just crazy.

No, God is slowly but surely revealing his will, revealing his plan.

You know, Paul writes in Ephesians that God's perfect plan has finally been revealed, that one day all things will be united under Jesus Christ, all things in heaven and all things on earth.

So God is slowly revealing his plan, and the old covenant was his way to prepare us for the new.

When we recognize that that we need help, there's Jesus.

And he forgives us.

It's covered.

Now we have a new covenant, which is I'm a follower of Jesus, he's forgiven me, he loves me, um, and he isn't gonna he's gonna empower me to actually do God's will.

So old covenant, new covenant, same God.

I think that is that it you have anything else to add?

No, that's good.

All right, well, that's it for this episode of Crash Course.

We will talk to y'all later.