HOW TO LIVE FOREVER   PART THREE

God made a contract, or a covenant, with His chosen people. They broke it within days.

But separate to the Israelites breaking it, the contract itself was faulty.

The covenant was faulty because it didn’t have any provision for enabling humans to escape from death. The covenant was simply meant, through the Israelites and their religion, to bring all people to God.

But then what? Even if the whole world had embraced God’s Israelite religion, they were still going to die, and cease to exist. Because the whole world, as we have seen in previous articles, was subject to a law which had sentenced all humans to death:

“you shall not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:17)

So on the surface, the contract, which is generally called the Old Covenant, was just a way to give people a better human society. But better society or not, human life would still end at death, and there would be nothing beyond that.

So did God make a mistake with that contract? Or was it just not possible for Him to make an effective contract, one which would enable all people to live forever?

The truth is, that at the time the Old Covenant was made, it just wasn’t possible for God to make a contract which would enable humans to live forever.

Because a contract is a commitment to keep one’s word.  And prior to the covenant with the Israelites, there was an unbreakable contract, or commitment which God had already made:

“you shall not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:17)

God could not make a contract which promised life, because He had made a previous contract which said people had to die. So at that time, God could make no contract with the Israelites which would give them a release from death.

What He could do, however, was make a shadow contract. A shadow of a new and different covenant which He would be able to make at some time in the future, when the situation had changed. And the new contract would have a provision to enable humans to live forever.

The shadow contract, the Old Covenant, would appear to the Israelites to be able to give them permanent life, but it would only be the appearance of life and not the reality. As Hebrews says:

“For the Law [the Old Covenant and its added rituals] which has a shadow of good things to come, not the very image of the things, appearing year by year with the same sacrifices, which they offer continually, they are never able to perfect those drawing near.” (Hebrews 10:1)

The Israelites understood perfectly that according to their religion, sin resulted in death.  However, their understanding was imperfect in that they believed sin could be removed by offering animal sacrifices to God. Which wasn’t true:

“For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.” (Hebrews 10:4)

Not knowing this, that their animal sacrifices had no effect on removing their sin, the Israelites believed that their agreement with God, their covenant, would enable them to live forever, beyond their human life. As long as they made the appropriate animal sacrifices to remove sin. They were wrong.

They knew they were God’s chosen people, and they believed that their covenant, their agreement with God, was perfect. They boasted of it. But they were boasting of a shadow which God had only ever meant to be temporary:

“He has made the first covenant old. Now that which decays and becomes old is ready to vanish away.” (Hebrews 8:13)

That fact, however, that their covenant was only temporary, was hidden from the Israelites.

As we saw, the Israelites’ animal sacrifices could not and did not take away their sin. But every year, they enacted out the special ritual which they believed would cleanse them and thus enable them to live forever.

The ritual was ordained by God and was therefore serious and holy, but it was only ever meant to be a temporary ritual. Because the ritual, what it acted out every year, was only a portrayal of something that would happen far in the future.

What the ritual acted out was a shadow of an actual event in the future which would accomplish what the Israelites thought they were accomplishing already with animal sacrifices.

There would be a future sacrifice which would in fact, not in shadow, remove the Israelites’ sin. That sacrifice would not be an animal sacrifice, but a Human sacrifice.

That future Human sacrifice would enable God to make a new agreement with the Israelites, a new agreement which would have life built into it.  That is, a new agreement, or covenant, between God and humans, which would deliver permanent life to anyone who made that new agreement with God.

The future Human sacrifice, of course, would be the slaughter of Jesus Christ at the hand of Satan’s seed. The ritual which foresaw the slaughter of Jesus, and which the Israelites believed was effective in removing sin, was called the Day of Atonement. It was central to the life of the Israelites. The slaughter of Jesus is central to the life of all humans.

Without the death of Jesus, it wasn’t possible for God to make a covenant which could give permanent life to humans. Because without the death of Jesus there was no way to remove the death penalty hanging over all humans.

But once Jesus had been slaughtered as a sacrifice to remove human sin, God was able to announce a new agreement, a new covenant. In fact it was announced by Jesus Himself the night before He died, in the confidence that He would indeed die the next day:

“For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” (Matthew 26:28)

So, there was a new covenant announced. But what covenant? A covenant is  a verbal or written agreement made between two or more parties. So what is the new agreement that Jesus announced?

The old agreement, the old covenant, was the Ten Commandments and its various regulations:

“And Jehovah spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the voice of the words, but saw no likeness, only a voice. And He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, ten commandments. And He wrote them on two tablets of stone.” (Deuteronomy 4:12-13)

An agreement, or a covenant, must have words. There must be words laying out just what the agreement is. One party to the agreement will do so and so, and the other party to the agreement will do this and that. But the so and so and the this and that must be clearly stated or written so that both parties know what they are agreeing to.

And once the agreement is accepted by both parties, the agreement, the words, can’t be changed.

In the case of the old covenant between God and the Israelites, the words were written on stone tablets. That was deliberate, because words, agreements, written in stone are impossible to easily alter. Meaning that an agreement is an agreement and what was agreed to can’t be changed.

So we see that an agreement must have words that can be agreed to.  So what and where are the words of the covenant that Jesus announced?  Because how can anyone agree to a covenant or agreement if they don’t know what they’re agreeing to?

So what is the new covenant? It can’t be just the old covenant with Jesus somehow attached, because as Hebrews explains, the old covenant has gone, and the new covenant will not be the same:

“For if that first covenant had been without fault, then no place would have been sought for the second. For finding fault with them, He said to them, behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will make an end on the house of Israel and on the house of Judah; a new covenant shall be, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day I took hold of their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt.” (Hebrews 8:7-9)

 So just what is the new covenant which Jesus inaugurated? What are the words of the new agreement? Just what are we to agree to?