September 4. What's new about the new covenant?

This is the covenant that I will make with the House of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts,

and I will be their God, and they will be my people.

Jeremiah 31 33.

Jesus shatters any absolute dissociation of commandments and love.

He says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.

And he who loves me will be loved by my father, John 14, 15, and 21. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father's

commandments and abide in his love, John 1510.

Thinking in terms of commandments and obedience did not stop Jesus from enjoying the love of His Father.

And he expects that our thinking of Him as one who commands will not jeopardize our love relationship with Him either.

This is crucial to realize because the new covenant relationship that we have with God through Jesus Christ is not a covenant without commandments.

The basic difference between the old covenant offered by God through the Mosaic law and the new covenant offered by God through Christ is not that

one had commandments and the other doesn't. The key differences are, one, the Messiah, Jesus, has

come and shed the blood of the covenant, Matthew 26,28, Hebrews 1029, so that henceforth he is the mediator of a new covenant so that all saving covenant-keeping faith is conscious faith in him.

Two, the old covenant has therefore become obsolete, Hebrews 813, and does not govern the new covenant people of God.

2 Corinthians 3, 7 to 18, Romans 7, 4, Galatians 319.

And 3. The promised new heart and the enabling power of the Holy Spirit have been given through faith.

In the Old Covenant, the gracious enabling power to obey God was not poured out as fully as it is since Jesus. To this day, the Lord has

not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear, Deuteronomy 294.

What's new about the new covenant is not that there are no commandments, but that God's promise has come true.

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