SOURCE - The Two Covenants: their Relation
Galatians 4:22-24 KJV
It is written, that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondmaid, and one by the freewoman. Howbeit, the one by the bondmaid is born after the f lesh; but the son by the freewoman is born through promise. Which things contain an allegory: for these women are two covenants.
- There are two Covenants
- the Old
- and the New
Jeremiah 31 KJV
The days come, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not after the covenant I made with their fathers.
- Hebrews quotes this passage and adds, “In that He saith a new covenant, He hath made the first old.”
- Jesus spoke of the New Covenant in His blood
The clearer our insight into the reasons, and the Divine reasonableness, of there thus being two covenants, and into their relation to each other, the more full and true can be our own personal apprehension of what the New Covenant is meant to be to us.
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The two Covenants
- indicate two stages in God’s dealing with man
- two ways of serving God
- an elementary one of preparation and promise
- an advanced one of fulfilment and possession
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The Reason for Two Covenants
… in religion, in all intercourse between God and man, there are two parties, and that each of these must have the opportunity to prove what their part is in the Covenant.
In the Old Covenant man had to opportunity given him to prove what he could do, with the aid of all the means of grace God could bestow. That Covenant ended in man proving his own unfaithfulness and failure.
In the New Covenant, God is to prove what He can do with man, all unfaithful and feeble as he is, when He is allowed and trusted to do all the work.
The Old Covenant was one dependent on man’s obedience, one which he could break, and did break (Jeremiah 31:32).
The New Covenant was one which God has engaged shall never be broken; He Himself keeps it and ensures our keeping it; so He makes it an Everlasting Covenant.
If the image and likeness of God was not to be a mere name, and man was really to be like God in the power to make himself what he was to be, he must needs have the power of free will and self-determination. … In all God’s treatment of man these two factors were ever to be taken into account. God was ever to take the initiative, and be to man the source of life. Man was ever to be the recipient, and yet at the same time the disposer of the life God bestowed.
… (Man’s) absolute dependence upon God was not to be forced upon him; if it was really to be a thing of moral worth and true blessedness, it must be his deliberate and voluntary choice.
THIS now is the reason why there was a first and a second covenant, that in the first, man’s desires and efforts might be fully awakened, and time given for him to make full proof of what his human nature, with the aid of outward instruction and miracle and means of grace, could accomplish.
When his utter impotence, his hopeless captivity under the power of sin had been discovered, there came the New Covenant, in which God was to reveal how man’s true liberty from sin and self and the creature, his true nobility and God-likeness, was to be found in the most en tire and absolute dependence, in God’s being and doing all within him.
The two covenants represent two stages of God’s education of man and of man’s seeking after God. The progress and transition from the one to the other is not merely chronological or historical; it is organic and spiritual.
In greater or lesser degree it is seen in every member of the body, as well as in the body as a whole. Under the Old Covenant there were men in whom, by anticipation, the powers of the coming redemption worked mightily. In the New Covenant there are men in whom the spirit of the Old still makes itself manifest. The New Testament proves, … how possible it is with the New Covenant still be held fast in the bondage of the Old.
Only through faith in the promise and the mighty quickening power of God (can anyone) be made truly and fully free, and stand in the freedom with which Christ has made us free.
… (these two Covenants) are indeed the Divine revelation of two systems of religious worship, each with its spirit or life-principle ruling every man who professes to be a Christian.
… the one great cause of the feebleness of so many Christians is just this, that the Old Covenant spirit of bondage still has the master. And we shall see that nothing but a spiritual insight, with a whole-hearted acceptance, and a living experience, of all the New Covenant engages that God will work in us, can possibly fit for walking as God would have us do.
- Old Testament types of these two stages
- the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place in the temple with the veil separating them
- In Christ’s death
- the veil was rent, and His blood gives us boldness and power to enter into the Holiest of all and live there day by day in the immediate presence of God.
- It is by the Holy Spirit,
- who issued forth from that Holiest of all, where Christ had entered, to bring its life to us, and make us one with it, that we can have the power to live and walk always with the consciousness of God’s presence in us.
… everywhere throughout the Church, there are to be found two classes of Christians. Some are content with the mingled life, half flesh and half spirit, half self-effort and half grace. Others are not content with this, but are seeking with their whole heart to know to the full what the deliverance from sin and what the abiding full power for a walk in God’s presence is, which the New Covenant has brought and can give. God help us all to be satisfied with nothing less.