A New Covenant

Through the New Covenant, we find our standing as holy children of God. The first (Old) covenant was set aside because it made no one perfect. After all, it was a performance-based system, and no one could perform in a way that met its standards!

Imagine walking on eggshells your entire life as you try to do everything written in the law. How overwhelming! For that reason, the Old is now obsolete. It has been set aside due to our inability to cooperate with it:

“By calling this covenant ‘new,’ [God] has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.” — Hebrews 8:13

“The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.” — Hebrews 7:18–19

What does the writer of Hebrews say? The Old is “weak and useless” in its attempts to perfect us. Today, we have a better option – the New.

This new system introduced through the death of Jesus Christ actually works. It places us in perfect standing even though we don’t perform perfectly. Only through the New can we genuinely draw near to God.

When I’m feeling distant from God, it’s because I’ve measured myself and have come up short. This leads me to believe that God must be measuring me by this same standard. So I end up with the false conclusion that he’s distant from me.

Under this logic, how would I get close again? Obviously, the only option would be to achieve in a way that I hadn’t achieved previously.

But the Scriptures are clear: there’s only one way to get close to God – through the New Covenant. Any other way is a counterfeit that is invariably rooted in ill-conceived parallels with human relationships and driven by moment-to-moment feelings.

(from the book The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley)