So far we have observed that all the covenants, including the Sinai covenant, were encoded with the same grace-based, gospel-bearing, faith-inducing, mission-directed DNA markers as the new covenant. We've also seen that all proclaimed the same everlasting gospel and were progressively revealed expressions of the covenant-love of the Trinity. So we must ask, why then did God say that the new covenant would "not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt"? (Jer. 31:32; Heb. 8:9). And further, why would Moses say of the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai: "It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today" (Deut. 5:3).
Some authors interpret these texts to mean that the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai was entirely different from both the covenant He made with Abraham and the new covenant.[1] That view can be summarized in the following table:
1. Abrahamic Covenant
a) Promise/Faith
2. Sinai Covenant
a) Law/Obedience
b) Not like the covenant made with their fathers. (Deuteronomy 5:3)
3. New Covenant
a) Promise/Faith--Holy Spirit/Love
b) Not like the covenant made with those redeemed from Egypt. (Hebrews 8:8-9)
These interpreters thus attempt to isolate God's covenant at Sinai, including the Ten Commandments, from its surrounding covenants of grace, and identify it with the "letter that kills" (2 Cor. 3:6), "the ministry that brought death" (2 Cor. 3:7), and "the ministry that condemns men" (2 Cor. 3:9). They further charge that God's covenant at Sinai was written in stone and letter only, not in the heart or by the Spirit, and was not designed so that the majority of covenant members could know God personally. They see the Sinai covenant and law as the target of all the apparent anti-law texts of the New Testament, making that covenant ineffectual and liberating the new covenant believer from its oppressive bondage. This interpretation would seem plausible if Deuteronomy 5:3, Jeremiah 31:32, and Hebrews 8:9 meant what such interpreters claim, namely that the Sinai covenant was different in character from God's previous covenants and the new covenant.
Let's examine these texts and see whether they necessarily contradict the conclusion we came to in chapter 4 that the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai is consistent with, and of the same character as, His other covenants with humanity.
There are at least six ways in which the new covenant is different:
• A different response was anticipated.
• It was like the new commandment to love, which wasn't new.
• It was a new and more powerful revelation than previously given.
• It was to make the older covenant new and more real to us.
• It replaced the older, fulfilled ceremonies with new ones.
• Jesus came in the middle.
None of these differences affects the essential nature of the covenant, which is still a grace-based, gospel-bearing, faith-inducing, mission-directed expression of the covenant love of the Trinity. In this chapter, we will examine these six differences.
A Different Response Anticipated
The immediate context within the new covenant itself provides the most obvious and probable resolution of Jeremiah 31:31 and Hebrews 8:8. The full statement in Jeremiah's edition reads: "[The new covenant] will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant [made with them at Sinai], though I was a husband[2] to them." Hebrews 8:8 replaces "though I was a husband to them" with "because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them."
Clearly, what God intended to be different about the new covenant from the one made with Israel at Sinai was the faithfulness of the recipients of the covenant. It was an appeal for the new covenant believer to be faithful where the recipients of the covenant He made at Sinai had been unfaithful.
The master of the vineyard in Jesus's parable, after having his servants beaten and killed by the tenants of his property, finally "sent his son to them. 'They will respect my son,' he said" (Matt. 21:33-37). So too in the new covenant God is effectively saying, having killed My prophets and rejected their appeals for repentance and offers of a new heart and spirit by My grace, surely My people will not reject My Son whom I have resurrected from the dead for their justification. Surely, He says, this covenant will be new in the positive way My people respond to it. How could they reject My Son?
Like the New Commandment to Love, which Wasn't New
There is the further possibility that the new covenant differed from the one given at Sinai in the same way that the Old Testament commandments to love and obey God and to love one another (Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18) were reiterated in the New Testament as a commandment that wasn't new, but yet it was: "Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him [Jesus]" (1 John 2:7-8). "I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning. I ask that we love one another. And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love" (2 John 5-6).
The Old Testament commandments to love God and neighbor were expressed with the very same words in the New Testament, but Jesus lived that love in a way that made the law of love shine with new splendor--almost as though it were a new law.[3]
Similarly, each of the four DNA promise/provisions of the covenant of redemption, while already explicitly stated in the Old Testament, could be seen in a gloriously new light after people had seen them lived out in the life of Jesus. These were the same truths but now wondrously illuminated. So much so that even though the promises had been operative from the implementation of the covenant at Adam's fall and progressively expanded upon with each succeeding covenant, once we saw those promises lived out in the life of Jesus, it was as though we hadn't seen them before. They seemed like new promises even though they had been around from the beginning.
A New and More Powerful Revelation
Closely related to the previous point is one related to the name by which God made Himself known to Moses and to Abraham. God told Moses, "I am the Lord [Hebrew YHWH or Yahweh]. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty [Hebrew El-Shaddai], but by my name the Lord [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them" (Exod. 6:2-3). And yet, it was precisely as the Lord, Yahweh, that God did make Himself known to Abraham and entered into a covenant relationship with Him: "Abram believed the Lord [Yahweh], and he credited it to him as righteousness. He also said to him, 'I am the Lord [Yahweh], who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.' ... On that day the Lord [Yahweh] made a covenant with Abram" (Gen. 15:6-7, 18).
And it was by that very name that Abraham knew and addressed God: "Abram said, 'O Sovereign Lord [Yahweh] ... '; Abraham ... called upon the name of the Lord [Yahweh], the Eternal God" (Gen. 15:2; Gen. 21:33). Furthermore, Isaac and Jacob also knew God by the name Yahweh (Gen. 27:20; 28:13; 32:9). In what possible way then could God have said to Moses that He had not made Himself known to Abraham "by my name the Lord [Yahweh]"?
If the context of God's statement to Moses is carefully studied (Exod. 6:1-8), it will be seen that God was about to reveal Himself in a new way to Moses and Israel, a way that Abraham and the patriarchs had not seen. His new revelation would be so much greater than the old that by comparison it would seem as if God had never before revealed Himself as Yahweh. God's statement to Moses that He had not made Himself known to Abraham by His name "the Lord" (Yahweh) "reveals that the fullness of God's nature and the total meaning of His name was not yet manifest."[4] He was about to work mighty miracles to deliver His people from their slavery. God had worked miracles previously (e.g., Gen. 12:10-20; 19:24; 21:1-7; 22:12-14), but not to the same extent as they were about to see happen in Egypt and throughout their wanderings in the desert. God was also about to reveal to them His holy law at Sinai, amidst spectacular displays in nature. And as noted in the previous chapter, it was at the giving of the law at Sinai that Scripture first records God declaring Himself to be a loving God, a forgiving God, a gracious God, a merciful God.
In other words, Abraham had known God by His name Yahweh on a limited basis, but Moses and Israel were on the verge of knowing Him by that name on an even grander scale, pursuant to the progressive revelation He was about to give in His "new" covenant at Sinai. The events surrounding and including Sinai were going to be a fuller revelation of who Yahweh was and what His will was for His people than even Abraham himself had been given. God's self-revelation to Moses and Israel was not a different revelation but a fuller revelation, and in that sense a new revelation.
Similarly, when God said that the new covenant would not be like the one He made with Israel at Sinai, He was stating that the new covenant, characterized as it was by the real presence of the Son of God among us, would make known the divine nature and will in a revelation far surpassing anything given previously. Thus the revelation was not new in the sense of being different in kind from the previous revelation, and yet it was new, being a much fuller revelation than that which had been given previously. This understanding is consistent with the way God has worked throughout the history of salvation--progressive understanding made known in each successive administration of the covenant of redemption--Adam, Abraham, Moses, historical new covenant.
Making It New and Real to Us
Edward Heppenstall has made this observation about Deuteronomy 5:3:
The question may be raised that Deuteronomy distinguishes between the Abrahamic and Sinaitic covenants. "The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day" Deut 5:2,3. Moses is not emphasizing the difference between covenants. He is saying that each man must renew that covenant for himself. God made a covenant with Abraham; nevertheless both Isaac and Jacob renewed that holy covenant for themselves. And it must be renewed by their descendants. They cannot be excused by saying that God made this covenant only with their fathers, and so it is not binding. No, he made it with them, "with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day." What avails it to the children of Abraham according to the flesh, since God is able of the stones to raise up children unto Abraham? This is a covenant that needs to be ratified by every individual for himself apart. Similarly, we urge our own children to seek and to gain a Christian experience for themselves, for they do not inherit it from their parents. This is exactly what Moses was asking the Hebrews to do just before he died.[5]
Moshe Weinfeld, author of the Anchor Bible Commentary on Deuteronomy 1-11, and Peter C. Craigie, who wrote a commentary titled The Book of Deuteronomy, agree with Heppenstall's argument. They note that the point of Moses's appeal to his audience is not to distinguish between the present covenant and earlier ones but rather that Moses's audience might make the covenant given to their fathers their very own, to adopt it and internalize it personally, to assure that it does not remain in granite but rather becomes ingrained within them.[6]
Similarly, we who live in the New Testament era must not consider a study of God's covenant(s) as an esoteric religious exercise unrelated to our daily lives, but should embrace the most mature and purest expression of God's covenant(s) as seen lived out in the life of Jesus Christ. It must not remain in granite but become ingrained. Viewed in that light, God's timeless, universal invitation to salvation takes the form of a new covenant to each new generation.
New Ceremonies
Another difference between the new and old covenants was their divinely ordained ceremonial systems. The new covenant no longer maintained the elaborate ceremonial system structured around animal sacrifices. The prophet Daniel had prophesied that the coming Messiah would not only "confirm a covenant with many" but would also "put an end to sacrifice and offering" (Dan. 9:27). Hebrews 7-10 confirms that the animal sacrificial system met its fulfillment in Jesus's once-for-all sacrifice for sin and was no longer to be practiced. In the new covenant, baptism and the Lord's Supper replaced the old covenant's circumcision and animal sacrifices (Luke 22:19-20; 1 Cor. 11:23-26; Col. 2:11-12).
Similarly, the Sinai covenant had differed from earlier covenants in the elaborateness of its ceremonial system. Animal sacrifices were certainly part of the system previous to Sinai (e.g., Gen. 4:4; Exod. 3:18). But the instruction to build a sanctuary as a dwelling place of God, as well as to provide a structure for the administration of an expanded sacrificial system and ceremonial ritual, was new (Exodus 25-40; Leviticus).
Jesus Came in the Middle
Of all the ways that the new covenant differs from the old, the most significant is that in the old "God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets," but in the new "he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe" (Heb. 1:1-2). The prophets were godly men, to be sure. They knew God. In them God was restoring His image. Their messages are as valuable to us today as to their original hearers. But Jesus "is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word" (Heb. 1:3).
In a biblically illiterate society, many people do not know the most fundamental difference between the Old Testament and the New. The difference, of course, is that Jesus came in the middle. That's a cataclysmic difference! The whole Old Testament looks forward to His coming. The New Testament looks back at it and now anticipates His return.
Conversion is an experiential form of Jesus's coming in the middle. Many believers have testified that their own personal conversion to Christ, itself an act of grace, changed the way they view the world. My own conversion was no exception. The day after my conversion I well remember looking at trees and grass as though seeing them for the first time and marveling at how they were an expression of God's love for me. People in my life I had hardly noticed before became important to me when I realized the value that God places on them. The personal experience of conversion to Christ transforms one's whole perspective on life. It enables the believer to see old things as new in some beautiful way.
The same happened to history itself when Jesus came in the middle. Now we have BC/AD, Old Testament/New Testament, made so because Jesus came in the middle. His advent is the epicenter of history.
Simply in terms of God's progressive revelation through the covenants, think of what it means that Jesus who was "from everlasting," Jesus who was "with God in the beginning," Jesus who sat on the most holy Trinitarian council where covenant was born before time was born, Jesus whom John declared "was God" and whom the prophet Isaiah called "Mighty God, Everlasting Father"-think of what it means that this very Jesus actually came into our world and lived with us! (Mic. 5:2; John 1:1-3, 14; Isa. 9:6). After Jesus came, the gospel was focused like a laser beam on the events of His death and resurrection for us (1 Cor. 15:1-3).
Floodlight on the Law
John could say, "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known" (John 1:17-18). "The law given through Moses" was a huge advance in God's progressive revelation of his covenantal relationship with His people. The psalmist declared, "Your law is truth" (Ps. 119:142 NKJV). God's law--His commandments and the symbolic sanctuary depiction of the Messiah's atoning death--revealed the way to life. But Jesus, the Author and Giver of that very law, could say, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). What the law testified to, He was. The law was a transcript of His character.
God revealed a fleeting and wonderful glimpse of Himself to Moses as a merciful, gracious, loving, forgiving God (Exod. 34:6-7). But Jesus was "at the Father's side" from the beginning and could say something that Moses and the prophets could never say: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). He was the gracious one, the one who loved us to the death, the forgiver. Nothing the law said became untrue once Jesus came. Rather, His coming shined a floodlight on the truths revealed in the law. In His most famous address, the Sermon on the Mount, He said: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished" (Matt. 5:17-19).
The new that had come in Christ was not to the denigration of the old but in fulfillment of it. Those who watched Him, listened to Him, and lived with Him began to view everything, including God's eternal laws and promises and character, in a new light: "But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify" (Rom. 3:21). As Paulien has noted, "Righteousness is whatever God does."[7] Righteousness is His character. And righteousness is His actions which are always consistent with His character. The law prescribed it. Jesus lived it. His life magnified what the law taught.
Everlasting Covenant Personified
In Jesus the Old Testament covenant symbols met their reality-the promise met its fulfillment. He was "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). He "was without sin," and credits to us His own righteousness so we shall be "saved through His life" (Heb. 4:15; 2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 5:10). He who voluntarily placed Himself on death row to spare our race from extinction, who had been depicted through the covenants as the hope of the race, had finally come to the execution ... and the resurrection! In every conceivable sense, in Jesus the new had come. In Him God's progressive revelation through His covenant(s) reached its pinnacle. So much, so in fact, that in a Messianic prophecy written centuries before the advent, God revealed that in the Messiah humanity would be in the presence of the very One who is Himself the covenant: "I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness" (Isa. 42:6-7; cf. Gal. 3:19-20). In Him "the Word [the everlasting covenant itself] became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14).
The DNA of the everlasting covenant was His DNA. Promise/Provision 1 (Sanctification): In Him, in His humanity, we saw one whose heart was so dependent on the heavenly Father that God could fully write His eternal law on it. Promise/Provision 2 (Reconciliation): In Him we saw one in whom God could bring to fullest realization His promise, "I will be their God and they will be my people." Promise/Provision 3 (Mission): In Him we saw one who needed no one to teach Him about God, for He knew God, and none was ever so passionate as He to make God known to those who knew Him not (Luke 19:10; John 14:7-9; 17:25-26). Promise/Provision 4 (Justification): In Him symbol met reality, promise met fulfillment (Heb. 9:12-14). In Him the effective sacrifice and atonement for our sin has been finally made and need never be repeated (Heb. 9:25-28). In Him the devil received his ultimate sentence and awaits his final disposition (Heb. 2:14). In Him death itself has lost its sting, and "those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death" are set free (1 Cor. 15:20-22, 55; Heb. 2:15).
Cosmically New
The New Testament authors viewed the entire revelation and history of the Old Testament through the new lens provided by the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If they had failed to do so, their eyes and hearts would have remained veiled (2 Cor. 3:14). They understood Jesus as the new Adam, the new exodus (the new "way out"), the new Moses, the new Israel, the new temple, the new king, the new Elijah, the new redeemer from exile.[8] Where Adam and Israel failed, Jesus succeeded. The covenant curse that Adam and Israel, and all humanity, merited through disobedience was borne by Jesus.
• "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree'" (Gal. 3:13, quoting Deut. 21:23).
• "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all"; "by his wounds we are healed" (Isa. 53:6,5).
• "For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification for all men" (Rom. 5:17-18).
• "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:22).
Jesus's atoning death on the cross seems to have not only made God's covenant with humanity a new covenant, but in ways we don't fully understand it appears to have made His everlasting covenant with the other inhabitants of the universe a new covenant as well. Note this astounding revelation: "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (Col. 1:20).
Jesus's death on the cross put God's everlasting covenant on display before the universe itself in a way it had never been seen before. God used Jesus's death on the cross to, in some profound way, "reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven" (italics added). In what way did Jesus's death "reconcile to himself ... things in heaven" that have never been estranged from Him through sin? Before such great mysteries we stand on holy ground with bowed heads and awed hearts. But at least this much can be said: in the Christ event God was revealing something breathtakingly new, even to the universe that lies beyond sin's borders, about His everlasting covenant promise and commitment to His creation.
The Holy Spirit's New Ministry
One of the most amazing evidences of how the New Testament writers, and Jesus Himself, understood the "newness" of His everlasting covenant in the New Testament historical era was in the way they treated the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit had been operative in the Old Testament as a creating (Gen. 1:1-2), convicting (Ps. 51:9-12), converting (1 Sam. 10:6-10), reviving (Ezek. 37:1-14), empowering/sanctifying (Ezek. 36:25-27), indwelling (Exod. 31:1-3), gift-imparting (Exod. 31:1-3), miracle-working (Gal. 4:29), all-pervading presence (Ps. 139:7) who strove for the conversion of all humankind (Gen. 6:3) and who could be longed for (Ps. 51:11), resisted (Ps. 106:33), and grieved (Isa. 63:7-10).
Conversion and sanctification have never been available except through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. All the sanctified qualities of a godly, righteous, holy, divine-image-bearing life are but the fruits of the Spirit (John 3:3-6; Gal. 5:19-23). It has also been revealed that "those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God," and that only "if the Spirit of God lives in you" (Rom. 8:8-9) can one be redeemed from this spiritually bankrupt condition. This is a timeless and universal truth. Jesus was amazed that Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, did not understand it (John 3:3-6).
One recent writer on the covenants claimed, "In the old covenant only the key leaders were filled with the Holy Spirit and had a personal knowledge of God."[9] This is a serious misunderstanding of the biblical record. While Old Testament believers in general did not know much about the Holy Spirit's unique role and work, just as they did not know much about the identity and role of Jesus, that does not mean that these members of the Trinity were not fully and globally active throughout that period--convicting, converting, and indwelling those who believed to sanctify them and restore the divine image within them.[10]
Even so, the apostle John, who experienced the powerful display of the Holy Spirit's ministry manifested at Pentecost, could look back on the whole of salvation history, including the years that Jesus was on earth, and conclude, "Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified" (John 7:39). And Jesus Himself said, "Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you" (John 16:7). In light of the abundant scriptural testimony regarding the pervasive work of the Holy Spirit throughout the entire period of the Old Testament, in what possible way could it be said that the Holy Spirit had not come or been given until Jesus was glorified?
Robertson shares a valuable insight: "The self-revelation of God throughout the ages may be regarded as the 'raw material' used by the Holy Spirit to apply the benefits of redemption to the life-experience of the believer."[11] The Holy Spirit's work is not different in the New Testament era than it was in the Old. What is different is the "raw material" the Holy Spirit has to work with. Previously He used the wonderful stories of creation, the flood, the exodus from Egypt, the manna from heaven and water from a rock, the law given from Sinai, and the animal sacrifices in the sanctuary to impress people of their spiritual need and of God's covenant promise to save them to the uttermost if they do not reject Him.
Once Jesus had completed His earthly mission and was glorified, the Holy Spirit had powerful new "raw material" to work with. The new story didn't discount the older ones. It supercharged them. Even a quick read of the book of Acts reveals that the Holy Spirit still used the old stories, but they had become subservient now to the new story-the resurrection of Jesus! The old had been gathered up and made even more effective by the new. But now that the new had come, it must forever after take center stage. "When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. ... He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you" (John 16:13-14).
In every way, God's long-standing covenant with His people had entered a profoundly new phase. Something indescribably new had taken place. Not the final consummation yet, but the guarantee of it.
Caveat
The underlying assumption of evangelical dispensationalism appears to be that the nature of the Sinai covenant itself contributed in some way to the general unbelief and failure of Israel to live up to their covenant privileges and obligations. In essence this is an accusation against God who gave the covenant. But pointing to the general failure of Israel as proof that God's covenant at Sinai was faulty would be similar to pointing to the dark ages of Christian history as evidence that there was something faulty about the New Testament because it left generations of supposed Christians in such spiritual darkness.
And what about our own generation, with Bibles in practically every home in the Western world and churches dotting our landscape? Is Jesus's plaintive query a warning to our generation, "However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8). Perhaps we should listen anew and take to heart the appeal Moses made to the covenant people who were poised to enter the Promised Land: "The Lord our God made a covenant with us. ... It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today."
Summary
In Deuteronomy 5:3 Moses differentiates the covenant God made with the generation of Israelites who were about to enter Canaan under the leadership of Joshua from the one He made with their fathers. Jeremiah 31:31 and Hebrews 8:9 differentiate God's new covenant with Israel from the one He entered into with the generation of Israelites He delivered from Egypt. How are we to understand this differentiation?
God's own answer to this question was that He expected a different response from those in the New Testament period to whom the gospel would be preached than He had received from those in the Old Testament period to whom that same gospel had been preached. Also, the New Testament ceremonies of baptism and the Lord's Supper replaced the Old Testament animal sacrificial services. Furthermore, whenever a new generation receives God's covenant, it comes as a new covenant to them in the sense that they cannot rely on the response of their forbearers to God's invitation to salvation but must make that choice for themselves.
In addition, Jesus's advent in human history made everything new-the age-old commandment to love became a "new" commandment; the grace and truth depicted in the law given to the world through Moses came into our world personified in Jesus Christ as though it were a new revelation; the Holy Spirit, the divine sanctifying agent who had been drawing and sealing men and women to God from the beginning, was introduced by Jesus as though He had not been active previously. The cataclysmic advent of Jesus, the unifying agent in God's covenant(s) with humanity, made everything that came before it "old" and everything that came with and after it "new." God's entire revelation through the prophets came to be regarded as the "Old" Testament, and His subsequent inspired revelation the "New." The "old" revelation was not old in the sense of somehow being less inspired, valid, or applicable than it had been previously, but rather "old" in the sense that it could never again be fully understood without reading it in the light of the everlasting gospel revealed in Jesus. To read it any other way would be to do so with veiled eyes and hardened hearts.
We are now prepared to understand and appreciate the all-important theme of the next two chapters-how Scripture refers to the old and new covenants at some times with a historical application in mind, and at other times with an experiential application in mind. The significance of recognizing this scriptural demarcation can hardly be overestimated. On the one hand, the failure to recognize these distinct applications has resulted in scriptural interpretations that fracture the unity of the covenant of redemption/everlasting gospel. On the other hand, discriminately applying these distinctions erases apparent conflicts between some passages of Scripture and preserves the scriptural unity and coherence of the everlasting gospel.
Notes: