Diving In Session 4 Covenant 8 The New Covenant week 2

Reminder New Covenant made initially with the House of Israel and the House of Judah.

• Unconditional covenant which is made at God’s initiative, the promise of which is given at Israel’s lowest point – just about to go into Exile following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, to give them hope as it is …
• The basis of fulfilment of OT covenants – it reiterates all that God had promised to the Patriarchs, as impossible as it looked at the time! The timing of the promises of the New Covenant:
  • Isaiah – the time of Assyrian conquest of Israel and Sennacherib threatening Judah;
  • Jeremiah – the time of the Babylonian conquest with Nebuchadnezzar’s armies at the gates of Jerusalem;
  • Ezekiel – written by one of the exiles in Babylon
• Looks forward to the Millennium
  • It is the time when the nation of Israel will be united and regenerated (Ezek. 37:12-28; Isa. 59:21
  • The restoration of Edenic conditions (Ezek. 34:25-31) and thus is a consummation of the Edenic ‘Covenant’.
• Also deals finally with the question of sin, which the Mosaic Covenant could not do (Heb. 8:7-9; Rom. 3:20, 28; 4:4; Acts 13:39) through the death of the Messiah (Gal. 2:21; Heb. 10:9)
• Deals with the powerlessness of the Law to sanctify (Rom. 7:7, 21-23; 8:4, 9, 13), through the indwelling Holy Spirit, Who could only come after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension (John 7:39)

1. What is the Old Covenant?

3/4. One New Covenant or two? Single united fulfilment of two-fold?

Indicated in ‘stars of heaven’ and ‘sand on the seashore’? The church as the Bride of Christ and Israel as the wife of Jehovah? Or is that just disguised dualism with the earthly people relegated to a lower standing in the Kingdom? (NB Replacement theology is even more dualistic with its writing off of Israel completely)

Replacement Theology, the idea that the Church has superseded Israel, spiritualises all these promises and sees them fulfilled in the Church. It is a simplistic solution to quite a complicated subject! Anything from the OT you can’t make fit into your over-riding NT model, you spiritualise or allegoricalise it.

5. Is the Church a parenthesis?

Based partly on Dan. 9 and the ‘gap’ we observed last time between the 69^th and 70^th ‘weeks’, one view sees the Church age as a parenthesis in the working out of God’s plan and purposes for Israel. Dispensationalists are often accused of making the Bible’s Big Story ‘all about Israel’, while the accusers take the ‘high ground’ of making it solely about the Church

6. How do the Gentiles fit in?

The scope of fulfilment – Jew and Gentile in One Body

Rom. 11:16-24 The wild branches (the Gentiles) are grafted in amongst the natural branches (Israel) What or Who is the tree? Which branches are broken off? How and when are they grafted in again?

Arnold Fruchtenbaum suggests a better way of looking at it is Partaker theology. The conditional Mosaic Covenant was the middle wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles, preventing the Gentiles from sharing in the Covenant blessings (Abrahamic, Land, Davidic, New). But that wall of partition was removed with Messiah’s death, enabling Gentiles to benefit from the spiritual blessings of those covenants, and become sharers-together (Eph. 3:6) – partaking in the blessings, not taking them over.

Eph. 2:14-15 the Middle wall of partition is broken down – both are reconciled to God in one body, making One New Man in Christ.

The One New Man

The issue is “Is the One New Man like a cake where all the individual ingredients merge into a new entity where you can’t distinguish the ingredients, or is it more like a fruit salad where all the individual fruits are identifiable but blend together?” Or to use Paul’s analogy of the olive tree, do the Israelite branches and the Gentile branches look the same after the Gentile branches are grafted in? Or do the wild olives still look like wild olives? (The latter, as any tree grower will tell you!)

But since the second or third century, the standard Church thinking on this has been that the One New Man is a third race. In Eph. 2:15, Jesus is said to have made “the two into one new man”, i.e. from Jew and Gentile. Some newer translations say ‘in place of’ between the ‘two’ and the ‘one’ but there is no justification in the original Greek. It is a theological interpretation revealing the translators bias, which in turn is drawn from Gal. 3:28 where there is said to be ‘neither Jew nor Gentile’ in Christ. But following that logic, there are neither men nor women in this new race but some new combined or genderless race, which is obviously not the case! (The point in Gal. 3 is that neither race, nor gender, nor social status, is a bar from inheriting the Abrahamic promises.)

The divisiveness of the Jew/Gentile distinction is removed, but not the distinctiveness. The reference in Eph. 2:15 is to Adam and Eve, or Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31-32), where the two become a unity without losing their individual identity. Mark Saucy says regarding this:

“Estrangement to the God that Israel serves is removed by Christ, but as in the Old Testament’s Zionism, the nations coming into Christ do not surrender their national diversity. The God of Israel is able to call Egypt “my people,” Assyria “the work of my hands,” and Israel “my special possession” (Is 19:25). Thus, the church is not equated with Israel, but Israel in Ephesians remains central to the believers’ identity and therefore cannot simultaneously be undermined either.”