A New and Better Covenant (2 Corinthians 3)

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today we're going to be looking at 2nd Corinthians chapter 3. As we do each day, I'm not going to be able to read and look at the whole chapter, but I want to break down some of the parts of the chapter and look at one specific section.

The New Covenant in 2 Corinthians 3

And today we're going to be looking at verses 14 through 16. But before we do that, I want to make mention of the context of the passage. Paul begins to mention earlier in this chapter that God has made him, has made us, ministers of a new covenant.

The Bible, as we have it today, is broken up into what we would refer to as Testaments. The Old Testament is everything that happens prior to the coming of Jesus Christ, and then the New Testament is everything from the birth of Jesus Christ on to the end of the life of the Apostles.

So the Old Testament covers many hundreds of years, and the New Testament covers less than a hundred year period. And so when we look at the Bible, and it's broken into two parts, the vast majority of it is the Old Testament or the Old Covenant Scriptures.

And that phrase, Old Covenant, is actually used in the New Testament to refer to what came before Christ. Everything that came before Christ was the Old Covenant, and when Christ came, he came to inaugurate, or he came to bring a new covenant.

Now this new covenant wasn't something that was unheard of, because we see the prophecies of the New Covenant back in the Old Covenant. The prophets said that there was going to come a new covenant, and so Jesus came to fulfill that promise, to bring a new covenant.

Now when we talk about a covenant, a covenant is an agreement, a covenant is a promise, and there are covenants that have what we call conditions, and then there are covenants that do not have conditions, or covenants of promise.

And so when we look at the Old Covenant, there are actually several covenants that are mentioned, but specifically when you refer to the Old and the New in the Bible, we're typically referring to the covenant that God made with Israel through Moses at Sinai.

That's the covenant that regarded the law, the covenant that had stipulations, that had conditions, and then when we come to the New Covenant, this is a covenant of promise that's not based on the law, but it's based in faith and the promise.

And in Galatians, Paul compares the New Covenant to the covenant God made with Abraham. The Unconditional, it was made by God himself, he didn't make it with an agreement with Abraham, but he made it to Abraham, and he made it as a promise.

And the New Covenant very much is the same way, it's to be received not by works, but by faith alone. And so the Apostle Paul, in the letter of 2nd Corinthians, mentions being a minister of this New Covenant.

We are no longer a part, well I never, we never were if we're Gentiles, but the Old Covenant has been made obsolete in the coming of the New Covenant. That doesn't mean the Old Testament scriptures do not have value, certainly they do.

The Bible says that the Old Covenant is written for our instruction, and there's great value in it. Of course we learn about the character and nature of God, we learn about his dealings with Israel, and it becomes sort of a prototype of how he deals with the church.

And so there's a great deal of information that is learned in the Old Testament, the Old Covenant scriptures, but that Old Covenant has been superseded by a new, and the book of Hebrews tells us, a better covenant.

The Veil Over Israel's Reading of Moses

And what Paul says about the the New Covenant in verses 14 to 16 is very interesting, because he, in referring to the Israelites, he says that their minds have been hardened. I want to read the text, it's verses 14 to 16.

We know he's talking about the Israelites, it's the group that he's referring to. He said, but their minds were hardened, for to this day, when they read the Old Covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.

Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts, but one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. This is specifically referring to the people of Israel, who have, in a sense, been blinded to the true understanding of their own scriptures.

Because of their denial of Jesus Christ, they don't see him in their scriptures. Christians look at the Old Testament, and we see Jesus everywhere. We see Jesus in types, he is the lamb that is the sacrificial lamb, he is the the Passover lamb, John calls him the lamb that takes away the sin of the world, the Lamb of God.

He is the the ram that took the place of Isaac on the altar on Mount Moriah. He is so many different things that are pictured in the Old Testament, so many types and symbols. I think one of the greatest examples of Jesus in the Old Covenant is the ark.

Noah and his family were inside the ark, and therefore protected from the wrath of God that befell those outside the ark. And in much the same way, the Bible says when we are believers in Christ, we are in Christ, and in Christ there is no condemnation, and so there's no wrath for those who are in Jesus Christ.

And so in that way, Jesus Christ is like the ark that Noah and his family were protected within. And so there's all of this rich symbolism, there's all this rich typology, and there are passages that specifically talk about Jesus, talks about him being born in Bethlehem, talks about being born of a virgin, talks about him being the sufferant servant.

Isaiah 53 and the Suffering Servant

Isaiah 53 is probably the most just explicit explanation of the servant Jesus giving himself for us, that he bore our transgressions, and that by his wounds we are healed. That passage refers specifically to what Jesus did on the cross, written 700 years before Jesus.

I'll never forget, a woman came to my office one day after church, she wasn't a member, she just visited the church, and she said she was having trouble believing in Jesus. And so I opened up my Bible, I opened Isaiah 53, and I read to her the verses of Isaiah 53, and I said, who is this referring to?

And she said, well that's obviously Jesus. And I said, do you realize this was written 700 years before Jesus was born? She was amazed, and it challenged her in her lack of belief, because that is such a powerful vision of Jesus that came so many hundreds of years before he was alive, or before he came in the Incarnation.

Certainly Christ has always been alive as the second person of the Trinity. But when I hear people from the Jewish community, and I have heard it with my own ears, the Orthodox modern Jewish community who say, we don't believe in Jesus, and our scriptures don't talk about Jesus.

First of all, I have to say, wow, I can't believe that they're missing it. I can't believe that they can read the scriptures. Some of them memorize in their schools, memorize large sections of the Torah, and yet they don't see Jesus in it.

But this passage tells us why. It says there is a veil over their eyes. It's as if they are blinded to seeing it, and until they turn to the Lord, they're not going to see it. Until they receive the Lord Jesus Christ, they will not see him in their sacred scriptures.

John 1 and Receiving Christ

It reminds me of John 1, one of the saddest sections of the New Testament. It says that speaking of Jesus, he came to his own, and his own received him not. Who was his own? His own was the Jewish people.

When he came to the Hebrew people, to the Israelites, the majority of them did not receive him. But the text goes on to say, but to those who did receive him, who believed on his name, to them he gave the power to become the children of God.

That's the beauty of what it means to turn to Christ. We turn to Christ because of the Holy Spirit's work in our hearts, and when we turn to Christ, we become children of God by faith, because we are adopted into the family of God through the work of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit who comes to live within us.

And it's the Holy Spirit that opens up our ability to see Jesus in the scriptures, both in the Old Covenant and in the New Covenant. So I guess in this time I would like to take just a second and say, if you haven't seen Jesus in the Old Testament, perhaps the blinders are over your eyes, and maybe, just maybe, it's going to take an act of the Holy Spirit whereby you will turn to the Lord, and you will see that there is this wonderful Old Testament scripture that points to the New Testament Savior, and the Old Covenant is now obsolete.

It has been replaced with a new and better covenant. If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you're a part of that covenant, and we look forward to the day when the King will return, and he will set up his kingdom, and we will be with him forever.

I hope this has been an encouragement to you today. I hope that every day you're enjoying these Bible studies with us. I pray that you would continue to follow along with us. Tomorrow we'll continue in our study of 2 Corinthians, but between now and then, may God bless you.

I'm Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist. Thank you for tuning in to Coffee with a Calvinist. I want to remind you that if you like what you have seen, please take a moment and thumbs up this video if you're watching it on YouTube.

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My name is Keith, and I've been your Calvinist.