The Blessings Of The New Covenant Part 1 – Hebrews 8:8-9

Hebrews 8:8-9 and the Promised New Covenant

And now we turn your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 8, the 8th chapter of Hebrews. We're going to read in Hebrews chapter 8, and we'll read verses 8 through verse 12. Hebrews 8, beginning at verse 8, "'For finding fault with them,' he says, "'Behold, days are coming,' says the Lord, "'when I will effect a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, for they did not continue in my covenant, and I did not care for them,' says the Lord.

"'For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After those days,' says the Lord, "'I will put my laws into their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen and everyone his brother, saying, "'Know the Lord,' for all will know me from the least to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.'".

Let's pray together. Father, it is our earnest desire to be able to understand Your Word, and any time we read in Your Word of the promises of salvation and redemption and of Your covenants, we are getting a glimpse into Your eternal and redemptive purposes and into the very nature and heart of You, our God, who desires to save sinners and does save sinners for Your own eternal glory.

And we ask that as we look at Your Word today and examine the promises here of the new covenant that You would be honored and glorified through this teaching and through the meditation of our hearts, and that You would be honored and glorified in and through our understanding of this passage.

And so, we would ask for the aid and assistance and the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit today as we look at Your Word, that You may be glorified here in the hearts of Your people. That is our prayer and our earnest desire and expectation.

We ask these things in the name of Christ and for His sake and for His glory. Amen. Well, you'd be happy to know that we've done almost all of the heavy lifting in terms of understanding the new covenant and its parameters.

We've kind of laid the groundwork by looking at the differences between dispensationalists and covenant theologians. We did some introductory work on the new covenant, and then we answered the question, to whom are the promises of the new covenant given?

And that is a huge question because that is really at the heart of the difference between dispensationalists and covenant theologians. Who gets the promises of the new covenant? To whom is it given? And last week, we looked at four different views of the new covenant, and I would like to say regarding all four of those views of the new covenant, they're within evangelicalism.

No one of those views is heretical in and of itself. There are good men, good theologians, our brothers and sisters in Christ who would hold to any or all of those four views of the covenant, the people in each one of those camps.

And so, this is not a heretical doctrine in those terms of what you believe about the new covenant. But answering the question, to whom are the new promises of the new covenant given, that really gets down to the heart of the distinction between two primary views of the new covenant held within evangelicalism.

Probably the most popular, the most prominent two positions on this subject would be covenant theology and dispensationalism. Covenant theology, again, to review would be kind of the R .C. Sproul, James Montgomery Boyce, Benjamin Breckenfield, Warfield's camp, Hodge's camp, and that sort of group on the sort of the Reformed, the old school Presbyterian camp, that would be covenant theology.

Dispensationalism would be more along the lines of John MacArthur and John Wolverd, and some modern names would be Michael Vlock, and who's the other guy I'm thinking of? Anyway, you're writing this down.

So that would be the dispensational camp. So those would be the two main camps. And here's how each of them would answer this question, to whom are the promises of the new covenant given? The covenant theologians would say the promises were given to Israel as a nation, but they are fulfilled by the church.

Given to Israel, but fulfilled in and by the church. Obviously not that we are a new nation, but that we fulfill spiritually some of the elements of the covenant as the people of God now under the new covenant in this new dispensation.

Dispensationalists would argue differently. They would view it differently. They would say that the promises were given to national Israel, and they are not all fulfilled in the church. The church gets to enjoy some of those blessings today, but ultimately, eschatologically at the end of time, those blessings will be fulfilled in Israel.

So dispensationalists would recognize the distinction between Israel as a people, as a nation to whom promises were given, and the church who have been brought into the promises of the new covenant. We've been brought in by faith as it were, and Israel's disobedience has not meant their rejection.

Israel's disobedience means our salvation. Now because they have disobeyed, the kingdom has been delayed as it were, and God has now opened the door of faith to the Gentiles, and we get to be brought in and enjoy all of the salvific blessings of the new covenant.

And though we enjoy the salvific blessings of the new covenant today, though we're not national Israel, we're not descendants of Abraham in any physical sense, we are his spiritual offspring in that we trust in the very one who mediated the covenant that we will be fulfilled with the descendants of Abraham.

So now we get the salvation blessings now, but we will also participate in all of the end time blessings, all of the eschatological end of time blessings that will fall upon the nation of Israel in fulfillment to the new covenant.

So we've kind of been brought in on the side as it were, and now we're incorporated salvifically into that, but when God fulfills all of those promises to Israel at the end, then we also will enjoy the kingdom, and the land, and all of those blessings that are promised to the nation of Israel.

But Israel will be at the center of that, and we get all of those blessings as well. Today we get the salvation blessings of it. Now whatever your view of the new covenant is, you have to incorporate, you have to deal with five basic truths that we have been looking at in recent weeks, and I'm just going to review these quickly.

Whatever your view is, covenant theology, dispensational theology, and obviously I'm a dispensationalist, so I think that my theology deals with all five of these in the best possible way. But whatever your view of the covenant is, it has to deal with, you have to have room for these five facts.

Number one, the promises were given to national Israel. You cannot get around that. They were given to national Israel. Jeremiah chapter 31 is not addressed to Gentile nations, it's not addressed to the church, it's not a promise to the church.

It's given to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. Those promises were given to national Israel. That's the only way that text could possibly be understood in its context if it is allowed to speak for itself.

Second, these promises are connected to God's fulfillment of His other covenants. You see that in Genesis, or Jeremiah, I keep saying Genesis, Jeremiah 31, you see that in Jeremiah 31 with the reiteration of the terms of the Abrahamic covenant of a land and a people and a blessing, and you see that in Jeremiah chapter 31 with the reiteration of the Davidic covenant, that there will be a king and these blessings will be fulfilled just as God gave them to David.

So the promises are connected to the fulfillment of God's other covenants. Number three, the New Testament quotation of Jeremiah 31 does not change, reinterpret, or spiritualize those promises in any way.

When the New Testament author in Hebrews 8 quotes Jeremiah 31, he doesn't change, reinterpret, or spiritualize those promises in any way to any degree whatsoever. There's not even a hint, not even the vaguest hint that the author of Hebrews intends that passage to be understood in any way other than Jeremiah would have understood it.

Number four, there is no hint that these promises are conditional in Jeremiah 31. There's no hint at all in Jeremiah 31, in Hebrews chapter 8, in the Abrahamic covenant, or in the Davidic covenant, that any of those covenants or any of the terms of those covenants are in any way conditioned upon Israel's obedience, their worthiness, or their keeping of the terms of the covenants.

They're not in any way conditional, and that is not even hinted at in any of those passages. Number five, we undoubtedly participate in some way in the new covenant, don't we? There's some element of the new covenant that we participate in.

So I built this entire perspective of the new covenant that says it is given to the house of Israel, to the house of Judah. It is for them. It's national Israel. It's not spiritualized. It's not taken away from them.

It's not conditional. God will fulfill it to them. And yet in some way, we benefit from, we participate in the blessings of the new covenant. How do we do that? I suggested to you last week that today we participate in it salvifically.

We get the salvation benefits of that now. Some of them, not all of them, some of them. And eschatologically at the end of time, we will participate in all of the blessings that are promised in the new covenant when God fulfills them to Israel.

So whatever your view of the new covenant is, you have to deal with those five facts, I think. And the only way to do that is to see, as I have suggested, that today we participate salvifically and later we will participate with Israel eschatologically in that.

In short, the complete fulfillment of all these promises still waits a future time. I had to lay all of that out and talk about the differences of interpreting it because now as we start to look at the promises of the new covenant, how you view the answer to this question, to whom are the new covenant promises given?

Is it to Israel as a nation or are those new covenant promises given to the church? Your answer to that question will determine how you interpret the individual promises of the new covenant, how you will interpret the individual promises of them.

So if, for instance, you hold to covenant theology, then you have to say that I don't believe that there is a future for national Israel. I don't believe that those promises given to national Israel will be fulfilled by national Israel.

God is done with the Israelite people. And so the only way that any Jew alive today can participate in any covenant or any promise that God is going to fulfill is if they come to Christ and then they participate on the same terms as us.

But in terms of the future as a nation, there is no future for national Israel, as a covenant theologian would say that. So then you would have to take each of the individual promises and understand them in some way that eliminates any kind of fulfillment for national Israel and sees them as being fulfilled entirely in the church today, in what we experience or what we participate in.

So it's going to affect how you view the fulfillment of those promises depending on who you think the promises are given to. I hope that makes sense. Depending on who you think it's given to, it will affect what you think the promises are actually promising.

And I'm going to show to you over the course of the next little while that the promises that are given can be understood as being fulfilled both to us in some way today and to future national Israel. I don't think that we have to choose between those two.

So if the they and the them, which you read here in Hebrews chapter 8 when you get into the covenant in verses 8, 9, 10, and 11, when it refers to the they and the them and the their fathers and I took them out of the land of Egypt, who is that referring to?

It's national Israel. Well, if you're going to take and spiritualize that and apply it to the church today, then you have to in some way explain how it is that these promises are fulfilled entirely today in what we experience.

And I will show you that I don't think that these promises can be fulfilled entirely today in what we experience, not just because we don't experience all of it, but because these promises were not given to us, they were given to national Israel.

So your answer to this question, to whom are the promises given, will affect how you interpret the individual promises of the new covenant and it will also determine how you interpret the promises made to Abraham and made to David.

Because you see, if there is no future for the nation of Israel, then you have to go back to the Abrahamic covenant and say it is either conditional, which nowhere in the text is it suggested that it is, or that those promises are fulfilled in some way other than to the sons of Abraham.

They have to be fulfilled in some way spiritually and allegorically, metaphorically, in some other mysterious way in the church today. And then you have to do the same thing with the Davidic covenant.

And this is why I'm not a covenant theologian. It's far too much work to go back and to take all of those passages and cram them into my theological system than it is to just let the passages speak for themselves.

That sounded harsh, but it was intended to be a harsh statement regarding the difference between dispensationalism and covenant theologian. It's way too much work to try and cram those passages into a theological grid than it is to simply say, what does the passage in its context teach?

Just by itself. Just read it. On the surface, what does it say? It's national Israel, to the house of Israel, to the house of Judah. So now let's look at these promises, the promises of the new covenant.

There are three of them that we're going to be looking at, three of them. And before I list the three of them and show you them in the text, I do want to clarify this is not to say that there are only three things in the new covenant.

It's to say that there are three specific promises here, but it would probably be better for us to think of these three promises in terms of them being sort of general promises or actually headings of promises or blessings.

We could think of them as three categories of blessings that are given in the new covenant because underneath each one of these promises, you'll see that there are a lot of things in each one of them.

For instance, the promise in verse 12 of the forgiveness of sins, I will be merciful to their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more. That's a promise or a blessing of the new covenant. Complete forgiveness of sins.

Well, what is involved with the complete forgiveness of sins for us, both now and in the future? What's involved with that? There is obviously the blessing of our election, our being chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world.

There is the blessing of our calling and our being drawn to the son. There's the blessing of the gift of repentance, the blessing of the gift of faith, the blessing of the gift of our adoption, the blessing of God's gift of predestination, the blessing of redemption, the blessing of imputed righteousness.

That's just eight that I can only think of just off the top of my head. It wasn't really off the top of my head because it's here in my notes, but those are just eight of them that I can think and rattle off real quickly.

In other words, there are all of these other things that are under that blessing of forgiveness. What's tied in with the blessing of forgiveness? All of those things. So it is with all of these other blessings of the new covenant.

These are like categories of blessings or groupings of things that are involved with our salvation. Think of it in those terms. Now what are the individual three blessings? I want you to notice them. Beginning in verse 10, the first one is an internal law that is a law that is written on our hearts and our minds.

Verse 10, for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my laws into their minds and I will write them on their hearts. That's the first blessing of the new covenant, an internal law, the law of God written on our hearts.

Second, a universal knowledge of God. Verse 10, and I will be their God and they shall be my people and they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen and everyone his brother saying, know the Lord for all will know me from the least of these to the greatest of them.

Jesus quotes from this passage actually in John chapter six. Okay, so first is an internal law, second, a universal knowledge of God, and the third blessing promised on the new covenant is the complete forgiveness of sins.

Verse 12, for I will be merciful to their iniquities and I will remember their sins no more. So let's look at the first one, an internal law, and I want you to keep in mind as we go through all of these blessings of the new covenant that these blessings are not things that were provided under the old covenant.

These are not things that were provided under the old covenant. The old covenant did not make provision for any of these things. And so there is an intended point of contrast here in the text between the old covenant, which again is not the oldest covenant, it's just the old covenant or the first covenant, and it was the Mosaic covenant.

There was a covenant older than the Mosaic covenant, and that was the one given to Abraham. But the new covenant, and this is important, the new covenant does not abrogate or do away with the covenant that God made with Abraham.

The new covenant is intended to be the second covenant, which does away and renders obsolete not every other covenant that has ever been made, the Noahic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the priestly covenant, and the Davidic covenant.

The new covenant only abrogates and does away with one other covenant, and that is the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant. The covenant that God made with the children of Israel when he took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt.

That's the point of contrast in verse 9. On that day, God made with the nation of Israel a covenant, and it was the Mosaic covenant. So the new covenant does not change, it does not alter, it doesn't reinterpret, it doesn't spiritualize, and it does not replace the Abrahamic covenant or the Davidic covenant or the Noahic covenant or the priestly covenant.

All of those covenants are still in force. The new covenant replaces one, the terms that God gave to Moses with a nation at Mount Sinai. When he brought them out of the land of Egypt and made them his people.

The new covenant replaces and makes obsolete that covenant and that one alone. So one of the first things that you need to know about the old covenant is how gracious that old covenant was. And I want to spend a couple moments talking about this because this is important.

We tend to think of the old covenant that was made with Israel as sort of a condemning, judgmental, negative, horrible covenant that it would have been absolutely miserable to live under the terms of that.

And there was plenty of condemnation and there was plenty of judgment regarding the terms of the old covenant, plenty of curses that were there for disobedience. But I want you to also see that in the old covenant there were elements of grace, a number of gracious elements in the old covenant.

It wasn't just a covenant of law and condemnation. There were gracious elements involved in the making of that covenant. For instance, the context for the giving of that covenant was filled with gracious things.

That God would condescend and make a covenant with any man or any nation is itself incredibly gracious. Can you understand that? How that would be the case? That God would deign to condescend and to speak and to relate with sinners who deserve His judgment in any kind of a gracious way.

Just God's act of doing that and making a covenant with Israel itself was a gracious thing. Not only that, but He took them into Egypt to preserve their lives and to make them a nation and then, as it says in verse 9, He took them out of Egypt by His hand and delivered them from slavery.

He took them by the hand and brought them out into the wilderness where He provided for their needs and gave them everything that they needed out in the wilderness. And when He brought them out of Egypt, He plundered the Egyptians and they brought out with Him all of the spoils of Egypt.

How gracious are all of those things that God did in delivering the nation? Did they deserve that? No, they were stiff-necked and hard-hearted people, disobedient, deserving of His wrath. There was nothing about Israel, the book of Deuteronomy says, there was nothing about Israel that made them greater or mightier or more deserving than any other nation on the face of the planet.

But God made a covenant with that nation. How gracious was that? Just the terms, the environment of the making of the covenant was filled with gracious elements. And all of this in spite of their grumblings.

They came out of Egypt and they complained about being brought to the edge of the water and that Pharaoh was pursuing them. Then they went out across the Red Sea and they complained about not having water.

And then they complained about not having food. And then they complained about not having meat. And then they complained about not having leeks. And then they complained about Moses and his leadership.

Children of Israel complained about everything all the way along. The book of Numbers is the book of complaints. It is them waging and lodging one complaint against God's grace after another. And he could have destroyed them entirely and it would have not been an unjust thing for God to do at all.

It would have been completely just. But God treated them with grace, not because of them, but because of a promise he made to whom? To Abraham. I'll give you the land, I'll give you the people, I'll make of you a nation, I'll bring kings from you.

Those were the promises he gave to Abraham. So for the sake of his promise to Abraham, he treated the nation with grace. Just the context of the environment in which that covenant was made was a gracious thing.

That God would take them by the hand and lead them out and make them his people. And reveal himself to them in the law and in the prophets. In fact, the law itself had gracious elements as well. We tend to look at the Old Testament law and we think, how ungracious is it to regulate slavery and women and children and obedience to parents and to stone people for certain crimes and all of that blasphemy, etc.

And we tend to think that that kind of law would have been onerous and horrible to live under and what oppression that would have been. But put yourself back into the ancient world, 2 ,000 years before Christ or 1 ,500 years before Christ.

Think of the culture at that time, what slavery would have been like, how women were treated in that context. And then you can understand that the giving of the law to the nation of Israel, which regulated indentured servitude and regulated how people were to treat their slaves and the women amongst them and their children and how justice should be done.

It would have been a breath of fresh air to live under the Mosaic law in that ancient world. In fact, the law itself was so filled with grace and mercy, there was judgment there, but it had so many elements of grace and mercy in it that it would have been a delight.

It should have been a delight for a Jew to understand and to enjoy the justice that would have been done in a cultural society. How poor people would have been taken care of. How kids would have been raised.

How the religious life of the nation would have been at the center of the nation. All of those are gracious elements. God poured out his grace upon those people, bringing them out of Egypt and giving them the law, making them his people and pledging to be their God and then promising them, if you obey me, you will live in the land and I will lavish you with prosperity.

I will pour out blessings upon you. You'll be able to have every male in your entire nation go up to Jerusalem three times a year and I will protect you from the surrounding nations around you. I will pour out on you such blessing that all of the nations, the wealthy nations around you will look at it and say, wow, what a God must be their God and they will want to know me for you will make me known in your midst as you obey me.

You obey me and I will pour out blessing upon you. Did they obey him? All of that grace. And the response of the nation of Israel should have been to look at the Mosaic Covenant and say, we will obey him because he has been so gracious to us.

You understand the sentiment of the heart that does that, that looks at the gracious outpouring of God's goodness and says, I will obey, not because I am demanded to, not because I am commanded to, I will obey because God has been so good.

God has been so gracious. God has poured out on me far more than I deserve and so I will render my obedience to him just because he has been so gracious. Out of my affection and my gratitude, I will obey, but that is not the story of the nation of Israel.

They didn't obey. In fact, verse eight of our text says that God found fault with them because they disobeyed. The people did not keep the covenant and the people were to blame for not keeping the covenant.

The fault of obedience was not with the covenant itself. It's not that the restrictions or the commandments were too onerous for the people. It's that the people lacked an ability to obey the commandments.

And so they looked at the law and rather than saying we will obey out of affection and love for a gracious God who has been good to us, they looked at the law and said, well, we're not going to obey that.

We don't want to hear the law of God. We're not even interested in the law of God. And so, verse nine says, they did not continue in my covenant, the nation of Israel. They did not continue in the covenant of God, and so God did not care for them.

In other words, God promised them, you obey and I will pour out on you blessing. They didn't obey, so God did not pour out those blessings. They didn't continue in the covenant, and so God did not care for them and tend for them and pour out his blessings upon them just as the covenant stipulated.

And for that reason, they were exiled. The northern kingdom fell in 722 BC. The southern kingdom fell in 586 BC, and together those two captivities, the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom and the Babylonian captivity of the southern kingdom, those two destructions left their land looted and plundered and being indwelt by foreigners, and it left the Israelites themselves exiled to foreign nations.

And so they were ejected from the land, and that was the mark of their disobedience. But God promised he would bring them back to that land again. Now listen, the promise to be brought back to the land might sound gracious at first until you realize, you think through it, I want you to think like a Jew for a second.

Imagine that you're in the Babylonian captivity, you know you've disobeyed the covenant, you've been kicked out of the land as a result of it, you're in Babylon or you're even inside the land and you're just suffering under the oppression of your enemies, and then there is this promise that God is going to bring you back to the land of Israel.

And you know that according to the terms of the old covenant, your dwelling in the land depended on your obedience. Now with that understanding, is it a blessing to be brought back into the land? Yes, and no.

You see, we failed the first time, didn't we? You don't have to think that, we failed the first time. We were in the land and we had everything and we lost it because we couldn't keep the terms of the covenant.

And then God says, but I'll bring you back into the land. That's good news, but hold a second. My possession of the land is still dependent on my ability to obey the terms of that covenant. And if I failed one time, what am I going to do the second time around?

If God were to give me a second chance, see that's not good news because I as a wicked sinful person have no ability to obey the terms of that covenant. Disobedience is my default setting. Therefore, it might sound like good news at first to be brought back into the land until you realize, but I still can't keep those commandments.

I still can't obey the terms of the covenant. Something must happen to me to make me want, desire and be able to obey those commandments. And what is that? That's the first blessing of the new covenant.

Verse 10, I will put my laws into their minds and I will write them on their hearts. You see, the old covenant did not change the sinner. It could not perfect the sinner. The old covenant could not do any of that because all of it was external.

It was all rituals and external things, dressings, investments and priests and sacrifices and everything was external to the worshiper. And so the worshiper could approach God and honor God with his lips, but his heart would be far from him.

And he could fulfill all of the external terms of that covenant, but internally his heart was wicked and proud. And so he could go through the rituals, but everything about the Old Testament was only rituals.

The Old Testament, sorry, the old covenant made no provision at all for the worshipper to obey the terms of the covenant. And this was the fault of the covenant. The covenant demanded obedience, but no provision for obedience was made.

In other words, there was no enablement in the covenant itself that enabled the people to obey the terms of the covenant. So the covenant stood there and the people disobeyed, but the covenant, the fault with the covenant was that the covenant did not create obedience in the people.

There was no provision in the covenant to create obedience within the people. So, everything was external. You're familiar with Deuteronomy chapter six, where Moses said, these words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign. Now, listen to all of these external descriptions.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be frontals on your forehead and you shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates. Where were they to write the commandments?

On their hands, on their forehead, the doorpost, the gates. You put them around the house. Where were the commandments to be? Everywhere external. The one place that a Jew could not inscribe the commandments of God was the heart because the heart was made of stone.

They had to have something happen to the heart that enabled them to obey the commandments because you and I are the exact same way. Without the grace of God, without the redemption that is in Jesus Christ and the enabling grace of God, we cannot obey the terms of the old or the new commandment.

We can no more keep the law of God than an Old Testament Jew could. We would have stood just as condemned under the Old Testament law because we had a heart of stone and lacked the ability even to obey that.

So the Old Covenant did not transform the worshiper. It's not to say that nobody in the Old Covenant was saved. It's not to say that nobody in the Old Covenant had a soft heart like David who longed for God.

It's not to say that nobody in the Old Covenant enjoyed those blessings and benefits, but it is to say that the Old Covenant itself did not provide them, did not guarantee them. There were no terms in the Old Covenant that enabled obedience to its terms.

The New Covenant is entirely different. The New Covenant writes the law of God internally in the hearts and in the minds, and this is why in verse 10, the first provision, is I will put my laws into their minds and I will write them on their hearts.

So under the New Covenant, one of the results of salvation, one of the effects of salvation, the benefits of it, is that now the word of God, the law of God, the righteous requirements of the law are inscribed upon the heart of a believer.

That's the internal reality. Now inside a believer, there is not only a recognition of the righteous requirements of the law, but listen, if you're in Jesus Christ, you have a desire to obey the righteous requirements.

If only I could be totally righteous, if only I could have no desire for sin, if only there were in me no internal compulsion toward any kind of wickedness or impurity or immorality, if only I got to enjoy the place and the position in my life where there was no inward inclination whatsoever toward any unrighteousness or sin, no evil thought ever came into my mind, no impurity, no wicked motive, no self-seeking desires, nothing, if only I could have that.

Have you ever longed for that? Have you ever been so sick of your sin that you said, I wish I could be done with this and done with this entirely? In fact, I wish that there were a time and a place, I wish that I could enjoy it now when all my righteous desires would be fulfilled, when all I longed for was righteousness.

Or do you battle like Paul does and say, the law is there and I know what I don't want to do, but those are the things that I do. And the things that I know I should do, I can't do those. I don't do those.

So there's not a complete and total obedience on our behalf, even as those who have been redeemed to the law, there's not total and complete obedience even yet, but there is inside of us the righteous requirements of the law written on our hearts and the spirit of God dwells within us and now we have holy affections.

That is the lot and the promise to every believer in Jesus Christ, that the heart is changed and his law and his truth is written on our hearts and we know him and we desire to obey. And because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we have the capacity to obey.

That is something that the Old Testament, the Old Covenant could never provide. The Old Covenant could never provide the desire to obey, nor could the Old Covenant ever provide the capacity, the ability to obey.

They lacked both the desire and the ability. And this is the difference, this is the contrast, the first one, between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The Old Covenant demanded obedience but could not enable it.