The Blessings Of The New Covenant Part 2 - Hebrews 8:10-12

Hebrews 8 and the Better Promises of the New Covenant

And we turn now to Hebrews chapter 8, Hebrews chapter 8, and we'll read together verses 8 through verse 12, and then we'll pray before we begin. Hebrews chapter 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. Our Lord, we have lifted our voices and our hearts to you in praise and worship and adoration. We have thought upon the great work that Christ has done on our behalf as our high priest, as the one who is the mediator of this new covenant.

We thank you for the promise that we have that our sins have been taken out of the way and forgiven, and that we can gather together here as your people around your word with the confident expectation and joy that is ours when the Spirit of God is in our midst and teaching us and instructing us in the truth, and so we pray that you would help us in our hearts to be thoughtful and contemplative about what we are about to read and study and think, and we pray that as a people, we would bow our knees to your word and that you would use it to sanctify us by the truth and teach us more about Christ and his work and more about you, our great and covenant-keeping God.

We thank you, our triune God, for all that you have accomplished in salvation and for all that you have revealed in your word, and we ask that you bless this time of our study now in Christ's name, amen.

Internal Law as One of the Better Promises

Well, we are looking at the promises of the new covenant here in Hebrews chapter 8, and we only got through one of those promises last week, and that was the promise of an internal law. This is, these promises are what Hebrews chapter 8 verse 6 refers to as the better promises.

Look at Hebrews 8 verse 6, I should get there myself, verse 6, but now he has obtained a more excellent ministry by as much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.

Christ is the one who is a better mediator, having a better ministry, because he mediates a better covenant enacted on better promises, and that word better marks for us or signals for us a point of comparison between two things, and we are looking at the comparison between the old covenant under the Old Testament that we are familiar with, the Mosaic covenant, and the new covenant that was promised in Jeremiah 31, and now is cited here in Hebrews chapter 8 and expanded on actually for the next couple chapters of Hebrews.

And that point of comparison is between the new covenant and the old covenant, and there are three promises in the new covenant, and these three promises are general promises. I said a couple of weeks ago that we can think of them as sort of overarching or categorical promises because there are a lot of things tied to each one of these three promises.

The first one is an internal law, that the Spirit by the work of regeneration comes to dwell in the hearts of God's people, causing their eyes to be opened, opening their eyes, causing them to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, giving them new life, dwelling within us.

He writes His law upon our hearts, so now there is an internal compulsion, what was once external to us, the commandments written on stone, is now etched upon our hearts in the new covenant. And so now there is this inner desire to obey as well as an ability to obey the law which we never would have been able to obey without the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.

So that is just the first of the better promises, and then there are two more that we're looking.

At.

The three promises, internal law, the second, a universal or we should say comprehensive knowledge of God, and then the third is a complete forgiveness of sins, and the complete forgiveness of sins is mentioned in verse 12.

We looked at the first of those three last week, and today we're focusing on those next.

Two.

Under the new covenant, that which was external to us from the old covenant, and listen, none of us have ever lived under the old covenant, so I'm speaking kind of universally as us as in humanity, but under the new covenant, that which was external to us under the old covenant, the law and the righteous requirements of the law, now is met in us by virtue and by work of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, etches that law on our hearts, and transforms us more and more into the image of Christ as we go from one degree of glory to another, as it were, as Paul describes in 2 Corinthians chapter 3.

And that's the promise we looked at last week, and now as we approach the next two, I want to remind you of the interpretive grid through which we are examining these, and I shouldn't say it's an interpretive grid through which we're examining them, I should say this.

We are approaching this passage and asking or seeking to allow each of these promises as they were given, and as the Jews would have understood them, and as Christians in the first century would have understood them, to allow each of these promises to speak for itself.

So rather than imposing a theological system, which I believe is what covenant theology does, upon the text, we are asking what do each of these promises mean in their proper context? And so our desire is to interpret this in a way that does honor and does justice to two indisputable facts.

The first, that this new covenant was not made with the church, it was not made with Gentiles, it was made with the nation of Israel, the house of Judah and the house of Israel. The new covenant was not made with us, it's not made with an indiscriminate group of people, it's not made with whosoever believe, it is made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

And I hope you've seen as we have beat that drum for the last three weeks over and over again how significant that is. It is significant because every place in the Old Testament where these promises are mentioned and expanded upon, every single place, was national promises, it was Israel that was being described.

So the promises are given to national Israel, second, you and I, who are not national Israel, we're not Jews by birth, we're not physical descendants of Abraham, you and I in some way participate in these blessings of the new covenant.

We know God, we have His law written on our hearts, we have been regenerated, the Spirit of God dwells in us, we have had our sins forgiven, we have been imputed righteousness, we have been adopted into God's family, and we confess every time we gather around the Lord's table that the blood that Christ shed which initiated the new covenant, that we partake of and we have a share in the interest of His righteousness and of His blood.

So that is the hope that we have and we confess that every time we gather around the Lord's.

Table.

So those two things are important. The promises were given to national Israel, and number two, we participate in some way. And we're trying to interpret these passages and these promises in such a way that does honor to both of those realities as expressly stated in Scripture.

We don't have to…. I reject the false binary choice that says you either have to believe that they all belong to Israel and we enjoy none of the benefits, or the choice that says we enjoy all of the benefits and everything to be fulfilled in the new covenant is experienced by us today and there is no future for Israel.

That's a false binary choice. There is a way of understanding and treating the new covenant that appreciates these two facts. The promises are given to Israel, but yet in some way God's grace has spilled over the nation of Israel to us who are now brought into that glorious promise of the new covenant.

We get some of the benefits, the salvific benefits of that. So here's the next two promises, universal knowledge and forgiveness of sins. Let's look in verses 10 and 11. 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 internal law. The rest of verse 10 and verse 11 describes this universal knowledge of God. 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 them to the greatest of them.

So this is a promise of some kind of a universal knowledge of God amongst all the participants in the new covenant. This obviously naturally follows from the other one, the word of God or the law of God to be written on the hearts of those who are in the new covenant.

It would stand to reason that if the law of God is written on our hearts that that must imply some sort of a universal or knowledge of God, some sort of a comprehensive knowledge of God on behalf of those who partake of the new covenant.

So we ought not to think that this is just some we know about God because Romans chapter one says that everybody knows about God. There's no such thing as an atheist. The atheist suppresses the truth and unrighteousness.

He knows that God exists and he suppresses that truth and it takes him a lot of work and a lot of energy to suppress that truth and unrighteousness. So he knows that God exists and everybody has this innate knowledge that there is a God and that he exists and that he has created everything and that they are going to have to stand before him when they die.

Everybody knows that instinctively. They deny it but they know it instinctively. So we're not talking about that type of a general knowledge of God. We're talking about an intimate knowledge of God himself that is the possession of everyone who is part of the new covenant.

Every individual in the new covenant who enjoys the blessings of the new covenant understands and knows who God is. We have a knowledge of God. Now I've said that the blessings of the new covenant are, or sorry, the promises of the new covenant are given to national Israel and one of the objections that covenant theologians will make is that they will say, how can you say that this knowledge of God is of a nation and not of individuals?

Only individual people can know God. Nations cannot.

That's true.

Nations can't be saved. Nations can't be Christians. Nations can't be baptized. Nations can't be regenerated, etc. That is true. But when we talk about the promises given to national Israel, we shouldn't say, we shouldn't think that that means that there is no expression of that to the individual.

The individual is the one who has the knowledge of God and if every individual, hypothetically, if every individual in the nation of Israel had this knowledge of God, wouldn't we say that God had fulfilled that promise to them as a nation?

If every individual in that ethnic group had a knowledge of God, wouldn't you say that God had fulfilled that to that individual, sorry, to that nation? One of the objections that people say about dispensationalism is we say that there's going to be a future salvation for national Israel.

They say, pfft, nations can't be saved. How do you have a whole nation get saved? Well, if every individual in the nation gets saved, then what would we say? The whole nation got saved, right? Do we have a family who comes here, the husband and wife of four kids, and they all hear the gospel and they all get saved and they all get baptized and they're all regenerated?

Would it be inappropriate to say that the family got saved? No, we would describe that if every single individual in the family got saved, we'd say the family got saved. Well, listen, I believe that there's coming a time when every single individual in the nation of Israel will be saved.

Not every Jew who has ever lived, but every Jew who is alive, when God fulfills these promises, they will be saved. And so though we're talking about promises and blessings that are promised to a nation as an ethnic group, don't let that get you away from thinking that or undermine your ability to understand that these are individual promises that every individual is going to experience these things.

So the first one is this knowledge of God, and that obviously describes something that must be individual or personal and not just national. The promise of being God's people that you see at the end of verse 10, I will be their God and they shall be my people.

You have seen me, and I'm going to read them all to you here in just a moment, but you have seen me read that from the pulpit. You have read it yourself in Jeremiah and Ezekiel a dozen times over the last couple of weeks because this was all the way through the Old Testament.

And there are two sides to this equation. I will be their God and they shall be my people. That is two sides of one coin. The first is that I will be their God, and this is not something that was true of Israel in the history of the nation ever.

In terms of a universal acknowledgment that God was their God. Even the generation of people that came out of Egypt and through the wilderness and through the Red Sea and into the wilderness and stood at the base of the mountain, even that generation was not composed entirely of believers.

There were a lot of believers among the Jews. There were a lot of Yahweh worshipers among the Jews at the time, but that wasn't a national salvation. That was a national deliverance from Egypt, but not every person delivered from Egypt was saved and regenerate.

At no point in the history of the nation of Israel has every Jew been saved and been a Yahweh worshiper. Even at the most glorious moments of Israel's history, the number of true believers was genuinely few, and idols were always among them, and there were always reprobates and always wicked men and men of bloodshed.

There were always impious people and unregenerate and impenitent people all the way through the nation of Israel, through all of its history. At no time in any of their history has this been true, that they as a nation, all of them could say, Yahweh is our God and we worship Him and Him alone.

Their entire history is one of idolatry. Every idol they could find they worshiped for hundreds and thousands of years, even though God was calling out to them with the prophets and the teachers and the kings saying, follow the Lord and know the Lord.

Israel's history is a history of idolatry, but there is coming a point when this knowledge of God will be universal amongst all of the Jewish people in order for God to fulfill this promise. For us, what does this look like?

We in the new covenant, we have a knowledge of God, do we not? Isn't our ability to understand who God is and what He has done for us in Jesus Christ a knowledge of God? We worship God revealed in Jesus Christ.

We worship a triune God, and we have a knowledge of God that comes to us through His word and through the indwelling Holy Spirit when He opens our eyes. We understand who our God is, and we can say with every ounce of fiber of our being, those of us who are saved, we can say that we worship Yahweh, and we love this God, and we know who this God is, and we have a personal relationship with this God.

That is one of the blessings of the new covenant, and it's a blessing that we do enjoy, that He is their God. That is something that they look forward to at some point, that happening. It had never been true of the nation as a whole ever, but it will be someday, and now we enjoy that same blessing.

Now we get to know God as well through salvation. We have the same knowledge of God that is promised to a Jew eventually, when God fulfills the promise of the new covenant to them, and they shall be my people.

This is God's own possession of them. Now they had been God's people in the sense that He had called them, He had named them for Himself, He had made a covenant with them under the old covenant, they had been His people nationally, but not every individual who was a Jew was His people personally, if.

You will.

It doesn't make sense to say it other than to say it that way, but that doesn't make sense either. Not every Jew was His person, was His person personally, His people. Not every Jew belonged to Him through faith individually, but as a nation they did, as a nation they all gathered together.

So see you're laughing because as I was trying to say that, you were trying to think to yourself, is there another way of saying that that does make sense? And you had to admit there wasn't. So those Jews, though they knew who their God was, because He was worshipped at the temple or at the tabernacle, and He was revealed in Scripture, and He had delivered their nation, that did not mean under the old covenant that they had an individual and personal knowledge of God or that they enjoyed salvation.

As Paul says in Romans chapter 9 through 11, somewhere in there, Paul says, not all Israel is Israel, meaning not everybody who was a descendant of Abraham was genuinely saved. They had the mark of the covenant in their flesh, circumcision, they had the Word of God in the covenant revealed in Scripture, but they were not necessarily saved.

But there's coming a time when that will be true of them as a nation, and that blessing is one that we enjoy today. So that phrase, and I will be their God and they shall be my people, that is the language of the Abrahamic covenant.

Now listen, as a Jew would hear those words spoken by Jeremiah or Ezekiel, he could not help but think of the promise that God made to Abraham back in Genesis chapter 17, because it's the same language that is used when God called Abraham and said, I'll make of you a nation and a people, and they shall be my people and I will be your God.

I'll read to you Genesis chapter 17, because I want you to hear what a Jew would have been immediately thinking of, the promise to Abraham. If God reiterates this promise, then he is not done with his promise to Abraham.

Something has to be fulfilled there, Genesis 17. Now when Abraham was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to him, I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless. I will establish my covenant between me and you and I will multiply you exceedingly.

Abraham fell on his face and God talked with him and saying, as for me, behold, my covenant is with you and you will be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abraham, but your name shall be called Abraham.

For I will make you the father of a multitude of nations. I have made you exceedingly fruitful and I will make nations of you and kings will come forth from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant.

To be a God to you and to your descendants after you. I will give to you and to your descendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be their God.

Did you hear that language? To be a God to you and to your descendants, Joshua, I think it's chapter 22, Joshua mentions that when God called Abram out of the Chaldees, Abram was an idol worshiper. Abram wasn't a Yahweh worshiper, he was an idol worshiper.

When God called to him and said, come out, follow me, I will be your God, you will be it and you and your descendants will be my people. So he says in Genesis chapter 17, to be God to you and to your descendants after you, I will give to you and your descendants after you the land as an everlasting possession and I will be their God.

See this is the two-way relationship that God promised with Abraham for Abraham and his descendants. I will be your God, you and your descendants will be my people. That's a national promise. There was a promise of a land, a promise of kings and a promise of nations and a promise of descendants, a promise to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth and listen, there is no hint of conditionality anywhere in the Abrahamic covenant.

It is not as if God got halfway through his redemptive plan and said, you know what, we're going to switch this. I'm not quite sure that I like how the Jews are handling this. We're going to take all of these blessings from the Jewish people and now transfer them to a different people group.

That's not how God works. If God is going to keep his promise to Israel, then these things must take place. It will be known and it will be said that God is the God of those people and they are his people, that they worship that God and that they are his people.

That is the everlasting possession that God promised to Abraham and it was made with Abraham's race and now in Hebrews chapter 8, those promises are reiterated in the new covenant when God says after the nation had seemingly lost all of the blessings promised to Abraham and it seemed as if there was no way that any of those blessings could ever become theirs again.

God promises in the new covenant, don't worry, I will write my laws on your hearts, I will bring you back into the land, I will give you my spirit, I will cause you to walk in my ways, I will forgive you of your sins, you will be my people and I will be your God.

That's the promise reiterated all over again.

Why?

Why?

Because the Abrahamic covenant was not changed, it wasn't altered, it wasn't conditional, it wasn't dependent upon their obedience or their worthiness or any such thing and so the promises were reiterated.

Some people object and they will say that Israel as a nation is not God's people today. Look at them. They promote all kinds of secular and ungodly ideas and agendas. They deny Him, they deny the Messiah, they deny Christ, they are bound up with tradition, they're a secular state.

They're in no way religious, they in no way acknowledge Yahweh at all. Their religion, the true religion of Judaism is totally covered under with their traditions and their formalities and myths and superstitions and even if you listen to an Orthodox Jew on the radio like Ben Shapiro or Dennis Prager or Michael Medved, are they even close to Biblical Judaism?

Not even close. Even the most Orthodox Jews today are far removed from anything that might be considered Biblical truth or Orthodoxy. So people will object, covenant theologians will, and they would say that national Israel is not the people of God today.

Look at them. And the response to that is very simple. The promise of the new covenant is not that the nation of Israel as it exists today is the fulfillment of the new covenant. But that the nation of Israel as it will exist and be at some future point is the fulfillment of the new covenant.

Of course national Israel today does not fulfill the terms of the new covenant. Of course it doesn't. No dispensationalist says that it does. That's lunacy. But we do believe that if God is going to keep His promise to the nation of Israel that at some point these blessings, all of them, will belong to them.

Jeremiah 24 verse 7, I want to just remind you of some of the verses in these. These are all in the context of the promises of the new covenant in Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Listen to this. Jeremiah 24 verse 7, I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord and they will be My people and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart.

Listen, to this point today that has never happened in the nation of Israel. It has not happened. That promise in Jeremiah 24 verse 7, unless you are going to alter the terms of it or in some way spiritualize it or in some way say that it's fulfilled in the church, that promise has never been fulfilled to this day.

That means that if that promise is going to be fulfilled, it must be fulfilled when? That's an easy one.

Future.

It's going to be fulfilled in the future. Jeremiah 24 verse 7 says that. Verse chapter. Jeremiah chapter 30 verse 22, you shall be My people and I will be your God. Jeremiah 31 verse 1, at that time declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel and they shall be My people.

Some Jews? No, all Jews of all the families of Israel. This promise will be at some point. Jeremiah 32 verse 37, behold, I will gather them out of all the lands to which I have driven them in My anger, in My wrath and in great indignation and I will bring them back to this place and make them dwell in safety.

That has never happened to this day. They shall be My people and I will be their God and I will give them one heart and one way that they may fear Me always for their own good and for the good of their children after them.

I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them to do them good and I will put the fear of men in their hearts, sorry, the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.

Ezekiel chapter 11 verse 20, and I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them and I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and I will give them a heart of flesh that they may walk in My statutes and keep My ordinances and do them.

Then they will be My people and I shall be their God. Ezekiel 36 verse 28, you will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers so you will be My people and I will be your God. Ezekiel 37 verse 23, they will no longer defile themselves with their idols or with their detestable things or with any of the transgressions but I will deliver them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned and will cleanse them and they will be My people and I will be their God.

Ezekiel 37 verse 27, My dwelling place also will be with them and I will be their people and they, sorry, I will be their God and they will be My people. Do you hear that promise reiterated all the way through those contexts of the new covenant blessings?

What is God trying to say? If He only said it once it would be sufficient but He hasn't just said it once. Over and over and over again in the context of the promises of the new covenant, God has promised to national Israel a land, safety, security, blessing, prosperity, regeneration, salvation, repentance and to be their God and that they will be His people.

That is the promise of the new covenant, a universal knowledge of God. And to whom are those promises made? The church, you, gentile nations, some indiscriminate people group, those promises are made to Israel.

But we obviously benefit from that because would you not say that you are His people as well? Can we not make that same claim? If you're in Jesus Christ you can say I belong to Him and He belongs to me.

I am a Yahweh worshiper, I worship the God of the Old Testament revealed in the person of Christ, manifested in the person of Christ, incarnate in the person of Christ. I worship that God and I belong to Him and He has secured my everlasting promise and blessing with Him and my everlasting dwelling with Him.

He has done all of that through Christ so we can say that we are His people and that He is our God. But just because we can say that as Gentiles who are not national Israel does not mean that national Israel will never be able to make that exact same confession.

Because if my eschatology is true then there will come a point when all of national Israel will say of Him, of Jesus, we are His people and He is our God and they will worship Him. And if that doesn't happen then all of the promises that I have read to you are not going to be fulfilled in any meaningful sense.

You can spiritualize them and say that they're fulfilled in some other way but they certainly will not be fulfilled in any way that would have been understood by those who heard those promises. This is a universal knowledge of God, it's not something that's provided under the Old Covenant.

Not everybody who was under the Old Covenant was saved today, even today there are many people who are, just as today there are many people in church bodies and in congregations like ours that do not know the Lord, they've never repented of their sin and trusted Christ, they've never been born again and been saved.

Just as that is true so it was true that under the Old Covenant in national Israel amongst those who enjoyed the blessings of the Old Covenant that there were unbelievers there. In fact most of the nation most of the time was unbelievers.

It was very rare that there was actually in the history of the nation of Israel it was very rare that the nation actually walked in God's commandments and obeyed His ordinances for any length of time, for any period of time.

And under the Old Covenant this universal knowledge of God where they would say we know Him because we are His people and He is our God, that type of relationship with God was not something that was provided under the Old Covenant at all but it is provided and it is promised to every member of the New Covenant.

To every individual covered by the blood of Christ who is saved and redeemed, every person who is part of the New Covenant community is promised this knowledge of God. Under the Old Covenant regenerate members were in the Covenant community but in the New Covenant regenerate members are the Covenant community.

Do you understand the difference between those two things? Under the Old Covenant there were regenerate or saved, sanctified, justified people under the Old Covenant amongst the nation of Israel but all of those who were in that covenant were not saved.

Under the New Covenant it is better because in the New Covenant the regenerate people are the Covenant community. They're not among the Covenant community, they are the Covenant community. Now the Covenant community is composed of only believers but we have unbelievers who wander in and out of our midst from time to time.

Some of them are wolves in sheep's clothing, some of them look and sound a lot like us and they come and they dwell with us for a period of time but they're not truly regenerate and they're not truly part of the Covenant community.

The New Covenant provides the salvation that the Old Covenant pictured and so in verse 11 it says, 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.

This is the universal knowledge of God. This is the knowing God that is the possession of every individual who is part of the Covenant community, the New Covenant community. The Old Covenant didn't provide that.

The Old Covenant, you could be in the Old Covenant community, be a member of the nation of Israel and even have the sign of the Covenant in your flesh be circumcised and have that sign and you could go through all of the external forms and ceremonies that were part of national Israel and be part of their celebrations and take a day off every week and enjoy the Sabbath and hang out in the city of Jerusalem while everybody celebrated.

You could enjoy all of that and not be at all redeemed or saved and still be a member of the Old Covenant community but without salvation. There were people in the Old Covenant community who died without a knowledge of God and without salvation and they perished everlastingly.

But in the New Covenant community there is no such thing as somebody who is in the New Covenant who dies without belief and perishes everlastingly because every member of the New Covenant knows God, has that intimate knowledge of God that is part of that salvation, that personal experience.

And so in the New Covenant then there is no need for teaching. Look at verse 11, it sounds like I'm out of a job 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 even to the greatest of them.

So if we're enjoying the benefits of the New Covenant and we're not supposed to be taught and nobody is teaching one another then what am I doing up here? Maybe some of you have been wanting that for years, what are you doing up there?

Does this mean that in the New Covenant, if we are in the New Covenant, that there's no need for teachers at all? Is that what's being described here? Some people would say that that is. I don't think that that's what's being described here at all because isn't Hebrews itself a book of teaching?

It would be kind of contradictory for him to quote this and say, hey, there's no need for teaching and here, by the way, here's a book in which I'm teaching you some things about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, right?

So you can't be describing that. It's not describing teachers or preachers because that is needful for us today even though we're in the New Covenant and we enjoy the benefits and blessings of it. Teachers and preachers are necessary for us today because teachers and preachers explain things to us and preach the Word and teach the Word so that we can apprehend and comprehend these things and the Spirit gives gifted preachers and teachers to the church even today.

So that can't be what's being described here. But notice and think of this in terms of, again, a Jew who understood what life was like under the Old Covenant and now would understand what life is like under the New.

Covenant.

Under the New Covenant, there is no need for me to evangelize other members of the covenant community and say, look, you might have the sign of the covenant, but you need to know the Lord personally. There's no need for me to do that to other members of the New Covenant.