A professor taught me recently that our tendency to look for immediate application out of biblical passages is a mistake. First and foremost, these texts are written as parts of the great, grand story that the whole Bible tells. So instead, we should seek to understand that grand story first and then consider application with the whole in mind. And it’s an incredible story indeed! This is what the book of Hebrews aims to tell us: look at how wonderfully well this entire incredible story ties together!
The writer of Hebrews, whoever it was, writes with the purpose of explaining Jesus in light of the Word of God that the Jews knew up to that point—the Old Testament. Thus he quotes directly from Jeremiah. It’s a long quote, but it’s a point worth stressing: in Jesus the Scriptures are fulfilled! The old covenant, the covenant of the Law of Moses, had proven its point that we humans are powerless to overcome sin on our own. If only we had a new covenant, and someone to overcome sin on our behalf!
What does it mean to be in Christ, under the new covenant? Based on the passage that Hebrews quotes, we have the Holy Spirit in us, teaching us his wisdom and perfect law. All of us, from the wisest and mightiest to the lowliest, get to enjoy the Lord the same. Our sin is finally, eternally forgiven and defeated. And perhaps most importantly, we are finally able to enjoy a perfect, all-fulfilling relationship with him, in which he is our God and we are his people, which has been God’s ultimate loving purpose since the beginning.
Doesn’t the rest of the story make so much more sense in light of Jesus? God’s purposes were the same back then, in Moses’ time and also in Jeremiah’s time, but the problem of sin was so great that we had always needed a savior. And this is the covenant we live in now! The law is written on our hearts; we are forgiven of, and freed from, our sin; and God is our God, and we are his people. What an incredible true story! Now we can ask the question: what does it look like to live as if that’s true?
