Focal Point

Guest (Male): Today on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: The whole Old Testament economy was, I'm just going to ceremonialize it and look to the future to see it. And yet it wasn't seen until John the Baptist sees Christ walking up and what does he say? He says, "Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world."

He doesn't say atone for or covers the sin of the world. Isn't that interesting? He takes away the sin of the world. The real thing now had stepped up.

Guest (Male): And welcome to Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez. Glad to have you with us for today's study. Well, in the past, if you wanted to get close to God, there was a series of demanding steps you were required to take.

Under these stringent rules, everyone failed to meet expectations. But today we'll learn how one person altered everything about relating to God and finding forgiveness. Our miniseries in Hebrews is called *Christ Changed Everything*, and Pastor Mike has titled this message "Why Did We Need a New Covenant Anyway?"

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Turn to the eighth chapter of Hebrews with me, if you would, and let's continue our series on trying to figure out, in this case, how Christ changed everything and why it was we needed a new covenant to start with.

Number one on your outline, let's just jot this down as a heading and then work through this and figure this out a little bit, that there is a problem with the old covenant. There's something about that whole arrangement on the left side of the Bible that is just not adequate. There's a problem with it.

It's not because God didn't know that there was going to be a problem with it; it's because He was leading us to the new. He was leading us into the right side of our Bible. He was bringing on a new economy that needed a foundation laid in the old.

The old covenant in a nutshell. Turn to Deuteronomy chapter 30. If you know about the giving of the Mosaic Law and the title of Deuteronomy, you recognize that the word Deuteronomy itself is the second giving of the law. That's what Deuteronomy means, the second giving of the law.

The Mosaic Law had come and Moses went up on the mountain, he got the rules, he came down, the Levitical priesthood was put in place, and then he sums it all up and elaborates on it in Deuteronomy, and then he sums it all up in Deuteronomy chapter 30. If you want to go to the most succinct section just summarizing in a cliff note way what the old covenant was about, here it is, and it's as simple as this.

Deuteronomy chapter 30, drop down to verse number 15, as the prophet says, God's saying through the prophet, "See, I set before you today—are you with me, Deuteronomy 30:15—life and prosperity, that's behind curtain number one, and death and destruction, that's behind curtain number two." Now, that's a no-brainer, right? Thinking, I want the former. I choose letter A.

He says, "Here's the catch: I command you today to love Yahweh your God, and walk in His ways, and keep His commands and His decrees and laws. And then you get life. You get to live and you get to increase. You get prosperity, you get God's blessing. And Yahweh will bless you in the land that you're entering."

Remember, they're going into Canaan here. They'd been wandering around in the desert, off they were going. And the point was, just do the right thing. Keep God's commandments, love God, you walk in His ways, you got nothing but good ahead of you.

But verse 17, here's the downside. "If your heart turns away and you're not obedient, and if you're drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them," God says, "I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You'll not live long in the land that you're crossing the Jordan to enter and possess."

"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you, that I have set before you two options. You got life as an option and you got death as an option. You have blessings behind this curtain, you got curses behind that one." And God says, "It's really not hard to figure out now. Choose life." That would be good.

"So that you and your children may live and that you may love Yahweh your God, listen to His voice, hold fast to Him, for Yahweh is your life." Very profound statement. "And He's going to give you many years in the land that He swore to give your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." You got two choices.

But here's what I hope that you do, God says. You want it in a nutshell? Here it is: do right and I'll bless you. It's that simple. Just do the right thing. Obey me, love me, do what is correct, walk the path that I've set out for you, and if you do that, everything will be great.

God will bless you, I'll make sure you live long in the land, I'll keep the pestilence from your fields, you'll have everything that you want, you'll have a great relationship with God, you'll listen to His voice, all will go fine for you. God's saying, "Hey, just do the right thing."

But after trying and trying and trying, they always find themselves back at this point. That's what the old covenant does. It tells me the right things to do and God delineates it all, and then I try to do it and all of a sudden I realize, "Wow, if behind door number two or B here is death, that's what I deserve, because if I look honestly at myself, that's where I end up."

Basically what we recognize is exactly what the law was intended to do. It was intended to get us to a place where we recognize we can't be good enough to receive God's blessing and life and prosperity, and we're left to the place where we're reaching out for some kind of solution to the problem.

The law shows me the problem, but it really doesn't solve the problem. Let's jot this one down, letter C. The real limitation of the law is it doesn't fix our problem. The old covenant doesn't fix it. It simply ceremonializes the solution.

That's why we had all this stuff called the Levitical priesthood, and as we looked at the tabernacle and the temples of the Old Testament, because there were some ceremonies we had to walk through to envision as best we could how God's going to solve the problem.

I'm going through a ceremony every week where an animal is being sacrificed and accepted on my behalf to ceremonially show you that there can be a substitute in God's economy, but it hadn't happened yet. As a matter of fact, the whole Old Testament economy was, "I'm just going to ceremonialize it and look to the future to see it."

And yet it wasn't seen until John the Baptist lifted up his eyes in John chapter 1 and he sees Christ walking up and what does he say? He says, "Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world." He doesn't say "atone for" or "covers the sin of the world."

Isn't that interesting? He takes away the sin of the world. The real thing now had stepped up. Well, the old covenant was good, it was useful, it was holy, it was right, it was a good way for people to relate to God, but they only could recognize their problem and never really grasp a solution. And that is a weakness of the old covenant until the new covenant, which was the perfect complement to the old, could replace it.

That's exactly what's going on in the rest of Hebrews chapter 8. The quotation is simply an extended quotation from Jeremiah 31 as you look back to Hebrews chapter 8. But something that should call really a flag on the play for everybody here who doesn't have a Jewish mother is, wait a minute, this great new covenant is clearly stated in Hebrews chapter 8, verse number 8, that this is a covenant made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

The new covenant that was going to be the perfect covenant to supplant the old covenant is a covenant according to verse number 10—what does verse number 10 say?—it's a covenant with the house of Israel. And so us Gentile people are sitting around going, "Well, I'm kind of hoping I can participate in this," but this text doesn't say it, does it?

It should cause us some pause. Any Jewish people here? Got a Jewish mom? Anybody? Oh, look at this, one, two, three, four people who are just feeling like, "Yeah, this is my passage here. Good luck you guys, I'm part of this, right? New covenant." And you're right, you should feel a sense of privilege for that because the promises were made initially to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

If you can track your lineage back to that, there's some kind of heritage that you should feel and you should say, "Wow, that feels right and that feels good." But before you look down your Jewish nose at us, recognize this: that from the very beginning, God anticipated that the outsiders, us Gentile people, would one day have an interest into this that wouldn't just be ceremony, it would be real.

As a matter of fact, from the very beginning of the founding of Israel, who started with Abraham, he said in the promises, do you remember that in Genesis 12, Genesis 15, Genesis 17, that one day through Abraham, all the nations of the world would be blessed.

God looked forward to that. You can see it even in the Garden, that there was a sense that the whole world would one day see a victory over the problem of sin and the necessary consequence of sin, the consequence of death. And God knew that one day He was going to open up that door.

If you're thinking, "Did He wait that long to open up the door?" next time you read through the first five books of the Old Testament, every time you see the instructions as to how to celebrate the Passover, for instance, notice there's always a footnote that shows up at the end of these instructions. It's for the alien or the non-native-born person.

They're what we often call in theology the proselyte, who comes into Israel and he's not born of Israeli descent, he's not a son biologically of Abraham. It was interesting how even tucked away in the law, every time you turn around, God says, "You can celebrate the Passover, you just got to go through these rules. You got to get circumcised, got to have the sign of the covenant."

But if you're an outsider and you want to participate in the pictures of God's future grace, you can do it. And I love that about God, that even in His dealings with Israel in the old covenant, the back door always seemed to be open to people like us that weren't a part of the family of the Israelites.

In the new covenant, He opens the door wide open, wide open. As a matter of fact, if you know anything about the book of Acts, you can even start at the very beginning of the book of Acts. Acts 1:8, Jesus says to His disciples just before He leaves, He says, "I want all you Jewish boys and fishermen and tax collectors to go and be my witnesses, first in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth."

Samaria, that was even worse than the ends of the earth for most of those Jewish boys. They grew up with a hatred for Samaria because they had sold out and intermarried with the Assyrians after 721 BC, and they thought, "Man, we don't think God's going to bless those people."

Jesus commands them in the beginning of the book, "You guys go outside the realm of Jerusalem, and I want you to go and reach the ends of the earth, and be sure you stop off in Samaria and share the good news of the new covenant with them." That was big and that was tough, and they struggled with that.

The first pastor of the church in Jerusalem, his name was Peter. Remember him? Senior pastor, if you will, of the first church in Jerusalem that grew from 1,000 to 2,000 to 3,000 to 5,000 in the early chapters of the book of Acts. They were going full guns, they were winning Jews to Christ left and right, and people were becoming followers of the Messiah.

God said, "This is great. We got the first thing checked off. We're reaching Jerusalem big time. But I really wanted you guys to start reaching the ends of the earth." So He had to bring in persecution to scatter the church. Remember that?

By the eighth or ninth chapter, we've got the church scattering in every direction because Christ didn't just want this to be a Jerusalem Jewish thing. As a matter of fact, it's interesting how God called the first church service to be held on the Day of Pentecost when all the nations would be in town to celebrate that feast.

But they didn't get the point right away. God had to distribute the church in all different directions because of persecution. And finally, we see in the 10th chapter of the book of Acts, the very first clear statement and testimony of a foreigner being won to Christ.

It's almost ironic. God uses the pastor of the church of Jerusalem, a Jewish boy, a Jewish fisherman turned preacher, who'd been preaching to 5,000 Jewish Christians on the Temple Mount every weekend. He used him to be pulled out of the crowd, and the senior pastor himself to go and have an evangelistic encounter with a guy from Italy.

Remember the story? His name was, Sunday school grads? Cornelius. And he was this commander in the Italian Roman army, and he was one who was a God-fearer. He was one of these proselyte types from the Old Testament who looked and thought well of God's people, and he gave money for the temple services and all of that.

God says, "I got a guy I want you to talk to." And He sends him through supernatural means, He sends the message to Cornelius to send his servants to go off to find Peter in Caesarea, who's hanging out there and he's moved out of Jerusalem and persecution had hit the early church.

Let's pick up the story there. This is good. You got to get your eyeballs on these verses in Acts chapter 10. God preps the pastor with a vision because he wasn't ready to do this. I mean, he might have in theory and remembering the words of Christ, but he needed a real dramatic reminder that Cornelius was a target for evangelism and that he was going to be a recipient of the new covenant promises.

Interesting text. Do you remember this text? Acts chapter 10, look at verse number 9. About noon the following day, as they were on their journey—these are the people from Cornelius's house—and approaching the city, Peter went up to the roof to pray.

They had these little roofs they'd get up on and hang out on, it's like a big patio. He became hungry and he wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. That happens to me a lot, too. This was a God thing, though, a real vision from God.

He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to the earth by its four corners. I mean, it's like some big pillowcase coming out of the sky in this vision that he's having. It contained all kinds of—all kinds, that's the key phrase—of four-footed animals as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air.

What that spells is stuff that you're not supposed to eat. Now, there're all kinds, so we're assuming there're good and bad animals. By that, I mean clean, ceremonially clean, and ceremonially unclean animals, okay? He sees all that. And then a voice tells him, middle of verse 13, "Hey, you're hungry, you're having a vision. Get up, Peter. Kill and eat."

Now, that's a big deal because there's a lot of unclean animals in that sheet crawling around. And he says what every good Jewish boy should say, verse 14, "Surely not, Lord," Peter replied. "I've never eaten anything impure or unclean. I can't eat that stuff. I eat kosher, you know that. I'm all about the rules of Leviticus. I got to keep the dietary rules. Okay."

Verse 15, the voice spoke to him a second time. "Do not," he says, "call anything impure that God has made clean." It's interesting. If you read Levitical laws of dietary rules in the Old Testament, they were by and large a barrier to keep the Israelites from some kind of social intercourse and partying and revelry with the pagans of the land of Canaan.

These dietary rules kept them apart. It kept them out of circles that they would normally travel in, and three times a day, they had to have a special meal and they couldn't eat like everybody else. It was a dividing law. It was a ceremonial dividing wall. And he says, "I can't do it."

This happened, verse 16, three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back up to heaven. While Peter was wondering about the meaning of the vision, the men sent by Cornelius found out where Simon's house was, and they stopped at the gate and they called out asking if Simon, who was known as Peter, was staying there.

And you can read the rest of the story, and most of you know it, and sure enough, an encounter in Cornelius becomes the first clear and obvious convert from Italy, from non-Jewish descent, that Peter the pastor, a Jewish pastor of a Jewish congregation, leads to Christ.

Now, back to Hebrews in our minds. Why was it that the writer of Hebrews didn't clarify this? Well, the title of the book should help you give you a hint, right? This wasn't written to Gentiles. This was a book that was written to Jews. Therefore, no clarification.

But us Jewish people peaking in on this message from the writer of Hebrews, we've got to say, "Hey, this applies to us, too." So you three or four or five people here that are of Jewish descent, fantastic. You got nothing on us, though, when it comes to the new covenant, because the Bible is clear that God from the beginning, even in the prophets of the Old Testament, was driving to bless the world and all nations through the promise made to Abraham back in Genesis 12.

Number two on your outline, let's just summarize it this way. You and I, Gentile people I'm talking to now, most of you, not the five or six of you that raised your hands, we ought to be grateful. We ought to be grateful that we get to participate in this.

We're included in it. Be grateful that we're included, because we are. And if you're going, "Well, you quoted a lot of New Testament there," then here's some passages for you to read when you get home. Isaiah chapter 40, Isaiah chapter 52, Isaiah chapter 56, Isaiah chapter 60. I mean, there's a very Jewish prophet, okay?

If you read through all those chapters, let me quote one for you that you know. How about Isaiah 52, the suffering servant? We always look at this as Christ, He's the fulfillment of it. It says this about Him after it says He's been marred more than any man, He was killed, the suffering servant in a prophetic vision, here He was killed in the future, and the very next verse in Isaiah 52 says this: "And by His blood, He will sprinkle many—do you know the next word?—nations."

What's that about? How does the suffering servant that's going to take away the sins and transgressions of the world or of Israel, how is it said that He sprinkles clean many nations? See, even from the Old Testament perspective, as God revealed His truth through the prophets of the Old Testament, He always had the Gentiles in view as well.

So the good news is that the blessing, though it came through Israel, the new covenant promise is not just for Israel, it's for us as well. If it's absent in Hebrews 8, it's only because He's preaching to the choir. He's preaching to Jewish people.

Was that sufficient? That proved the case, I hope. Hebrews chapter 8. What is the covenant? Let's summarize it real quick. Verse number 9, Hebrews 8:9. "It's not going to be like the covenant I made with their forefathers," the forefathers of all the modern Israelis and people from the house of Judah, "when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt."

Now, that's an important vision, metaphor, picture. It's like He's taking His people and He's dragging them out, and that's kind of what it was like. They were being dragged, were they not? Moses was leading them, I recognize that, but they were sitting around complaining. They were dreaming of the leeks and onions by the Nile. You remember that, right?

And God was dragging them into the promised land. "I led them by the hand. I led them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant. I turned away from them," declares the Lord. As a matter of fact, every adult who was there after they sent their 12 spies in and 10 came back and said, "Oh we're scared, we can't do it," God says, "Fine, then you're all going to die in the desert." And for that generation, they didn't receive the promise of the promised land.

God continued even through the captivity in Babylon, you can go on and on and on, and every time God had to discipline these people because they broke His promise. And He says, "Choose life, choose death, you're choosing death, I'm going to have to punish you."

Verse 10, "This is the covenant I'm going to make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my laws in their mind and I will write them on their heart." Let's analyze this, because if we're living in the new covenant age, let's figure out all the features of the new covenant phone here and let's make sure we maximize it and live it to the fullest.

The first point we've got to distinguish here, letter A, and make clear, is that in the old covenant, these people were externally taken down a path. There was coercion—it's a hard word—but they were certainly channeled down a path.

They were led by the hand. I mean, they were taken, but it wasn't like having the law written on their minds and written in their hearts. There was, as many of us have experienced before we became Christians because we were just good churchgoing non-Christians, we were led from the outside. There was a pressure.

God's word would hit us and we'd go, "Yeah, that's right, I know I should do that. I'm going to try, I got to try to do the right thing." But then there's something that happens in the new covenant relationship with God, where God says to the disciples, "The Spirit will no longer be with you, but He's going to be in you."

There was something different there. It's the truth of 2 Corinthians 5:17. "If any person's in Christ, he is a new creation." Everything's new, the old stuff goes away, the new stuff has come. I am now new. As Paul said, the old man's gone, new man has come.

A lot of non-Christian churchgoers are led externally by the principles of God's word, but God's word never resonates with their spirit because their spirit hasn't been transformed by the author, and the author doesn't live in their lives. There's a difference there.

Now, this is a dangerous thing to say to you non-Christian churchgoers, but if you're a Christian here, this is how I'd like to put it. You want to maximize the new covenant, then here's what I'd like you to do: live from the inside out. Live from the inside out.

Now, again, that's deadly advice if you're a non-Christian here, and there's a lot of people that think they're Christians that are non-Christians and they're just good churchgoing people. Which means they hear a sermon and they hear what the Bible says, and they go, "Yeah, I need to do that. You're right. Oh, I got to do that."

And they're trying to do it, but they're trying to do it by external pressure, see. And you know what? Does external pressure work? Yeah, it can work for a while. As a matter of fact, external pressure can keep people from doing a lot of wrong things and suffering a lot of consequences from the wrong things that they do.

How many of you grew up in the church? Grew up in the church like I did? Grew up in the church and there's all this pressure to do the right thing. You learn all these verses, you go to Boys' Brigades and Chappy Chipmunks and all that stuff, right? And they're teaching you, "Do the right thing, do the right thing, do the right thing."

And you know what? A lot of times you choose the right thing because you don't want to do the wrong thing because of all that pressure. But then I became a Christian in college and all of a sudden something happens, because inside, God now puts His law in your mind, He impresses it in your heart.

Or as Ezekiel, the parallel passage to the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 says, He takes away your heart of stone and He gives you a heart of flesh. Remember that? Here's a great phrase: and He moves you by His Spirit to keep His decrees, so that you'll be careful to follow in His ways. That's different.

It's the difference between being dragged and being driven. Now, that may be a distinction that's too subtle for some, but it's the difference between being dragged into a path of righteousness and being driven into a path of righteousness.

One is being pushed from the outside, one is being led and driven from the inside, and there's a difference there. And I know that's subtle, because I know a lot of people go, "Well, I don't know the difference between those."

If you've experienced it, you know the difference. Because a lot of us went to church for years before we ever had the internal transformation that takes place in a new covenant relationship with God. And God changes the inside; now all of a sudden, we move from inside to the outside.

Guest (Male): We're learning about all the benefits granted to believers because of the gospel. You're listening to Focal Point and a message from Pastor Mike Fabarez titled "Why Did We Need a New Covenant Anyway?" We're in a series called *Christ Changed Everything*, and we'll continue our lesson tomorrow.

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Before we sign off, we'd love to put a great resource in your hands. Today, Pastor Mike traced Christ's presence through the pages of the Old Testament. And this month's book goes even deeper into that same theme. It's titled *The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament* by Edmund Clowney.

A rich, rewarding read that shows how every page of Scripture points toward Him. This is a book that connects the dots across thousands of years, revealing the intricate masterplan of God's redemption for mankind.

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State rooms are going fast; reserve yours now at focalpointradio.org. That's all for today. Be sure to come back tomorrow for the third and final part of our message titled "Why Did We Need a New Covenant Anyway?" That's Tuesday on Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Pastor Mike here. I pray today's message will help you live out your faith with truth and love. After all, that's the kind of biblical faith that changes lives and transforms a crooked culture.

But if you haven't truly surrendered your life to Christ, then I'd like to invite you to get in touch. We'd love to pray with you and help you discover God's plan of salvation. Visit focalpointradio.org.

Guest (Male): Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.