Hebrews 8:6

Hebrews 8:6

The New Covenant The Superiority of Its Promises.

This superiority relates to two things the quality of the promises and their certainty.

I. The Quality of the Blessings. (1) Note the greater excellence of the Christian blessings. The Jewish religion had its pardon, or something that passed for pardon; the superiority, however, of the pardon held forth by the gospel is indicated by the expression, "And their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more." Contrast this statement with what is said respecting the method of dealing with sins under the Old Covenant: "But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance of sins every year." In the one case we have the forgetting of sins, in the other the remembrance of them. The ancient pardon, then, was not really such, but only a kind of reprieve annually renewed, a kind of suspension of the sentence, not the removal or abrogation of it. It was in the nature of a ticket-of-leave transaction. A convict, through good behaviour, obtains a suspension of his punishment, but he is not pardoned; for one of the conditions of his liberty is that he report himself regularly at stated times to the authorities. There was only sufficient efficacy in the Jewish sacrifices to revive the memory of sin; but the infinite sacrifice of Christ, on the contrary, is of sufficient efficacy, not only to abolish the penalty of sin, but also to obliterate the very memory of it, in the sense we have explained, from the mind of God. (2) The greater excellence of the knowledge of God, assured by the New Covenant. (3) The greater excellence of the relationship between God and His people. (4) The greater excellence of the formative principle of the New Covenant.

II. The superior certainty of the promise of the New Covenant. The utmost assurance that these promises will be fully realised in the experience of every one who accepts Christ's salvation is given us in the fact that they are called by the term covenant. The term "promise" is merged in the term "covenant." This substitution of covenant for promise indicates the element of certainty belonging to the latter. To appreciate properly the nice use of terms by our author, we must bear in mind the difference between a promise and a covenant. A promise is the bare word; a covenant is the act which ratifies that word and guarantees its due performance. It is implied, then, by this designation "covenant," applied to the promises, that they are accompanied by guarantees for their due fulfilment. The promises of the gospel rest upon the atonement of Christ The grand and mighty act of sacrifice is the sure foundation whereon rest the Divine promises enumerated in the text.

A. J. Parry, Phases of Christian Truth, p. 184.