Complete Fulfillment, Part 5 - A New Covenant Promised

As I’ve repeated throughout this series, God is a covenant keeping God. He keeps his word and intends his people to place their confidence and hope in his faithfulness to it. This is why God has chosen to reveal his character (and ours) primarily through covenant relationships. This is why covenants form the backbone of the Bible’s story and why it is important to understand how they relate to each other and to Christ. Using the graphic** at right as our guide, we have traced God’s covenant relationships from Adam through King David.

Each covenant is nestled within and dependent upon the covenants that precede it. Each provides further revelation of God’s redemptive plan and narrows the focus as it funnels inexorably down toward its full expression and fulfilment in Christ and the New Covenant he came to inaugurate. To quote Stephen Wellum, “All Old Testament hopes and expectations are centered in Christ.”*

Christ, we have seen, is the promised “seed” of the woman (Gen 3:15) and of Abraham (Gal 3:16). He is the ultimate Israel, the true firstborn son of God, of whom the nation of Israel was a type (Ex 4:22, Hos 11:1 Mt 2:17-18). As the ultimate firstborn he fulfills God’s covenant purpose for the Levites, who served God in the place of all the firstborn sons of Israel. And because Christ, unlike Israel, was perfectly obedient to the terms of the Mosaic covenant, he was able to fulfill it by becoming the only perfect sacrifice for sin. Finally we saw that Jesus Christ was the ultimate Son of David, the fulfillment of God’s promise to establish his throne forever (2 Sam 7:12-16).

But even in the days of David and his son Solomon, the kings and the people of Israel violated their covenants with God. The nation quickly began to disintegrate under the weight of its sin. The northern kingdom was carried away into an exile by Assyria, never to return. Judah, the southern kingdom, along with its Davidic dynasty was not far behind. They were eventually taken into exile by Babylon, and though the Jews eventually returned to Israel, there was never another Davidic King to sit on the throne in Jerusalem.

But through decline and through exile, God’s promises remained in the air. His prophets called the people to repent and to return to their covenant-keeping God, who extended to them the promise of a New Covenant that would perfectly embody and fulfill all of God’s previous promises, and, best of all, would never be broken.

 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jer 31:31-34).

Ezekiel puts it this way:

“And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God” (Ez 11:19-20).

These were the promises that God’s faithful remnant were intended to cling to through the 400 silent years between Malachi and Matthew. God gave these promises of a future New Covenant to set the expectations of his people. God had not given up on them. He had not abandoned his promises. But these New Covenant passages make it clear, the real problem Israel faced was not political. It was not the Babylonians or the Persians, the Greeks or the Romans. It was not the lack of their own king or their own land. They’d had all these before and lost them. No, Israel’s problem was not “out there” somewhere. It was far more personal than that. The problem was their hearts that were hard as stone. They needed Messiah who would save them from their sin.

* Stephen J. Wellum. Christ From Beginning to End: An Introduction to Biblical Theology. 2020-2021. The Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary, Vallejo, CA. Word Document

**This graphic borrows some of its details from Fig. 16.3 in Kingdom Through Covenant, by Peter J. Gentry & Stephen J. Wellum.