The New Testament is the Real Thing

So you do not understand some concept that is introduced to us in the New Testament ? Read through the Old again. One teacher at a Bible School told me that at the beginning of the semester in his Bible course he would ask his class to find the New Birth in the Old Testament. At the end of semester he would ask, “so who found any reference to the New Birth?”. The Old Testament is full of pictures of the things that Jesus and the New Testament authors taught; sometimes called shadows, or types, or illustrations. A whole bunch of it is. When we look back we can see lots of pictures in the architecture of the temple, the colours, the location of the furniture, the ceremonies; we can see Jesus in all the little details. One whole book of the Old Testament exists to teach us one very important lesson about becoming a Christian and just to think, some people thought that that book did not deserve to be in the canon of the Bible ! Ezekiel is a good illustration of this principle, he used toy soldiers and a scale model city to teach his people what was in store for their home. I wonder, why did he spend so much time recording the dimensions of the temple, chapters and chapters of it ?

Fortunately for us the New Testament is not another chapter in the saga of back to the future. The New Testament is the here and now. It is the end all, be all, ultimation. It is true that when God made a covenant with the descendants of Israel He said that it would be everlasting, but there was a caveat; and it was not written in fine print. It said “keep the terms of the covenant”! The covenant of works. In other words the duration of the covenant was up to the people. It lasted something less than forty days. So Moses had to go all the way back up the mountain and get a new set of stone tablets and a new covenant with one new condition; God Himself secured the covenant till its purposes had been fulfilled. The New Testament is one hundred percent gaurnteed! The New Testament has terms as well and it required obedience but not on the part of any person or group thereof. Jesus already obeyed God. He both lived a perfect life and He died for sin; “the soul that sins it shall die!” In reality He did not die it was me who did. I died on the cross. The number one big major difference between me as a Christian and someone living under the Mt Sinai covenant is that I live on the other side of death, “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ”! Imagine telling someone who is dead, “you shall not steal”! Imagine a police man telling a dead man “sit up and pay attention!”


In the New Testament we have something unique, something that the Old Covenant or any other religion could or can or will never provide, and we have it now. It is not something that we look to the future for. It is very real and here and now. The New Testament is a new computer with a new operating system on it. Oh sure, we have to reprogram all the rest of the software (study and meditate on the Bible) and we are looking forward to getting a new case to put it into but we have all the benefits now.