Daily Meditations

Hebrews 8:9 They did not remain faithful This is a further quote from Jeremiah 31, and it reveals something of the emotions in the heart of God towards His people. We can almost feel His sadness as He recalls His covenant relationship with the ancient Israelites,  “I took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt.”  This is the Lord God at His most gentle and caring, it is with tenderness and love that He led the people away from the cruel demands of their Egyptian slave masters and guided them through the Red Sea and the wilderness. After a few months the vast crowd of ex-Hebrew slaves arrived at Mount Sinai and there the Lord gave them the terms and conditions of His covenant. He had high expectations, they had none. They were never going to obey Him completely; they were unfaithful people and still are. But even as we read these words, we realise that we are looking in a mirror for we are no better! The last part of this verse is chilling, because the people were not faith...

Hebrews 8:8 A new Covenant with Israel and Judah t’s probably a bit pointless to speculate about what God expected from Israel when He gave them the first Covenant. Did He really think that they could keep it? Did He unwittingly underestimate the ability of this people to obey His Law? Did they make far more of a mess of it all than He had ever considered possible? I think not! Our Father always had a plan; he knew that men were fallible and that a system of sacrificial offerings was necessary. If not, why did He instigate it so precisely to begin with? As the Apostle Paul says,  “So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.”  Galatians 3:24.  All the religions of the world depend on obedience and works, on adulation and on devotion to the gods, these are the only qualities that will appease their hierarchy. Our God accepts all such efforts from His faithful ones, but He shows us that we can never earn His favour, we can never atone f...

Hebrews 8:7 The battle of the Covenants It’s a good point that is being made here. In modern parlance we would say, “If it ain’t broke, you don’t need to fix it!” In other words, if the Law, the sacrifices, the rituals and the ordinances of the old Jewish Covenant made with Abraham, Moses and the Israelites was working fine, then God would have not needed to replace it. But it was not working fine. It was constantly failing the people who found it impossible to meet the Covenant’s demands. They had spent centuries examining it in detail and trying to make it simpler and easier to uphold, hence the Mishna (written code of Jewish oral law) and the Talmud (the recorded oral thoughts of centuries of debate by the various Rabbis). The Law had become increasingly complex and, in their attempts to understand it and simplify it, the teachers and the scribes had made it impossible for the people to obey it! As we have seen, the Old Covenant only covered sins committed in ignorance and the whole...

Hebrews 8:6 A superior Covenant Oh dear, I wonder how this verse and its associates went down with Jewish readers of this Epistle! If they had fully embraced the Gospels and the work of Messiah, then no problem. If, however, they were still sceptical, (and the whole point of the letter is that some were) then statements like verse 6 would be hard to accept. For the point being made is that the ministry of Yeshua, and the Covenant that He initiated, is far superior to all that had transpired under Moses and the Levitical system of the Law. This whole verse seems to revolve around one word – mediator! In fact, the entire letter concentrates on the supremacy of Christ and how He has initiated and mediated a superior way of relating to the Lord God.  Moses was able to intervene before the Lord on behalf of His people on numerous occasions, however, he could only bring temporary respite, in the same way the sacrifices and offerings at the Tabernacle were only temporary, they had to be c...

Hebrews 8:5 A copy and a shadow There are two potent verses in Exodus that probably are never given the attention they deserve. Exodus 25 describes the precise instructions given by God to Moses about the building of the Tabernacle and the furnishings within it. Twice the Lord says to Moses , “Make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.”  V9, v40. When God instructs us to follow a pattern, it is always in the context of it being a shadow or an earthly replica of a heavenly reality. Throughout the centuries of Jewish worship and rituals it didn’t seem to dawn on anyone that all their sacred objects and their sacrificial offerings were merely reflections of a greater, spiritual reality. The sanctuary was just  “a copy, a shadow of what is in heaven. ” It took the coming of Christ Jesus, and the revelations to the Apostles, to unlock this mystery and to explain it all so that we might understand. This is exactly what the author of Hebrew...

Hebrews 8:4 Jesus is no earthly priest We have already discussed this point! Yeshua was in no way qualified to be a human priest of God Most High. That is why the religious leaders and the priesthood of Jesus’ day rejected Him. He was not of the tribe of Levi so He could not be a priest. He was not officially trained as a Rabbi and did not align Himself with any of the prominent teachers of His day. He exhibited few of the skills of a scribe and was most certainly unconnected to the Sadducees and Pharisees. He failed all the criteria required to be a religious leader in the culture of those days. He was not even a zealot for He had no political affiliations or motives. Small wonder that the Jewish leaders questioned His integrity, and in a culture that relied on traditional values, Jesus was found to have fallen short of every qualification used at the time. And yet He left them all gasping at His knowledge and His wisdom, even when He was a 12-year-old boy, visiting the Temple for the...