1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The
message from God’s Word this morning is taken from Ex. 24:3-8 & Jeremiah
31:31-34, (read text), it’s entitled, “What
God Does for Sinners—The Covenant or Testament,” dear brothers and sisters
in Christ.
2.
We sinners can only live in the
presence of a holy God if he does something for us that we can’t do for
ourselves. The last sermon noted that the most basic thing God does for sinners
is to give us Christ, the Prophet like Moses. This sermon and the next will
dwell still more upon what Christ does for us. This time we see that through Christ, God gives us his New Testament.
3.
In Exodus 24, the Lord was coming
through on everything he had said about making ancient Israel his people. There
was a covenant ceremony at Mount Sinai. Sacrifices were offered. Moses the
mediator put half of the sacrificial blood on an altar. He sprinkled the other
half of this blood on the people. One biblical scholar noted, “This transaction was the most important in
the whole history of Israel. By this one sacrifice, never renewed, Israel was
formally set apart as the people of God; and it lay at the foundation of all
the sacrificial worship which followed.”
4.
Not once but twice in this passage
Moses told the people God’s regulations, and twice they answered that they
would do everything the Lord had said. When I read them saying these words,
part of me wants to shout to them, “Stop!
Do you realize what you are saying?”
5.
Let me pose for you a somewhat
similar case. A college student said to her campus pastor, “I love my boyfriend so much. I would give anything if he would propose
to me. For weeks I’ve been praying God to get him to do that. And if God would,
I promise that I’d be the best Christian you have ever seen, a model
churchgoer, volunteer, and disciple in every way. If God helps me out with
this, I have promised him that I will be faithful all my life.”
6.
When you hear this story, don’t you
want to call to this young woman, “Stop!
You don’t realize what you are saying”? For one thing, she’s trying to make
a bargain with God with the One who doesn’t need us to fulfill any of his
needs. There’s no reason to think that the people of Israel were trying to do
that in Exodus 24. At the same time, though, the young woman is also making
promises she’s not going to be able to keep, and here the leaders of Israel
were similar. As things turned out, they and their people definitely didn’t
keep their promise to do everything the Lord said. Soon after this event, they
would go so far as to fashion a golden calf and worship it, under the
leadership of none other than Moses’ brother Aaron. They were going to fail,
and fail miserably. Hence, our impulse to scream out: “Stop! Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.”
7.
Last week we talked about the fact
that we don’t keep the Law of God as we should. We can’t keep it any more than
the people in Exodus 24 could. We know this. So why do we in so many ways
pretend that we can keep God’s Law, when in reality we can’t? One part of the
reason why is that we brush over this Law much too quickly. We don’t take to
heart all its true demands and threats.
8.
Now here’s another part of the
reason why we pretend we can keep God’s Law: so often, the things we find
valuable are the ones we have put significant time, effort, energy, or money
into. A young man studying to become a Pastor was involved in producing a radio
public service announcement in which two men were talking. One was trying very
energetically to buy something from the other. The second man wouldn’t sell the
item in question at any price. Finally, however, he offered simply to give it
away. The man who had been so eager to buy the item then says, “What’s wrong with it?” and “I don’t want it
if you’re giving it away for free.” Do
you get the point? We think that we’ve got to have an investment in something
if it is going to matter to us. So, if we can invest ourselves successfully
into the keeping of God’s Law as the basis for our relationship with him, then
it figures that the relationship will mean something to us.
9.
Do you hear what we are saying?
Don’t you wish someone would come along and yell to us, “Stop! You can’t treat the Lord God this way. For starters, you can’t
be the judge of when a relationship with him is going to mean something to you!
Right there you’ve already broken the Law and fractured the relationship.” Even if no one else says such things to us,
God’s Law certainly does. If God and man are going to be related, the Lord is
going to have to bring about the relationship—all of it. Sinful human beings
like you and me won’t. We can’t.
10.
A pastor was visiting an elderly
woman. She told him that she had enjoyed a good, long life in which she tried
to do the right thing. She never wanted to hurt anyone. Yes, she said that she
tried to keep the Ten Commandments as well as she could. The pastor cringed on
the inside, because he had a feeling he knew where this conversation was going.
He started to think to himself, “Not
Suzie Johnson! After all the words of Gospel Good News she had heard all her
life, after all the Christian education, and many, many sermons—she still
imagines that her works are going to save her?”
But, the woman wasn’t finished. She went on, “Yet even though I have tried to live the best life I could, I know that
none of it is good enough. The older I get, the more I realize that I have
broken God’s Law again and again. But I thank the Lord that I am saved on
account of Jesus Christ. He has done for me what I am unable to do. I can look
forward to the end of my life trusting in his love.” The pastor breathed a sigh of relief, because
Suzie ended up talking about God’s New Testament.
11.
Often when we use the term “New
Testament,” we’re talking about the portion of the Bible that starts right
after the Book of Malachi ends. Or, we think of the New Testament as a period
of time, the years after the “BC” years of the Old Testament era. The Bible
itself uses the term “New Testament”
somewhat differently, though, as in our other text from the prophet Jeremiah: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the
LORD, when I will make a new covenant”—a New Testament—“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 their hand to bring them out of the land
of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the
LORD” (Jeremiah 31:31–32). Here, the New Testament isn’t a portion of the
book or a period of history. Instead, here the New Testament is a basis for the
relationship between God and man. Jeremiah says the New Testament would be
better than the old covenant of Sinai. This New Testament’s high point would be
that the Lord would forgive iniquity and remember sin no more (Jeremiah 31:34).
12.
Notice carefully what the prophet
said. He was talking about forgiveness. This is the forgiveness you and I have
in Christ. It’s not probation. The New Testament does not amount to a second
chance for people to make good and prove themselves. It does not put a mere
patch on the old covenant. It is a far better replacement.
13.
For the old covenant didn’t work. That
failure wasn’t God’s fault. It resulted from human sin. That is, people broke
the old covenant right and left. By contrast, the New Testament has no laws to
break. It’s pure forgiveness. It’s the only way we can be brought into a
relationship with God. This New Testament is the only way we can be saved, and
the Lord has brought it about. He
brought it about in Christ. The book of Hebrews, which quotes the Jeremiah
passage in full, goes on to say that a testament—a last will and testament—only
goes into effect at the death of the one who made the testament. Luther
observed that “He who stays alive makes a
covenant; He who is about to die makes a testament.” The death of Christ
makes the New Testament what it is. With his holy, precious blood and with his
innocent suffering and death, Jesus the God-Man purchased for us the
inheritance which is the forgiveness of sins. In Christ, we have a much better
testament than the covenant the Lord made with Israel at Mount Sinai.
14.
Jesus, after the Passover meal on
the night when he was betrayed, gave his disciples the cup and said: “This is my blood of the new testament, which
is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” He connected to his impending
death both the New Testament and the new meal he was instituting. No one asked
him what he meant by the term “New
Testament,” because they knew Bible passages like our texts from Exodus and
Jeremiah. If the New Testament is the forgiveness of sins and the Lord’s Supper
gives the New Testament, then in the Lord’s Supper God gives the forgiveness of
sins. He gives it to you.
15.
Also, in the Exodus 24 passage there
was a sacrifice, there was eating and drinking, and the people had blood
sprinkled on them in the presence of God. In the Lord’s Supper everything is
better still. Here we do not eat the body of a sacrificed animal, but instead
we eat the body of the Man who is also God. He was sacrificed for us. In the
Lord’s Supper the blood that was shed for us is applied to us not by
sprinkling, but much more intimately, by drinking. In the case of the Lord’s
Supper we’re not simply in the presence of God, but we also have the presence
of God in us, the presence of the body and blood of the Christ who died for us
and rose from the dead. In the Lord’s Supper, we have a much better testament
than the covenant the Lord made with Israel at Mount Sinai. It all centers in
the forgiveness of sins on account of Christ, given freely by God in his New
Testament.
16.
Imagine this scene: A person has
just arrived at the portals of heaven. A voice asks: “What is the password? Speak it and you may enter.” “The password?” the person replies
tremulously. “Well, is it: ‘Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be
saved’ ”? “No,” replies the voice. “ ‘The just shall live by faith’ ”? “No.” “
‘For God so loved the world that he gave . . .’ ”?“No.” “ ‘There is no longer any condemnation to
them that are in Christ Jesus’ ”? “Those
are all true sayings,” says the voice, “but they are not the password for which
I listen today.” “Well, then, I give up,” says the person. And the voice says, “That’s it! Come right
in!” You and I are saved by grace alone! By faith in Christ we have the New Testament,
the forgiveness of sins. Amen. Now may
the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in
Christ Jesus until life everlasting.
Amen.
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