Colleen and Nikki continue their discussion of the transition to the New Covenant including the amazing words of God that told about the end of the law covenant. Podcast was published April 14, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. This is Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: We’re really happy that you’re joining us again. Today our topic is going to be a continuation of Jesus’ role in introducing the New Covenant. Last week we talked about His relationship to the law, and this week we’re going to show that Jesus introduced the New Covenant specifically to His disciples before His departure. This is going to be the session that takes us from a discussion of the law and the Mosaic covenant into a discussion of the New Covenant, showing the transition between the two that Jesus worked out and taught us. And as we move into the New Covenant after this session, I just want to say that we’re going to do a little series on the New Covenant as outlined in the book of Hebrews because it just so clearly walks through the things that are the ways we learned the law in Adventism. That’s what the future holds. Nikki, why don’t you also talk to us about what we’re doing as a special thing during this pandemic.
Nikki: The whole world right now is going through something together with this pandemic and experiencing a lot of different reactions to it, and former Adventists have their own special set of reactions and triggers and things that they’re thinking through and ways that they have to deal with it. So we thought it might be a good idea to have an extra podcast each week where we just discuss how things are going and how we’re thinking and how we’re handling that and an opportunity to learn how to pray for each other, so we’re going to be getting together an extra day each week to have some conversations with each other and possibly with others about how they’re walking through this.
Colleen: So just keep looking for that. Our plan is to release them on Mondays and then to have our regular podcast as usual on Wednesdays, and then don’t forget that on Fridays we have contact with you through the weekly Proclamation! email. So if you haven’t signed up for that, be sure you do. You can go to proclamationmagazine.com and sign up for the weekly emails.
Nikki: And just a reminder that if you do subscribe for the podcast, you will get notifications every time something airs, so if there’s something off schedule that we’ve gone live with, you will get notifications for that if you’re subscribed.
Colleen: So we look forward to meeting with you that way. Today, kind of moving as a transition from where we ended last week, talking about Jesus giving a new law, His law, we’re going to talk about Jesus’ new commandment, and one of the typical trigger things for Adventists, that word, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” and “A new commandment I give you,” and how we interpreted that. Nikki, how did you react to that word “commandment” in the New Testament as an Adventist.
Nikki: Well, I felt pretty sure that I knew that that meant we were supposed to be keeping the Ten Commandments.
Colleen: Did you ever stop to ask – I know I did not – why we thought the word “commandment” meant the ten?
Nikki: It didn’t even occur to me to redefine that or to think of it any other way. The Ten Commandments. I mean, everybody talks about the Ten Commandments. Even non-Adventists talk about the Ten Commandments. They’re in the court system. “Commandments” are the Ten Commandments. I mean, that was synonymous in my head.
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: I didn’t know how to separate that.
Colleen: I didn’t either. It never occurred to me that that word might not mean Decalogue when it occurred in the New Testament. And I look at it now and think, “That was a really interesting example of perhaps brainwashing –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – that the word, the English word, “commandment” would always mean Decalogue, not even thinking that in the original language there might have been a different underlying word.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: But that is exactly what we learned as we came out; right?
Nikki: Well, yeah, yeah. That was one of the most exciting things I learned, and it was really, honestly, what freed me up, to consider that I might have been wrong all those years.
Colleen: Now, I think what we can do to start this conversation is to go to John 13 where Jesus introduces a new commandment. I definitely knew this text, or knew about it, as an Adventist. It wasn’t a proof text for anything, by any means, but it was something that was not unfamiliar to me, and this is where Jesus is talking to His disciples, and He says, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” And then in the next verse, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Nikki: And that’s 34 and 35.
Colleen: Correct, John 13:34 and 35. It never occurred to me that this passage in John 13 was actually stating something that was completely new and not just a restatement of a way to look at the Decalogue. I remember when I first read Dale Ratzlaff’s book, “Sabbath in Crisis.” It was before he had revised it to the current “Sabbath in Christ.” It was back in the mid-’90s, and he had a chapter in that book where he explained the difference between the Greek words “entole” and “nomos.” Now, I had never heard of such a thing. I’d never known there was such a distinction. When he explained that in John’s writings – now, John wrote five of the New Testament books, John, the three epistles, and the book of Revelation – every time John uses the word that’s translated “commandments,” the underlying Greek word is a form of “entole.” Every time he uses the word “law,” the underlying Greek word is “nomos.” Nikki, could you talk a little about that because this was a huge thing for you, and I’ve heard you explain it before really interestingly.
Nikki: You know, you really have to redefine your words when you leave Adventism, like you’ve said, and I was having a hard time working through the gospels and the epistles and the arguments that I was getting from Adventists, who were throwing these verses like “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.” I actually hadn’t read Dale’s books when I came out. I came out a little differently.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: But you guys had told me about this, and so I went online and I found an interlinear Bible and did some looking up of verses in John, and I was prepared to find out that this was just kind of a loose – something that I was holding onto that maybe wasn’t all that dependable. I was looking for the one verse where it didn’t work –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and I couldn’t find it. Everywhere I looked, commandments was “entole,” and the Law of Moses was “nomos.” And we get a lot of examples of that when Jesus is talking and He refers to the Law of Moses, like in John 8:5 He says, “In the law Moses commanded,” so there you have the two words, “law” and “command,” and there again, it’s “nomos” and it’s a variation on “entole” for “commanded.” So it really held up together. So as we were preparing to do this podcast, I thought I’d try to revisit some of those verses that were so exciting to discover. I wondered about the Law of Christ because we’d been talking about the Law of Christ, and I wondered what word is used there. The word actually is a variation of “nomos,” but it’s “ennomos,” and I remembered Kaspars talking about this at the conference, and he talked about this being like “in law,” “in lawed,” so we are “in lawed” to Christ. It’s a completely different system. The law in the Old Testament was something that was external, something they had to deal with that was outside of them, and when we are born again and when we are in Christ, we’re placed in Christ, we are in lawed to Christ. We are in – I don’t even know how to articulate it. It’s a good idea to go back and listen to the Former Adventist conference videos because Kaspars did such a great job with this, but it’s a completely different thing.
Colleen: It’s almost as if we are put into the law because we are in Christ. He is the lawgiver. We are in Him. We are in His righteousness, morality. We are in Him and in law in Him.
Nikki: Just like the Jews could not – they could not participate in the Mosaic Law unless they were circumcised –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – we cannot live in the Law of Christ, under the Law of Christ, unless we are born again. We were talking about this earlier, and I was saying, it’s like calling your boyfriend’s mother your mother-in-law. You can’t. That doesn’t work like that.
Colleen: Because she isn’t yet.
Nikki: Because she isn’t yet. And so that law is written on our hearts. It’s Christ Himself, and we are in Him.
Colleen: It’s not the Decalogue. I think it’s worth mentioning that “entole,” the way it’s interpreted and used in John, is a word that does not mean law. It means teachings, sayings, commands, instruction. It doesn’t mean “law.” The word “nomos,” as John uses it, always refers to a system of requirements or laws or something by which we live. But “entole” is not referring to the Decalogue ever. So when we have in Revelation, John, this same John writing, “Here are they that keep the commandments of God and have the faith of Jesus,” he is not talking about the Decalogue. He is talking about “entole,” or commands, the commands of God. As an Adventist I might have camped on that and said, “Well, then, what is the command of God? God gave the Ten Commandments,” but think about John 6:29. This helps me understand the command of God. Jesus was teaching, and the Jews asked Him, “What is the work of God?” John 6:29: “Jesus answered them and said, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” This is the command that God gives through His Son to everyone. The work of God, to do God’s will, to do God’s work, is simple, clear, and foundational. We are to believe in the Lord Jesus. In Revelation when John is using “commandments of God” to define God’s people, he is not referring to the Ten Commandments. He is not using the word “nomos.” He is using “entole,” and “entole” is the teachings or the commands of God, and God’s command to us is to believe in Jesus.
Nikki: When I was rolling this around in my head as I was first understanding it, I had a hard time with it because God gave the Ten Commandments –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – God gave those, and so how do we separate that from the commands of Christ, and I just sort of struggled with knowing – I don’t know, it seems like a little bit of a weak answer to me, and I got my hands on a book by John Piper called “What Jesus Demands from the World,” and he talks about all of the various commands of Christ, and he talks about how when He ascended He told His disciples, now His apostles, “Go and teach all of the world all that Ihave commanded you.” The epistles are full of the unique commands of Christ: to be born again, to repent, to come to Him, to believe, to love one another, to take up your cross and follow Him. Those are all just a few examples of the commandments of Christ, the commandments of God, and I remember too, with Revelation, where it talks about those who keep the commandments of God. When I put that together with the ascension, with Jesus saying, “Teach all that Ihave commanded you,” and then Revelation saying “These are those who keep the commandments of God,” that verse which was once used to prove we’re supposed to work, keep the Sabbath, keep the law, that verse is actually affirming that Jesus is God.
Colleen: That’s what it is. It’s like we talked about last session, the gospels are full of Jesus doing things systematically in His ministry to demonstrate His identity, to reveal to the Jewish nation that their Messiah had come. He was God, He was the Messiah, He was the Son of David, the promised one who would make the blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, and the dead to live. That’s what’s Jesus’ ministry was about, and these commands are the same thing. So when Jesus says in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give you,” He is not just speaking as a rabbi who’s interpreting the law. He’s speaking as God, the giver of law, the giver of life, the sustainer of the universe, the one who is over all of us, and He is saying, “I’m now giving you a new commandment, love one another as I loved you.” I remember realizing the significance of that command. He’s not just saying “love one another.” How did He love His disciples? How did He love His people?
Nikki: By going to the cross, by sacrificing His life for them.
Colleen: His command is our love for one another, including our love for the world, is to be sacrificial in nature. We know that we are secure in Him if we have trusted Him, and the rest of our days on earth as believers is to be spent pouring out ourselves for His purposes sacrificially, for the sake of helping others to know Him, and I just want to say, that’s why we do this podcast, that’s why we do Proclamation! magazine, that’s why FAF exists. We love Adventists. We were Adventists. How can we hate who we were? We want our Adventist loved ones to know Jesus. And it’s worth spending the rest of our days helping them understand the true gospel. Another moment in my reading through “Sabbath in Christ” way back in the mid-’90s was the chapter in which Dale discussed the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, where Moses and Elijah came with Him. I remember I had never understood the story of the transfiguration. Nikki, what did you understand the transfiguration to be, as an Adventist?
Nikki: I thought it was a situation where Jesus was revealing to a special few that He really was sent from God. That was the extent of it, and I didn’t understand why He didn’t just do this for everybody because it would have been so much easier for people to understand who He was.
Colleen: Interesting. And see, I didn’t even have that clear a picture of it. I had been taught in Adventist school – and actually, this is what Ellen White said – that at the transfiguration Moses and Elijah just came to Jesus to strengthen Him for what He was about to go through. And somehow that just seemed weak to me.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Even as an Adventist, I thought, there’s something so significant about two people from heaven, a dead man and a translated man, Moses and Elijah, showing up and being with Jesus, and these three apostles being there and watching this happen. It never made sense to me that they were just strengthening Him for what was to come.
Nikki: That’s just really interesting because I don’t remember being taught anything about it in Adventism, but I did – when I was about 19 or 20, I watched the “Matthew” series. I can’t remember who puts it out, but we started watching that around Easter in my home, like we do now. That was, I think, the first time I really thought about that, watching it happen, and I wondered, like I said, you know, why didn’t He do that in front of everybody, but I did have it in the back of my head that they were there to encourage Him, and so I must have somewhere gotten that idea out of Adventism.
Colleen: Well, and you know in the Gospel of Luke, they do talk to Him about what is coming, about His departure.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But the point was something much bigger than that. So when I read in Dale’s book what he said about the transfiguration, I decided to do a little more research on my own. But let’s – for the sake of just planting ourselves in a central passage, let’s go to Matthew 17. Matthew 17:1-13 describes the whole story of the transfiguration. This same story is also told in Mark 9 and in Luke 9. I knew enough as an Adventist to understand that not all stories in each gospel was repeated in every other one. So I looked up the transfiguration in the other gospels to see if they were there, after reading in Dale’s book, and I discovered that this story is told in the three synoptic gospels. It is not told in John, but it is told in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and I realized that if that was the case, it had to be really significant, because it was repeated three times. Just by way of setting the stage, Nikki, could you read the passage for us?
Nikki: “Six days later Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up on a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him. Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three tabernacles here, one for you, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!’ When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground and were terrified. And Jesus came to them and touched them and said, ‘Get up, and do not be afraid.’ And lifting up their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus Himself. As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them, saying, ‘Tell the vision to no one until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.'”
Colleen: I think all of us have heard this story. The three inner circle, Peter, James, and John, go with Jesus up an unnamed but high mountain, and while He’s there these three disciples see Moses, Elijah, and Jesus standing together, and they became very bright, transfigured before them. Now, the first thing that I need to mention here that I had never heard before was that to the Jews Moses represented the law. Did you know that?
Nikki: I never thought about it.
Colleen: I didn’t either. And after understanding that, I see over and over in the gospels how when Jesus is talking, He will talk to the Pharisees and say, “Moses does this,” or “You believe Moses,” or “If you believed Moses,” or “Moses said,” but Moses represented the law. Elijah represented the prophets. So for Moses and Elijah and Jesus to stand on that mountain, for them to be talking to Jesus and then, an amazing thing, a cloud, a bright cloud overshadowed them. Now, Nikki, what did you discover? You were just telling me, before we started this, in the account in Luke, who did that cloud cover?
Nikki: Well, it covered all of them. It covered Peter, James, and John, and they were afraid.
Colleen: So it wasn’t just Jesus, Moses, and Elijah that the cloud covered. This bright cloud covered everybody on the mountain, including those three disciples. So the cloud would represent whom?
Nikki: The Father, God the Father.
Colleen: Yeah, the presence of God on that mountain.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And as they’re inside the cloud, what do the disciples hear?
Nikki: They heard God speak, and He said that this was His Son, His beloved Son, in whom He was well pleased, and He told them to listen to Him.
Colleen: And then the disciples, who were afraid and hidden in the cloud, suddenly felt Jesus coming down to them, touching them, and telling them to get up, and when they looked up, who was there?
Nikki: Only Jesus.
Colleen: The law, Moses, and the prophets, Elijah, had disappeared. Only Jesus stood before them.
Nikki: This is so reminiscent of Moses saying that another would come like him, and he said, “Listen to Him.”
Colleen: It is. It’s echoing what Moses said in Deuteronomy, and here is Jesus. I remember when I read that, when I read Dale explaining this in his book, Sabbath in Crisis, I remember putting the book down and pacing in the bedroom [laughter] –
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: – and realizing – it was just a deep realization – I’m going to have to leave Adventism. Because it can’t be telling me the truth if this is true. I knew it wasn’t going to be tomorrow, but I knew that I was walking down a road from which I would not go back. It was just really clear. This story was the first really big realization that something changed about the law because of Jesus.
Nikki: It’s completely opposite of the picture of Jesus with His arm around us pointing to the Ten Commandments.
Colleen: Jesus is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, and now we listen to Him, we don’t look back to the law, which has no more use now that the thing to which it pointed, the person of Jesus, has come. As I was looking up this story in the three gospels and reading it, I realized that there was another part to this story, which even more confirmed this understanding. And that was that very last part that you read, Nikki. “As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them saying, ‘Tell this vision to no one until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.'” It’s interesting because the Old Covenant, the law and the prophets, were still in place, still had to be observed by the Jews, because Jesus, the Lamb of God, had not died on that final Passover day yet. He was still on earth. Until He fulfilled the shadow of the perfect sacrifice, the law still was the mandated source of authority for the Jews.
Nikki: Yeah, this piggybacks with what we were talking about last time, that when it says that the law will not pass away until all is fulfilled and not to teach anyone not to keep it.
Colleen: That’s exactly right. And so for Him to tell His disciples, who were His inner circle, and this is just really days away, this is not long before His crucifixion, but to say, “Don’t even tell anybody about this until the Son of Man is risen from the dead,” well we learn also from – was it the Gospel of Mark, Nikki, where you read what the disciples said at that point?
Nikki: Okay, so they discussed it with one another. In verse 9, Mark 9:9, “As they were coming down from the mountain, He gave them orders not to relate to anyone what they had seen, until the Son of Man rose from the dead. They seized upon that statement, discussing with one another what rising from the dead meant.” And then their question to Him was about Elijah. They didn’t ask Him directly about that, at least it’s not recorded.
Colleen: This was something that even the disciples didn’t understand, when Jesus said, “Don’t tell anybody what you’ve seen until the Son of Man rises from the dead.” Jesus knew that when He had died and risen from the dead, this would become clear to them in retrospect, but it was also His way of saying, “This won’t even have meaning until I have fulfilled the curse of the law and broken its power by rising from the dead. Only then will the law and the prophets disappear and I will stand here as their fulfillment.” Even in His instructions to the disciples, which they didn’t fully understand at the time, Jesus was confirming that the law and the prophets were about to come to a distinct end in terms of their authority over the Jewish nation. He Himself was going to be the authority they were to listen to.
Nikki: So as we were getting ready to do this podcast, I decided to read the transfiguration in all three gospels as well, and I don’t think I had ever spent much time in Luke’s account of this. Like I said, I watched the Matthew video, and I’ve just – I have a special place in my heart for John and Matthew. But I read it today, and it was interesting. I never realized that Luke shares what it was that Moses and Elijah discussed with Jesus, that they had heard that. It says that in verse 30, “And behold, two men were talking with Him; and they were Moses and Elijah, who, appearing in glory, were speaking of His departure which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” Moses and Elijah understood what Jesus was about to do, and the word “departure” there is “exodus.” I don’t know if this is a loose connection, but when I think about the fourth commandment and the fact that it’s linked to the God who took them out of Egypt –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and that He was giving them rest because He took them out of Egypt, and I think of Jesus and His exodus and what He did and how that gives us eternal rest in Him. I don’t know, the connection just –
Colleen: It’s an interesting one.
Nikki: Yeah, it was an interesting connection.
Colleen: And you know, one more thing that I feel we need to mention is that Moses appeared on this mountain with Jesus. Ellen White had to do some convoluted explanations to get Moses on that mountain with the Adventist doctrine of death because the Adventist doctrine of death is that people cease to exist until the resurrection. We know Moses died. It tells the story of his death in Deuteronomy. The Epistle of Jude has a slight account, it’s just one verse, it’s Jude 9, that describes Michael the archangel contending with the devil over the body of Moses. It says that Michael would not deliver a stinging rebuke against the devil but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” Now, there are two things here. The first is Adventism, because of Ellen White’s teaching, says that Michael the archangel is Jesus, and the reason then she explains that by saying it’s Jesus contending for the body of Moses with the devil. And the reason for that is in Ellen White’s theology, Moses had to be resurrected in order to appear on the mount of transfiguration. So the way she explains that is that Jesus came, had a little argument with the devil, resurrected Moses, and thus he was able to show up on the mount of transfiguration. Well, there’s a lot wrong with that explanation, not the least of which is Jesus directly rebuked Satan during His ministry on earth. In the second place, there can be no glorified resurrection of any human before Jesus rises from the dead, so Moses was not resurrected, the Bible does not say he was resurrected, but the fact that he could appear with Jesus only underscores what the New Testament teaches us, that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and Moses was on that mountain because Moses never ceased to exist. He was alive with the Lord, and the Lord allowed him to appear with Elijah to talk to Jesus and to give this illustration that they would be superseded by Jesus when He fulfilled the law and the prophets. The last thing that we’re going to talk about in terms of Jesus telling us that there really was a New Covenant coming is going to focus on His giving of the Lord’s Supper. Now, Adventists do celebrate “The Lord Supper,” but it’s interesting that I did not understand what it really meant, even though I had the words, even though we had the words that Jesus used in the gospels. So for our central passage today, I mean we’re just going to take a look at Matthew 26. Now, this account is also in Luke, but we’re going to use the Matthew passage and then refer to Luke because there’s something very interesting in the way Jesus spoke about the wine and His blood. Matthew 26:26-29. Do you mind reading that, Nikki?
Nikki: “While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins. But I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.'”
Colleen: Okay. So what is the meal that they’re initially sitting down to celebrate together?
Nikki: This is the Passover meal.
Colleen: The Passover meal had four cups of wine. It had specific food. It had the lamb. It had the bitter herbs. It had specific food. And Jesus is using an old familiar meal, the Passover meal, which always represented what to the Jewish nation?
Nikki: This represented the Passover – the first Passover in Egypt.
Colleen: The death angel passed over the homes of all of those who had killed the Passover lamb and sprinkled its blood on their doorposts. In Egypt the firstborn died, but in Israel, where that blood was put on the doorposts, the firstborn were spared. That had been the Passover meal, remembering what God did to spare Israel and to ultimately deliver them from Egypt, and that was the meal they were sitting down to celebrate, but Jesus does something unprecedented that forever changed the Passover meal. So He picks up the bread, the unleavened bread, which was part of the Passover meal, and what does He say?
Nikki: “Take, eat, this is my body.”
Colleen: What an interesting thing to say. They didn’t say that when they ate Passover. But what does Jesus mean by this? I’m not even completely sure if the disciples understood what He meant by it. But looking back at it, what do we understand He means by that?
Nikki: Well, He says in another passage that this is His body broken for them, and it gives us a picture of Him on the cross, what He’s about to go and do.
Colleen: His body was literally broken for them, and we learn in Hebrews 10:20 that His body was represented in the temple by the curtain that separated the Holy from the Most Holy place. And when that curtain ripped, it was a symbol of His body breaking and making the presence of God accessible to everyone because of His sacrifice. So He is giving His disciples a tangible, physical representation of what He is about to do on the cross. Here is the broken bread, the broken Bread of Life, which was going to be His body in just a few hours, His broken body, which represents what He did for us. And then, after they ate that, He took the cup of wine, and He said what?
Nikki: He said, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.”
Colleen: He takes the wine, and He calls it what?
Nikki: The blood of the covenant.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting? This isn’t the Mosaic covenant He’s talking about because the Mosaic covenant required drinking wine at the Passover meal without any designation of it as being Jesus’ blood. So when He says, “This is my blood of the covenant,” He’s talking about something new. In Luke 22 this story is also told, slightly different wording. It’s in Luke 22:20, “And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.'” He very distinctly connects His blood with a newcovenant. It’s not the Mosaic covenant. But He takes the symbols, the shadows, the physical representations of the Old Covenant, and He assigns a new meaning to them. And He’s showing His disciples that something new is about to start. It’s something He’s giving them to observe into the future until He comes again and eats it with them in the kingdom, and it’s always going to be representing His death. After Jesus assigns a new meaning to the bread and to the wine, calling the bread His body and the wine His blood of the New Covenant, we have an amazing promise that He gives in verse 29 of Matthew 26. What does He say to the disciples after having them drink the blood, which is representing the New Covenant?
Nikki: He said, “But I say to you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
Colleen: Jesus is fulfilling all the symbols, all the physical shadows of the law. He is about to go to the cross and then rise from death. His disciples don’t understand what He’s about to do, but He’s about to do that. And all the law and the prophets are going to be fulfilled in Christ, and Christ will be the one that we listen to, but now He’s saying He’s giving them a physical point of remembrance to do until He comes and drinks in His kingdom with them. It’s a new remembrance. The Mosaic covenant had a specific sign that was their remembrance of the covenant, and that was what?
Nikki: That was the Sabbath.
Colleen: And what is His new remember for His disciples in the New Covenant?
Nikki: It’s the Lord’s Supper.
Colleen: The body and the blood. It’s the only physical symbol that He carries over and gives to His disciples and His followers in the New Covenant that they will actually do physically. Everything else is becoming spiritual. Circumcision was the way people entered the community of Israel, and because they were circumcised they were then able to be under the Mosaic Law. But now circumcision is going to be superseded by the new birth, the circumcision of the heart. But God is giving us, who are still here in mortal bodies, a physical symbol reminding us that He died for us, that it’s done, that we’re under a New Covenant, and it’s also pointing forward to His kingdom, when He will eat it again with us in His kingdom. And it’s kind of like the Sabbath. It was a backwards and forward symbol. It pointed Israel backwards to creation, backwards to their Exodus from Egypt, and forward to His completion of the propitiation for their sins on the cross. So that entering God’s rest would again be possible. So God is once again giving us a backwards and forward symbol, pointing us to the next thing in our program with Him.
Nikki: It’s incredible. We completely missed that.
Colleen: I know!
Nikki: We made Sabbath all about Him creating in six days.
Colleen: Not His finished work.
Nikki: So as we were reading these passages, I don’t know, I just kept thinking back to – probably because we just recently did the Abrahamic covenant, but I kept thinking back to it, the words, “this is His body,” you know, He breaks the bread and this is His body, and the picture I get in my mind is those animals cut in half –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – while Abraham laid there, and God was making this promise of what He would do one day. So, “this is my body given for you,” and then the blood. He tells them to drink it, to take it in themselves, that this is the blood of the covenant, and they’re to take it in themselves. When Moses came down from that mountain, you know, he took the blood of the sacrificed animals –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and he sprinkled the people. It was something that was placed on them, but in the New Covenant it’s something we take in, and it makes me think again of the “ennomos,” in lawed.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: This is truly an internal, intimate, brand new thing.
Colleen: It’s not like anything that existed in the Old Testament. We are new creatures when we believe in Jesus. When we believe He completed His work on the cross and rose from death. We are completely new, born of God. It’s almost like we become a new race. We’re no longer considered in Adam; we’re considered in Christ. Every covenant is initiated with blood. Only the New Covenant is initiated with the eternal blood of the covenant of Jesus Christ. It will always be Jesus’ blood that assures our eternal position with Him for eternity. His blood is sufficient. His blood does not have to be repeated.
Nikki: This just keeps making me think back to the Abrahamic covenant. You know, God promised He was going to do this on His own. It was unconditional. It was Him who walked through those animals, and here we have Jesus going to the cross in spite of the fact that they don’t understand what’s going on. This isn’t something they brought about. They didn’t uphold their end of some deal and so now everyone knows what’s happening and God is going and doing this. This is God doing this in spite of their disobedience, in spite of their not understanding and their faithlessness –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – He is keeping it because He is faithful to Himself, and He cannot deny Himself.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: And this is what He promised. And I used to wonder why doesn’t Jesus just come out and say it really clearly, and He did in a lot of places that I didn’t recognize before.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: But it wasn’t actually necessarily important for them to fully understand what was happening because they had nothing to do with it. This was the work of Christ –
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: – that He was doing in spite of them. It was unconditional, in the fullness of time.
Colleen: Yes. And I just want to say to those of you who are listening, if you have never admitted your sin and trusted the finished work of Jesus to forgive your sin, to pay the price of your sin and to reconcile you to God, think about what Jesus did. Think about how He fulfilled all the shadows of those sacrificed animals and the sprinkled blood, and He died a once for all death, even telling His disciples in advance, without their fully understanding what was coming, a New Covenant was coming, a new age was coming, an age when people who believed in Him would be born of God, and they would be His people. It would no longer be a nation that would be His people, but it would be people within the nations who were filled with the Holy Spirit because they had trusted in Jesus’ finished work, and if you have not been born again, I urge you, face the Lord Jesus and confess your sin and ask, ask Him to be your Savior and your Lord and receive what He did way back 2000 years ago that is eternal and permanent. And when you trust Him, you are inHim, you are in lawed to Him and in lawed to His own Law of Christ. You become a part of the New Covenant, and the Old Covenant is obsolete. It has no power over you because Jesus took its curse.
Nikki: And we’ll be looking at what it means that the law is now obsolete as we study Hebrews together in the days to come.
Colleen: We invite you to write to us if you have questions, comments, or observations that you’d like to make. You can send you email to formeradventist@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our weekly email at proclamationmagazine.com, and we urge you to subscribe to this podcast. You can subscribe at iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and write a review of this podcast wherever you listen to it. It helps spread the reach of our podcast and gets the word out to other people. Thank you for being with us as we talked about how Jesus introduced the New Covenant to His disciples even before He died, and we look forward to meeting with you again next week. Don’t forget, we’ll have an extra podcast on Monday, Lord willing, to have some discussions about how people are doing in this quarantine time. Know that in Christ your eternity is secure, and you have eternal life.
Nikki: Bye for now.
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