This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 8: “Jesus, the Mediator of the New Covenant”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- This lesson portrays Jesus as the paragon of obedience that makes Him our Example.
- The lesson does not explain Jesus’ role as a Jew who opened a way for gentiles to be reconciled to God.
- This lesson doesn’t connect Jesus’ blood with our belief and new birth into the new covenant.
This lesson combines proof-texts from Hebrews into hybridized arguments that utterly obscure the gospel, that misdefine the new covenant, that eclipse who and what Jesus actually did, and it leaves the reader confused and helpless. The end game of this lesson is to believe that because of Jesus, we have no excuse NOT to keep the law.
This lesson perpetuates the heresy of Adventism’s false gospel.
Who Is Jesus?
Hebrews 7 explains that the Mosaic law—all of it, including the Ten Commandments which cannot be separated from the rest of the old covenant—was based on the foundation of the levitical priesthood. Without the levitical priesthood, there could have been no Law. No Ten Commandments. No old covenant.
Adventism insists (as do some Christians) that the Ten Commandments are eternal, that they pre-date creation and existed both in eternity past and into eternity future. The Bible, however, never makes this assumption. This argument is supported by the notion (within Adventism) that the law is the expression of God’s character; thus, it MUST be eternal.
The Law, however, is not the expression of God’s character. Rather, it reflects God’s will and fits under the framework of the “greatest commandment” which Jesus Himself (God the Son) articulated thus:
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37–40).
Adventists insist that this definition is derived from the first and second tables of the Ten Commandments: Love for God and Love for Man. But this idea is NOT what Jesus was saying, and it is NOT what the Bible reveals. Rather, Jesus was stating that the eternal articulation of God’s will for man is that he love God supremely, and that he love his neighbor as himself. Furthermore, Jesus even revealed that this definition was a HIGHER articulation of God’s will than are the Ten Commandments. He stated explicitly that all the Law (and that includes the Decalogue) and the Prophets depend on these two commandments!
Think about those actual words: the Decalogue depends on those two overarching commandments. Adventism, however reduces those two commandments to a shorthanded version of the Decalogue. They REVERSE the importance of them.
No, the Ten are not eternal. They served God’s purposes for the nation of Israel and were in complete harmony with His will: Israel was to love Him supremely and love their neighbors. God’s will and purposes are eternal because they flow from Him, but the exact expressions of His will vary from person to person and from age to age.
For example, God’s command to Adam and Eve has never been given to another human: do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That command was in harmony with the two “greatest commandments”. It required that Adam and Eve trust God completely and do what He said, even if they didn’t understand it. Furthermore, God’s giving that command to Adam implied that he had to teach it to Eve. The fact that he was with Eve when she was deceived by the serpent and ate the fruit she gave him—the fact that he didn’t protect his wife and help her resist the serpent—these facts demonstrate that Adam did know he had to love his wife as much as he loved himself but he simply did not do it. Instead of protecting her and removing her and himself from temptation, he gave in to Eve’s deception and ate.
Adam failed to trust God, and his failure allowed Eve to be deceived without protection. Thus Adam’s failure to love God supremely, even when he didn’t understand the details, led him not to protect and love his wife, and he thus plunged all of us into depravity as our natural condition.
No, it is not the expression of God’s commands that is eternal; it is the innate character of God that asks us to love Him and one another as He loves us—it is God who is eternal.
Jesus came, God the Son wrapped in mortal human flesh, unable to be tempted by sin because He was spiritually alive. Yet He came under the law as a son of Israel. He was the fulfillment of hundreds of prophecies beginning with God’s promise to Eve in Genesis 3 that her seed would crush the serpent’s head.
Jesus came, as Galatians 4:4 says, under the law. He came to systematically fulfill the law and to reveal His identity as the Lamb of God whom the Father had promised would come. The law, in fact, was tailored by God to reveal the identity of Jesus. Consider Romans 3:19–22:
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: (ESV)
Notice that the law was not given to facilitate or achieve righteousness. Rather, it and the prophets WITNESSED to the righteousness of God—but importantly, that righteousness is APART FROM THE LAW!
Furthermore, the law was given as a shadow of Christ. Hebrews 10:1 says:
For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. (ESV)
Colossians 2:16-17 puts it this way:
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. (ESV)
The law—all of it, because the Law cannot be divided—foreshadowed the Lord Jesus and witnessed to the righteousness of God that was coming into the world in the person of Christ. Furthermore, the righteousness that we receive when we trust and believe in Jesus’ finished work is not connected to the law! It is the actual righteousness of God that is credited to us in Christ. See the Romans 3 quote above again. The law did not reveal the righteousness of God. Rather, the righteousness of God has been “manifested”—made visible—apart from then law!
The next verses in Romans 3 will explain that in the Lord Jesus the righteousness of God was made visible by His dying as a propitiation for our sins. Jesus Himself revealed the righteousness of God—that He would be both just in having left the sins of the generations preceding Him unpunished, and also by being the Justifier who would take those sins and become a curse for us and pay for our sins with His blood. That whole exchange that Jesus did on the cross for us revealed the righteousness of God!
God demands death for sin, and Jesus satisfied that demand—His own demand—and also rescued us from them. In His death, burial, and then His resurrection, Jesus obeyed the Father’s will. He loved God supremely, and He loved His neighbor as Himself—He was willing to die for His brothers in order to save them for eternal life.
Jews and Gentiles
Why did it matter that Jesus was a Jew?
Jesus said that salvation is from the Jews (Jn. 4:22). Jesus came and fulfilled the Mosaic covenant because Israel could not. Being naturally depraved just like all humans, the Israelites could not keep their law. Jesus, however, God the Son born in a human body with a human spirit that was alive since conception, DID keep the covenant. He perfectly loved the Father, and He perfectly loved His neighbors. He never sinned against God or man, and His obedience identified Him as the One who was coming, the only One who could rescue men from their bondage to sin.
Jesus’ perfect obedience identified Him as GOD. Only God could never break the law nor the demands Jesus Himself gave not to lust or hate. Only God could touch lepers and impart healing instead of taking uncleanness. Only God could raise the dead and not become ritually impure but instead impart life and forgive sins!
The old covenant was give to Israel to reveal the Messiah when He came. Jesus’ fulfillment of the law required His perfect trust and obedience to His Father’s will—not to the law per se but to the Father, as He said over and over of himself—and Jesus’ perfect fulfillment, including the fulfillment of the purification rituals by appearing to break them but in reality revealing that they always had pointed to Him, showed Israel that all God had promised He would do, He had done in sending Jesus.
Jesus was the Perfect Israel. He kept the covenant they could not keep because He Was God—yet He was also man. The law was perfectly designed to identify Jesus when He came.
When Jesus died, He fulfilled the sacrifices and promises that Israel had carried for hundreds of years—but the effect of the Man Christ Jesus paying for human sin and breaking the curse of death changed reality for gentiles as well.
Jesus paid for all our sin with His perfect blood. The curtain in the temple tore the moment He died, and the way into the presence of the Father was opened once and for all for ALL mankind! Now Jews and gentiles alike could come to the Father directly without bringing a sacrifice—because the sacrifice had already been offered!
The hurdle for the Jews, however, was that the gentiles could approach God without ever having to be subject to the law! They were never qualified to be under the law (or to keep the Sabbath), but now, on the basis of faith, of believing in Jesus whom the Father sent (Jn.6:29), even gentiles could be justified and counted righteous with the actual righteousness of God!!
Acts 15 and the book of Galatians forever settled the question: gentiles are never to be brought under the law. In fact, as Hebrews so eloquently demonstrates, the law is OVER! It does not continue for believers. Galatians 5:4-5 says that if a person who claims Christ goes back tot he law, he falls from grace.
The righteousness we receive is APART from the law! Second Corinthians 5:21 puts it this way:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Jesus became sin for us so that IN HIM we might BECOME the righteousness of God.
This righteousness is apart from the law, as Romans 3:2-21 says. When we see who Jesus is and trust Him, when we trust His word and repent of our sin, trusting ourselves to the full payment for our sin in the blood of Jesus, we are born again and sealed with the indwelling Holy Spirit. We are placed IN CHRIST, and we are credited with the righteousness of God in Christ!
We do not go back to the law. We do not step up our Sabbath keeping and PROVE that we love God. NO! We trust Jesus alone and live by His Spirit and His word. We allow the Bible to say what it says: the old covenant is obsolete. We are under a new covenant with a new law and a new high priest.
NOTHING about the new covenant is the same. It is for all who believe, and God’s crediting us with righteousness is not dependent upon the law or our Sabbath-keeping. Our righteousness is entirely a gift from the Lord Jesus to us, and the Father accepts us because we trust the Son!
This lesson is deceptive and misleading. I urge you to get a notebook and begin, if you haven’t, the process of copying Hebrews into it. And if you haven’t yet done so, please go to Former Adventist Podcast and listen to our series on Hebrews. Here are some links to help you understand this week’s lesson:
- Melchizedek: The Right Priest Hebrews 7 Part 1
- New Priest Changes the Law: Hebrews 7 Part 2
- The New Covenant Is Here! Hebrews 8
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- We Got Mail - May 2, 2024
- April 27–May 3, 2024 - April 25, 2024