COLLEEN TINKER
The day I first understood the new covenant changed me forever. As an Adventist I couldn’t have explained how the new covenant “worked”, although I had heard the phrase. I believed that, whatever Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished, I still had to keep the law, and my sincerity and obedience would satisfy God. Jesus would make up the difference between perfection and my best efforts, and I could be saved. Somehow the new covenant, in my understanding, was simply an expansion of the law and the covenant God made with Israel. In fact, I thought that believing in Jesus gave me extra power to keep the law that Israel didn’t have, and I was now more “Israel” than the Israelites themselves.
And then I heard Dale Ratzlaff compare the old and the new covenants. The old covenant was a two-way agreement between Israel and God. He promised blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, and Israel agreed that all He had said, they would do. God’s blessings depended upon Israel’s obedience—but Israel’s sincerity and good intentions would crumble. The old covenant was doomed to failure because Israel could not keep its promises to God!
Then Jesus came—the reality-changing event that we celebrate during this Christmas season. He was the Perfect Israel, and He perfectly obeyed His Father. As He grew up and carried out His ministry, He fulfilled every jot and tittle of the law, even revealing Himself as the Perfect Sacrifice that fully propitiated for all human sin, satisfying the law’s death sentence for sinners. Finally, as He hung on the cross, He cried out, “It is finished!” (Jn. 19:30), and He “gave up His spirit.”
As an Adventist, I believed that what Jesus finished on the cross was His physical suffering. I had no idea that He finished everything God and the law demanded for the full forgiveness of sin.
As an Adventist, I believed that what Jesus finished on the cross was His physical suffering. I had no idea that He finished everything God and the law demanded for the full forgiveness of sin. I believed that I still had to keep that law—now with Jesus’s power—and I still had to please God by obedience, working out my own salvation with fear and trembling. I had no idea that Jesus completed everything necessary for my own salvation, that all I had to do was to believe and trust Him and His finished atonement.
On that unforgettable day, I realized for the first time that the new covenant was not based on mutual promises between God and me. I did not have to keep the law and prove my loyalty for God to save me. Instead, the new covenant was between the Father and the Son! Jesus was my Substitute. He was God in human flesh, and His fulfillment of the law in every detail satisfied God. If I trusted the Lord Jesus and believed that He accomplished my salvation on the cross, I would be counted righteous just like Abraham was counted righteous when he believed! (Gen 15:6). I wasn’t in a two-way deal with God; I was the recipient of God’s unconditional promises when I believed Jesus and was hidden with Him in God (Col 3:3).
What About the Sabbath?
This question brings me to the contribution former Adventists can make to the body of Christ. When we heard the shocking news that Jesus had fulfilled the law and that our obedience was not part of the “formula” for our justification before God—that all God asked of us was to believe the Son and we would be counted righteous and be saved—we found ourselves clutching the cherished core of our identity: the Sabbath. If obedience to the fourth commandment was not required, what about God’s commands against murder and adultery? What about coveting and stealing?
Christian tradition has often taught that Jesus fulfilled all the requirements of the sacrificial laws, ceremonies, and rituals, but the moral requirements of the Ten Commandments still stand. In fact, many say, it is the Ten Commandments that are written on the heart in the new covenant. This argument, then, makes Sabbath part of the so-called “moral law” that believers of all times must observe.
Some Christians see the problem of requiring the fourth commandment of the church, but because they see it tucked among the moral imperatives of the rest of the nine, they attempt to create a “creation ordinance” argument for a new covenant Sabbath.
Some Christians see the problem of requiring the fourth commandment of the church, but because they see it tucked among the moral imperatives of the rest of the nine, they attempt to create a “creation ordinance” argument for a new covenant Sabbath.
Is this what the New Testament teaches?
Paul, the apostle to the gentiles, gives us the answer. As many of us “formers” have discovered, however, embracing what Paul teaches about the new covenant is sometimes an uphill battle when we have discussions in many Christian circles. Yet Paul is adamant: if a person has trusted Christ and has received the indwelling Holy Spirit “by hearing with faith” (Gal. 3:2), that new birth is ENTIRELY the work of God. We not only didn’t—but we couldn’t—receive the Holy Spirit and the new life of Christ by the works of the law, including Sabbath-keeping. Furthermore, Paul makes an even more startling statement: we can’t be perfected, or sanctified, by works of the law, either. Both our justification and our sanctification are works of God alone—we are counted righteous when we BELIEVE the gospel of Jesus’ finished work of death for our sins, His burial, and His resurrection according to Scripture. We, like Abraham, are counted righteous when we believe God.
The new covenant, like the covenant God made with Abraham, includes no promises or works of our own. Rather, we are counted righteous simply by believing (Gal 3:5,6; Gen. 15:6). Even more, Paul explains in Galatians 4 that God sent His Son as a Jewish baby born under the law for a specific purpose: “to redeem those who were under the Law” so that we could be freed from the death sentence of the old covenant and adopted as sons of God. He even explains that, before knowing God through the finished work of the Son, we were literally slaves.
The Lord Jesus came to set us free from slavery and to release us from the constraint of the law! Paul even compares a believer’s going back to the law once he has known God to immersing oneself in paganism—to the “weak and worthless elemental things” that enslave everyone who does not know God! (See Galatians 4:1–9.)
Then, lest anyone miss his point and think that Sabbath-keeping is a principle that overrides the old covenant—that somehow one can make a Sabbath day a Christian principle based on other arguments from Scripture—Paul even says,
You observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear for you, that perhaps I have labored over you in vain (Gal. 4:10-11).
Paul uses a classic pattern from the Old Testament as he makes this statement: days and months and seasons and years are old covenant designations for the holy days God demanded of Israel. This pattern, used here in ascending order (“days” referring to the weekly Sabbaths, months referring to the new moon Sabbaths, seasons referring to the seasonal feast days such as the feasts of Firstfruits, Harvest, Tabernacles, and so forth, and yearly feasts including the Day of Atonement and yearly sabbaths such as the Sabbath years [every seven years] and the Year of Jubilee [every 50th year]).
Paul is telling the Galatians that if they embrace holy days that Israel was required to observe, he feared that his teaching them the gospel was in vain. Furthermore, he said in Galatians 5:3,4 that if they put themselves under the law—any part of the law, including Sabbath days—they are obligated to keep the whole law, and they have fallen from grace!
Moreover, in case people are tempted to carry a Sabbath day into the new covenant using arguments other than the law, Paul is even more explicit in Colossians 2:16, 17:
Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day—things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ (Col 2:16-17).
Again in this passage Paul uses the Old Testament designations of sabbaths—this time in descending order: yearly, monthly, and weekly—but he adds a powerful explanation as to why no kinds of Sabbath observances are to be mandated on believers: the substance of these sabbath shadows belongs to Christ!
The Lord Jesus is the reality to which every old covenant Sabbath-shadow pointed!
In fact, the weekly Sabbath which was placed at the heart of the Decalogue pointed backward to God’s finished work of creation and forward to Jesus’s “It Is Finished!” When He breathed His last and died, He completed everything necessary for redeeming and reconciling fallen humanity to God!
The weekly Sabbath was always a shadow of God’s work on behalf of His people. It reminded Israel of Adam and Eve’s being created into the perfect rest of God’s finished work, and it pointed forward to believers’ being newly created into the perfect rest of the Lord Jesus’s finished atonement for sin.
Paul could not be more clear: Jesus’s work of atonement and propitiation has fulfilled every nuance of old covenant Sabbath. It is God’s rest, His ceasing from the work of creation and the work of atonement that we enter when we trust Him. The Sabbath days were only shadows of the eternal finished work of God, and Hebrews 4:1–9 explains how even Israel never entered God’s rest. The old covenant was an agreement Israel could not keep because their promises were flawed. Therefore, God established a new day called TODAY:
He again fixes a certain day, “Today,” saying through David after so long a time just as has been said before, “TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS.” For if Joshua had given them rest, He would not have spoken of another day after that. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God (Heb. 4:7-9).
The new covenant Sabbath is our rest in the Lord Jesus Himself! Because He fulfilled every righteous requirement of the law and broke its curse of death, when we believe in Him, we are born again, filled with His Holy Spirit, (Eph. 1:13,14) and hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3)! We enter eternal life at that moment (Jn. 5:24), and we now have peace with God.
We no longer observe holy days foreshadowing the work of the Lord Jesus; when we believe and trust Jesus, we enter REST itself because we are literally made alive and united with Christ by His own Spirit (Eph. 4:1–6). We are placed in Christ, and His finished work is credited to our accounts. We live in His life and His finished work, and we have rest from all our efforts to make ourselves worthy of Him. He keeps us when we are His (Jn. 10:28).
What Do We Have To Give?
Many of us former Adventists have had to grapple with the fact that we never learned the biblical truth about the Bible’s covenants. When we see that God made an unconditional covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15) in which Abraham made NO promises but lay asleep while God in the forms of a blazing torch and a smoking furnace ratified the covenant—when we see that God made a CONDITIONAL covenant with Israel which involved two-way promises between God and the nation—and when we see that the New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31–33) was also UNCONDITIONAL, a one-way promise that God Himself made—then we see that the Law is not eternal.
The Law—and indeed, the Ten Commandments which are the very “words of the covenant” (Ex. 34:27, 28)—was first given to Israel on Mt Sinai in Exodus 20. That law was founded on the levitical priesthood, and when there is a change of the priesthood, there is of necessity a change of the law (Heb. 7:11,12). Therefore, the Law was temporary, as Paul explains in Galatians 3:15–17, and it ended when the Seed—the Lord Jesus—came and fulfilled all the shadows of the Law.
Even though the moral commands of the Ten are found in the New Testament, it is not the Ten that are written on the hearts of believers.
Even though the moral commands of the Ten are found in the New Testament, it is not the Ten that are written on the hearts of believers. The moral commands do not come from the law, as Adventism taught us. On the contrary, they flow from the law’s Author, God Himself.
Consequently, because we now have a new High Priest in the order of Melchizedek, not of Levi, the Law has no more authority over us. It was fulfilled by the One of whom it was a shadow.
Now we live as citizens of a new kingdom: the kingdom of the Beloved Son (Col 1:13), and in this new kingdom with a new priesthood, we have a NEW LAW, the Law of Christ (1 Cor. 9:21; Gal. 6:2). The Lord Jesus told His disciples that He was giving His followers new commandments, and those commandments include loving one another as He Himself loved us (John 13:34, 2 John 1:5; 1John 2:8–10).
At the same time, the moral commands of God for His people are expounded throughout the New Testament. These include but also go beyond the simple commands of the Decalogue. Yet we cannot say that these new covenant commands come to us via the vehicle of the law; they are part of the new covenant law—the law of Christ.
The morality of both covenants sound similar because God is the Author of both laws. Yet we are no longer under the law which Christ fulfilled; we are under the new covenant law of Christ! His own Spirit indwells us, and it is He—not a set of external commands—that teaches us to trust God when we are tempted. He teaches us to say “No” to the lusts of the flesh.
Former Adventists have a calling to believe what the words of the New Testament actually say. We are not under the law, but we are under grace. Our sins have been forgiven and we have been made spiritually alive by faith in the blood of the Lord Jesus.
Sometimes people fear that if we say they are not under the law, they will be unrestrained in sin. This fear, however, ignores the reality of the new birth.
When we are born again, God Himself in the person of the Holy Spirit indwells us, and He teaches us all truth and convicts us of sin. He is far more effective than the law not only at restraining sin but also at convicting us of things that are sinful. He deals with us in the deepest places of our minds and hearts.
As former Adventists, we have a calling to help our Christian brothers and sisters remember what the New Testament actually teaches about the law.
As former Adventists, we have a calling to help our Christian brothers and sisters remember what the New Testament actually teaches about the law. If we place ourselves under any part of it, we are obligated to keep all of it. Yet to keep the law means to fall from grace, as Paul reminds us.
The new covenant is NEW because Jesus’s blood has opened a new and living way to the Father (Heb. 10:20). On the basis of Jesus’s blood we can go before the Father and seek forgiveness and mercy.
Moreover, the new covenant has a new symbol of “remembrance”. Where the old covenant had the weekly Sabbath as the sign of Israel’s relationship with God, we in the new covenant have the Lord’s Supper. Jesus told us eat it in remembrance of Him. The bread and wine remind us that the Lord Jesus has paid the price for our sin and has ushered us into new life in Him. We live IN the rest of His finished work.
When we see that the Lord Jesus has completely fulfilled the law and has replaced the law as our authority, the One who personally teaches us His word and truth and changes our hearts, we see that the law, including a mandated weekly Sabbath, are cling-ons from an obsolete covenant.
Romans 14 tells us that it is up to individual decisions whether or not people should observe a holy day—but there is no day that is intrinsically holy or mandated by Scripture.
We in the new covenant are not lawless; on the contrary: we live with the permanent presence of our triune God in us! We answer to God Himself, not merely to the commandments of the old covenant! Furthermore, we gladly meet together to encourage one another, as Hebrews 3:13 says. Hebrews 10:23–25 also commands us not to forsake meeting together, especially as we see the Day drawing near. The first day of the week has historically been the day believers meet together to celebrate the Lord’s Supper and to worship the risen Christ corporately. Yet there is no mandate, not “deification” of the first day.
Our role in the church is to call our brothers and sisters back to the apostolic teaching of living by the Spirit. The whole Bible is God’s word to us, and the indwelling Spirit is the One who sanctifies and teaches us.
The Lord Jesus, as Paul says in Romans 10:4, is the end of the law for righteousness to those who believe. He is worthy, and we worship our triune God in spirit and in truth for all eternity. †
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Excellent article… but I’m confused. In the 3rd to the last paragraph, you mention Heb 3:10, but I don’t see how that verse applies to the content in your article’s paragraph.
Thank you for pointing out my mistake! I have corrected it online; it should have been Hebrews 3:13, not 3:10. I also added one more text, Hebrews 10:23–25, which tells us not to forsake meeting together. I’m so sorry!
Thank you, Colleen, for stating biblical truth in such a beautifully written, Spirit inspired and moving article that sent my spirit soaring! Praying, as I share your article with family members that these truths will resonate within them by the Holy Spirit too and that they will come to believe that they are under the new covenant ratified by the blood of Christ and receive His rest! Blessings always, Lona