New Covenant and the Spirit

The promise of the Spirit is vital to the redemption of humanity and the New Covenant of God with His people.

The New Testament connects the “Promise of the Spirit” to the “Blessings of Abraham,” the promise that God would bless the nations through the Great Patriarch. The Spirit is the gift believers receive “through the hearing of faith.” It is part of the covenant promises given to Abraham that find their fulfillment in the “New Covenant” established by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.

[Photo by Oliver Plattner on Unsplash]

The Apostle Peter connected the Gift of the Holy Spirit to the “blessings” for the nations promised to Abraham during his sermon on the Day of Pentecost. The gift received by the 120 disciples on that day, and by 3,000 converts following Peter’s sermon, was in fulfillment of what God promised Abraham centuries earlier.

• “The promise is for you, and to your children and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call” - (Acts 2:38-39, Genesis 12:1-3, 17:7).

Unfortunately, Israel failed to keep the Abrahamic Covenant. Though the nation had sworn to perform “all the words which Yahweh has spoken,” history attests to the nation’s failure to fulfill its covenant obligations. The Israelites could not meet its requirements since they did not have this gift. Without the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, they would never fulfill the “righteous requirements of the Law” - (Exodus 24:1-8, Numbers 11:1-15).

The Mosaic legislation anticipated Israel’s failure and the need for something beyond written Law. After predicting the scattering of the nation as punishment for its sins, God promised that after Israel truly repented, the nation would “return to me and obey my voice with all your heart and soul.” God would gather His people from all nations and “circumcise your heart and the heart of your seed to love Yahweh your God with all your heart” - (Deuteronomy 30:1-6).

The themes of renewal and circumcision of the heart were addressed by the prophet Jeremiah. God would “make a New Covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” but not a covenant according to the one He made with the nation’s forefathers at Mount Sinai – (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would provide a New Covenant. By His Spirit, He would write His laws in the hearts of His people. This circumcision of the heart foreseen by Moses came to fruition in the “New Covenant” prophesied by Jeremiah and inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth.

The New Testament applies this promise to the covenant founded by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. Likewise, the Prophet Ezekiel employed the same theme, but he added the essential element of the Spirit:

• (Ezekiel 36:24-28) – “Therefore will I take you from among the nations, and gather you out of all the lands, and will bring you upon your own soil… And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the heart of stone of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh, and my spirit will I put within you and will cause that in my statutes you shall walk, and my regulations you shall observe and do.”

THE COVENANT

Thus, Ezekiel combined the promises of the New Covenant, the Gift of the Spirit, and the circumcised heart. Centuries later, Paul would apply these promises to the congregation in the city of Corinth, likewise the Author of the Letter to the Hebrews to his readers:

• (2 Corinthians 3:1-6) – “You are our letter, inscribed in our hearts, noted and read by all men, manifesting yourselves that you are a letter of Christ, ministered by us, inscribed, not with ink, but with the Spirit of a Living God; not in tablets of stone, but in tablets which are hearts of flesh… Not that of our own selves sufficient are we to reckon anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God, who also has made us sufficient to be ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive.”

• (Hebrews 8:6-13) – “But now has he obtained a more excellent ministry, by so much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted upon better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second. For finding fault with them, he said, Behold, the days come, says the Lord, That I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them forth out of the land of Egypt. For they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. After those days, says the Lord, I will put my laws into their mind, and on their heart also will I write them. And I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people… For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and their sins will I remember no more. In that he says, A new covenant, he has made the first old. But that which is becoming old and aged is nigh unto vanishing away.”

The prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel pointed to the centrality of the Spirit under this “New Covenant.” With the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, the long-awaited New Covenant arrived for the people of God when the Gift of the Spirit was poured out on the Church on the Day of Pentecost.

The connection of the Gift of the Spirit to the Abrahamic Covenant and the “New Covenant” illustrates the continuity of what God is doing today in the Church with His redemptive purposes for the nation of Israel.

Neither the Church, the New Covenant, nor the Gift of the Spirit was an unforeseen interim stage or necessary detour in God’s redemptive plan. They are fundamental parts of His covenant and promises, and they have been so from the beginning.

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SEE ALSO:

• Covenant and Creation - (The promises to Abraham are fulfilled through Jesus in the New Covenant inaugurated by his Death and Resurrection)

• His Incomparable Covenant - (Jesus inaugurated the superior New Covenant through his Death and Resurrection, rendering the old covenant obsolete – Hebrews 8:6-13)

• Purification of Sins - (Having achieved the purification of sins, Jesus sat down at the right hand of God to intercede for his people as their faithful High Priest)

• La Nouvelle Ère - (L'ère de la prêtrise lévitique s'est terminée avec l'arrivée de la parole dans le Fils de Dieu, notre grand Souverain Sacrificateur pour toujours)