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Continuing with yesterday’s thought – that God keeps his promises even if we won’t/can’t keep ours – we contemplate today’s lesson scripture from Hebrews, chapter eight:

6 But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises.
7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one.
8 God finds fault with them when he says: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;
9 not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; for they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.
10 This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
11 And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.
12 For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” Heb 8:6-12 (NRSV)

Some people read Hebews 8:5 and think, “Ah-hah, he’s making the same argument as Plato”. Not so. Plato submitted that our world was a mere shadow of the “real” world, which was an abstract perfect conceptual “reality” as opposed to a physical, messy “non-reality”. But Hebrews has just spent the preceding chapters emphasizing that Christ was truly human – God incarnate – and in his resurrected human form had entered into “heaven”: God’s dimension. That’s not Plato – who didn’t conceive of joining the perfected abstraction with the imperfect material world.

What God has done, says Hebrews, is kept his covenant by interceding on our behalf himself – in the flesh – fulfilling the original promise of humanity. God has kept our end of the bargain! We’re not all the way there yet, but Jeremiah’s prophecy of a new covenant has been fulfilled.  Moreover, it has been fulfilled without abandoning the old covenant. Rather, the old covenant has been honored and propitiated by God’s substitution of himself in our place.  I love Hebrews because no one could make this up – it had to come from beyond our dimension.

So, what does the law that we’ll be studying this Sunday – the covenant made at Sinai – tell us about ourselves?  About God?  About our relationship with God?