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Music For the Soul
Devotional: June 15th

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THE NEW COVENANT

This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord. - Hebrews 10:16

We can scarcely estimate the shock to a primitive Hebrew Christian when he discovered that Judaism was to fade away. Such an earthquake might seem to leave nothing standing. Now, the great object of this Epistle to the Hebrews is to insist on that truth, and to calm the early Hebrew Christians under it, by showing them that the disappearance of the older system left them no poorer, but infinitely richer, inasmuch as all that was in it was more perfectly in Christ’s Gospel. The writer has accordingly been giving his strength to show that all along the line Christianity is the perfecting of Judaism, in its Founder, in its priesthood, in its ceremonies, in its Sabbath. Here he touches the great central thought of the Old Covenant between God and man, and he falls back upon the strange words of one of the old prophets. Jeremiah had declared as emphatically as he, the writer, has been declaring, how the ancient system was to melt away and be absorbed in a new covenant between God and man. Is there any other instance of a religion which on the one side proclaims its own eternal duration, " the Word of the Lord endureth for ever," and on the other side declares that it is to be abrogated, antiquated, and done away? The writer of the Epistle had learnt from sacreder lips than Jeremiah’s the same lesson, for the Master said at the most solemn hour of His career, "This is the blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." These articles of the New Covenant go very deep into the essence of Christianity, and may well be thoughtfully pondered by us all, if we want to know what the specific differences between the ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ and all other systems are.

The earliest Christian confession, the simplest and sufficient creed, was, Jesus is the Christ. What do we mean by that? We mean that He is the realization of the dim figure which arose, majestic and enigmatical, through the mists of a partial revelation. We mean that He is, as the word signifies etymologically, "anointed" with the Divine Spirit for the discharge of all the offices which, in old days, were filled by men who were fitted and designated for them by outward anointing - prophet, priest, and king. We mean that He is the substance of which ancient ritual was the shadow. We mean that He is the goal to which all that former unveiling, in part, of the mind and will of God steadfastly pointed. This, and nothing less, is the meaning of the declaration that Jesus is the Christ. The true presence of God, the true lustrous emanation from, and manifestation of, the abysmal brightness, is in Jesus Christ, " the effulgence of His glory, and the express image of His Person." For the central blaze of God’s glory is God’s love, and that rises to its highest degree in the name and mission of Jesus Christ our Saviour. If we would see God, our faith must grasp the Man, the Christ, the Lord - as Climax of all names - the Incarnate God, the Eternal Word who has come among us to reveal to us all the glory of the Lord. So let us make sure that the fleshly tables of our hearts are not like the mouldering stones that antiquarians dig up on some historical site, bearing half-obliterated inscriptions, with fragmentary names of mighty kings of long ago, but with the many-syllabled Name written firm, clear, legible, complete upon them, as on some granite block fresh from the stone cutter’s chisel.

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