The New Covenant has begun. The Mosaic Covenant has passed away, and the Temple has been destroyed, thus, testifying that the Old Covenant is no longer in force. Under the New Covenant we have teachers of the word of God. In fact, teachers are one of the gifts of God to his Church (Ephesians 4:8, 11). If the Old Covenant has, indeed, passed away, giving place to the New, and, if the Lord has placed teachers among his people to clarify the word of God, what does Paul mean when he quotes Jeremiah saying: “they shall not teach every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest” (Hebrews 8:11)? Why isn’t this Scripture a contradiction of the idea that the New Covenant has begun? The answer lay in the process of coming to know the Lord and entering one’s inheritance.
Under the Old Covenant people were born into their inheritance, but they had to be taught who God was and who they were in relationship to him. This is not so under the New Covenant. Believers enter their inheritance in Christ only after they have come to know him through the Gospel. It is because they have come to know the Lord that they become believers, and as believers they accept the terms of the New Covenant. So, they don’t have to be taught who the Lord is when they receive Jesus as Savior, because they already know him. Teachers are there to help people who already know the Lord to come to a fuller understanding of him and his ways.
Paul speaks of the unrighteousness of believers in Hebrews 8:12, saying that the Lord would be merciful to them, but what does this mean? A righteous God certainly doesn’t approve of unrighteousness in others, so what does the Scripture tell us? Many believe that God had to change his plan when Adam rebelled in the garden. Adam’s rebellion changed how man would come to know God, but it didn’t change God’s plan one iota, as far as bringing man into a perfect knowledge of his Lord and Creator is concerned. The Law came to man through Moses; it didn’t exist in the beginning. There was no such law in the Garden of Eden. Yet, if we used the Mosaic Law to judge Adam’s behavior, it is evident that he sinned, even before he rebelled from God in Genesis, chapter 3.
Consider for a moment what Eve told the serpent in Genesis 3:2-3. She said that God told them they couldn’t touch the Tree of Knowledge or they would die. God said no such thing (cf. Genesis 2:16-17). So, who told Eve that she would die, if she touched the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? One cannot say that she simply made a mistake, because Adam was present with her to correct her, if she was wrong (Genesis 3:6). Therefore, logic demands that it was Adam who told Eve that God said they would die, if they touched the tree. This indicates that Adam not only lied to Eve, his wife, but he also marred the character of God in the eyes of his wife, showing he was sinning before he rebelled against God by eating of the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis 3:6. Yet, sin, alone, didn’t keep mankind from eating of the Tree of Life, if they were so inclined!
If God forgave the unrighteousness of Adam in hope of his change of heart, then it couldn’t be wrong, today, for God to forgive believers of their unrighteousness in hope that they would come to a fuller understanding of their Savior and Creator, becoming more and more like him. So, just as any good parent forthrightly forgives his or her children who disobey them, so does God.
Thus, by declaring that he would make a new covenant with his people, the Lord, through Jeremiah made the Mosaic Covenant old (Jeremiah 31:31-34), and by Paul’s day he says it was about to pass away (Hebrews 8:13), which it did in 70 AD with the destruction of the Temple. With the Temple not in existence, there was no vehicle through which the Mosaic Covenant could be carried out. The Old Covenant, in order to exist at all, needs the Temple or the Tabernacle and all its holy things, but all these were parts of the pattern[1] that pointed to Christ and are needed no more.
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[1] See my previous studies: The Tabernacle the Lord Pitched and Jesus, the Tabernacle of God.
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