“But God found fault with the people and said: ‘The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah’ ” (Hebrews 8:8).
The problem with the Old Testament Law wasn’t that it was bad. It was good. The Ten Commandments describe a perfect life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with them. The problem was never the Law. It was the people. People are still the problem because we still can’t keep the Law on our own. No one ever has but Jesus. The reason the old plan didn’t work was because we couldn’t let it work. What it did, though, was diagnose our condition and show us our need of salvation.
That’s not the end of the story, though. God loves us so much He came up with another plan. It’s called the New Covenant. God hates sin and He couldn’t just overlook our failures. The new plan involved sending someone to take our punishment. It had to be a perfect person, though, and there weren’t any in the world’s population. God solved the problem by sending His Son, Jesus. He was fully human and fully divine. He was born in a manger, lived as we do without ever sinning and was fully qualified to take our place.
Many things can be said about the new covenant but one thing stands out. God loved us enough not to give up on us. When we failed repeatedly to keep the Law God sent Jesus to rescue us. He not only kept the Law, He died for those of us who couldn’t keep it.
Salvation, which is so free to us, cost God a great deal. The only way He could grant us a new plan was to have His Son come and die for us. Who can comprehend love like that? When we feel that we aren’t worth much all we have to do is remember the price God paid for us. When we realize that God sent His Son to redeem us it lets us know how loved we are, how valuable to God we are and, most important, how blessed we are.
