About the New Covenant

SPEAKER 02 : 0:02

The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:17

What did the first Christians believe about the New Covenant? I’m talking about those Christians who were alive in the days when the New Testament was being written, when they could actually ask the apostles questions. When some of them had actually seen Jesus, or had at least talked to people who did see Jesus and heard him talk, these were heady days for those folks. It does seem to me, in the discussions I’ve heard over the years about the Old and New Covenants, there’s something about them I think very few people seem to have understood. But before I can go into that question, I have to lay a little background. Several years ago, I attended a workshop presented by a psychologist, and it shook me up a little bit. He said that the human mind is like a closet you can never clean out. Everything you hear, everything you see, everything you smell, everything you experience through the senses, and everything you create by thought goes into your mind and stays there forever. Now, I believe that. You never really lose anything. When you forget something, you have temporarily lost the ability to access it. But any number of things, a sound, a word, a smell, can recall it in a snap. It’s kind of troubling because there are just not a few things we would like to forget. We just can’t. Now, let me give you an illustration of what I’m talking about. Imagine a virtual room covered with cubbyholes from top to bottom, side to side, all four walls. Now, if you sit down to watch a movie, you will fill a number of those cubbyholes with the story and the events of the movie. Some of the events will make a deeper impression than others and will have a dominant place. Let’s say they will be at eye level. Other events will be up against the ceiling and out of reach. Sex and violence tend to print more deeply and can often be troubling, depending on how powerfully they’re presented. I still recall that scene from The Godfather where a dead horse’s head turns up in somebody’s bed. Man, that was shocking, the way they presented that thing. And it’s just there, and it won’t go away. Now, the human mind is designed in such a way that it has to create meaning out of all the junk we put in there. Nothing can remain meaningless. I’m going to repeat that. We’ve got to understand this. Nothing can remain meaningless. This is what Viktor Frankl calls the drive to meaning. So, while we sleep, our mind runs through all this stuff and does some sorting and rearranging. It attempts to find relationships and to assign meanings to events that take place. The brain runs down all the corridors and looks in all the cubbyholes. We’re sleeping, hopefully not snoring. We’re dead to the world, but still we are aware of this. And the weird thing is that the body has a little fluid or chemical that it puts into us while we’re doing this that paralyzes us. And that’s what keeps us from walking, hurting ourselves, and so forth while all this is going on. You can sometimes watch your dog sleeping, and you’ll realize it’s going on in the dog’s brain as well. Okay, the brain finds things that are troubling you the most and attempts to deal with them. It takes a terribly violent act that you witnessed and determines first if it was real or imagined. I think of the guy who said, there have been an awful lot of bad things in my life, most of which never happened. But anyway, it tries to deal with these. It will try to straighten them out. It relates it to other events you have experienced and to other facts that you know. Hypnotism is sometimes used to recall events, but it’s an unreliable method in that hypnotism does not always cause you to discern between what is real and what is imagination. Because in our lifetime, we have created who knows how many imaginary scenes that never did take place. Now, out of all this jumble of junk, you may look at a room full of this stuff, the mind creates meaning. When we’re alive, when we’re awake, when we’re sleeping, it’s working. But that meaning is not always right. That meaning is not always healthy. It can sometimes create mental illness in the form of neuroses. A classic example of this is what I call, and I didn’t call it that, I forget which psychologist did, calls it the double bind. Take two authority figures, the Bible and, say, the apostolic leader of a church who is said to be infallible. Now, you may find the Bible says one thing, the apostle says something quite different. Both are infallible in your eyes. That creates a double bind. Now, it’s easily cured if we can just decide which authority to follow. But if our system requires that both be right, then our mind has to make sense out of something that doesn’t make sense. What do we usually conclude when we come up against a double bind? I’ve seen it in practice, and I really appreciate it when I finally found somebody that explained it. But what happens is when we can’t make our decision between those two, we conclude there must be something wrong with me because I can’t see this. Or we lie to ourselves and pretend we can see what we don’t. We tell ourselves that if we’ll be patient, we will come back and see it again. We will finally see it. Our subconscious mind, doing its best, rearranges all the wires in our mind so we can find meaning in the meaninglessness. And when we are wired wrong, we make bad decisions and we become confused. Now, I’ve had occasion, being in the field I’m in, to counsel with people from religious traditions that have created the double bind. And I noticed something as we were going along in several of those congregations. The most common phrase I hear is, I’m confused. Their leadership tells them, just be patient and you will come to see it. I got news for you. The devil will tell you exactly the same thing. It’s sort of like Groucho Marx’s example of a woman who finds her husband in a closet at a party with another woman, lipstick all over his face, and he says, are you going to believe me or believe your eyes? The normal response of a sane mind in the presence of a lie is confusion. What’s the way out of the confusion? Simple. Call it a lie. recognize that you are being lied to by a liar. Say it out loud. You can say it in privacy of your own home. Say it out loud. That’s a lie. Interesting, when you do it, when you finally bring yourself to do that, confusion will melt away and meaning will start to return. Now, what does all this have to do with the question of the old and the new covenants as seen by the first Christians? Stay with me through this short break. Grab a pad and a pencil. I’m going to give you an address and a phone number so you can ask for this. And I’ll be right back to explain what I’m driving at.

SPEAKER 02 : 7:53

Central to understanding the Christian faith is the idea of covenant. What exactly is the difference between the old and new covenants? And what is behind the biblical idea of covenant? Write or call for a free CD titled, The Idea of Covenant. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44.com.

SPEAKER 03 : 8:21

Now, the odd thing about all this is that a man named Moses, in his last sermon to the children of Israel before they entered the Promised Land, handed them the answer to this question. You’ll find this in Deuteronomy chapter 6. He said, now, these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments which the Lord your God commanded to teach you that you may do them in the land where you go to possess it. This is so you may fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes, all his commandments I command you. You and your son and your son’s son, all the days of your life that your days may be prolonged. It often gets overlooked, you know. People think, well, God gave Israel law, and they never give a second thought really to why. Did they think it was for God’s benefit? Of course not. It was for their benefit. Hear, therefore, Israel, and observe to do it, that it may be well with you, that you may increase mightily as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you in the land that flows with milk and honey. Then he says this, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your might. And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart. They are to have a prominent position in that closet you can never clean out, your mind. Now, if you’ve been following me on this, you may already be ahead of me in realizing, oh, I see. The law gives you a framework in which the events, the circumstances that you go through in life can be placed. It makes it easier to know where you’re at. It makes it easier to know whether this is a good thing to do or a bad thing to do. He goes on, verse 7, “…you shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house.” You shall talk of them when you are walking by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. You shall bind them for a sign on your right hand. They shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them upon the posts of your house and on your gates. Now, what effect does this have on how your mind develops meaning? Well, it develops deep grooves. When you’re talking about this when you get up and when you lie down at night, if you’re talking about it at the dinner table, you’re talking about it at your son as you’re walking along the road outside, you are laying in place memories, a framework, a set of standards, a worldview, if you will, into which everything that happens has meaning. It develops deep grooves, prominent ideas that give you a worldview that is just not shared by an awful lot of people. Write them on your doorpost, he said. You know, I wonder if you perchance have the Ten Commandments on the wall of your house somewhere. Years ago, someone gave me a plaque, nice-looking plaque with the Ten Commandments. So I put it up on the wall. I no longer notice it. I know where it is. I can walk to the house and walk right over to it and read it. But I don’t even notice it. It’s a phenomenon of human nature that we do not notice what is always there. We notice what is new. We notice what is changed. I was once invited to speak to the seniors at a school called the Master’s School. They gave us a tour of the place, and every time we turned around, it seemed, we came and encountered a scripture on a wall somewhere. They were in calligraphy. They were in artwork. They were printed out on long printer paper. Most of them were obviously changed regularly, and the scriptures were applicable to what was going on in the school right then, now, current. And they changed them regularly. I don’t think anything stayed up for over a week. You know, the equivalent of doorposts, as they put it back then in our houses, is the refrigerator door. We have these magnets. We stick things on the refrigerator with a magnet. But if you have kids in the house, you really ought to have visuals around that change frequently. All these visuals, be they pictures or scriptures, go into that closet regularly. And they will stay in that kid’s mind forever. And when a bad experience goes into that closet, the things you have taught them will be there to make sense out of the things that come rolling in out of season, to attach the right meaning to the events instead of the wrong meaning. You are giving the kids an absolute that will tend to support mental health. It’s staggering when you think about it, and it’s as logical as sunrise, sunset when you think about it. Be very careful not to ever give your kids a double bind where they have to figure out whether mommy or daddy is lying to them. And he goes on to say it again. You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. This is crucial. And it’s a lot more than some little old block in which you have a roll of screwable commandments that you tie to your wrist, as I think some Jews do. It’s more than that. You’ve got to talk about it. It’s got to be something that registers on the mind and stays there. Repetition prints these things more prominently in the mind, especially repetition with variation. These things are in the cubbyholes at eye level in your little room, and they dominate a lot of the other stuff. You know, if you really want a good example of this, if you happen to be a person who has watched the Star Trek series, or you know somebody who has, we call ourselves sometimes Trekkies, they tell you the characters, the stories, the plot lines, they register on this, and they’re in there, and they will be there forever. Hopefully, we’ve got something firm that we can use to gather meaning from them. The fact is that Americans and others… have shamefully neglected this commandment, and we have created a problem that we cannot solve in less than a generation. And we won’t solve it then, unless we go to work on it right now. And Christian churches have been just as shamefully neglectful of this as anybody has been. If you want to understand what’s going wrong with us, it is simple. We have not taught our children that God is the ultimate authority. Who do your children see as the ultimate authority? The government? The school? Perhaps the church? You? Oh, well, the church is a good authority, right? No, not necessarily. Consider a church that teaches the law of God as an external authority which the church is obliged to enforce. I think the Catholic Church is less inclined this direction than it was at one time in its history, but they’ve been there. You could easily have a generation of kids who grow up hating the church and the law of God, and when their generation becomes influential, they will try to get rid of the things they hated when they were kids. Catholic Church, to some degree, may be experiencing that now, and for all I know, the church you attend may. If the churches continue to ignore the law of God in teaching their children, the church… That church is headed toward the graveyard of history. The problem of evangelism in today’s church is they have not even been replacing their losses. Losses? Yeah, losses. The people who die and the children who leave. Because the number of children who leave is probably greater than the ones who stay. There was a time when Christian churches grew rapidly. They still do in places in the world. Take Africa as an example. But in the Western world, we’ve been treading water for the last generation, and frankly, we have less and less of a reason to even exist. Here is the task before us. While we evangelize our communities, we must also evangelize our children. The churches will grow if we do more than these two things. evangelize our children and stand as a light in the community for what is right in God’s eyes. Our children must be taught from their earliest years to love God, to love Jesus. And this is a stick in the craw of a lot of Christian people. They’ve got to be taught to love the law of God. They must be taught that the church is not the ultimate authority. God is. And I’m not going to go down this road today, but they also need to learn that the Bible is not the ultimate authority. God is, for the Bible points to God and is about God, and He is the authority. Children must be taught that the law of God is nothing more than an expression of the character of God as it applies in a given circumstance and time. They must not be taught that they are serving the God of their parents or their parents’ church. They must be taught to develop a personal relationship with God. They must be taught the law of God. not as an external authority over their lives, but as an internal authority in their lives. And you see, this is the very point of the new covenant. Paul wrote this, I think it was Paul, in Hebrews 8, verse 6, “…but now has Jesus obtained a more excellent ministry, by which also he is the mediator of a better covenant, established upon better promises.” If that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no place looked for for another one. But finding fault with them, he said, Behold, the days come, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. You see, the Pharisees in Jesus’ day did look upon the law as an external authority over their lives. What Jesus wanted the law to become was the internal authority. In verse 9, he says, I’m going to make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not according to the covenant I made with their fathers. When I brought them out of the land of Egypt, they didn’t continue in my covenant. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days. Now listen carefully. I will put my laws into their mind and write them in their hearts, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people. You know, this is completely counter to the asinine argument that the passing of the old covenant meant a passing of the law. It was not the law that changed. It was the locus of control. What I mean by that? What I mean is that the law is no longer an external authority. It is an internal authority. It is in your mind. It’s in your heart. It gives meaning to life. It gives you a framework that you can use to direct and understand all the information that comes your way. It is not the government, be it state or church, that decides how you must obey the law. It is you who must decide. It is not the church or government that must enforce the law in your life. It’s you. Under the Israelite covenant, the political structure of the nation had the authority to enforce the law of God. The new covenant conveys no such authority. Now, I think there has been a presumption that this writing of the law in your heart is a spiritual thing that takes place with no effort on our part. I don’t think so. God is not miraculously going to put something into your mind and your heart without you doing something about it. Think about that, and I’ll be right back with more.

SPEAKER 02 : 20:59

For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, About the New Covenant. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.

SPEAKER 03 : 21:28

Now, if you really want to understand this, take your Bible, get yourself a nice hot cup of coffee, a comfortable chair, turn to the 119th Psalm, and just read through this long Psalm, listening to what this chap is trying to say. because it is one of the most profound statements you’ll ever find anywhere about establishing a basis, a foundation for a worldview, for a way of looking at the world, for putting stuff into that closet you can never clean out, which will help you keep it organized and clean. Take, for example, 119 verse 9. This is in the Psalms. Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to your word. King James English is a little bit awkward. I don’t personally like it, but what he’s saying is, how on earth am I going to clean up my life? I know, by paying attention to what I’m doing in the light of the Bible. How hard is that? With my whole heart I have sought you. Don’t let me wander from your commandments. Your word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against you. You do realize that’s nothing more than simple memorization and implanting in the mind by repetition. I am often surprised at how much Scripture I can cite. Not having made any conscious effort to memorize it, it’s just that I have spoken the words so many times in sermons, radio broadcasts, and you name it, that when I face situations in life where there are questions that arise… An awful lot of the time, some scripture pops into my mind that God has told us a long time ago how to handle situations like that. In verse 12, he said, Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes. With my lips I have declared all the judgments of your mouth. Now, notice this is not something that merely goes on in the mind. It is a matter of the lips. Second, the word declared means in Hebrew to score with a mark like you would do with a tally or record. I have checked them off, tallied them with my lips. I have rejoiced in the way of your testimonies as much as in all riches. I will meditate in your precepts. I have respect unto your ways. I will delight myself in your statutes. I will not forget your word. The synonyms for law in the first two stanzas of this psalm are fascinating. They are these. Your word, your testimonies, your precepts, your ways, your statutes, your commandments, your judgments. There are seven of them just right there. This is fascinating to watch because what he is telling us is this. By the repetition, and it is so much better to start when you’re just a little kid before you can even read them yourself, to learn to memorize passages out of the Bible. They go into your mind. They will never come out. That’s the way we are designed with good reason. They will be there when you face decisions in your life to tell you when you’re doing something stupid wrong. Although sometimes we are only able to put that together after we have been shown to be stupid, but that’s another sermon for another day. Later in verse 17, deal bountifully with your servant that I may live and keep your word. Open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Wondrous things? Isn’t the law a yoke of bondage? He didn’t think so. For him, it was a light to his feet, a lamp to the path, so he could see where he was going and not fall down and hurt himself. He said, I’m a stranger in the earth. Don’t hide your commandments from me. What does that mean? That means I’m going to face a lot of things I’ve never faced before. And I need a worldview. I need a framework into which I can place all this stuff. He says, You have rebuked the proud that are cursed, who err from your commandments. Remove from me reproach and contempt. I’ve kept your testimonies. Princes did speak against me, but I meditated in your statutes. Your testimonies are my delight and my advisors. The law of God was his advisor in difficult times. It was of enormous value to him. Notice the difference between the external old covenant imposed on you by some person and the internal new covenant which this man had already found. It is really remarkable to see the degree to which this happens in a child’s life as well as a grown man. In the 105th verse of this psalm, he makes this profound statement. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. Question. Where is the light coming from? Yeah, yeah. But where is the light coming from? It’s not from the church that walks alongside you. The light comes from inside. Right? from the law written and engraven in your heart, your mind, and your conscience. But you are going to have to work at putting the law of God into your heart and mind, or it will never be there, and neither will the light. The same thing is true of your children. Your children can be a part of the new covenant from the beginning. Just follow this commandment. Teach these commandments diligently to your children. Talk of them when you sit in your house. Talk when you walk by the wayside. When we talk about the moral collapse of our society, we want to blame it on government, on the schools, on anything except us. But if all parents obeyed this simple commandment, this problem could be turned around. in a generation.

SPEAKER 02 : 27:32

You have heard Ronald L. Dart. If you would like more information or if you have any questions, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. In the U.S. and Canada, call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and visit our website at borntowin.net.

SPEAKER 01 : 28:01

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