EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/24/2026
4:38 PM
My
Worship Time Focus:
“The Promise of
the New Covenant”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference: Luke
1:77
Message of the verse: “to
give to His people the knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins”
In an earlier SD it was noted to experience the
promised blessings of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, as well as to escape
the threatened cures for violating the Mosaic covenant, it requires that God
sovereignly give to His people the knowledge of salvation. Now the knowledge in view here is
not theological or theoretical, but the personal knowledge that comes by the
forgiveness of … sins.
3/24/2026
10:47 PM
John MacArthur writes: “Moses, the giver of the law, recognized the
need for this covenant. As he reiterated
the principles of the Mosaic covenant to the new generation about to enter the
Promised Land, Moses spoke of another covenant ‘besides the covenant which
[God] had made with them at Horeb [the Mosaic covenant]’ (Deut. 29:1). That the people of Israel would be unable
to keep the Mosaic covenant is evident from Deuteronomy 30:1-3:
“ 1 ¶
"And when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the
curse, which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the
nations where the LORD your God has driven you, 2 and return to the LORD your God, you and your
children, and obey his voice in all that I command you today, with all your heart
and with all your soul, 3 then the LORD
your God will restore your fortunes and have mercy on you, and he will gather
you again from all the peoples where the LORD your God has scattered you.”
“The
reference to their banishment and captivity makes it clear that the people of
Israel were not going to obey the law of Moses.
God promised to regather them from the nations to which He had scattered
them—but only when they returned to Him and obeyed Him with all their hearts
and souls. (It should be noted that Israel’s reconstitution as a nation in 1948 is not the regathering in view in this
passage; modern Israel is a thoroughly secular state, whose people as a whole
have not returned to the Lord with all their hearts and souls. The regathering predicted here refers to
Israel’s national salvation [Rom. 11:25-26]).”
I would like to say that the Bible shows us every time that Israel will
come back to their land, and so in my opinion this is the last time that Israel
will return to their land. When the rapture
of the Church happens, [and I hope that it is very soon], Israel will be in
their land as soon after the rapture of
the Church the Tribulation period will start, the last seven years that are
spoken of in the 9th chapter of Daniel. Once that is over the Lord will return to
planet earth as seen in the 19th chapter of the book of
Revelation. He will end the battle of Armageddon
and then set up the Millennial Kingdom which was promised to Israel and then
once that is over the Great White Throne Judgment will happen, after that heaven
and earth will be destroyed seen in 2 Peter chapter three, and then there will
be a new heaven and earth, and a New Jerusalem as eternity will then begin.
“Before anyone can turn to the Lord
and be saved, God must first circumcise their hearts (Deut. 30:6). Here is the essence of the New covenant—a spiritual
surgery performed on the sinful heart of man.
Only such a radical transformation (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17), can break the
power of the law of sin and enable people to keep the law of God. Since the Mosaic, Davidic, and Abrahamic
covenants did not have the power to change the heart, God provided the New
covenant.
“The most explicit Old Testament
description of the New Covenant is in Jeremiah 33:31-34:
“31 "Behold, the days are coming, declares
the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the
house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant
that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring
them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their
husband, declares the LORD. 33 For this
is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,
declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their
hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his
neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know
me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will
forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.’” (ESV)
“By
Jeremiah’s time, Israel’s situation was desperate. The northern kingdom (Israel) had already
fallen to the Assyrians, and the days of the southern kingdom (Judah) were
numbered. The people were apostate, and
Jeremiah’s dire warnings of impending judgment and calls for repentance went
unheeded. In the short term, then, the people’s forsaking of the Mosaic
covenant had rendered their situation hopeless.
But God through Jeremiah promised a new covenant—the one Moses had
spoken of centuries earlier (see the discussion of Deut. 30 above—His unconditional,
unilateral, eternal, irrevocable promise to redeem lost sinners from judgment
and hell.)
“The promised New covenant would ‘not
[be] like the [Mosaic] covenant which [God] made with their fathers’ (v.
32). In sharp contrast to the
external law code of the Mosaic covenant, God promised that in the New covenant
He would ‘put [His] law within them and [write it] on their heart’ (v. 33), thus
granting sinners a new heart (Ezek. 36:26).
The powerful spiritual dynamic provided in the New covenant provides
deliverance from the power, penalty, and, ultimately, the presence of sin. God irresistibly draws sinners to Himself
(John 6:44), and to those who come (John 6:37) He promises, ‘I will forgive
their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more’ (Jer. 31:34; Ezek.
36:25). The New covenant thus
provides the essential things that all the other covenants lacked—a new heart,
power to obey God, fellowship with God, the Holy Spirit (Ezek. 36:27), and the
forgiveness of sin. Those are the keys
that unlock all the promised blessings of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants
and cancel the condemnation of the Mosaic law (cf. Rom. 8:1-2).
“The New covenant is personal,
promising the salvation of individual sinners through faith in the sacrificial
death of Jesus Christ, the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin or the world’
(John 1:29). Everyone who ever has
or ever will be saved has come to salvation under the terms of the New covenant
(John 14:6; Acts 4:12; cf. Acts 10:42-43; Matt. 1:21; 1 Tim. 2:5-6).
“But the New covenant also has national
implications for Israel. The irrevocable
promises of God that Israel would be saved and blessed, that Messiah’s kingdom
will come, and that their land be restored all hinge on the nation’s believing
in Jesus Christ. In the future, the
believing remnant of the Jewish people will ‘look on Me whom they have
pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and the
will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn’ (Zech.
12:10), and as a result ‘all Israel will be saved (Rom. 11:26). Until that time of national repentance
and acceptance of the New covenant and the One whose death made it possible,
Israel cannot receive the blessings of the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants.”
3/24/2026
11:23 PM
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