Is the Law Faulty?
“Because finding fault with them, He says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Hebrews 8:8).
The weakness of the first covenant was not in the covenant or the law itself. It was the people who were faulty (Hebrews 8:7; Romans 9:30 to 10:3; Hebrews 3:18 to 4:2). The Old Covenant was an agreement between God and Israel: “And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments” (Exodus 34:28). The Ten Commandments were the basis of the covenant. God promised to bless Israel upon condition of obedience to Him (Exodus 19:5, 6).
In the Old Covenant, God wanted to write the Ten Commandments on the hearts but the people said, no, we can do it ourselves! “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). The people relied on their own strength to keep the law instead of letting God do that with the power of the Holy Spirit.
The weakness of the Old Covenant lay in the fact that it was dependent upon the promises of the people. The faultiness of the Old Covenant did not lie in the commandments over which it was made, nor in God’s part of the agreement, but in the human element.
Ever since Sinai, God had been trying to lead the people to a higher spiritual experience such as is represented in the new covenant, but they rebelliously refused to progress beyond their restricted concepts of what constituted true religion. They clung to the belief that salvation could be achieved by a strict surface adherence to law, particularly laws regarding ceremonial acts and offerings.
But in the New Covenant, God promised, “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; 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” (Hebrews 8:10).
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In His service,
BibleAsk Team
