Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

Hebkews VIII. 8-12. 481
lies in its inefficacy, which has been demonstrated by actual experience.
The cause of this is to be traced not merely to the Israelites
not continuing in that covenant, but to the mutual relation that
subsisted between the people and their God, which is expressed in
the two members: they continued not, etc., and I regarded them not.
The people, on their part, remained not in the covenant, fulfilled
not the commands enjoined as the condition of the covenant, and
God, on his part, punished the people, inasmuch as after, and in
consequence of, the transgressions, he accepted them no more. The.
conduct of God regulated itself then according to the conduct of
men. God first demanded hefore he gave; he first imposed his
commands without regard to the capacity and power of men; then
he rejected the people because they fulfilled not these commands.
(It needs not, of course, to be shewn here for the first time, how
wise this stage of legal enactment in the training of Israel was, how
necessary it was in order to awaken the knowledge of the infirmities
of sin. Nor does our author deny that it was necessary /or its thne-.
But he proves from this announcement of God himself to Jeremiah,
that this stage was only a preparatory one, which could not confer
blessedness and brought no perfection.) It is difierent with the new
covenant which God promises to make in the coming days. In this
covenant God will not write his law outwardly, as a cold requirement,
on tables of stone, but he will ^vrite it in the hearts and in the minds
of his people; he will, therefore, first give to the people and then
ask from them; he will first give them a new heart, a regenerate
spirit, pleasure, love, and joy in God's will, and then he will require
of them ; nor will he then require in vain ; for he wiU then be truly
the people's God, worshipped and beloved by them, and in consequence
of this, the people can then also be truly his people, protected
and blessed by him. In a third principal idea (ver. 11, 12), it is
now shewn still more plainly, how the fulfillment of the law is under
this new covenant to rest on the inward disposition, and on what
ground this disposition is to rest. In the old covenant God had
commissioned Moses and the priests to read the law to the people,
and to lay before them the command to acknowledge Jehovah as
their God. There is to be no such outward process under the new
covenant. Then will every one personally, and from his own inmost
experience, know and acknowledge the Lord,—and how.? by what
means.? Because he forgives their sins, and remembers not their
iniquities. The diff'erence, then, between the old and the new covenant
is traced even to this innermost centre-point in that evangelical
announcement of God to Jeremiah. There it is the laio that
stands first, and lays down its requirements, which man cannot
fulfil, because he wants the power and the spirit, the power of love
and the spirit of love. Here it is free grace, the forgiveness of sins.
Vol. VL— 31