THE BLOOD OF THE NEW COVENANT

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”

1 Corinthians 11:25

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Soon after God created people, He displayed an affinity for making covenants.

What is a covenant?

Well, the best way to think about it is a formal agreement between two parties where each has a responsibility. As long as both sides do what they vowed to do, the covenant remains intact but if someone fails to keep up their end of the bargain, then the covenant would be broken.

For example, marriage is a form of a covenant. A man and a woman pledge their faithfulness and allegiance to one another until death do they part. But unfortunately, these covenants are broken frequently which leads to divorce which of interest isn’t just a modern day problem. The Bible talks about the matter of divorce and adultery, one of the chief reasons why divorce occurs, and so the problem has been around since God brought marital relationships into His creation.

Go to the Old Testament of the Bible and the first covenant you will see is God’s agreement with Noah.

God was angered by the sinfulness of the world and so He sent His judgment in the form of a great flood that would wipe out all people with the exception of Noah, his sons, their wives, and the animals on the ark which included “seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female” so to “keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth” (Genesis 7:2-3).

After the flood, God established this covenant with Noah and his sons:

“I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between Me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” Genesis 9:9-16

Next time you see the beauty of a rainbow in the sky, give thanks because it’s a reminder of God’s first established covenant with creation.

It wasn’t long after the vow given to Noah and his sons that God was back at it in regard to covenant establishing, this time with Abraham. God told Abraham to pick up everything he had and go to a place where He would lead to. In return, God would make Abraham’s descendants a great nation and we know this became the nation of Israel.

God would make a personal covenant with the nation of Israel, a covenant delivered at Mount Sinai as the Israelites were on their exodus from Egypt to Canaan, the land God promised to His people. In what is widely known as the Mosaic Covenant, God promised that He would be the God of the Israelites and in return, they were required to honor Him as their God, a promise they failed to keep over and over again in their relationship with their Lord.

Finally, God made a covenant with David, the hand selected successor to Israel’s first king, Saul. God’s promise was that one of David’s descendants would reign over all the people of God. It was this covenant that served as the future hope for a Messiah and led to the validation that Jesus would become the King of the Jews.

All these covenants are found in the Old Testament and the word “testament” is just another word for covenant so as we move to the Gospels and the life story of Jesus, we enter into what would be the new covenant, a promise completely centered on Christ and the salvation He came to bring for all people, Jew and Gentile.

What was the foundation of the new covenant?

It was really nothing more than belief, belief in Jesus as Savior. We know this through the foundational verse of this new promise, John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

This covenant statement was delivered by none other than Jesus Himself, the only One who could bring a person out of certain perish and into the guarantee of life everlasting, a saving initiated by a loving God.

Indeed, Jesus was the central figure of the new covenant between God and all His people. Pardon from sin and the pathway to live with God forever were only possible through Him and Him alone (Romans 10:9, John 14:6) and Jesus calls on all Christian believers, past and present, to remember what He has done to bring certain hope to a once hopeless world. Look at today’s verse from 1 Corinthians 11:

In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” 1 Corinthians 11:25

In yesterday’s message, we saw how Jesus called us to remember His body being broken as He paid the sin penalty that we deserved. The bread is one of the two elements of the Lord’s Supper/Communion sacrament.

The other is the cup filled with wine (or grape juice in many places today) that represented Jesus’ shed blood as He was first brutalized by the Roman soldiers and then nailed through His hands and feet to a cross and hoisted in full view of the public at Golgotha.

At the very first Passover, the Israelites, who were in captivity in Egypt, were told to spread the blood of a lamb on the doorposts of their homes so they would be passed over when God sent the final curse which would kill all firstborn children. The blood of the lamb became the saving substance for God’s people.

Within the new covenant, Jesus became the Lamb who came to take away the sins of the world (John 1:29) and it is His shed blood that washes the sinner clean and justifies them before God, leading to judgment and eternal damnation passing over them,

Therefore, when we take the cup during the Lord’s Supper/Communion, we are to remember that there is saving, resurrection power found in the blood of Jesus, the blood at the center of the new covenant.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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