Before we go any farther in our study I must say that God has made two Covenants the first is what we've called our first estate as all who come into redemption must of necessity pass through it before ever entering into the second. This is what Paul is delivering in the Epistles of Hebrews, Galatians and Romans and which Andrew Murray speaks of in his book "The Two Covenants" from chapter 3, which I'll quote:
"In studying the Old Covenant we ought ever to keep in mind the twofold aspect
under which we have seen that Scripture represents it. It was God's grace that
gave Israel the law, and wrought with the law to make it work out its purpose in
individual believers and in the people as a whole. The whole of the Old Covenant
was a school of grace, an elementary school, to prepare for the fullness of grace
and truth in Christ Jesus. A name is generally given to an object according to its
chief feature. And so the Old Covenant is called a ministration of condemnation and
death, not because there was no grace in it-it had its Own glory (2 Cor. iii.
10-12)-but because the law with its curse was the predominating element. The
combination of the two aspects we find with especial clearness in Paul's epistles.
So he speaks of all who are of the works of the law as under the curse (Gal. iii. 10).
And then almost immediately after he speaks of the law as being our benefactor, a
schoolmaster unto Christ, into whose charge, as to a tutor or governor, we had
been given, till the time appointed of the Father. We are everywhere brought back
to what we said above. The Old Covenant is absolutely indispensable for the
preparation work it had to do; utterly insufficient to work for us a true or a full
redemption."
"The two great lessons God would teach us by it are very simple. The one is the
lesson of SIN, the other the lesson of HOLINESS. The Old Covenant attains its
object only as it brings men to a sense of their utter sinfulness and their hopeless
impotence to deliver themselves. As long as they have not learnt this, no offer of
the New Covenant life can lay hold of them. As long as an intense longing for
deliverance from sinning has not been wrought, they will naturally fall back into the
power of the law and the flesh. The holiness which the New Covenant offers will
rather terrify than attract them; the life in the spirit of bondage appears to make
more allowance for sin, because obedience is declared to be impossible."
"The other is the lesson of Holiness. In the New Covenant the Triune God engages
to do all. He undertakes to give and keep the new heart, to give His own Spirit in it,
to give the will and the power to obey and do His Will. As the one demand of the
first Covenant was the sense of sin, the one great demand of the New is faith that
that need, created by the discipline of God's law, will be met in a Divine and
supernatural way. The law cannot work out its purpose, except as it brings a man to
lie guilty and helpless before the holiness of God. There the New finds him, and
reveals that same God, in His grace accepting him and making him partaker of His
holiness."
"This Epistle of Hebrews is written with a very practical purpose. Its object is to help believers to know that wonderful New Covenant of grace which God has made with them, and to lead them into the living and daily enjoyment of the blessed life it secures them. The practical lesson taught us by the fact that there was a first Covenant, that its one special work was to convince of sin, and that without it the New Covenant could not come, is just what many Christians need. At conversion they were convinced of sin by the Holy Spirit."
"But this had chiefly reference to the guilt of sin and, in some degree, to its
hatefulness. But a real knowledge of the power of sin, of their entire and utter
impotence to cast it out, or to work in themselves what is good, is what they did not
learn at once. And until they have learned this, they cannot possibly enter fully into the blessing of the New Covenant. It is when a man sees that, as little as he could raise himself from the dead, can he make or keep his own soul alive, that he
becomes capable - of appreciating the New Testament promise, and is made
willing to wait on God to do all in him."
"Do you, my reader, feel that you are not fully living in the New Covenant, that there is still somewhat of the Old-Covenant spirit of bondage in you? --do come, and let the Old Covenant finish its work in you. Accept its teaching, that all your efforts are failures. As, at conversion, you were content to fall down as a condemned, death deserving sinner, be content now to sink down before God in the confession that, as His redeemed child, you still feel yourself utterly impotent to do and be what you see He asks of you. And begin to ask whether the New Covenant has not perhaps a provision you have never yet understood for meeting your impotence and giving you the strength to do what is well-pleasing to God. You will find the wonderful answer in the assurance that God, by His Holy Spirit, undertakes to work
everything in you. The longing to be delivered from the life of daily sinning, and the extinction of all hope to secure this by our efforts as Christians, will prepare us for understanding and accepting God's new way of salvation---Himself working in us all that is pleasing in His sight."
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