The Best News You’ve Ever Heard

Have I got good news for you!

The first covenant God made was with Adam as the covenant representative of the human race. It was a covenant of works. In essence, God said to Adam, if you will keep my laws, I will bless you and your posterity with life and happiness. But if not, you and all those you represent will die. Then God tested Adam’s obedience by commanding him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Adam failed miserably. He came under the curse of the broken law. He died spiritually and was immediately cast out of God’s presence. And since then,

no member of Adam’s fallen human family has ever been able to obey God’s laws perfectly. Thus, Paul writes, “by the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.” (Rom. 3:20). The Scriptures declare all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All came under the curse of the covenant of works.

So what did God do? He decided to discard the Old Covenant based on works altogether since it could only produce a curse upon people who could not keep it. He decided to replace it with a new covenant based on better promises. But He could not discard the Old until its terms were fully met, particularly the curses and sentence of death it placed upon every man. And for this reason, God sent His Son, born of woman, born under the Law, that He might taste death for every man. Jesus, the Second Adam, as our covenant representative took upon Himself the sins of the entire human race, died in our place, and absorbed all of the wrath of God against sin on our behalf.

Having fulfilled the Old Covenant through Jesus’ perfect obedience and atoning sacrifice, God did away with it and established the New Covenant. He revealed the terms of this covenant in Jeremiah 31:31-34. One of the things you will notice about this covenant is that there is no “if”, “but” or “maybe” in it. All the uncertainties are removed because unlike the first, God does not make the New Covenant dependent upon man’s works at all. Instead, God makes it totally dependent upon Himself. For this reason, the New Covenant is everlasting and all its blessings guaranteed because it is resting, not on our ifs, buts, and maybes, but securely on the “I wills” of God.

Now, since it is built upon God’s work and not man’s, the New Covenant, unlike the Old, contains no curse. Since it depends upon what God has done in Christ, it cannot fail. And since it is based on Jesus’ performance and not ours, it contains only blessings for all who believe in Him. NO CURSE IS NECESSARY!

Listen as God reveals just one of the blessings of the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31:34: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sins no more.”

This means that God will forgive all our sins, and then, go on to forget that we had ever sinned in the first place! This means that even though God is omniscient, his omnipotent love will overcome His omniscience and not allow Him to recall our sins. This means that He will not only erase our sins, He will go even further, so as to erase His mind of the very memory of our sins.

THUS, NO CONDEMNATION IS POSSIBLE AND NO CURSE IS PERMITTED!

So, now when Satan tries to accuse you before God and argue that God should not bless you because of your sins, God cannot take him seriously because God has no memory of what he is talking about!

Beloved, if that is not the best news you have ever heard, I don’t know what is!

Please don’t keep it to yourself. Spread it. Certainly, this is news everybody needs to hear, especially during this Christmas season.