The slow clock of history ground on, dragging with it a broken nation. Israel. Prince with God. Oh, how they had failed. Time and time again, from the time of the golden calf that fateful day at the foot of Sinai, they had rebelled and broken God's covenant.
Even after repentance, they had returned to their sin as the sow returns to wallow in the mire. Warnings had lain unheeded, prophets persecuted and killed, while the people and their kings forgot their God.
Even the best of them, the great King David, wise Solomon, Gideon, and Moses himself, fell and failed before the demands of God's holy law. Faith in God's promises gave way to dead tradition and ritual. Rather than the broken and contrite heart God sought, He found souls which delighted in abominations. As the prophet Isaiah wrote, truth had fallen in the streets and equity could not enter.
The old covenant, contained in the law, had failed. It could bring no one to God, but rather condemned all who heard it. None could draw near to God, for man's best deeds were as the profane fire of Nadab and Abihu. The veil hung heavy and unmoving between the Holy God and His unholy nation.
But in the midst of this, the promise of a new covenant came. An everlasting covenant that would succeed where the last had failed. Where the law was written on stone, bearing no power over the heart, now God promised to "give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep my judgements and do them." (Ezekiel 36:26-27)
God promised to send the Messenger of this new covenant to purify the people (Malachi 3:1-2), then silence fell. Four centuries rolled past with no further word from God.
Empires rose and fell. Oppressor after oppressor tyrannized the nation of Israel. The people of promise clung wearily to their traditions and their hope of the promised Saviour, who would fulfill the promises from the dawn of history and set His people free. But none was prepared for the destruction of the old covenant.
Then Christ came. How history must have trembled when the eternal one stepped into time! How the angels must have marvelled as the Holy One from whom even they his their faces took a form more lowly than their own! God in human flesh. The great paradox of veiled majesty, the great union of strength and frailty, the Creator became the creature. He came to His own--His chosen nation, the keepers of the promises--but His own did not receive Him.
As He rose to threaten and challenge the old covenant, they rose up to its defense and His destruction. They rose to do exactly what God had planned, but that was not how they saw it. The cross looked to them like a preventative. It seemed expedient to have one Man die rather than risk their nation and their traditions.
Now, with the wider picture painted, let us hone in on these final days--the days that shattered the old covenant and brought in the new.
The scene is set. Dinner finished and the betrayer already on his way to his final treachery, Jesus brings His disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane as He so often had. Another night of prayer. The disciples, taking lightly His warnings of the horror that was so soon to come upon Him, see only the familiar garden and their own weariness. As He leaves them to pray alone, they lie back and drowse, unheeding of the anguish of their Master as He falls to the ground in desperate prayer.
"Take this cup from me." These words, gasped out as the bloody sweat of extreme emotional aguish runs down His face, reveal the cause of his agony. He knows of what He speaks. The cup of horror and desolation--the stored up wrath of God upon all the earth. A cup none but He could fully understand even as none but He could drain it. All the wrath, all the fury--all the sins of all His people, past, present, and future, was stored up and ready to crush Him. Unknown suffering may frighten men, but there is no terror like the full understanding and anticipation of every moment of pain. Yet He did not flee or call down angels to His rescue, but rather submitted Himself fully to the will of the Father.
Then came the betrayal, with the desertion of His followers and the heartless abuse of the guards, even after they witnessed Him miraculously restore the severed ear of one of their number. A sleepless night, alternating between interrogations and brutal beatings, brought Him at last to the darkest day.
The trial was held before a secular power, the same oppressor the people hoped their Messiah would save them from. His judge had no right or reason to condemn Him, save that which He himself allowed. The violent Roman flogging, known to sometimes kill the victims, was only a hint at the anguish to come. Shredded flesh and muscles and hypovolemic shock setting in rendered Him physically incapable of carrying His cross alone. And yet, despite the agony He was already in, He refused the pain-reducing drink offered at the place of execution. He had come to suffer and He would not be spared, for, if He were spared, His people would not be.
Then they nailed Him, hands and feet, to the cross and hoisted it up right with a joint-dislocating jolt. The physical pain of the cross is hard to imagine. We live in a gentle Western world where pain is quickly treated and death is eased by any means possible. But Romans were experts of pain. One need only look to Coliseum to see their lust for blood.
For six long hours, He dangled from spikes in His wrists, pushing up on the spikes slowly tearing wider holes in His feet as the grated against the bone. And the people were laughing. Laughing! They mercilessly mocked the dying Lord, relishing their final victory over He who would have destroyed their covenant.
Then came the peak of His suffering. The anguish of the cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" cannot be fathomed. The spiritual agony of condemnation and fury from God raining down mercilessly upon the Holy One made all the other torment pale. This was the cup He had dreaded--not the lash, not the nails, not the mocking, but this crushing and pouring out of His soul.
Yet even then, at the height of His suffering, He did not cry out "Enough!". He had the right--at any moment, He could have, as the scoffers dared Him to, "come down from the cross" and "Save yourself."
Then came the final cry--the victory shout. "IT IS FINISHED!" And all men's schemes turned upside down. In an emphatic demonstration of a covenant ended, the veil in the temple, symbolizing all that divided the people from God, tore clean in two. And the Giver of life surrendered His life.
History hung suspended. The old covenant ended, the new hung in the balance of a single question: What now?
Then came Sunday. And death rolled back, surrendering its undefeated prey. It had swallowed what it could not contain. And Christ rose up from the grave in final victory, as the guarantee of the New Covenant. The old was ended forever. The law could stand no more before the new Law of Christ.
The Law of Christ written on His people's hearts rather than the stone, the Everlasting Covenant that covers all saints from the beginning of history to the end, had replaced the old forever. And in this covenant, we have a new and better hope. A hope which will not and cannot disappoint, for the love of Christ has been poured out both on the cross and in our hearts. A people sealed and bought by grace cannot and will not stray for the Spirit of God is in them, compelling them to repentance and faith.
Rejoice, Covenant people of our God. You are no longer under law but under grace. You stand no longer separated by your sin, but, covered in the blood of Christ, the door to the throne room of God is open wide to you.
For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in the ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity."
-Ephesians 2:14-16
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