Is God really all good?: # 3

                                             Adapted from unrealreality.org

    Before we take a look at Jesus, let’s see what the Old Testament prophets had to say about the New Covenant, that was to come: Jeremiah 32:40 "And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from doing them good …" and Isaiah 54:10 " For the mountains shall depart And the hills be removed, But My kindness shall not depart from you, Nor shall My covenant of peace be removed,” Says the LORD, who has mercy on you." (See also Is 55:3, Is 61:8, Jer 31:31-33, Ez 16:60). So we can see that the prophets predicted a new, everlasting covenant, of goodness, kindness and grace, which God had told them, was to come ... and it did. There are also over 300 direct prophecies of Jesus, spoken about in the Old Testament as well as many more types and shadows of the coming Messiah; He was prophesied as being the Christ, or the anointed one. He would be the one who would set the captives free, be the prince of peace, establish a new kingdom on earth and be the savior to the world. He came and He did all these things and more, He established a New Covenant.

    In Hebrews the writer says this 8:7 "For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second" and later on he says in v13 “A new covenant, He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.” The 'He' that is being spoken of is Jesus and the covenant that is being made obsolete in the old-covenant, the Mosaic covenant. Galatians 3:13-14 says, "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree'), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith"

    So, if we are under the new covenant, how does God relate to us? He has made the covenant of the law of no effect, nullifying the curses and amplifying the blessings. See above versus for reference on God's inherent nature, but most obviously we must look at Jesus' life, to see how God relates to us. JESUS IS PURE THEOLOGY. If we look at Him we see love, we see kindness, gentleness, wisdom, righteousness, justice, patience, we see all the fruit of the spirit endowed in one person; a sinless person. When we put our faith in Jesus and the finished work of the cross, God sees us through Jesus, He sees our born-again spirits as being perfect and blameless, just like Jesus (Eph 1:4, 2:7, 2:13; Col 1:22). As the atoning sacrifice, Jesus, was the beginning of the New Covenant (Heb 9 -10), the beginning of God's best for all who choose to believe in His Son.

    When questioned on fasting, by the Pharisees, Jesus had this to say in Matthew 9:16-17, “No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Jesus uses the metaphor of the new patch onto the old garment and the new wine into the old wineskin to illustrate the fact that He has come to bring a new covenant, one where the old ways of a works-based religion won’t work anymore, He has come to do the will of His father and nothing else.

    This point was made even clearer when Jesus’ disciples wanted to call fire down from heaven on those people who rejected Jesus, in Luke 9:55-56, as Elijah had done in 2 Kings 1,. But Jesus rebuked them saying, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives but to save them” Showing a significant difference in how God relates to us now, under the new covenant, to how He related to us under the old covenant. (See also Eph 2:14-17)

    To conclude: God is not angry with us, He is not putting ridiculous trials on us to make us stronger, He is the giver of good gifts, always, all the time (James 1:17). Life is tough enough without God having to make it even tougher for us. The new covenant is a covenant of love and grace, by which we enter through faith (Eph 2:8), made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus (Col 1:21-22). It is a covenant by which we go from glory to glory (2 Cor 3:18), where our sins are not held against us and GOD IS IN A GOOD MOOD!