THE NEW COVENANT

THE NEW COVENANT                                  Thursday - October 21, 2010

“By calling this covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.” – Hebrews 8:13

Soon after the Declaration of Independence was signed in July 1776, it took a lot of abuse. It was rolled and unrolled countless times. It was tossed in a trunk or stuffed in a linen bag and whisked away every time the British Army got too near. And for 35 years, beginning in 1841, it was hung on a wall in the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., across from a sunny window.
The document was so badly faded that in a quote from the Public Ledger in 1876, when the Declaration was taken off that wall and transported to Philadelphia for the centennial. "Its aspect is ... faded and time-worn," the Ledger noted on May 8 of that year. "The text is fully legible, but the major part of the signatures are so pale as to be only dimly discernible in the strongest light ... and some are wholly invisible, the spaces which contained them presenting only a blank."
Because light damages the ink, in 1987 the National Archives and Records Administration placed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in a special argon gas chamber and had a $3 million camera and computerized system installed to monitor the condition of the documents. 
The Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, described the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as "these fragile objects which bear so great a weight of meaning to our people."

Old, fragile covenants have disappeared and are replaced by the “new” living and eternal covenant we have in Jesus Christ. Today in prayer, praise the Lord that the old covenant has faded and we have a vibrant new life found in Jesus.

“It is a new heart-righteousness which the prophets foresaw as one of the blessings of the Messianic age. ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts.’ God promised to Jeremiah. How would he do it? He told Ezekiel ‘I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes.’” – John Stott 

God’s 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