God's Covenant | Plan of Salvation

In The Old and New Covenants Part 1 , we discussed the old covenant—the sacrificial system and the ceremonial laws—and what it represented. Jesus’ fulfillment of the promise by His life and death on the cross is the new covenant. It is the fulfillment of the old one.

Without Jesus, who came and fulfilled the promise, none of the ceremonies and sacrifices would have done any good or meant anything. They simply were a foreshadowing of the true remedy for sin—Jesus Christ.

Some people claim that the God of the Old Testament is different than the God of the New Testament and that Israel was under law and we are under grace. But if we study the sanctuary, which we did only briefly in the last article, we can see that the Gospel was preached to the Jews through type.

Once Jesus fulfilled this promise the representations were no longer needed. They were done away with at the cross:

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it. Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come (Colossians 2:14-17).

Included in the ceremonial law were many feast days and special holidays called sabbaths, where the people would perform certain rites to remind them of God’s mercy and provisions to them. These sabbaths are not the same as the Sabbath of the Fourth Commandment. For example, the Passover was celebrated in commemoration of the deliverance from Egypt. These feasts and ceremonies were no longer needed after Jesus’ death because we now have the cross to remind us of God’s great love and mercy.

The ceremonial law was the perfect way for Christ to demonstrate the plan of salvation to the Israelite people so that they could understand salvation by grace before He actually came and fulfilled this plan. The entire system with the sanctuary, sacrificial system, feast days, and priest’s garments, was a type in which Jesus was the . Everything the Jews did pointed forward to the Messiah.

And so God’s covenant remains and lives as a witness today for us. Jesus was and is the promise and if we accept Him by faith we may have eternal life.

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