If you read our church's doctrinal standards, you will see that it describes one covenant of grace administered in two different ways — the Levitical way and the New Covenant way. I believe that that is a correct way of understanding the relationship between the covenants. But it leaves something to be desired, because it imports that non-Biblical category of "administration" into the heart of our understanding of how Scripture is put together. So I am going to propose a different way of understanding the relationship between the old and new covenant today, a way that preserves the Biblical language of two different covenants and is based on the biblical categories of original and copy. In brief, my proposal is this: the Hebrew writer is teaching that the New Covenant is the original, heavenly reality through which God saves us, and that the Old Covenant is that heavenly reality copied down into an earthly set of institutions we call the Levitical system. In other words, the category "copy" should be the master category with which we understand the old covenant; in turn, that implies that the New Covenant is the original, the thing which the old covenant copied. That means, further, that the new covenant actually existed before the old covenant, and the old covenant took the heavenly reality of the New and copied it into an earthly form. Let's look at this in more detail this morning. I trust you will see that there are some solid applications to us from these truths.
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Caleb Nelson grew up in Ft. Collins, CO. Born into a Christian home, where he eventually became the eldest of 11 children, he has been a lifelong Presbyterian. He professed faith at the age of six, and was homeschooled through high school. He then attended Patrick Henry College...
