1 John 3:16


"By this we perceive the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

Wednesday 13 October 2010

New Heaven/Earth

God applied the same language to the removal of Israel and the Old Covenant and the bringing in of the reign on His Son in the New Covenant. This is the greatest establishment of a New Order in prophetic history.

And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, says the Lord. For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before Me, says the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain. And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before Me, says the Lord. (Is 66:21-23).

This is about the New Covenant, as the Gentiles worship the Lord. God said that He will take of the Gentiles and make us Levites and priests. The term Levites here means that God will make priests of the Gentiles through the New Covenant. Levites is not used literally, but symbolically for priests.

Imagine the outrage of the early Jews over this. “How could those Gentiles be made priests?”. We are made priest through Jesus Christ, through new birth and by the gift of the Spirit. This is the only priesthood now and it includes believing Jews also.

Then God said that this New Heaven and New Earth would remain before Him forever. That is, the new order, the New Covenant, is an eternal covenant in His Son. There is no doubt that the New Heaven and New Earth are symbolic of the New Covenant, the everlasting covenant where there is an eternal remission of sin by one sacrifice.

Heb 9:10 claimed that the Old Covenant was “ordinances imposed on them until the time of reformation”, meaning correction or perfection. Kittel, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, commented on the Greek word διόρθωσις (reformation), saying that the Old Covenant:

Lasted until the setting up of the order of the fulfilled time…when the Law and the Prophets were replaced by the διόρθωσις…the time of the true order…From this time on there is in force the order of the dawning time of consummation in the fashioning of the relation between God and man. Thus διόρθωσις is a witness to the fulfilment of Judaism in Christianity and an expression of the eschatological faith of primitive Christianity.

Eschatology in the mind of early Christendom meant the fulfilment of the Old Testament expectation in Christ. Is 66:23 also uses the term Sabbath symbolically for worship. Paul said that the literal Sabbath was abolished forever in Christ (Col 2:16). The literal Sabbath will never return. To say it will return in a future dispensation opposes the finished work of Christ.

Hag 2:5-7 and Heb 12:26-28 together also show that the New Heaven and New Earth refer to the New Covenant. This is the contextual meaning of the passages. (We discussed in the previous chapter.)

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