Hebrews 8:10 Commentary and Bible Study

God’s wonderful solution to this problem is to bring in a new covenant which is established on a completely different basis. It is a covenant of grace and not of works. It is, as we have seen, a covenant made between the members of the Godhead, and we are included in it because we are united to Christ by faith. Faith gives us an interest in the blessing which he has earned for us as our surety. He has taken our debts on himself and paid the price for our sin, and he has earned the perfect righteousness we need to stand before God.But in this verse a quite aspect of the new covenant is highlighted, which addresses perfectly the weakness identified in the previous verse, which was attached to the covenant of works. That covenant left men and women to struggle in their own strength to keep God’s commandments. They failed, and they failed universally. Not one human being ever kept the covenant of works successfully apart from Jesus Christ, who kept it on behalf of his elect people. Why was this? Because we are all fallen in Adam. He was appointed by God as our representative head in the covenant of works as originally given in Eden, and when he sinned, all mankind sinned in him and fell with him in his first transgression. As a result death came into the world, and we come into the world with a fallen human nature. The covenant is already broken as far as we are concerned, and from the earliest time when we start to make our own individual choices, we confirm Adam’s sinful choice. We are responsible to obey God, but we are morally unable to do it because our wills are in bondage to sin. However the new covenant wonderfully addresses this problem. At the same time that we come to Christ in repentance and trust in his death on Calvary and are justified by faith, God also gives us his Spirit and renews our hearts including our corrupt wills. This is the great benefit that this verse speaks of. God justifies us, but he also changes us and gives us a will to obey that we never had before. Our sinful nature with which we are born resents his commandments, and the very presence of the commandment makes our fallen nature want to sin more. But the new birth sets free our wills, and for the first time we are able to obey God from a right motive and out of love for him and his commandments – only obedience like this is acceptable to God.Does this mean that the way God saves us is to give us new hearts so that we are now able to earn salvation for ourselves? No, all credit for salvation belongs to Christ alone. To reinforce this point God leaves the old sinful nature within us, and our daily behaviour is a mixture of sin and righteousness – we need to confess our sins to him every day. Only a perfect righteousness could earn heaven for us, and we do not have that. Nor can we remove the debt of sin we owe God. Christ must take our punishment and he must give us his perfect righteousness, and thanks be to God he has done both of these things. The reason God changes us is not so that we can earn our way to heaven, but so that we begin to be conformed to his image of holiness. We must love him and we must be like him. So why does the verse speak of this difference with the old covenant as so significant? Because the old covenant was entirely unsatisfactory in this respect. It left those who were in it as wilful sinners, having a hostility to God in their hearts. The new covenant does two things. Because it is made between the members of the Godhead and does not directly involve us, Christ fulfils the requirements of the covenant on our behalf – he cannot fail. At the same time God remedies the weakness of the covenant of works by putting life within us. That change starts in the centre of our being so that we serve him truly and with sincerity of heart. We do not serve merely outwardly as in the old covenant, while our hearts remain estranged from him. That lack of change and resulting hypocrisy were hated by God, and were one reason why he regarded them not.