‘Now that which decayeth and waxeth old.’ How did it decay? We read about the decay of the old covenant in the Gospels. The children of Israel reached rock bottom when they rejected the Saviour. They could not possibly have done worse than that in that generation. The nation comes to the end with the rejection of the Saviour. ‘And waxeth old’ – faith is nowhere to be found. Christ comes, and nobody recognises him except those in whose hearts God has worked. ‘It is ready to vanish away.’ When did it vanish away? Why is it not described as already gone, since by the time this letter is written, we are well into the New Testament period? Some answer that this is because the old approach of worshipping God through symbols and rituals still persists in some places, such as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. But although there certainly a wrong harking back to old covenant order in such churches, and a failure to appreciate the new worship in spirit and in truth which God requires now, this verse is not talking about man’s misuse of the old covenant, but about God’s timetable. There was a period of overlap between the Old Testament worship of the Jews and the New Testament worship of Christ’s church. God gave the Jewish people a period of time in which to hear the gospel and respond to it before he brought the Old Testament ritual to an end. He dealt patiently with the nation to allow them to understand the change that had taken place. That period of overlap came to an end in AD 70 when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and the temple was physically destroyed. The fact that the writer uses this language may tell us that this letter was written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.