Hebrews 8:9 Commentary and Bible Study

This new covenant is compared to the covenant made with Israel. The old covenant refers not to the covenant God made with Abraham, but to the covenant made with the nation of Israel. God took hold of them, and as a parent takes a child by the hand and leads it along a way that would be difficult for the child to walk alone, so Israel was led out of captivity by God. They were taken out of that land which they were unable to leave on their own, and it required the severe judgments of God on Egypt and the leadership of God’s man for the times, Moses, and the sign miracles worked through him to persuade them to depart. The covenant was made soon afterwards, the covenant of the law given in the wilderness on Mount Sinai. Verse 8 has spoken of the fault God found with the old covenant and the old promises. At first sight it seems to be a fault not so much with the covenant itself as with the failure of the people to keep it: ‘they continued not in my covenant.’ Was the covenant to blame for that? No, and yet God knew that if a covenant was actually to save men and women, it must address this weakness in the people also. In Old Testament times God took a whole nation, to teach them, to reveal his word, to free them from idolatry. Within Israel there was to be a way of worship and much rich teaching. But how he would God do it? Not all of them were converted. The church of those times was an inferior thing. It consisted of the whole Jewish nation – some sought God, some did not – all mixed up together. You even had leaders in the church, who were not true believers. The Lord knew they would not respond. He could not regard them as his true people when they turned back from the terms of the covenant he had made with them. It was clear that no covenant would succeed which relied on the steadfastness of the people, for they were too changeable, too weak, and too sinful to keep the terms assigned to them on Sinai, which amounted to total obedience to God.