The Word Made Fresh
1Here is my point: we have a high priest who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, 2who ministers in the sanctuary of the true tabernacle that the Lord, and no one else, has established. 3Every high priest is appointed to offer donations and sacrifices, and so it is necessary that the priest has something to offer. 4Now, since there are priests on earth who offer gifts according to the law, he would not be a priest at all if he were still on earth. 5They are leading worship in a sanctuary that is but a shadowy sketch of the heavenly sanctuary, because when Moses was about to put up the tent he was warned, “Be sure you make everything exactly like the pattern that you were shown on the mountain.” 6But Jesus has been given a more excellent ministry that makes him the mediator of a superior agreement which has been obtained through superior promises, 7because if the first agreement had been faultless there would have been no need for a second one.
8But he found fault with them, for he says, “The days are surely approaching,” says the Lord, “when I will form a new agreement with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 9It will not be like the agreement I made with their ancestors when I led them out of Egypt by the hand, because that was an agreement they did not keep, and so I no longer had any concern for them,” says the Lord. 10“But this is the agreement I made with the house of Israel after those days,” says the Lord: “that I would put my law in their minds and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God and they will be my people. 11They will no longer have to say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ because all of them, from the greatest to the least, will know me. 12And I will have mercy on them and will remember their sins no more.”
13Now, when he speaks of a new agreement, it means he has made the old one obsolete, and that which is obsolete is fading away and will soon disappear.
Commentary
1-7: What the author seems to have in mind is the very Greek idea that everything has a form on which it is based. The form is the reality of which the thing is a copy. The wilderness tabernacle, he is saying, was based on the form of the heavenly tabernacle — the true tabernacle — where Jesus as the great high priest now sits at the right hand of the “throne of majesty” which, in turn, corresponds to the mercy seat in the old tabernacle. The old wilderness tabernacle was based on the form or pattern of the heavenly one. In the same way the old covenant was based on the law, which is but a “sketch and shadow” of the new and better covenant based on “better promises” — that is, the hope of salvation.
8-13: Verses 8-12 quote Jeremiah 31:31-34 almost verbatim. The old covenant agreement, he says, has been replaced by the new covenant, an agreement in which the heart of every believer will be attuned to the will of God and the law will be obsolete.
Takeaway
Christ is the new covenant agreement, through whom we are drawn into a relationship with God. Through him, faith guides us to an ever-closer relationship with the One who made us.