On The New Covenant (Part 3)

by on August 1, 2025

The Benefits of the New Covenant Are the Benefits of the Covenant of Grace

There are some who understand the promises of Jeremiah 31 to be realized entirely in the future. There are reasons, however, why this is not the best way to understand Jeremiah 31. First, as we have already seen, each of these benefits was already promised under the covenant of grace to Abraham. The Lord himself characterized his covenant with Abraham as featuring just these benefits. Further, the New Testament interprets Jeremiah 31 and the Abrahamic covenant (which we surveyed in parts 1–2 of this series) as having these qualities.

The second great reason the futurist reading of Jeremiah 31 is unlikely is that it would mean, in effect, that the believers to whom these promises were given were not in present possession of them. It seems impossible to say that believers who lived under the Mosaic covenant from 1500 BC to the first advent of our Lord possessed none of these benefits in any way. The witness in the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures is that believers possessed these benefits. Certainly, the witness of the New Testament is that believers in Jeremiah’s day possessed them.

This chapter is often described as the “faith chapter,” but faith is often misconstrued. The great list of exemplars is too often taken to say, “These people had faith; you should have as much faith as they did.” Though there may be some truth to that characterization of Hebrews 11, it largely misses the point of the chapter.

Remember the original context of Hebrews. The writer is trying to persuade his readers that they should not apostatize by going back to Judaism. In 10:1 he argues that the Torah (the 613 commandments of the Mosaic covenant) were only a “shadow” of the new covenant realities. The entire sacrificial system (vv. 1–14) was, in redemptive-historical terms, an illustration, a pointer to Christ and to the new covenant. In this context he quotes and interprets Jeremiah 31 on the new covenant (vv. 15–17).

The reality of the things promised has come in Jesus Christ. This is why we are the priesthood, why we enter the holy places with confidence (v. 19) because the entire tabernacle-temple system was nothing more than a pointer to Christ who is our high priest, sacrifice, and temple. He has entered the holy of holies and we have entered it with him.

These new covenant believers are being tempted to “throw away” their “confidence” by going back to the types and shadows (10:36). The “faith” theme actually begins in 10:37–38. The writer quotes Habakkuk 2:4. The righteous shall live by faith. In verse 39, it is those who believe who “preserve their souls.” Only then does he characterize faith as looking forward to what cannot be seen. The point in 11:1 is that even though the Jewish Christians are suffering for their faith, largely at the hands of other Jews, they should continue to trust Jesus to save them even as their believing forefathers trusted Jesus. This is the intent behind citing Abel (v. 4), Enoch, Noah (v. 7), Abraham (v. 8), and Sarah (v. 11).

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar. (Heb 11:13)

From this Hebrews concludes that they were looking for a better, heavenly country (v. 16).

He returns to Abraham, “who had received the promises,” (v. 17), who believed in the resurrection (v. 19) and who, “figuratively speaking” (v. 19) received Isaac back from the dead. Moses was looking forward to the new covenant realities by faith (vv. 23–28). The people went through the Red Sea on dry ground by faith.

And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. (Heb 11:39)

What was it that they did not receive? If we read Jeremiah 31 absolutely, the way some would have us read it, then we should have to say that none of these received the forgiveness of sins. Of course, the analogy of Scripture makes it impossible to say that. Our Lord himself says that “Abraham saw my day and rejoiced” (John 8:56). Paul says that Abraham was “justified” (Rom 4). The writer to the Hebrews says that all believers are justified by faith, as we saw above.

What they did not receive was the fulfillment of all of God’s promises in the New Covenant. They had the realities by faith, but they did not have the realities by sight. We have what was promised to them. We have the new covenant. We have semi-eschatological blessings. Heaven has broken into history and we, in Christ, have been taken up to heaven. The types and shadows have been fulfilled. What they only saw typologically, we see in reality. We are not yet bodily in glory, however, and thus we must persevere in faith. This is why we must “lay aside also every weight” (12:1).

The great point of the “faith chapter” is that the believers who lived in the typological periods of redemptive history did have, by faith, the benefits promised in the covenant of grace. They had an immutable covenant. God would be their God and their children’s God. The universality of the covenant of grace throughout redemptive history is evident in the way the writer to the Hebrews moves seamlessly from one epoch of redemption to another. From the pre-Noahic, to the Abrahamic, to the Mosaic—they all had the same faith because they were all members of and beneficiaries of the covenant of grace by faith alone, in Christ alone. According to Hebrews, their lives give evidence that they had a hearty faith (interior piety), that they trusted Jesus, and that they expected him to come. They had no need of anyone to say “know the Lord” because, by the sovereign grace of the Holy Spirit who operates through the preaching of the gospel, even the typological preaching of the gospel, they had an immediate knowledge of the Lord. They had the forgiveness of sins.

The evidence is that the new covenant is substantially identical with the covenant of grace.

Hermeneutical Differences

Thus far we have looked at Jeremiah 31, Hebrews chapters 7–10, and Galatians chapters 3–4. We have seen that the new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 is not absolutely new. It is new relative to the Mosaic, old covenant that expired with the death of Christ. We have seen that the New Testament consistently interprets Jeremiah 31 this way. Among the implications drawn from the passages examined is that the covenant theology held by most contemporary evangelical Baptists cannot be reconciled with the New Testament interpretation of Jeremiah 31 (and its corollaries in the minor prophets). Insofar as a certain understanding of the new covenant is essential to all Baptist understandings of redemptive history, to that degree, they all fail.

One of the great questions between Reformed and Baptist theology is the question of how to interpret Scripture. The Reformed have tended to let the New Testament not only interpret the Hebrew (and Aramaic) Scriptures, but also to provide a pattern for how to interpret the typological revelation. Thus, not only do Romans, Hebrews, and Galatians give us specific direction about specific passages, but they also demonstrate how other typological passages not specifically addressed in the New Testament ought to be interpreted.

Reformed theology has not always been consistent in the application of this principle. In the seventeenth century, many Reformed readers were chiliasts—that is, they believed in a literal one-thousand-year reign of Christ on the earth. Before the late eighteenth century, most Reformed folk were also theocratic, a position that is very difficult to square with the hermeneutical theory which underlays the Reformed critique of the Romanist reinstitution of the Mosaic cultic system. It is also quite difficult to square the earlier Reformed theocratic ethics with the equally early Reformed understanding of the history of redemption. In other words, until the modern period, there were unresolved tensions in Reformed theology.

Gradually, the covenant theology worked out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries acted as a sort of leaven and most Reformed folk resolved those tensions in favor of their covenant theology that recognized the Mosaic covenant as a temporary, typological overlay upon the permanent and fundamental Abrahamic covenant of grace. We recognized that if the Mosaic civil law had expired and if the Mosaic national covenant was unique, then there are no theocratic, national covenants after the expiration of the old, Mosaic theocracy. In a similar way, most Reformed folk realized through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries that it was no longer plausible to reify a figurative passage in the most symbolic book in the New Testament (Rev 20).

Our Baptist friends, however, seem to operate on a different hermeneutical theory, and especially as it regards the new covenant. Even confessional Baptists, who would agree with most Reformed hermeneutical theory, step off the train when it comes to Jeremiah 31 and the new covenant. Behind this dissent lies a different view of the relations between the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. Baptists (whether confessional or non-confessional) tend to treat everything that happened before the incarnation as if it were under the “old covenant.” To be sure, in colloquial speech, we might speak of the entirety of typological revelation and redemptive history as “the old covenant,” but that would be a loose or broad (and perhaps even improper) way of speaking. As we have seen, the New Testament consistently identifies the “old covenant” with Moses and not with Abraham. All of redemptive history prior to the incarnation is typological, but it is not all Mosaic. All the typologies have been fulfilled in Christ, but not all the typologies are Mosaic. Failure to recognize the distinction between Moses and Abraham (or Noah) lies behind the rejection of the Sabbath by most contemporary Baptists. They assume that the Sabbath was instituted under Moses. They do not recognize the category of creational ethics. There are reasons for this, which will be explored in the concluding part of this series.

In short, Abraham was not Moses. Remember, Paul reckons the Mosaic, Sinaitic, old covenant as a temporary, national, pedagogical, typological arrangement superimposed upon the Abrahamic covenant of grace. It is a layer of law in the form of 613 commandments summarized in the Decalogue (Exod 20; Deut 5) intended to teach the Israelites the greatness of their sin and misery and to point them to the promised Messiah. The Abrahamic covenant, in contrast, is permanent in a way that the Mosaic, old covenant was not and could not be. Thus, the Abrahamic covenant of grace, even though it contained typological elements, could not be obsolete.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2011.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

You can find the whole series here. 

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    Post authored by:

  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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