NOTES for Heb 8:7-13

Continuing the discussion of Christ as High Priest, the author of the letter recalls Jeremiah's words about the new, messianic covenant that God will make with His people when the Messiah comes.

The distinctive feature of every newly established covenant is some quality of the relationship between God and His people. Judging by Jeremiah's words, the messianic covenant will differ in this: each person will become a living Torah. Each person's life will then be determined only by his relationship with God, by living revelation, and by the inner spiritual and moral imperative bound up with them, which in the post-exilic period was called the inner Torah. And now, in the author's understanding, the time the prophet spoke about has arrived. The former covenant gives way to the new one.

But the author is far from understanding the covenant as a merely legally binding contract, even though the Greek word used in the text, and the corresponding Hebrew word, mean exactly such a contract. He is speaking precisely of a covenant, of the dynamic relationship between God and His people, where there is no room for simply replacing one algorithm with another. In fact, every relationship with God, whether of an individual, a community, or even an entire people, always changes a person's spiritual life, or the spiritual life of a human community, giving it a new quality. And when the time comes for new relationships, they do not cancel these changes: a person, a community, or even an entire people enter the new covenant as they have become during the previous stage. But that previous stage itself ends; it exhausts itself, "grows old" and "wears out," as the author of the letter says. The old covenant, the old dynamic of relationship, is replaced by the new covenant, and the spiritual dynamic of the new relationship is now inseparable from Christ as the new High Priest.