Judaism is dead, a false religion. It has no God, because the only true living God no longer recognizes it. It cannot ever be resurrected or Christ must die yet again.
Christ is the ultimate High Priest of all Creation. He need not enter briefly the Holy of Holies every year and stand before the Mercy Seat. Instead, He sits upon that Mercy Seat. Further, His Mercy Throne is in Heaven, the one true Temple -- the one built by God's own hands. This is unlike the one Moses ordered. While it was indeed commanded by God at that time, it was but a model made by human hands, a copy of the real thing.
His offering is the one true offering, the only one which could actually bridge the chasm separating a Holy God and sinful men. Were Christ on earth, He could not be a priest of any sort, since the only priesthood appointed by God for the Nation of Israel was that of Aaron and his sons. They are but a symbol, the shadow cast on the ground by the brilliance of God's glory shining onto the real thing. Their Temple was but a shadow of the real thing. At that, it was merely a conceptual model of God's Courts above. Christ's ministry is better, for He offered the one acceptable sacrifice -- Himself. He brought about a better covenant, with better promises.
That earlier Covenant of the Law was hardly perfect. It was a collection of mere symbols, a far lower "reality" pointing to something much higher. It was mundane. It was a shadow cast on the ground. The true Covenant of God Almighty was always a matter of mystical spiritual truth, something inexpressible on earth. So He granted to this one nation of people a shadowy ritual observance to create a consciousness of something requiring a work of faith, something which no man could do in his own power. In theory, at least, the requirements of the Law were always within reach of human power. But the best you could hope to get from such ritual observance was a shadowy paradise of earthly proportions. It offered the best any man could obtain in this life, but could not change an evil heart. That required faith, something the Law could only hint at, not create.
So this imperfect copy of real religion was never meant to be the end of the matter. Jeremiah warned shortly before the Fall of Jerusalem there would be a new covenant sometime in the future. God had already decided long ago the Law of Moses could not accomplish much. It was never meant to, for while it was well within the reach of any willing heart, the nation routinely failed even that simple demand. So the covenant established by the Exodus, the Covenant of the Law, could not write the will of God on man's heart. It required something altogether different to do that. A new covenant which did not require people whipping up a frenzy of human discipline, God would find a way to put Himself in the hearts of men. There, His mercy and grace would manifest itself directly in the human soul, something the Law could never do.
Even back then, in the day of Jeremiah, the days of the Law were numbered. It had a distinct end point. It would become obsolete. For the people addressed by this writer, it was time to leave that behind, for Christ left this earth with the Covenant of Moses dead. The covenant in His Blood offered a much higher blessing, a blessing of spiritual and mystical redemption too grand for words, too grand for any mere material Temple, too grand for any mere ritual observance. The Law was dead.
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Ed Hurst
11 April 2008
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