There are things that God says will end and things that He says will not end. It is important that we understand that there IS a difference between the two, and it is even more important that we understand which is which. Confusing the two, especially when dealing with the matter of your soul is incredibly foolish and dangerous. It can leave you trusting in that which will vanish away when you need it most and despising that which will be the only matter on the day of judgement that will decide your eternal home and destiny.

In the final analysis of the New Covenant, we must understand that we are the recipients of the promise, the power and the work of God. That He has chosen, redeemed and preserved us against the day of His glory and that all that we are and all that we have is ultimately HIS. He has bought us with His blood, and kept us by His power and through that power He calls us to live out His will and purpose. It is NOT anything that we can do by ourselves, by our labor, by our work, but it IS something that commands our obedience and our allegiance all the same. God commands us to live in accordance to His will and promises us that He will supply all we need for that obedience.

As we consider the new Covenant which God promises, fulfills and preserves in Christ, we MUST consider that He will not only forgive us, but heal and restore us by that Covenant. He will not leave us ruined, cast off and abandoned through the destruction we wrought in our rebellions. He has a purpose which He will accomplish fully. A promised blessing that NOTHING can turn aside. And even our ruinous sin and rebellion is not capable of derailing the purpose of God. He intends to bless His chosen covenant people, and bless them He WILL!

We are at the end of this declaration of the new covenant, and have begun the work of looking at the forgiveness that is ours in the death of Jesus Christ. Does that forgiveness mean that there are never any cost or consequence that we experience in this life for our sin? Does it mean that God loses something that He once held in His mind? Is forgetting part of the bargain? Will we skate away laughing up our sleeves at God because we pulled one over on Him? Because we know we are guilty but God thinks we are not? Just what does God actually promise here?

We come to the close of this restatement of God's covenant promises to His people, and He has so ordered this declaration that He saves the best for last. This last mentioned benefit is the greatest truth, the grandest mystery, the most glorious wonder of the whole affair. For God tells us that the key to knowing Him is that all the barriers to a relationship with Him are taken away by HIS own hand. We all know our own failings. We all know our own folly, our own guilt. And for so many the very idea of forgiveness is so outlandish that they will not only reject it, but will go so far as to defend their sin, rejecting all need for this gift of mercy. God tells us plainly that for those who are inside the covenant forgiveness IS the promise, because if we are to know Him, forgiveness is the singular need.

God promises that all will know Him… but this is not something we can have or accomplish on our own. Apart from the power and mercy of God that makes us live and know we are trapped apart from Him. We are dead, we are helpless and we are doomed to an eternity of pain and misery under the unending terrible wrath of God. For this promise to be possible something MUST change, and over 2000 years ago that something DID change and it changed everything. That something was the coming of Jesus and all mankind knows the significance of His coming… even our calendars are split by the arrival of this one… BC and AD, Before Christ, Ano Domini, in the year of our Lord. (Modern man has renamed this ancient wording, but the dates remain unchanged. So we still confess the truth of it; even though we try to hide it by subterfuge and pretense.) Christ is the very Center of all history! And without Him we cannot know God.

The ability to know God is not something that is natural to man. We lost that ability in the fall and by our own work we will NEVER get it back. We are helpless to know what we do not know, helpless to see what is hidden from our eyes and helpless to change the manner in which we both see the world and even more helpless to change what we love and what we hate. That hatred is driven by the state of our hearts. Jesus told Nicodemus: "And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." (John 3:19, NKJV) But God promises here in Hebrews that for everyone who is inside the Kingdom, everyone who has had their hearts transformed, that these will absolutely be made over and given both the desire and the ability to KNOW HIM!

We left off last week at the idea of sharing what we have been given. Pressing the truth that evangelism and even just discussing the things of God are both the duty and the joy of the citizen of the Kingdom. I want to take up a corollary of this and think with you today about the fact that we understand and assimilate the knowledge of God in the same manner as we teach it. It is ONLY by the Spirit of God that we can teach truth, because it is ONLY by the Spirit of God that we can KNOW truth.

Some believe that this passage means that we should not teach, evangelize or speak about Jesus… that God will do the talking through our lives, that His Spirit will enable the silent witness and save without the need for words or even church. It is a foolish position, and it does not take the whole counsel of God into consideration. It is a paradigm which feeds the folly of the flesh and allows us to live to the lusts of the flesh without even considering the fate of the world around us. It is a folly embraced by hyper-Calvinists and libertines alike, and an error that calls even their own soul's salvation into question. God does not relieve us of the obligation to speak of Him and to teach, He relieves us of the fear of that work being ineffective and fruitless. This is a promise of power in evangelism, of growth in grace and of life abundant.

The disciples were people who had been with Jesus from the very beginning. They had spent three years in the most intimate of times with Him and had seen every part of His life, His teaching, His practice and His power… yet they did not believe in the resurrection… When Mary Magdalene brought the news of the resurrection she was doubted. "She went and told those who had been with Him, as they mourned and wept. And when they heard that He was alive and had been seen by her, they did not believe. After that, He appeared in another form to two of them as they walked and went into the country. And they went and told it to the rest, but they did not believe them either." (Mark 16:10–13, NKJV) This is because the disciples had not yet been born anew… they were still technically spiritually dead. Though Jesus had begun the work of planting and preparing their hearts, the fullness of who He was had not yet been revealed to them. And so they did not believe in the resurrected Son of God. God still had a work to do in them, and though they were already His; they did not yet know to whom they belonged. All mankind is born into the world in the same manner as the disciples had been before they met Jesus… we are all born dead.