The New Covenant and the Already/Not Yet of the Gospel

 The number one thing that people misunderstand about the new covenant is that it is different than the old covenant. That may sound like something that would be obvious, but actually it isn't to many people today. 

You see, the old covenant, we are told by the New Testament, consisted of shadows of things to come, things that would be eventually fulfilled in Christ's first or second coming. Some shadows point to spiritual realities of the individual's relationship to the Father, regeneration of the individual mind, and individual knowledge of God. Other shadows point to the corporate reality of all creation being renewed along with the bodies of believers. 

It is the misunderstanding of how these two shadows are fulfilled, or rather, when they are fulfilled. In Gnosticism, only the individual's relationship with God is restored but there is no hope for the body or creation to come. This is to reject the shadows of the old covenant that were promised to Israel if they had remained faithful to God. 

The promises of Israel were a picture of the new heavens and earth that would come at the end of the process of creation in which we now live. All of chaos would be a thing of the past for faithful Israel. There would be no more miscarriages, no more poverty, no more drought, starvation, disease, untimely deaths, etc. as a picture of the fact that God will remove chaos from the world at the dawn of the new heavens and new earth. 

But now Jesus comes on the scene and tells us that the kingdom of God is already here, in our midst. We are told that a day is coming and now is that those who hear the voice of the Son of God will come alive in regeneration. We are told by Paul that we have been renewed in the inner man, in the spirit. 

So there is an agreement with Gnosticism on that point. The fulfillment of the old covenant shadows in the new covenant before the consummation of the world is a spiritual fulfillment, not a redemption of creation. Not yet. However, against the Gnostics, we are also told that a time is coming (Christ does not say it is now as before) that those who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of God and come out of the tombs. Paul states that all creation longs for the revealing of the sons of God, which is defined as the resurrection of the body, because the physical creation is subject to vanity until that time. We are told that our flesh continues to be corrupted in the likeness of its sinful nature, that our body is one of death, and that there is no good in us. 

Hence, in the present time, we are told to set our minds on the things above and not on the things below. We are told that we await a heavenly city rather than placing our hope in one here. We are told we are aliens in this world but citizens in heaven. We are to hope for the things unseen, for a salvation ready to be revealed but has not yet appeared, to consider our deaths gain and our faithfulness to Christ in the face of persecution and suffering victory in this world.

All of this will result in our inner man taking control of our individual flesh, living in the new man by putting to death the deeds of the body. 

Gnosticism is NOT the emphasis on the spiritual in hope of the physical promises that are not currently presented to the saints. That is Christianity. That is the new covenant. To argue otherwise is to go back to the shadows of the old covenant and deny that Christ has come and is fulfilling the spiritual redemption of humanity, the federal head of creation, before He brings about the physical redemption of humanity. 

Creation is not redeemed until after the full human is redeemed in every saint. It follows its federal head. It does not precede it. And God has set that no one will be made complete without another. This means that Christ is not reigning over the physical world and redeeming it at the present time nor should his people think they can presently either. Instead, Christ has divided His ministry between priest and king, spiritual redemption and physical redemption, between His first and second coming. This is the already/not yet laid out in the New Testament. 

In the next post, I'll argue why applying old covenant promises to the new covenant is the Judaizing heresy that denies the New Testament gospel and would end up bringing the church under great judgment and damnation.