The Birth of Jesus and our New Covenant

The terms God has set are these: Believe what he says about Jesus Christ, turn from your life of self-reliance and put your confidence totally in Christ to wash you clean of sin, clothe you with righteousness and bring you into the family, the household, the kingdom of God. That is the only way we sinful humans can get off the devil’s side and onto God’s side, so to speak. We do it by accepting the terms of God’s new covenant — the new covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ. That is the only way we can be rescued from our rebel state against our Creator, the Provider of our life and being. That is the only way we can be brought into harmony and allegiance with him.

At its core, the new covenant is Jesus Christ. He embodies everything the new covenant is. He is the Word of God and the Son of God, made flesh for us. He is the Message of God, the Mind of God, and the Meaning of God, made flesh for us to see and know and love. In himself, he enables us to be friends with God. In Jesus Christ, God has given us a new basis for our relationship with God. This is the covenant God has given; we respond to Christ with either yes or no.

Now you might ask, How can a person be an agreement? It is a biblical idea. In a prophecy about Christ, Isaiah 42:6 says that the Messiah, or Christ, would be made a covenant. The Bible calls Jesus a mediator, a go-between. A mediator’s purpose is to get two parties to relate positively to each other. His work is what causes the barriers to come down and the relationship to bear positive fruit. Jesus was the greatest diplomat, the brilliant negotiator of the greatest covenant, or agreement, in human history. Jesus could do that because he was both God and human. He was not only able to represent both parties, he was able to be both parties.

Jesus Christ is the basis of the new covenant, or arrangement, God has given us. We can either accept this or reject it. Because he loves us with indescribable love, he urges us to accept it — to put our faith, our trust, in Jesus Christ, that is, to trust him with our lives, and to accept him as our Mediator, our only means of salvation.

Our salvation — being rescued from spiritual destruction and given glorious restoration as favored friends and children of God — depends entirely on Jesus Christ. He is the basis of this great rescue. Accepting him is the one requirement that God makes as the basis of this magnificent agreement, or arrangement, we call the new covenant. If we accept him, trust in him, and then we are given a right relationship with God (and all the responsibilities and privileges that go with that right relationship). If we do not accept Christ, then we have no basis whatsoever to be brought into peaceful harmony with God. Jesus Christ is the core of the new covenant. That is why he must always be the center of our church, our preaching, our proclamation and our personal lives.

It is the promise of the comforter that Jesus gave to us that gives us that special connection to God and our salvation. I speak on this often and it is a prevalent topic within my lessons. The reason being is it is essential to our fulfilling our side of the covenant. Without the Holy Spirit dwelling within we find ourselves where? In the flesh. When we are in the flesh we are indeed separated from God. Separated from his grace. His will. His purpose. His covenant.

The Greek word for Comforter is “parakletos”. The most familiar translation of this Greek word is “Comforter,” but a better translation is Counselor or Advocate, as in a legal sense. However, I will use Comforter since it is the most familiar translation.

Below are the New Testament texts concerning the Comforter.

JOHN 14:15-17: "If you love me you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father and He will give you another Comforter to be with you forever - the Spirit of Truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you."

JOHN 14:25, 26: "All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Comforter, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you."

JOHN 15:26: "When the Comforter comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me."

JOHN 16:7,8: "But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Comforter will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment...."

JOHN 16:13-15: "But when he, the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own, he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it know to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you."

This all part of the Covenant. The salvation of our very souls and the way to live while here on this earth. The Spirit is who we really are. We are of God and God is not of this world. We are made in the image of God and God is Spirit. It took God to send his son down here to explain the very thing we have struggled so long before Christ to understand.

On Christmas we celebrate that moment God made the New Covenant real for all of us.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

His coming was prophesied hundreds of years prior. The covenant was as well.

Ezekiel 37:26-27

"I will make a covenant of peace with them, an everlasting covenant. I will give to them, increase their numbers, and set my Sanctuary among them forever. My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people."

In Isaiah 7:14 the prophet Isaiah, addressing king Ahaz of Judah, promises the king that God will destroy his enemies; as a sign that his oracle is a true one, Isaiah predicts that a "young woman" ("almah") will shortly give birth to a child whose name will be Immanuel, "God is with us", and that the threat from the enemy kings will be ended before the child grows up. The almah has been identified as either the mother of Hezekiah or a daughter of Isaiah, although there are problems with both candidates.

The gospel of Matthew presents Jesus's ministry as largely the fulfilment of prophecies from Isaiah. In the time of Jesus, however, the Jews of Palestine no longer spoke Hebrew, and Isaiah had to be translated into Greek and Aramaic, the two commonly used languages. In the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 the word almah meant a young woman of childbearing age who had not yet given birth and who might or might not be a virgin, and the Greek translation rendered almah as parthenos, the Greek word for "virgin". Scholars agree that almah has nothing to do with virginity, but many conservative American Christians still judge the acceptability of new bible translations by the way they deal with Isaiah 7:14. The virgin birth is found only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke; there is no reference to the birth of Jesus in Mark's gospel or the Gospel of John, which refers to Joseph as Jesus's father, nor in the epistles of Paul, who says that Jesus was "born of a woman" without mentioning that the woman was a virgin.

So, with all of this being said we live by faith and we know through faith that the covenant is real and God did it for us because we belong to him and he cares for us.

So it is happy birthday to our Lord and the gift of salvation.