The New Covenant Provided by the Blood of Christ

The following is adapted from Bob Hoestra’s class Living By God’s Sufficiency, available free at the Blue Letter Bible Institute (www.blbi.org).

Previous posts in this series:

• Series Introduction
• The New Covenant: What Is It?
• The New Covenant Promised to Israel Eventually
• The New Covenant for the Church Today

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Here is the third provision of the new covenant: the inner, enabling work by which God provides us the sufficient grace needed to live as God calls us to live. Godly living comes by the sufficiency of God.

Likewise [Jesus] also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you.
(Luke 22:20)

At the Last Supper, when Christ and His twelve disciples were alone before His trial and death, Jesus instituted that which we know as the Lord’s Supper. The believer’s appreciation of the Lord’s Supper will explode into newer and larger dimensions as he begins to see the significance of the new covenant. The bread is His body and the cup is His blood; the supper is about His death, burial, and resurrection. And yet He also says specifically, “This cup is the new covenant.” The blessing of the Lord’s Table becomes manifest when the believer comprehends the new covenant because he will cease to imagine of the supper only in terms of forgiveness. The new covenant is forgiveness and more. It is forgiveness and intimacy with God and the necessary sufficiency to function and grow and serve the Lord.

The new covenant offers God’s sufficiency for godly living and the Lord’s Supper will remind the believer of that sufficiency. It pays to recall that the provision of the new covenant comes through the work of Jesus Christ. Drinking of the cup is confession of the new arrangement for living with God and by God. The new covenant is based upon His blood, so how fitting to see it expressed so often in the Lord’s Supper. Upon thinking of the amazing and effective price paid to establish the new covenant, it becomes no great wonder that the new covenant offers such amazing and effective provision for those who stand under its graceful terms.