"THE HOLIEST OF ALL" part LXIII

THE INITIAL BLESSING OF THE NEW COVENANT THE PARDON OF SIN.
Hebrews 8: 12 - 13 For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and their sins will I remember no more. In that He said, A New Covenant, He has made the first old. But that which is becoming old and waxed aged is nigh to vanishing away.

Continuing with the last part of SIXTH SECTION.
Hebrews 8: 1-13
The New Sanctuary and the New Covenant.

BY THE REV. ANDREW MURRAY

Of the Blessings of the New Covenant, the one which is here mentioned last is in reality the first. For I will be merciful--- this is what precedes, and is the ground of the renewal of the heart and intimacy with God through our fellowship. Pardon is the door; Holiness of heart and Life the pathway; the presence of God the Blessedness of the True Christian life. The first leads to the second, the first and second to the third. To live in God's presence and intimacy of fellowship two things must be clear: the thought of sin must be put away out of God's heart, and the love of sin out of our heart and consciousness. These two blessings are together Secured in the New Covenant. First, the forgiveness of sins is complete, that He remembers them no more forever (they are put into the sea of forgetfulness forever); they never more enter into God's heart (we're not to remind Him of them again ever for to do so nullifies the first and puts Him to shame). And, second, the renewal of our heart and will so complete, that the Law of God is written there by the Holy Spirit, so that the Will of God is our will.

The three Blessings--- the pardon of sin, purity of heart, and the presence of God are so enjoined, that as our views and our acceptance of one is feeble, our hold on the others will suffer. In Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant they are offered and Secured to us in their fulness, in the Authority and power of an Endless Life. But our experience of this depends upon our Knowledge, our faith, our surrender. And it is because our understanding and acceptance and experience of the two first blessings is so defective that our intimacy and fellowship with God, our entrance into the Holy presence, and our abiding there, is still so much in Old Testament failure--- But they continued not. Let us realize this.

Take the first of the three Covenant Blessings: I will be merciful to their iniquities, and their sins will I remember no more. In more than one respect the Christian's thought of what this pardon is may be defective. With some it is nothing more than the remission of punishment. They think only of acquittal; they know not that it implies acceptance, complete restoration in Grace, to the Heart and the Home of the Father. They are content with pardon, as the escape from a great danger; of the surrender to, and the Life abiding in the Love that pardoned, they Know LITTLE. With others the thought of pardon is mostly connected with individual or with daily sin. They have no conception of the Entire and Eternal putting away of sin out of God's sight and thought, which is assured to us in the words: Their sins will I remember no more. And with still others, whose views may be more accurate, the pardon of God exercises so little power, because it has been accepted more with the mind than the heart. They consent to and claim what God's word says of it; but have never, mostly owing to the want of any deep sense of sin, or any powerful workings of the Holy Spirit, realized the overwhelming Glory of God's mercy as they come to himself to Receive from His own mouth the pardon of their sins. In all these cases the farther Blessings are scarce understood or sought, or if claimed, their full meaning and power are never known.

It is even so with the second Covenant Blessing. There are not a few who know indeed what the greatness of God's pardoning Love is, who yet never reach out to claim it, as equally sure, the greatness of His Sanctifying Grace. The necessity of daily sinning, the impossibility of living for one day without actual transgression is such a deeply-rooted conviction, and there is such confidence that God's word teaches it, that the mind cannot for a moment enter into what the word has said of the radical difference between the old covenant and the New in this respect. The confounding the freedom from any sinful tendency, and freedom in the Authority and power of Christ's indwelling from actual sinning, even with the sinful tendency still remaining, is so universal, that every attempt to press home the promise of the Law written in the heart, in its contrast to the Old Testament life, is regarded as dangerous and unattainable. The wonderful promise is leveled down to the ordinary experience of the ordinary Christian life. No wonder then that the crowning promise, They shall not every man teach his brother, Know the Lord, with its direct teaching of the Holy Spirit, and its direct intimacy and fellowship with God through the Spirit, is neither valued nor claimed, and the entrance through the rent veil into the Holiest of All and the presence of God postponed to another world or time.

Let us pray the Father to give us enlightened eyes of the heart to know what is the hope of His calling, to a life in His Love and Will, and what the riches of the Glory of His inheritance in the saints is,--- the direct and full access to His presence and intimacy in fellowship, and what the exceeding greatness of His power in us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and set Him on His own right hand (Paul's prayer found in Ephesians 1: 15-23 Oh! The wonders of Joy when first we actually receive and accept this inspiration of revelation.). Let us believe that that exaltation of Christ out of the dead to His Throne, and the assurance that that same mighty power works in us, means, even for this earth, a Life of Heavenly power and joy, of Holiness and happiness which it has not entered into the heart to conceive. Jesus, the Priest-King on the Throne, is the Surety of the Covenant. Let us, like Him, yield ourselves to that death to sin and to self, out of which God raised Him. Let us sink into the death of emptiness and nothingness and helplessness; let us, as dead, wait for the mighty operation of God. He who gave Jesus as Mediator of the New Covenant, and Surety for its Promises, will reveal Him, and fulfill them in us, will bring us in Him within the veil, and give us our Life there in the secret of His Blessed presence.

1. The Pardon of sin is the door, the entrance to the Father's Home. The Law in the heart is the life and walk there, the fitness to draw nigh to God. Direct intimacy and fellowship with God; this is the Blessedness to be found in God' s presence.
2. All of the three Blessings in Him the Surety of the Covenant. In Him our justification and the assurance that our sins no more come up before Him. In Him our Sanctification, with the Holy Spirit breathing His Will into our heart. In Him our complete Redemption, the fitness to dwell in God's presence for evermore.