The Old and The New Covenant

The blood that runs through my veins is pretty much the same blood that ran through the veins of Adam and Eve. Each beat of my heart counts forward to a brand new day, and looks back to where I came from. My children have pretty much the same blood that Jackie and I have. We are family, and by blood part of a clan, a people, and all who have gone before us. But I am not just life composed of flesh and blood. I have an eternal spirit, a spirit which has been reborn through Jesus Christ, and this makes me as well a part of a family with all those who also have a reborn spirit, either here on Earth or with the saints in Heaven.

In Genesis is the account of how God called Abram to be the father of a people who would have a special relationship with Him. God changes the man's name to Abraham, and requires that he and his male descendants be circumcised. He makes a covenant with Abraham, ratified with a sacrifice of innocent blood, and dependent solely on the faithfulness of God to be accomplished. The covenant is a promise of land with specific borders, a promise of multiplication of Abraham's offspring, and a promise that some of them would be kings. The promise of kings was looking forward to David, and his descentent, Jesus.

Abraham didn't quite know how all of this was going to work out because he is 86 and his wife is 76. So he has relations with his Egyptian servant Hagar and from their offspring came the Arab nations. Fourteen years later (God sometimes likes to make things even more amazing) Sarah gives birth to Isaac, and later Isaac's wife gives birth to the twins, Easu and Jacob. Esau is the first born, but sells his birthright to Jacob. The descendants of Esau end up in Edom, which is part of present day Jordan, and would be the line from which most of the present day Arab Palestianians come from. God confirms his promise to both Isaac and Jacob, and Jacob has 12 sons. Jocob with 11 of his sons and family join his 12th son Joseph in Egypt because of a famine in Cannan. During the 400 years they are there the people grow to become a nation within a nation of about 2 million, which makes the Pharaoh very nervous. The Egyptians severly opprress the Hebrews, who call out to God, and God raises up Moses and his brother Aaron to lead the nation back to the land that God promised.

Because the Pharaoh does not want the Hebrews to leave, God sends a series of 10 plagues upon the Egyptians. The last one is an angel who will kill the first born of everyone in the land. But God has a plan to protect the Hebrew people. They gathered together as families, including with them neighbors who lack enough family, selected and killed a lamb without blemish, and put some of the lamb's blood on the door posts and header. They were to cook the lamb with fire, eat it, and share a meal including unleavened bread and bitter herbs. "And the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you. Now this day shall be a memorial to you, and you shall celebrate it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations you are to celebrate it as a permanant ordinance". (Exodus 12) This was the first of seven major feasts that God would give the Hebrew peole, and it was known as Passover, because when God saw the blood He would "pass over" the households, sparing them from God's judgment.

The feasts of Passover celebrated afterwards by the Jewish people were looking back to the deliverance God had provided, and looking forward to the coming King who would one day rule the nation, and nations, from Jerusalem. This feast had an important place in the New Testament. Jesus fed the 5000 on a Passover and His last meal was a Passover meal. John the Baptist saw Jesus coming to the water and cried out; "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world". And Paul, urging the Corinthians to walk in holiness wrote; "you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed". As mankind we are family because we share the same blood. As born-again believers we are an even closer family because we have been delivered and changed by the shed blood of Jesus.