in speaking of the new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. Hebrews 8:13 ESV
New – There is probably no verse more loudly proclaimed by those that assert the pre-eminence of the dispensation of grace than this one. George Guthrie’s analysis is typical. According to him, this passage “implies that the first covenant was flawed . . . the new covenant will not be like the Sinai covenant made at the time of the exodus. God’s rejection of the old covenant is explained in terms of the lack of faithfulness to the covenant on the part of its recipients.”
[1] Perhaps you have heard something similar. Israel failed to keep the old covenant so God brought about the Church and gave it the new covenant of grace rather than law.
The problem is that this Greek word,
kainos, doesn’t mean something that wasn’t there before, something brand new, something only just now appearing. That would be the Greek word
neos (like the derivative
Neo in the movie
The Matrix). But
kainos means “what is new in nature, different from the usual, impressive, superior.” In other words, since we also know that the reference to Jeremiah points us toward the Hebrew
hadash, the use of
kainos in this text cannot mean something that has never before been seen or that is new in time or origin. It must mean (as does
hadash) something that is different than the customary, something that is superior to what was before, something striking or unusual. As Behm remarks,
kainos “is a leading theological term in apocalyptic promise: a new heaven and a new earth . . . the new name . . .the new song; ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”
[2]
Without careful distinction between
neos and
kainos, it is easy to read this text and many others as if they express what has never been revealed before, what is now completely novel in creation. Reading the text this way, as if it used
neos, would allow us to claim that that the work of Yeshua has no Old Testament parallels, that grace is an original New Testament concept and that any attempt to return to the “old” Torah denies the radically-new development of the Christian worldview. But if I realize that
kainos means “impressive, superior or different than expected,” then I see the text not as an abrogation of Torah but rather as its
re-statementin the life of the Messiah. This, of course, is anticipated in Jeremiah. The amazing difference between the “old” and the “new” is not a revision in God’s instructions but the unimaginable difference in the delivery of those instructions – God will write them on our hearts!
So what do we do with the word “obsolete” in this text? The Greek is
pepalaioken, from
palai, which means “aged, earlier, past, ancient, venerable, antiquated.” “Obsolete” is a possible interpretation of the word, but
not in this context. First, if this author follows LXX usage, then
palaioo and its derivatives carry no theological weight. They are simply expression of things that are older, not useless. And secondly, the occurrence here is found also in Hebrews 1:11 which quotes Psalm 102:25 where the Hebrew term is
le-panim, meaning simply “before” or “of old [times].” Seesemann argues that its “only” significant theological usage is in this verse where he claims it means “that God, by setting up the new covenant, has declared the old to be outdated.”
[3] But since there are
no other theologically significant uses of
palaioo, how can Seesemannconfidently assert that this is the
only one. He can do so only because he reads this usage in terms of a pre-existing paradigm that tells him the “new” covenant has replaced the “old.” Otherwise, on the basis of the meaning of the word itself in other occurrences, he would have to conclude that the author is simply telling us that what Yeshua did shows Yeshua’s work to be newer than the original which is ancient (but not outdated) and will eventually pass away (when heaven and earth pass away).
So, what’s “new” to you?
https://www.skipmoen.com/2013/04/ignoring-the-greek-text/
