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It is such a great pleasure to be with you all, and I've just already seen, as I've just glanced around the room, several people that I know. So it's wonderful to see people I know. Great to see that they are outnumbered enormously by people that I don't. It is really lovely to meet you and a real privilege to come and spend some time with you this evening. I will just uh flesh out the answer to the question what does the Dean of Studies mean? It means that I oversee our academic programs at WTC and just make sure that they're all sort of working properly and so forth, and I look after our teaching faculty as well. But actually, most people, if you've studied with WTC, you'll know that your time with me is spent actually in the classroom where I teach Old Testament. So we're going to spend a little bit of time this evening looking at the Old Testament. We're going to daringly start in the new, which is uh so you'll get sort of five minutes of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about talking, and then we'll get into my topic, and then you'll think, oh no, this is okay, this is all right, and then I'll take us back into the New Testament, and you'll think, oh no, not here again. So that's the plan. And as we were thinking about the kind of thing to talk about this evening, I was conscious, I think we were uh all conscious that we have Easter on the way, that one of the passages that we're going to care about very deeply and return to every year as a matter of importance is the scene of the Last Supper when Jesus is framing for the disciples, for the apostles, what is about to happen the next day. How are we supposed to understand what's happening? And he's giving them a way of coming back to this moment after the earthquake that's about to happen in their lives has settled down a bit, a way of coming back and understanding how to understand and interpret these momentous events that have taken place. So that's what he's doing. And uh it is obviously therefore a key moment for us. We are wanting to not only celebrate the cross but to understand it, to engage with the God who was revealed on the cross and glorified on the cross. And here we have the man, the God Jesus, explaining to us exactly what is happening on the cross. So it warrants spending some time with. And one of the things that really stands out, if you've read it, this may have struck you, if you've uh spent time with this passage, is not so much how he does explain it, but how he doesn't. I'll read it to you in just a second, but one of the things that you will notice is that he doesn't give the kind of one-line gospel that we are used to giving. Why did Jesus die on the cross? He died to save us from our sins. He doesn't go that way. Why did Jesus die on the cross? He died to restore us to our original creation. He doesn't go that way. He goes in a slightly different direction. And it warrants just thinking about why he does that. So we're gonna read this passage together. We're going to notice the different explanation that he gives and then ask ourselves what he means by that. And we're gonna spend some time. This is gonna be a little rapid fire, I think, at places. I've got a lot of different places we might go. I'm conscious of the time that I've got a kind of strict, I've got half an hour and then we're gonna stop. And if I haven't got there, we haven't got there. So we're good for that. And I'm gonna try and cover as much ground as I can to try and help us understand as richly as possible exactly what Jesus is talking about when he refers to, as we will read, the new covenant. What does he mean by that? That's his explanation. This is about restoring the new covenant. So let me read you this passage. Because I'm focusing on the focus on the phrase new covenant, I'm narrowing straight away of our different possible places that we might read about the Last Supper to Luke, because Luke is the one who talks about the new covenant. So I'm going to read from Luke 22. This is one of those passages where if you leave any of it out, you're doing it a disservice, but I'm going to leave quite a lot of it out. Um so I'm just going to zero in particularly from verse 14 onwards, because this just gets us to the heart of what we're going to talk about this evening. When the hour came, he took his place at the table and the apostles with him. He said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks, he said, Take this and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. So here is his explanation. It is the new covenant in my blood. So that's what we're going to tease out is what is he talking about with that particular phrase? Why has he landed there rather than any of the other places we might more quickly land on if someone were to say to us, what's going on on the cross? Why land there? Just to set the scene a little bit, and just to notice really the way that Luke is setting the scene, Luke is a master storyteller. He is a real master craftsman of his work. He does some extraordinary work in terms of narrating stories in such a way that they draw you in. He's quite funny in places that you don't expect him to be, not in this moment, but there are plenty of places where he's quite funny. He uses wordplay a lot, he uses a lot of literary techniques to keep your attention. One of the things that he does here is he plays around with time. So if we had read right from the beginning of the passage, if you've got a Bible, you can just glance your eye ahead just to the beginning of the passage, to verse one, you'll see that the time reference is a festival. That's the time reference. But if your eye just glances on and just goes to around verse, I think it's probably verse seven, the start of the next sort of major section of this passage, you'll see that he's zeroed in, actually, and his time frame is the day. And now we begin this passage, and he is zero it is in again to the hour. He's narrowing our focus and narrowing our focus so that intuitively we are thinking in terms of a close time frame. We're thinking about moments that matter. He's drawing our thoughts in that direction. He's also picking a phrase that if we are good gospel readers, then we're just going to notice little echoes of this phrase, the hour, mostly from John, actually. John picks up on this phrase, the hour. He uses it a lot to talk about the cross. Luke doesn't, but John does. So we've just got that inherent little awareness that just draws our eyes to a phrase like that, to think, okay, he's talking about what's coming. Luke actually uses this phrase quite a few times just to say, here's the next stage of God's plan. You can go looking for the phrase the hour. That's the way that Luke uses it. And so here is the next stage of that. So he is drawing our eyes into a moment, and then he clarifies what the moment is along the way. He talks about, I wanted to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. So again, he is connecting these moments. This Passover we're about to eat equates to my suffering. And then we might notice the interpretive way that he then unfolds what happens. Each time he says, We're going to do this, he then explains some kind of interpretive reason for doing it. He took a cup, and after giving thanks, he said, Take this and divide it amongst yourselves, for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of it of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Take a loaf of bread, give thanks. This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. You see, there's an interpretation that's going on. Each time he is wanting us to notice that this moment isn't just about fellowship. This moment isn't because he knows something that they don't know, which is that their last time together is right now. This isn't only that. This is his opportunity to say, I'm going to walk you through this meal in such a way that you understand what's happening tomorrow. Because tomorrow is going to make no sense to you for ages. But I'm going to give you a way of just understanding it. But as he does that, Luke introduces some oddities. Jesus says things that are slightly unexpected. Let me point out a couple of them that might matter. The first is, and so if you ever pick up a commentary on Luke, they'll talk about this more than anything else, actually. It's one of the things that puzzles that scholars really wrestle with and they can't quite decide what's going on, which is why there are two cups referenced here. Because in the other records, there aren't. In any of the other gospel records or in Corinthians, or indeed you can go into early church Christian literature. You can go and read something like The Didic, which is an early church document talking about ways of living well. They talk about Eucharist there as well. And in that place, it's this one cup, one breaking of bread. Here, two cups. It drives scholars nuts, this kind of stuff. And it also draws out the worst in them because they still start explaining it in some of the wrong ways that don't really matter to us in the most, uh, in the deepest way. So they'll kind of say, oh, well, obviously this is just a little insertion. It's not from the original draft, this is from a later draft, and you know, as if somehow that made any difference. Because of course it doesn't. This is the word of God that comes to us, and it's here. But there is a literary narrative effect by repeating these cups, by creating a sense of narrative shape here where you have cup, bread, cup. And the effect of it is that he tells you right at the beginning how this is going to culminate. He gives you a sense of trajectory through the story. And he clarifies for you that this is not only a moment of stopping together and fellowship, not only a moment of remembrance, as Corinthians will come later on to talk about it, but this is a moment of anticipation. This is about something that is about to happen, something that's about to come. But he also uses the opportunity of this uh extra cup that he adds at the beginning. In fact, usually you would have bread then cup, he adds a cup at the beginning. He uses, he takes the opportunity to say something somewhat strange. I don't know if you would spot it necessarily. You may not care about it, but I've got the microphone and I do, so I win. So, verse 17. He took the cup and after giving thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves. Before I tell you what I think is strange about that, does anyone want to have a pitch at what might be strange about that? What would you do with a cup? You would share a cup. You wouldn't divide a cup. The word that's used here is literally he you will cut the cup in half. You will cleave the cup. Now, it is actually a perfectly reasonable way of speaking. It's not sort of bad Greek or anything. He's not breaking the language by saying this. He's saying distribute the cup, and you have to infer the meaning. It's just not the normal way you'd do it in Greek. Usually you'd use the language with the word simpino, which is to drink together. And indeed, that is used elsewhere and in the other gospels. And the verb pino to drink is actually the verb that all the other Last Supper accounts use. Because that's the more natural way to say it. It's just a slightly unnatural way of saying it. And it just invites the question: why did he use that language? That's an odd way of putting it, isn't it? To cut this cup up amongst yourselves. To make sure everything in the cup was right. Well, the other place that you see the Gospel writers using this verb is the only other place that Luke uses it in the Gospel of Luke is to divide up the clothes of Jesus. So it's it is actually about taking a hole and breaking it into pieces. The only other place that Luke uses it is fascinating. It's not in the Gospel, it's in Acts, and it is the tongue of fire of the presence of the Lord comes down and is cut amongst the people. Really fascinating, just a little link there. But it raises a question, what's going on there? I'm going to just put a pin in it and come back and point out another little oddity. Here's another little oddity. This will seem like an unfair critique that I'm going to bring here. The breaking of the bread. For a start, here's a question. Why pin everything on the bread and not point out the lamb? If this is about Passover, he's drawing out the same parallel that John is pulling out with Passover. Why not focus on the lamb? It's kind of odd that it's not mentioned at any point, right? So why focus on the bread? And if you are focusing on the bread, and the point of focusing on the bread is that it is to describe what's happening the next day, this is the bit you'll think is unfair. Is this a good description of what they're going to see the next day? That he's going to take a loaf of bread or a piece of bread and break it into two pieces? Is it a good depiction? Are they going to have to do some work to make the connection? Because what they're going to see the next day is not going to look like that. Again, it's not an unreasonable way of describing it. We're certainly so familiar with it now we barely even notice the crinkles along the way. But it's just it asks a question that we've got to wrestle with. Why is he choosing to describe this in a less than neat way? There is a reason. And then finally, he lands on this phrase: this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. These little riddles lead to this one. What does that mean? The new covenant in my blood? What does he mean? So there's a couple of ways we can attract, uh, we can attack this question. The first is that we might ask ourselves, well, what is a covenant? Let's start there. And covenant is the kind of language that we use quite a lot in the church. It has become good Christianese for the way that we talk to one another. So I'm interested to know what you think. I'm also really aware that when someone like me with a microphone asks a question like that, it just sounds so much like a loaded and trick question that no one will want to answer. I'm very aware of that. I want you to overcome that just for a moment. I promise you, not a trick question. Not a loaded question, open question. When you hear covenant, what does that mean to you? What does it make you think of? Relationship? Promise? Contract? A binding agreement? Marriage? The Ark. The Ark of the Covenant, yeah. Faithfulness. You obviously have to explain yourself. The Abrahamic covenant is where they put the bird in the kind of reputation of what would happen if they broke the covenant and then Abraham equally and not with anyone who walked down that which will shadow what we need. Yeah. Honestly, you are all writing my segues for me beautifully. We are going to come back to that passage. We're going to come back to basically every word that everyone has said so far. The first thing to note about a covenant is that it's uh this will sound harsh. I can't think of a way of saying it any less harsh than this. It's not God's idea, it's our idea, covenant. It's a human-devised idea. It was a concept that existed in the world long before God came along and used it for his own purposes. And we can see this in the way that Old Testament, the Old Testament, and particularly in Genesis, the way that relationships between different groups of people are described as being formalized around a covenant. And we can see that it's formal, we can see that it is usually sealed by some kind of ritual, sacrifice usually, we can see that it involves an oath, we can see that it may or may not involve a promise, and it may or may not involve requirements that are listed out. These begin to link very much with the notion of a contract. And in fact, when we look in the ancient world, this is something that is quite a good habit to get into, is to start to think where have these ideas come from in the ancient world? When the first readers are reading this, where is their head going to go? And quite a lot of people's head is going to go to the familiar genre of writing that is treaty writing or is land grant writing. These are two particular types of formal contracted agreements where the job is to take two people who are already in some form of relationship and to formalize that relationship to a degree of sacredness. And it is a bonding relationship that if there are equal parties, they would think of one another as family to the point of brothers. If it is an unequal partnership, they would also think of themselves as family. The language tends to be of parents and children. And because of the particular world that we're in, that is most commonly in the language of fathers and sons. So when you have, for example, in Exodus, and God is making a covenant with Israel, and one of his reasons for defending Israel against Pharaoh is that Israel is my son, that's covenant language that's being drawn out there. And so it is creating a very real and very intimate sense of relationship on a new level. If there is an unequal sense of participation or unequal status between the two parties, it tends to give a sense of a right to reply to the junior party. The junior party is able to call on the senior party because they owe them a certain degree of protection, they owe them a certain degree of provision. And in return, generally speaking, the other party owes loyalty and faithfulness. And the language that tends to be used more than any other is love and faithfulness. And it can seem a little artificial when you know you're reading a political contract between Ashabanapal, who is an Assyrian king, and those nations around him whom he now wants them to honour his son as his heir. There's a series of treaties that are framed around this situation. It can feel quite artificial when you're reading the language of kinship. But it's not really how they're thinking about it. They are thinking about these relationships as real, as forming something deep and meaningful. And if you break them, there are terrible consequences to those. Generally speaking, these covenants take the form either of uh treaties, and in which case the focus of those treaties tends to be on faithfulness and loyalty, or they tend to take the form of grants, where a senior party is giving something freely to a junior party, usually land or inheritance of some kind. And that has an emphasis on promise and protection. That's where the um the focus tends to be. That gives you a sense of what the ancient world thinks a covenant is, and that's one way of answering the question, what's sitting behind a new covenant? But of course, a new covenant somewhat triggers the question, well, what happened to the old one? And that should trigger another question, which is slightly harder to answer. Which one? Because the Old Testament has got several covenants in it. And sometimes those covenant traditions don't marry up together very well. So there are covenants with Noah, there is a covenant with Israel as a whole nation through Moses. In between those two, there's a covenant with Abraham and then his descendants with Abraham. And in fact, two covenants are stated to be made with Abraham, although they're always held together as one. There is a covenant with Joshua, that's at the end of Joshua, which is about forming Israel as a kind of political union under God. There is a covenant with the priests, there is the weird phrase, the covenant of death, there is a covenant of salt, don't ask me. There is a covenant with David, there is a covenant that is restated and reaffirmed through Josiah, who's one of the later kings of Judah. There are all these different covenants. So which one? Ultimately, Israel tends to only think about two of them. So that's quite important to know. The others matter, but when it's thinking about itself, Israel thinks about being in two covenants with Yahweh, God of the Old Testament. And the first is the covenant with Moses, and the second is the covenant with David, which by extension is seen. Also, to be the covenant made with Abraham. Those are seen to come from the same root of tradition. They carry the same sense of promise. They look like land grants rather than treaties. They're very much about inheritance focused. This is these are the descendants you will have. This is how fruitful they will be, and so on. These are the two covenant traditions that stand out more than any other. That when Israel's thinking about covenant, these are the covenants they're thinking about. But these two covenants don't play well together. So let me give you a pretty significant example from Israel's history where these two covenants don't work. Just to say, by the way, the covenant with Moses and with the whole nation of Israel is framed around a treaty and follows the pattern of an ancient treaty rather beautifully, and it emphasizes a focus on Israel's faithfulness. There isn't a great deal of promise that comes out of it. There's a lot of implied promise. There is an implied favor and provision and protection, but the focus is on this is what you must do. This is what we would usually think of in our heads as being the law. This is what comes out of the encounter with Sinai, the book of Leviticus, the book of Deuteronomy as a whole, second half of Exodus. This is the written law. That's the focus of the Sinai covenant. The focus of, oh, and the and the way that that covenant works is you be faithful, and if you're not, this covenant breaks down, and there are consequences. And those consequences are dire reading. If you go and read the end of Deuteronomy, you'll see what I mean. Deuteronomy 28 in particular is uncomfortable reading as God lists the longest possible list you could conceive of of different ways He can kill them if they are not faithful. And you do find yourself at the end of the page thinking, I do believe in a good God, I do believe in a good God, I do believe in a good God, but I'm struggling to see it right now. It is made a little bit easier when you then line it up against 20 other treaties in the ancient world and you realize if you don't put that list there, the world just will not take it seriously as a covenant. They just won't recognize that it's a covenant. But it also shows you just how seriously God takes faithfulness and just how seriously he takes relationship and your relational freedom within that. End of Deuteronomy says, I put before you life and death. Choose life. Your choice. You've got to make it. If you say no, I'll hold you to your no. But there are consequences for the breakdown of that relationship. So that includes things like being overcome by enemies, going into exile, and having all sorts of military defeats. That is in the list of things. That happens to both Israel in the north and then in the south in Judah. That happens to them. The Davidic covenant is focused on promise, and it is focused on saying, I will give you generation after generation of people who will continue to build the house of David. And there will never be someone who is not on the throne of David, and you will carry my favor. And what's happened here, the reason why there's a covenant with a particular individual, is that Israel has made a decision in its life, which objectively isn't a brilliant one, but a very understandable one, and one that God works with. Because he takes relationships seriously. You give him the environment, he'll bless it. Up to you what the environment looks like. Here's the choice you made. I want a king to stand in the gap between the people and God. Rest of the world does it that way, we want to do it that way. And that lost some fairly significant theological freedom that people were carrying, which is that God would be their king directly. This is what Samuel talks about. The way that Genesis frames it is that you were kings. You didn't need to appoint a king, you were the kings. The way that Exodus frames it is, you'll be a kingdom of priests. You'll all be kings. You'll all be priests. No, no, no, we'd rather have a king and we'd rather have a priesthood. Okay, well, that's how you want to work it. We'll have to solve that problem further down the line. If only I could think of a way of finding a king of kings and a high priest of high priests. I'll come back to that one. You can see how God's tapestry of redemption just runs through the kind of decisions that we make. He doesn't turn our decisions away because they're bad ideas. He turns them into things that are so beautiful that you can't tell they're not his idea. King, good or bad idea? Not a trick question. Bad idea! One of the worst ideas that people came up with, right? Who's Jesus? He's the king! Good idea. He's able to take your ideas and turn them into beautiful and powerful and wondrous and redemptive things. Just because you're no good at it doesn't mean that he's not good at it in his hands. It's not a reason to say no to him. Sorry, that's a sidetrack. Jesus is playing with uh these two different covenants, and there is a point in Israel's history where these covenants come into clash with each other, which is at the point at which they have failed to be faithful to Yahweh. Repeatedly, for centuries, failed to be faithful, and God has waited and waited and waited and sent prophets and said, Turn away, turn away from what you're doing, and I will redeem you, and they don't. Sends more prophets, turn away, stop doing it, seriously, I'm gonna have to judge you, and they don't change. And so judgment does come, and it does take exactly the form that Deuteronomy says that it will take, which is the complete destruction of the nation and the exile of those people out to Babylon. Now, the people will find themselves wrestling with that and thinking, well, he did tell us. So the terms of the covenant with Sinai seem very in place. They seem very satisfied by that. It's not a happy situation, but they are resolved. But what about David? There will never be a time without a king on the throne. But now there's a time without a king on the throne. There'll never be a time where you don't rule your own land, but now there is a time where you don't rule your own land. These two covenants under this pressure haven't been able to live together. So what do you do about that? You've got two precious covenants that you need to work together, and they don't work. This is the situation that Jesus is responding to. He does so by quoting a couple of old passages. One is Jeremiah 31, which talks about there will be a new covenant. And the other is Exodus 24, which is the covenant made with David. It's the scene where that covenant is sealed with a sacrificial ritual. And he says at the point of that sacrificial ritual, Moses says, This is the blood of the covenant. So he takes together, this is the blood of the covenant, and there will be a new covenant, pieces them together, this is the blood of the new covenant. So he's giving you a way into seeing what's sitting behind this notion of a new covenant. So what we have is Jeremiah. So we go back to Jeremiah, and here's what Jeremiah has to say. I'm going to start speeding up a little bit because I have seen the time. The days are surely coming when the Lord, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. That phrase, house of Israel, house of Judah, that's directly drawn from the Davidic covenant, which has a whole wordplay thing on house. Because David comes to God and says, I want to build you a house, a temple, I want to build you a house. And he says, You can't build me a house until I have built you a house. I'm going to build you a house, descendants. That whole wordplay is playing. Here we have an evoking of the Davidic covenant. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. So here we have an allusion now to the Mosaic covenant. But he's spotting a problem there, which is that covenant was written down and written down in such a way that it's this is what you would expect from a treaty. You write it down and you return to it, you reread it, you remind yourself of the terms, it holds you to account. The point of the Mosaic Covenant is to form you to be the kind of person that he's called you to be. The phrase that is echoed all the way through the Mosaic Covenant is be holy, for I am holy. Be like me. Walk in these ways, and you will be like me. You will be holy. This law can do that. But if you're not going to walk in the ways of this law, then this law all is going to do is hold you to account for the way that you're not doing it. And that's what's happened. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law, that forming bit, that bit that's going to show you how to be like God in this world. I will put my law in their hearts. I will write it on their hearts, and I will be God, and they shall be, I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. See, Jesus doesn't need to talk about the cross-forgiving sins, because Jeremiah talks about the cross-forgiving sins. Jesus only needs to point to Jeremiah. But he can point in lots of different directions because it's doing lots of different things this moment on the cross. It is forgiving their sins and redeeming them from their sins. It is breaking down the limitations of the Mosaic covenant by taking something that is written external to them to writing it internally to them. The vision there, incidentally, isn't one of saying he'll just change your nature so that you just naturally behave in God's ways, which is a little bit what it sounds like. What's being said here is his way of calling you to account will be inside you. His word to you will be inside you. His access to your conscience, your access to your decision making, it'll be inside you. This is really not a million miles away from what then happens with the dividing of the spire in Acts 2, and the Spirit of God entering the people and living in the hearts of the people and having a direct contact, a direct way of knowing them, of them knowing Him. Those barriers are broken down. You are back in His presence. And He is able to call you to account and form you from within. It's still formational, it's still about discipleship, it's still about you learning to be holy like He is holy. It's not about saying, I'm gonna flip the switch and now you're perfect. It's about saying, we're not gonna do that through an external source anymore. I'm gonna live inside you and form you from within. That's what this covenant will do. So when Jesus calls on new covenant, he's saying, that's what will now happen. This is what's happening. But Jesus also has another little illusion going on, and we ought to just pay attention to it, which is, as someone over here mentioned, which is in Genesis 15. This is subtle, but is quite extraordinary, I think. This is a visual cue from Jesus. God makes a covenant with Abraham relatively early in Abraham's story. In fact, so early that he's not yet called Abraham, he's still called Abraham. And Abraham has shown God some significant loyalty by refusing to, he has just saved his uh his uh adopted son Lot from a difficult situation and saved several other people as well, and has actually made some money out of that and has decided to tithe that to the Lord. And then the king of Sodom comes along and says, Well, why not you can keep all the money but give all the honour to me, or maybe you could just tithe to me. And it's about and it's sort of playing with the where with diluting the gift to God by sharing it with other people. And he refuses to do it, and he puts himself into a significantly dangerous position to do it, because he's talking to a king of a city-state, and he is not a king of a city-state, he's quite a fragile, small family, nomadic family, and he stands up to this king and says, No. And immediately in response to that, this is what happens. After these things, the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. Do not be afraid, Abraham, and he might be afraid, he's now put himself in danger. Do not be afraid, Abraham. I am your shield, and your reward shall be very great. But Abraham said, Oh Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus. This is an amazing little moment of Abraham's where the logic just completely breaks down. Here's what he says Lord, I don't have an heir. All I've got is this heir. Anyway, time for another time. And Abraham said, You have given me no offspring, because this is the point. It's not that he doesn't have an heir, it's that he's not a father. This is an open wound for those two. You have given me no offspring, so a slave born in my house is to be my heir. But this word of the Lord came to him, this man shall not be your heir, no one but your very own issue shall be your heir. He brought him outside and said, Look towards heaven and count the stars if you are able to count them. Then he said to them, he said to him, So shall your descendants be. And he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Then he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess. But he said, Oh Lord God, how am I to know that I am to possess it? He said to him, You might notice that they've this is all pronouns. He said to him, he said, he said, and you just lose track of who's speaking. The literary effect of that, incidentally, is to bring you into an awareness of how close they are. They are talking so closely together that you can't always tell them apart. There is a closeness of relationship here. He said, O Lord, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other. So this was the um the ritual that we were talking about earlier. And when the birds of prey came down on the carcass, Abraham drove them away. What's being envisaged here is an ancient ritual that has fallen out of use by the days of Moses, but is uh seems to be quite well known throughout Israel's history, which is that you would make a sacrifice and you would cut the animals of the sacrifice this way. This is an unusual way to cut the animals, but you cut them lengthways and you'd place half on one side and half on the other. And the two parties who are entering into an agreement would walk between the pieces. And actually, Jeremiah records why you do this, which is to say that you are bringing on, you are inviting a curse, which is to say, may their the fate of these animals be my fate if I break this agreement. That's that's what's the rationale that's going on here. So as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a terror a deep and terrible flying darkness descended upon him. Then the Lord said to Abraham, Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens and a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterwards they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace and be buried in a good old age, and they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. This is where they seal it. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. This is the sealing of that covenant. And you will notice that Abraham is neither of those, and God is both. That God is taking this covenant on entirely for himself. This is founded in his promise and his grace, and he is the one who's going to hold himself to account for it. And if they walk away from him, he is the one who will bear the consequences of it. Sound familiar? Let's fast forward back to Luke. Let's reread Luke. Oh, I've lost the piece of paper that Luke. Here we go. When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him. He said, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. He took a cup, and after giving thanks, he said, Take this and divide it amongst yourselves. Now the language that is used in Hebrew in the Old Testament for making a covenant, whenever you read the phrase they made a covenant, the language that's there in the Hebrew is they cut a covenant. They cut a covenant. We keep it in English with the phrase cut a deal. That's kind of still there. They cut a covenant, but it's mostly seen as not very great English, so they just translate it as made. But that's running there because it is signalling to you that there's a ritual sacrifice going on, that there is a cutting of animals going on. That's what it's signalling to you. And all covenants talk about this. The fewer covenants that don't have some other way of showing you some form of cutting. So Abraham in chapter 17, when they talk about circumcision, doesn't use the language of cutting, but it shows you some cutting that I won't dwell on. And then in Genesis 9, it also doesn't use the language of cutting, covenant with Noah, but something is cut. This covenant is with creation and with all of the animals, not just Noah. And so creation bears the cutting. When you spot it, it's so beautiful. Would anyone like to tell me what it might be? Where's the cutting? I know we haven't read it. What gets cut? No, although that's a rather interesting idea. But that comes before this covenant is made. The rainbow cuts the sky. So beautiful. Anyway. Here, take the cup and cut it amongst yourselves. It's covenant language. And you can just imagine them thinking, that sounds a little covenant-y to me. Just sowing a seed of wondering. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Then he took a loaf of bread. This bread that doesn't look anything like the cross event. And he had given thanks, he broke it in two. It doesn't look like the cross event. What does it look like? It looks a lot like Genesis 15, where a body is broken and each side is led half against the other. This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And he did the same with the cup after supper. And then he brings it together with a covenant. This is the cup that is poured out for you, is the new covenant. And so much covenant imagery has been laced there that that quote of the covenant, both from Moses and from Jeremiah, looking back at David, must have just erupted in them as a kind of yes, we false. This is covenant. This is the restoration of the covenant. But not just the restoration of the Mosaic covenant, it's the restoration, as we clarify through all of these different quotes and different threads that we might follow. It's the covenant restoration of the covenant made with David. It's the restoration of the covenant made with Moses. It's the restoration of the covenant made with Abraham. What that means is it isn't only forgiving you your sins, it is restoring to you your relationship with God, your capacity to interact with the presence of the Lord. It is restoring to you the promises that God has made to his people across all generations. It is restoring to you the inheritance that he first gave you. Incidentally, that inheritance he first gave you was in Genesis 1, and it is the earth. It is the restoration of all inheritance. It is the restoration of the kingdom of priests. It is the restoration of your authority to serve him and rule the world well. It is the restoration of discipleship and his ability to form you. It is the restoration of his lordship, which is what treaties are all about, is establishing who the Lord is. It is the restoration of his lordship. It is the restoration of the unity of God's people, no longer just Israel or Judah as broken nations, now a united people under Christ. That is a restoration of Genesis 1. The restoration to subdue the earth well is the restoration of Genesis. 1. What you are seeing in the cross is the culmination and fulfillment of all things. And he couldn't possibly tell you that in one line. But he can tell you covenant and ask you to go looking. He can say new covenant, gives you just enough threads to go on to look at Jeremiah, look at Moses, look at Abraham, and to draw these threads together. You are experiencing in Christ the restoration of communion between God's presence and his people, which is the full restoration of all of his creation blessings. And that's where we ought to stop. If we just get um uh Thanks so much. We we did promise to try and finish by eight.