For three years, Blessing’s engagement lived inside her phone. Dapo had gone to Manchester for a master’s degree and then stayed on for a job that would help them marry without debt. They agreed it was the wise thing to do. It was still hard.
She knew his face mostly from a screen. There were video calls that froze halfway through a sentence when the network dropped. There were voice notes recorded on his way to work at six in the morning, his breath visible in the cold. There was a photograph of the two of them at her sister’s wedding, printed and tucked into the frame of her dressing-table mirror, the corners going soft from being touched. On difficult nights she would scroll through old pictures and listen to the same voice note three or four times before she slept. Those things were precious. They were true. Every picture was really him, and every voice note really his voice. They kept her love alive across six thousand kilometres.
Then, one December evening, she stood in the arrivals hall at the airport in Lagos with her heart pounding and watched him walk through the sliding doors pushing a trolley with two suitcases. She did not take out her phone to look at his photograph. She did not play a voice note. She dropped her handbag on the floor and ran.
Later that night, sitting in her parents’ house with Dapo beside her on the settee and the whole family talking at once, her younger sister leaned over and teased her. “Blessing, you have not touched your phone since you came back from the airport.” Blessing laughed. “Why would I look at his picture when he is sitting right here?”
That is the question the letter to the Hebrews asks a congregation of tired believers who were thinking of going back to the photographs.
Why Hebrews keeps saying “better”
The people who first received Hebrews were Jewish believers in Jesus. They had suffered for their faith. The writer reminds them of the early days when they “took joyfully the spoiling of your goods” (Hebrews 10:34), standing alongside fellow believers who were imprisoned and shamed. But the pressure had gone on a long time. Some were drifting from the gatherings. Some were tempted to step back into the familiar world of the temple, the priesthood and the sacrifices, where life would be quieter and their families would stop treating them as traitors.
The writer does not answer them by mocking the old covenant. He could not, because it came from God. He answers by showing them Jesus, and by using one word over and over again. Better. The Greek word kreitton appears more than a dozen times in the letter. Jesus is “so much better than the angels” (Hebrews 1:4). He is counted worthy of more glory than Moses (Hebrews 3:3). He brings a better hope, a better covenant, better promises, better sacrifices, a better possession, a better country, a better resurrection and blood that speaks better things than the blood of Abel.
The writer also gives us a key word for understanding the old order. It was a shadow. The earthly priests “serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5). “For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things” (Hebrews 10:1). Paul uses the same language: “Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:17).
A shadow is real. It has the true shape of the thing that casts it. You can learn a lot from it. But you cannot embrace a shadow, and once the person casting it has walked into the room, you would not dream of turning back to stare at the outline on the wall. The tabernacle, the priests and the sacrifices were God’s own photographs of His Son, true in every line. Hebrews says that the Son Himself has now come.
A better hope that brings us near
The first “better” in the central argument of Hebrews appears in chapter 7, in the middle of a discussion about priesthood:
For there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof. For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did ; by the which we draw nigh unto God.
“The law made nothing perfect.” The word perfect in Hebrews means complete, brought to its goal. The law was good, holy and from God. But it could not complete what it pointed toward. It could describe righteousness, regulate worship and expose sin. It could not finally cleanse the conscience or bring the worshipper fully into God’s presence. The commandment was set aside “for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof,” a weakness that lay in what it was able to achieve in fallen people.
Then comes “the bringing in of a better hope,” and the writer tells us immediately what makes it better: “by the which we draw nigh unto God.”
That is the measure of the new covenant. It brings people near. Under the old arrangement, nearness was carefully restricted. Ordinary Israelites came to the outer court. Priests went into the holy place. Only the high priest entered the most holy place, once a year, and never without blood. The whole structure of the tabernacle said, God is holy, and the way in is not yet open. Hebrews says exactly that: “the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing” (Hebrews 9:8).
The better hope does what the law could not. It opens the way. Hope in Hebrews is not wishful thinking. It is the confident expectation that rests on what Jesus has done, and the writer describes it as “an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil” (Hebrews 6:19). Our hope is anchored inside the very place that was once closed. Jesus has gone in as our forerunner, and He has fastened our hope to the throne of God.
A better priest who never dies
PunchlineHow can the way be open now when it was closed before? Because the priesthood has changed.
Israel’s priests came from the tribe of Levi and the family of Aaron. Jesus came from the tribe of Judah, which had no priestly role at all. So the writer goes back to a mysterious figure from Genesis: Melchizedek, king of Salem and “priest of the most high God” (Genesis 14:18), who blessed Abraham and received a tenth of the spoils from him. Centuries later, David wrote a psalm in which God speaks to David’s Lord and says, “The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek” (Psalm 110:4).
Hebrews draws three lessons from that psalm.
First, God swore an oath. The Levitical priests were appointed by law, without an oath. Jesus was appointed with one. “By so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament” (Hebrews 7:22). A surety is a guarantor. Many of us know what it means to need a guarantor for a loan or a job. The guarantor puts his own name and resources behind the agreement. If the other party fails, he answers for it. Jesus is the guarantor of the new covenant. Its security rests on Him.
Second, His priesthood is permanent. Look at how the writer puts it:
And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man , because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people’s: for this he did once, when he offered up himself.
The old priests kept dying. Every generation needed new ones. Aaron died on Mount Hor. His sons and grandsons followed him into the grave. Israel was always one funeral away from needing another high priest. Jesus “continueth ever.” He was made a priest “after the power of an endless life” (Hebrews 7:16). And because He never dies, He is “able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him.” He does not hand you on to a successor. The One who received you will still be receiving you when you are old.
Third, His priesthood is perfect. The old high priests had to offer sacrifice first for their own sins before they could offer for the people. Jesus is “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.” He needed no sacrifice for Himself. And He did not offer a bull or a goat. He offered Himself, “once.”
This has very practical consequences. Some believers are always looking for a human priest to stand between them and God: a prophet whose prayers seem to carry more weight, a pastor whose blessing they must obtain, a special anointing they must receive through someone’s hands. There is a proper place for asking others to pray for us, and for honouring those who teach and lead. But Scripture is plain: “there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). You have a High Priest who never dies, never sins and never sleeps. You do not need to rent access to God from anyone else.
A better covenant on better promises
Hebrews 8 opens with the writer stopping to summarise his whole argument: “Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens” (Hebrews 8:1). Then he moves from the priest to the covenant He administers:
But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second.
“A better covenant, which was established upon better promises.” What was wrong with the first covenant? The writer answers in the next verse: “For finding fault with them” (Hebrews 8:8). The fault lay with the people more than with the covenant. Jeremiah had said the same: the old covenant was one “which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:32).
Think back to Mount Sinai. God set out the terms of His covenant, and the people replied with great sincerity, “All that the LORD hath spoken we will do” (Exodus 19:8). They meant it. Within weeks they were dancing around a golden calf. The old covenant depended in large part on Israel’s faithfulness to keep it, and Israel, like every one of us, was not able.
So what makes the new covenant’s promises better? Hebrews goes on to quote Jeremiah in full, and if you read the passage you will notice that every promise begins with God’s “I will.” God will put His laws into their minds and write them on their hearts. God will be their God and they will be His people. All of them, from the least to the greatest, will know Him personally. And God will be merciful to their unrighteousness and remember their sins no more.
The first covenant rested heavily on the people’s promise. The new covenant rests on God’s promise, guaranteed by Jesus. That is why it cannot fail in the way the first one did.
We should be careful not to shrink these better promises into something smaller. Some teaching treats the “better promises” as though they were mainly about more money, bigger houses or faster cars than the Israelites received. The promises Hebrews names are far greater: a changed heart, a personal knowledge of God, a people who belong to Him and a conscience that no longer carries the record of sin. God does care about our daily needs, and He provides for His children. But the treasure of the new covenant is God Himself, known from the inside.
NuggetThe first covenant leaned on the people’s promise, “All that the LORD hath spoken we will do.” The new covenant rests on God’s own “I will,” and Jesus stands as its guarantor.
A better sanctuary and a better sacrifice
Every covenant in Scripture is sealed with blood, and so Hebrews moves on to compare the sacrifices. The old covenant had an earthly sanctuary, a tent and later a temple built by human hands to a pattern shown to Moses on the mountain. Its sacrifices were offered constantly. Every morning and every evening. Every sabbath. Every festival. And once a year on the Day of Atonement, when the high priest went behind the veil.
The writer says something about those sacrifices that would have shocked anyone who loved the temple. They were reminders. “But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year” (Hebrews 10:3). Each Day of Atonement told Israel that the problem was still there. If the sacrifices had truly removed sin, “would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins” (Hebrews 10:2).
Then the writer shows us what Jesus offered and where He took it:
It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us: Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place every year with blood of others; For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
“Better sacrifices than these.” The plural is a way of speaking about the category. In fact there is only one, and the writer goes on to stress it: “now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” Once. The sacrifice was His own life. The sanctuary was heaven itself. And the purpose was to put sin away completely, rather than to remind us of it annually.
There is a beautiful detail in the next chapter. “And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:11-12). There were no chairs in the tabernacle. The priests stood, because their work was never done. Jesus sat down, because His was.
This is what the better sacrifice does for the conscience. “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:14). Notice the purpose of a cleansed conscience. Christ’s sacrifice frees us from the dead works by which we tried to make ourselves acceptable, so that we can serve the living God with a clear heart. Grace never produces idleness. It produces glad service.
Better blood that speaks
Near the end of the letter, the writer paints the contrast between the two covenants as two mountains:
For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, And the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; which voice they that heard intreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more: (For they could not endure that which was commanded, And if so much as a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned, or thrust through with a dart: And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake:) But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.
The first mountain is Sinai. It burned with fire. There was darkness, a storm, a trumpet blast and a voice so terrifying that the people begged not to hear it again. Even an animal that touched the mountain had to die. Moses himself said, “I exceedingly fear and quake.” That was the atmosphere in which the law was given. It was glorious and holy, and it kept people at a distance.
The second mountain is Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. There is a great festal gathering of angels. There is the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. There are the spirits of the righteous made perfect. There is God the Judge of all. And there is “Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.”
Remember what Abel’s blood said. When Cain murdered his brother, God told him, “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). That blood cried out for justice against the one who shed it. The blood of Jesus was also shed by human hands, by our sin. But it speaks a better word. It cries for mercy. It says forgiven over those who put Him on the cross.
Notice where the writer says you have come. “But ye are come unto mount Sion.” This is present tense. When you gather with other believers to worship, you are not standing at the foot of Sinai, trembling and hoping not to be struck down. You are joining a heavenly assembly, gathered around a Mediator whose blood speaks peace.
Better does not mean casual
It would be a serious misreading of Hebrews to conclude that the better covenant has made God less holy or our response less important. In fact, the letter contains some of the most solemn warnings in the New Testament, and every one of them is based on the superiority of the new covenant.
“How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation” (Hebrews 2:3). The argument runs from lesser to greater: if those who ignored the word spoken through angels faced consequences, how much more those who ignore the word spoken by the Son? Right after the two mountains, the writer says, “See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped not who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven” (Hebrews 12:25). And he ends the chapter: “let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:28-29).
Greater privilege brings greater seriousness. The warnings in Hebrews are aimed especially at those who would turn away from Christ altogether, back to a system that can no longer save. They are not written to make sincere, struggling believers live in terror. But they remind all of us that grace is a holy gift from a holy God. A bride who has been brought into her husband’s house does not treat the marriage casually because she is secure in it. Security makes love freer, and it also makes betrayal more grievous.
There is something else here that matters. Hebrews never despises the believers who lived before Christ. Chapter 11 is a gallery of honour: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab and many more, men and women who “obtained a good report through faith” (Hebrews 11:39). They lived by the shadows faithfully, and God was not ashamed to be called their God. The chapter ends with this sentence: “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:40). They and we are completed together in Christ. The new covenant fulfils their hope as well as ours.
So when we speak about the old covenant, we should do it with respect. We read the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets as God’s word, full of Christ. We honour the saints who lived under it. We simply refuse to go back to living as though Christ had not come.
Living in the better covenant
What does it look like, practically, to live in the better covenant rather than drift back toward the shadows?
It means approaching God directly through Jesus. “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). You do not need a human mediator, a special day or a holy location to have access to the Father.
It means refusing systems that make your standing depend again on rituals and rules. Some believers in our churches carry an anxious burden of religious obligations, offerings to avert misfortune, special fasts to stay in God’s favour, regulations about food or days, as though the new covenant were the old one with new vocabulary. Hebrews says, “it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats” (Hebrews 13:9). Prayer, fasting and generous giving all belong in the Christian life, but as responses of love, not as payments toward acceptance.
It means expecting God to work inside you. The heart of the better promises is a God who writes His ways on our hearts and works in us. The letter ends with a prayer that gathers all of this together:
Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
“The blood of the everlasting covenant.” This covenant will never be replaced, because nothing could be better than what God has given in His Son. And look at what God does within it: He makes you “perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ.” The better covenant produces a better life, from the inside, by the working of God.
And it means persevering. The first readers of Hebrews were tempted to go back because following Jesus had cost them. Some of you are feeling that cost too. Your family does not understand. Your faith has made work harder. The pressure to compromise is constant. Hebrews says, “Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward” (Hebrews 10:35). You have “a better and an enduring substance” in heaven (Hebrews 10:34). The better covenant is worth whatever it costs to stay in it.
PunchlineBlessing and Dapo were married the following April. At the reception, someone asked her whether she missed the long-distance days at all. She thought about it seriously before she answered.
“I am grateful for them,” she said. “Those pictures and voice notes kept me going. Every one of them told me the truth about him. I still have them. I would never throw them away.” Then she looked across the hall at her husband, who was being pulled onto the dance floor by her aunties. “But I don’t need them now. He is here.”
The old covenant was God’s gift. Its sacrifices, priests and holy places were true pictures of His Son, and the saints who lived by them were sustained in faith. We honour them and learn from them still. But Jesus has walked through the doors. He has offered the one sacrifice, entered the true sanctuary and sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. He is your High Priest, your surety and your Mediator. Do not go back to the photographs. Look at Him.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- In what ways might you be living as though you were still under the shadows, relating to God through rituals, special persons or anxious obligations?
- What does it mean to you that Jesus is the “surety,” the guarantor, of the new covenant?
- How does the picture of the priests standing and Jesus sitting down speak to your conscience?
- Hebrews warns as strongly as it comforts. How do assurance and reverence belong together in your own walk with God?
- Where are you feeling the cost of following Christ right now, and how does the “better and enduring substance” help you persevere?
This Week
This week, read through Hebrews and underline every occurrence of the word “better.” Next to each one, write down in a short phrase what is better and why. Then choose one area where you have been relying on a shadow, perhaps a ritual you perform to feel safe, or a person you depend on to reach God for you, and bring it directly to Jesus your High Priest in prayer, using Hebrews 4:16 as your invitation.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for the better covenant You have made through Your Son. Thank You for the law, the prophets and the saints who walked by the shadows, and thank You that the substance has come. Jesus, You are my great High Priest who never dies, my surety and my Mediator. Your one sacrifice has put away my sin, and Your blood speaks mercy over me. Forgive me for the times I have gone back to the shadows, trying to reach You through rituals and fears. Write Your ways on my heart, make me perfect in every good work, and work in me what is pleasing in Your sight. I will not cast away my confidence. I come boldly to Your throne of grace through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.