Ministry Part 2

 

    The first covenant was all rules and regulations.  It was an explicit way to live to be holy and pure.  You basically had to earn your way into heaven and since no one was perfect it was hard.  The ministry was all about learning the commandments and what they meant.  People even added onto it to make it black and white, but all that did was burden the people more.

    On top of that you had to be a Jew to be able to get into heaven.  They did not consider anyone else worthy enough.  Now, since God judges the heart I do believe some non-Jews had a heart for God and were allowed into Heaven.  That said the structure was built for God's people and the Jews were His chosen people.

    Since sin entered the world, blood has always been required to purify the sin.  When Adam and Eve sinned, God killed some animals to make them cloths.  From that point on they had to hunt and kill to have meat to eat.  I don't think iron was an issue before.  As you know, blood is not clean, so how can it cleanse a person?  It takes sacrificing something you love.  Causing harm to purify something you did.  It was designed to be hard, so you would consider everything before you sinned.

    The first ministry was all about appearances.  God's house was a temple.  It started out being one that traveled with His people and became a monument, a display of the condition of the human heart.  In the new ministry under Jesus, the Holy Spirit lives in our heart to guide our soul.  We are independently displaying the nature our heart in how we chose to live.  We are the temple of God.  Like the temple, we have many layer, but now we have access to God in a personal manner.

    Jesus came and everything changed.  Ministry was given life.  He lived his life to show us what is good.  He brought perfection back into the world.  Just a taste, but enough to make it clear to people what we need and soul desire.  He brought cleansing of our conscience, so that we could chose to serve God out of devotional love instead of duty.  

    God will never die.  Jesus died to his human life, but he was with God in the beginning of our time and will be with God after our time ends.  He is eternal, so that means his word is eternal.  This is how Jesus became our mediator of the new covenant.  He works with the Holy Spirit to decipher our true heart to God.

    It took the blood of Jesus to ransom us from our eternal sin.  We were hopeless before.  Now we can change things if we want.  We are not stuck in life.  His death, burial, and resurrection took the old covenant and transformed it into something obtainable.  His blood made it where we no longer need to shed blood to become pure and righteous.  Salvation makes us eternally clean.  Teaching that is our ministry.

Hebrews 9