Hebrews 7:19: for the law made nothing perfect; on the other hand, there is the bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God.
The Bible tells us God never changes (Numbers 23:19; Hebrews 13:8; James 1:17), so the God of the Old Testament is the same God of the New Testament. A reasonable question to ask is if God is the same, why not have just one Testament – why the need to segregate the new from the old? Today’s verse provides us a big reason. God revealed His righteousness in the Old Testament via the giving of the law. The Jews took the law as the standard to which they would need to live their life in order to make themselves acceptable, or complete, to a holy God.
Today’s verse tells us that the law made nothing perfect, or complete. What that means is the law was not meant to be a validation of one’s acceptability to God if someone kept the law perfectly. If the law did not do that, why would God provide it? – What was its use? The purpose of the law was to prove that no one was acceptable to God. That may seem strange or cruel, but you have to try to remember God’s mindset towards His creation – towards you. God’s desire is that each and every of His creation come to repentance, believe, and enter into a relationship with Him. He designed us to be in constant fellowship with Him. However, when sin entered the human gene pool, by man’s choice, in Genesis 3, that kind of fellowship became impossible. Something had to be done about our sinful condition before we could attain such fellowship with God.
Here lies the reason for the segregation for the Old and New Testament. The law was designed for people to recognize their sin. Without the law, we would have no standard to compare our behavior. The law made our sinfulness apparent. However, it did not make us perfect or complete – it did not give us hope for a relationship with God. His purpose for giving the law was to get people to recognize their inability to keep it due to their sin nature and come to Him to ask for His forgiveness. God’s installation of the animal sacrifice system – the life of the blood of another being shed on behalf of the sinner – was designed to be a message of both the seriousness of sin and the mercy of God. If God was not merciful or desirous to have a relationship with Him, He would have never established the substitutional sacrifice system.
There was, though, a limit to the Old Testament sacrificial system. A sacrifice was only good for the sins that had been committed to that point. Once a person sinned again, a new sacrifice was required. When Jesus was sacrificed on the cross, His blood washed away and cleansed all of our sin – past, present, and future. By faith, this made us permanently acceptable to God. This is the better hope today’s verse is speaking to – we are made perfect and complete in God’s eyes only because of Jesus. Jesus, being the Door (John 10:9), made the way for us to draw near to God and enter into that constant, intimate fellowship that we were originally designed to have.
If you’re wrapped up in your “have tos” – your duties that you believe you need to do to make yourself acceptable to God, you are still looking at Him via the Old Testament. The New Testament tells us God so loves you and wants to commune with you that He would sacrifice His only begotten Son, a part of Himself, to make that happen. This is God’s grace. Receive the completeness of Jesus’ work on the cross, and find rest from your futile “have tos”. This is not to say the things you are doing to please God are not necessarily bad things. But, by themselves, they will wear you out, and you won’t have time to just enjoy the presence of God. There’s nothing you can do to make yourself any more acceptable to God or closer to God. He’s done all the work. Rejoice in this better hope, and draw near to the God who loves you supremely.