“…since Moses writes about the righteousness that is from the law: ‘The one who does these things will live by them.’ But the righteousness that comes from faith speaks like this: ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will go up to heaven?”’ that is, to bring Christ down or, ‘Who will go down into the abyss?’ that is, to bring Christ up from the dead. On the contrary, what does it say? ‘The message is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In Christ, God did something totally new. At the same time, He was continuing something very old. He was completing an old covenant and creating a new one. The goal of both covenants was the same: our living in a right relationship with Him. The path these two covenants took to get there, however, was not. Paul offers a little study in contrasts here. Let’s talk about the differences and explore how Paul makes this distinction.

Having stated that Christ is the end, or the purpose, of the law, and the means of receiving and experiencing the righteousness of God for all those who are willing to believe in Him, Paul goes on here to highlight the differences between the two approaches to righteousness. The way he does this is really interesting. He doesn’t simply spout his opinions about how the two are different from one another. He doesn’t even point to something Jesus said in order to draw attention to their distinctions. Instead, he offers up a series of quotations from out of the old covenant documents to make the point.

This is something worth a moment’s reflection. This isn’t the only time Paul or one of the other New Testament authors takes this approach to demonstrating not only the legitimacy, but the necessity of the new covenant. Paul does it in several other places. Peter uses the old covenant to justify the new. The author of Hebrews quotes the Old Testament more than pretty much any other New Testament author, making extensive references to it in order to show how Jesus fulfilled the law and why the new covenant in Christ is now the only means of obtaining a right relationship with God.

Even Jesus took this approach. When Luke was describing the now-famous interaction between Jesus and two of His disciples on the to Emmaus after the resurrection, after Jesus scolded the pair who were still clueless as to who He was for not understanding what He had said and for their misunderstanding of the Scriptures, “then beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted for them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures.” In other words, Jesus took them through the Old Testament (which for them was simply “the Scriptures”) and by that proved the legitimacy and necessity of His life, death, and ministry.

Over and over again the first century followers of Jesus proved the legitimacy and necessity of Christ and the Gospel to skeptical unbelievers, resulting in huge waves of conversions, using nothing but their testimony about the resurrection and the Old Testament. We rightly give the lion’s share of our attention to the New Testament today because that outlines and unpacks the new covenant by which we live our lives as followers of Jesus, but as our forebears amply demonstrate, we don’t need the New Testament to demonstrate the truth of the Gospel. We can just use the Old.

And while this particular line of argument may not hold as much power today as it once did, in Paul’s day, when there was no New Testament, it was all they had and so they used it well. More specifically, for Jewish background believers who accepted the Old Testament as the authoritative word of God, to have someone come along and show how the whole thing was always pointing to Jesus and the Gospel was a pretty effective method of evangelism and discipleship.

Paul here starts by summarizing the mindset of the old covenant by quoting from Leviticus 18: “The one who does these things will live by them.” That was the old covenant in a nutshell. It was all about doing. Yes, faith played a key role in that doing, but the doing was the thing. If you kept the Law, you would achieve the status of righteous before God. This appears at first to be a very hopeful standard as it seems to set the righteousness of God within our grasp.

The problem, though, quickly reveals itself in that we don’t do the doing very well. Now, God built in a mechanism for dealing with this in the sacrificial system, but as the author of Hebrews goes on about at length, the very existence of the sacrificial system reveals the fatal flaw in the law approach to righteousness. An approach to obtaining the righteousness of God that we constantly had to re-up because we kept drifting away from it was not a long-term solution to the problem of sin and our separation from God’s righteousness. We needed something different; something better.

Paul goes on to show how the seeds for this something better were planted in the Old Testament by quoting from Moses yet again. In fact, the next three quotes are subsequent verses from the same passage. “But the righteousness that comes from faith speaks like this.” In other words, this is the mindset behind this other approach to righteousness.

“Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will go up to heaven?’ that is, to bring Christ down or, ‘Who will go down into the abyss?’ that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.” These two lines can be a little confusing at first, but here is what Paul is saying. The righteousness that comes by faith does not depend on our doing or someone else’s completing some kind of a herculean task in order to obtain it. We don’t have to do some grand deed or set of deeds in order to bring God’s Messiah, our Savior, down from heaven. Nor do we have to do any of that to bring Him up from the pit of hell as if some enemy was keeping Him from us. Our effort does not factor into the equation here.

Instead, “on the contrary, what does it say? ‘The message is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.'” God has put within you the means of obtaining His righteousness; the means of your salvation. And again, this is Moses saying this, not Paul. Paul is simply offering up what the Scriptures say about themselves. Now, I should note here that this does not mean we can somehow save ourselves by our effort in some kind of New Agey way. That would be the opposite of the point Paul is trying to make. He’ll go on in the next couple of verses to unpack what this means, but we’ll talk about that more next week.

The point here is that faith is the means now of obtaining God’s righteousness, and that this was always God’s plan. The covenant of the Law had to come first for a variety of reasons we are not going to try to explore today, but when the time was just right (something Paul observes in Galatians 4:4), God set in motion the plans He had been preparing the people for from the beginning. The seeds of the new covenant were laid in the very foundation of the old. The old requires our great effort and even then we fail. The new requires our faith and God does all the work in Christ to make it succeed.

That seems to be like quite an upgrade. If you haven’t yet made it, you should. How exactly you can make it we will talk about next week. Stay tuned.