On the Newness of the New Covenant, Schaeffer on Where Immorality Comes From, and a Question About Purpose

AN IDEA FROM ME

“There’s something about the New Covenant. It’s different. It’s prophesied that God’s going to make a new covenant, not like the covenant that he made with the Jewish ancestors. So, there’s a lot of continuity, but there’s a lot of discontinuity in the New Covenant. It’s a completely, totally new way of being human. It’s totally unlike everything else. So we shouldn’t be surprised that every member of the New Covenant Community has the Holy Spirit, whereas that was not true about the previous covenants. So it’s radically different, and that’s a distinctive of New Covenant Theology.”

—Source: “7 Principles of New Covenant Theology,” my episode of the Your Calvinist Podcast. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jftV_r6cBtU 

A QUOTE FROM SOMEBODY ELSE

Men in our own sociologically and psychologically oriented age have all kinds of explanations for the moral problems of man. But according to the Bible, it is not moral declension that causes doctrinal declension; it is just the opposite. Turning away from the truth—that which is cognitive, that which may be known about God—produces moral declension. The modern artists, the dramatists, and the novelists show how far modern man has turned away into moral byroads. The Bible tells us the cause: men who knew the truth turned away; they are followed by men who do not know the truth, and this results in all sorts of moral turning aside. 

—Francis A. Schaeffer, Death In the City (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 119 (emphasis added). 

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

Solomon: “‘Absolute futility. Everything is futile. What does a person gain for all his efforts that he labors at under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3)? What’s your answer to Solomon?