Passage : Hebrews 9For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. (Hebrews 9:15)
Christ, through his death, mediates a new covenant. This doesn’t mean that he mediates in the way we commonly think of mediation, working a compromise between two parties. Rather, the term mediator points to Christ’s function as the one who works out a new relationship between God and humankind, who have become estranged under the old covenant.
We see in chapter 8 of Hebrews that this estrangement comes because there was a problem with the old covenant, or, more specifically, the people under the covenant had a problem keeping it. As we saw in our look at Galatians 3:13-14, the old covenant included a promise of blessing to the people under the covenant if they kept the terms of the covenant, and a curse to the people if they broke the terms of the covenant. It would have served as a way to bring God and his people together if the people had kept their side of it, but they didn’t. Covenant breaking was a universal problem, causing the covenant to serve as a barrier between the people and God instead of a way for them to stay in relationship to Him.
So God established a new covenant, a covenant cut by the blood of Christ, in which those who have been called “receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.” Those who are called can receive their inheritance because Christ’s death redeems them from the curse that results from their lawbreaking under the old covenant.
Another purpose for Christ’s death is so that those who are called will receive the promised eternal inheritance.
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