The Cross was about showing that every person who lives in any degree of right relationship with God, whether Christian or pagan, Hindu or Muslim, agnostic or atheist (and whether they are conscious or completely unaware of this fact) does so through "the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world." Thus through his timeless work on the cross Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth and the life”, and no-one who is in relationship with God ultimately comes by any other way. All who on death find themselves in heaven will find that they are there only by virtue of the Cross - whether they had conscious knowledge of this or not.

When John, the writer of the book of Revelation, proclaimed that the Lamb (Christ) had been “slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13.9), he was proclaiming a hugely significant truth, the real import of which not even he fully grasped. All revelatory utterances of necessity pour through humans shaped and restricted by blinkers and preconceptions. It is one thing to receive revelation, it is another thing to necessarily understand the full meaning of what we have just come out with.

Certainly it was a truth that was not picked up on by the evangelical church. What blinded them from grasping the vast implications of this liberating concept was their mistaken belief that the nature and basis of ‘new covenant’ salvation and forgiveness was fundamentally different from what it had been under the ‘old covenant’. But it wasn’t!

The idea that God’s forgiveness and grace was fully available before the cross and without the Jewish or any other sacrificial system, was not new. For centuries God had been softening up Israel for this final break with the need for external sacrifices. The Jewish Bible contains a surprising number of proclamations of forgiveness that do not seem to need any form of religious ritual or actual physical sacrifice, for example Isaiah 6.6-7. As early as 1,000 BCE David, in some decidedly heretical statements, had cast doubt on the need for external sacrifices and declared that what God was really interested in was the state of a person’s heart. (See Psalms 40.6-8, 51.16-17 and 103.10-14) Even when the sacrificial system was advocated, it was declared to be of use only when the person making the sacrifice had the right heart attitude. Without that, sacrifices were said to be an abomination to God.

So, right at the very core of the ‘old covenant’ was the bed-rock response to God of ‘right heart’. As we have already seen, when the Prophet Hanani had declared in 2 Chronicles 16.9, "The eyes of the Lord run to and fro across the whole earth (not just Israel) to show himself mighty…”, it was on behalf of those whose hearts - not their sacrifices and certainly not their doctrines! – were pure and ‘hard after’ him. It is precisely this bed-rock attitude that is the basis of the ‘new covenant’. Clearly, as far as deepest core responses go, there is no difference whatsoever between the old and new covenants regarding what constitutes the fundamental basis for divine relationship.

What the ‘New Covenant’ was All About

Christ’s coming, teaching and crucifixion was all about the clearing away of false human perceptions (both Jewish and gentile) over how a person could be forgiven and live in relationship with God. The worldwide belief of the time said that sins could only be forgiven, and God or the gods propitiated, by means of some form of special physical sacrifice and ceremony, usually conducted by a priestly go-between. At its worst, this belief fed a universal delusion that religious ritual, correctly performed, had some special magic power which forgave a person’s sins even if they had no genuine sorrow or remorse for the evil they had perpetrated. For the Jews this had, for centuries, meant keeping meticulously to the yearly round of prescribed animal sacrifices and adhering to myriads of Jewish Torah rules and regulations, a practice which Jesus and Paul were to so rightly thunder against.

The ‘new covenant’ brought the previously subterranean bedrock of Gods grace, which had always been present in the ‘old covenant’, bursting upwards like a volcanic eruption into world of human consciousness. It was a new proclamation of the grace that had always existed. The ‘new covenant’ was God's grand restatement that he had always accepted people of 'good heart' into relationship with himself on the basis of his great love and graciousness, without the need for external sacrifice. It was God's dramatic way of saying, firstly to the Jews and then to the whole world, what he had been building up to for centuries through the psalmists and prophets - that physical sacrifice and the meticulous keeping of ritual and purity laws was not needed and could now be forever done away with. This is the new part of the 'new covenant'.