"This is my last will and testament." Readers of detective stories will remember that testaments have something to do with leaving property after one's death - as will anyone familiar with European continental legal systems (or even with Scots law). So it is easy to slip into the idea that "the New Testament is a sort of will. After Jesus died, we all were given the salvation promised in it. Doesn't the Bible say we are Christ's heirs?"
The Bible says nothing of the sort. We are "heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ" (Romans 8:17) - not the same thing at all. Paul is recalling how the Jews were given the Law and how they were given the Promised Land as their inheritance - obviously not something they received after God died, but something that was theirs permanently and for all time (as long as God didn't disinherit them!) Paul has earlier explained about Abraham's inheritance (Rom. 4:13) - just as Abraham inherited God's promises, so we in Christ share in God's love, and inherit God's salvation and God's glory.
If you know your Bible inside out, you may recall that there is a passage that says: "Where a testament is, there must also be the death of the testator." And this is how the King James Bible translated Hebrews 9:16. But as a footnote in more recent translations explains, this is not the only way to translate this sentence. Three verses later, the writer explains how the old covenant was made. Moses killed "calves and goats", and sprinkled their blood on the scroll and on the people. In what way was this "the death of a testator"?
In Jesus' day, the Greek word used, diatheke, certainly had the legal sense of a will. But when the Old Testament had been translated into Greek, diatheke was used to translate the Hebrew word which we normally translate into English as "covenant". A covenant is an agreement, but it is a rather one-sided sort of agreement. It is not like a contract, where one party does something and the other party does something of similar value in return. Especially where God makes the covenant, the emphasis is on giving. And this is the literal sense of diatheke, which literally means a disposition, a gift.
In the Old Testament, covenants could also establish friendship between families and between nations, and this second sense led the translators of the German Bible to use the word Bund where English versions have 'covenant'.
A covenant was often ratified with a sacrifice, and the writer to the Hebrews draws attention to the report in Exodus 24:3-8 of how Moses confirmed what the writer to the Hebrews calls "the first covenant" with such an offering. Clearly the writers had taken note of Jesus own words, that his own blood was being poured out to confirm a second, an everlasting covenant.
So the "New Testament" is a covenant. It is not just a book. The book records the New Covenant between God and God's people, but the covenant itself, the "disposition", is sealed by Jesus' sacrifice. This is the meaning of his words over the wine at the Last Supper, "this cup is the new testament in my blood" (1 Cor 11:25, Luke 22:20). The testament, the disposition, the covenant, is Jesus himself, and it is this that makes us all in the truest sense blood brothers with Christ.
HD