The Hebrew Roots Movement claims the new covenant is simply the Mosaic covenant renewed. This article takes that claim seriously - and follows it to its logical conclusions. What emerges is a broken system, two thousand years of diaspora, and a theology that cannot hold together under the weight of its own implications.

Jeremiah 31:32 does not go away simply because it is inconvenient. God himself declared the Mosaic covenant broken: "my covenant that they broke." This is not the assessment of a New Testament writer with an agenda. It is God's own verdict, spoken by his prophet, in the very passage the HRM appeals to for its renewed covenant theology. The covenant was violated from the human side - exactly as bilateral covenants allow for. That fact must be the starting point of any honest engagement with the HRM position.

What Happens If They Are Right - Following the Logic to Its End

Let us take the Hebrew Roots position seriously for a moment. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that the Mosaic covenant was not superseded but merely renewed - that it continues as the operative covenant framework for God's people, now internalised through the Spirit rather than inscribed on stone. What follows from that? What does the world look like if this is true?

We begin where we must. Jeremiah 31:32 does not go away. God himself declared the Mosaic covenant broken: "my covenant that they broke." Israel did not merely neglect it or struggle with it. They broke it - repeatedly, catastrophically, and in exactly the ways Deuteronomy 28 warned against. The exile happened. The curses came. The covenant was violated from the human side, which is precisely what bilateral covenants allow for. This is not a contested point. It is God's own verdict, spoken in the very passage the HRM appeals to for its "renewed covenant" theology.

So suppose, for a moment, that God chose not to replace this broken covenant but to let it limp on - renewed, internalised, running alongside the extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, accompanying the spread of the gospel to every nation, operating quietly in the background of two thousand years of church history. Suppose the Mosaic covenant, cracked and violated though it was, has been the governing framework for God's people all along - right through the apostolic age, the patristic period, the Reformation, the modern missionary movement, and into the present day.

What that means is this: for two thousand years, God's people have been living inside a broken system. A covenant declared violated by God himself, patched up and kept running, while Israel has been scattered across the nations in precisely the exile that Deuteronomy 28 promised as the consequence of covenant-breaking. The Jewish people in diaspora for twenty centuries. The temple destroyed. The priesthood ended. The sacrificial system impossible to practice. And somewhere in the background, according to the HRM, the Mosaic covenant - the very system whose collapse produced all of this - is still the operative framework for the people of God.

This is not a picture of a God whose covenant faithfulness is sure. It is a picture of a God whose primary covenant instrument has been visibly, publicly, catastrophically broken for two millennia, with no resolution in sight. It is a theology of perpetual incompletion - of waiting inside a damaged framework, keeping feast days without a temple, observing priesthood regulations without priests, performing shadow rituals after the substance they pointed to has already arrived. It does not sound like the God of Romans 8:31–39. It does not sound like the God whose mercies are new every morning. It sounds like a pretty hopeless scenario - and hopelessness is not the character of the One who said "It is finished."

And Where Does Abraham Fit In?

There is a further complication that the HRM position generates, and it is not a small one.

If the Mosaic covenant is still the operative framework - still running, still binding - then the Abrahamic promises of land, seed, and blessing in their fullest sense remain largely unfulfilled and must await a future age for their completion. The HRM, along with many dispensational frameworks it partially overlaps with, tends to place the full realisation of the Abrahamic covenant in the millennial kingdom - a future earthly reign of a thousand years, with Israel restored in the land, the temple rebuilt, and the sacrificial system reinstated.

So the picture looks like this: the Mosaic covenant, broken and renewed, is running now in the present age. The Abrahamic covenant, unconditional and eternal, is waiting in the future age. And in the millennial kingdom, both will apparently be operating simultaneously - the Abrahamic promises being fulfilled in the land while temple services, Levitical priesthood, and animal sacrifices run in parallel. The shadow and the substance, side by side. The copy and the original, operating concurrently. The blood of bulls and goats offered again, after the blood of the Son of God has already been shed once for all.

The author of Hebrews, who spent ten chapters arguing that the Levitical system was a shadow of the good things to come and that the one sacrifice of Christ accomplished what ten thousand animal sacrifices could never accomplish, would find this deeply perplexing. The logic of Hebrews 10:1–14 does not leave room for a reinstated sacrificial system running alongside a completed atonement. Either the sacrifice of Christ was sufficient and final, or it was not. Either the shadow gave way to the substance, or the shadow continues after the substance has arrived. You cannot have it both ways without the two halves of your theology pulling in opposite directions.

The more carefully you follow the HRM's "renewed covenant" position through its implications, the more architecturally unstable it becomes. Covenants that were declared broken continue running. Promises that were fulfilled still await future fulfilment. Shadows operate alongside substances. Present obligations depend on a system whose physical infrastructure no longer exists. And two thousand years of the most extraordinary outpouring of the Spirit the world has ever seen - lives transformed, nations reached, the gospel carried to the ends of the earth - are framed as the interim period inside a broken covenant waiting for a future fix.

At some point, when a theological position requires this many complications to sustain itself, the honest response is to go back to the drawing board. Not to patch the framework with more distinctions and more qualifications and more appeals to Hebrew nuance - but to ask whether the framework itself is built on the right foundation.

We Stand on Something Simpler

The New Covenant does not require these complications because it is not trying to hold together things that the text has already separated. It rests on a completed work, not an ongoing negotiation. It is secured by the faithfulness of the one who said "I will" - not by the faithfulness of those who must keep saying "we will." The Mosaic covenant required Israel's obedience as the condition of its blessings. The New Covenant requires Christ's obedience - which he rendered perfectly, fully, and finally.

We stand on the sufficiency of Christ. On the New Covenant sealed in his blood. On the simplicity of what Paul called "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27) - not a covenant system, not a calendar of observances, not a framework of shadows, but a Person. The one to whom every shadow pointed has arrived. The one to whom every promise pointed has come. The one to whom every sacrifice pointed has offered himself.

That is not a broken system limping through the centuries. That is the covenant that cannot be broken - because the party who guarantees it is the only one who ever kept a covenant perfectly, and he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. - Luke 22:20

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. - Galatians 5:1