A graphic has been circulating with the headline Hebrews 9:15 Destroys Modern Christianity. It quotes the verse, sets Jeremiah 31:31–32 beside it, walks the reader through a chain — first covenant broken, new covenant promised, Christ dies to redeem the transgressions under the first, the called receive the inheritance — and then asks one question:

If you were never under the first covenant, what transgressions under it were you redeemed from?

If you are a believer who has learned to rightly divide the word of truth, that graphic will have looked like an ally. Nearly all of it is what we teach. The covenants are Israel's. The New Covenant was made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Hebrews is not Paul's letter to the Body of Christ. Every one of those statements is true, and every one of them is on this website already.

Then comes the question at the bottom, and the question is a trapdoor. It is not asking you to rightly divide. It is asking you to conclude that a man who was never party to Israel's covenant has no redemption at all — and that is where the teaching behind it is going. The argument is not from the grace camp. It comes out of preterism — carried to the point that some are now calling it Israel Only preterism — and the conclusion it drives at is that Scripture's saving work concerned biological Israel and was finished in the first century. No Gentile believer. No gospel to preach. No one to preach it to.

This study answers it. And it answers it the way the error requires — not by disputing the verse, which is sound, but by exposing the premise underneath the question, which the post never states and which is not true. Guilt was never confined to those under the covenant, and neither is redemption.

First, a word about the quotation

The graphic puts this inside quotation marks: "He is the Mediator of the new covenant… for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant."

It is a paraphrase, not a quotation. The King James reads:

"And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance." (Hebrews 9:15 KJV)

Nothing turns on testament against covenant. The epistle uses both of the same thing — Christ is "the mediator of the new testament" here and "the mediator of the new covenant" seven chapters later (Hebrews 12:24), and "the mediator of a better covenant" at Hebrews 8:6. Nothing below rests on which word is used, and no one should be answered on it.

We will quote their words where we describe their case, because they are entitled to be quoted accurately. But everything proved below is proved from the King James.

The exegesis of Hebrews 9:15 is correct, and it is ours

Let us give the argument everything it has actually earned, because a great deal of it is right.

Hebrews 9:15 does tie the death of Christ to a covenant transaction. The transgressions it names are transgressions "under the first testament" — and the passage itself tells you who stood under that testament. Three verses later:

"Whereupon neither the first testament was dedicated without blood. For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book, and all the people, Saying, This is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you." (Hebrews 9:18–20 KJV)

Moses. The law. The people at Sinai. That is the first testament, and those are the parties to it. Nobody has to be argued into this; the passage names it.

The second testament has the same parties, and Scripture is not shy about it:

"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD:" (Jeremiah 31:31–32 KJV)

Note what kind of relationship that was. God was "an husband unto them" (Jeremiah 31:32). The first covenant was a marriage, and the second replaces a broken marriage with the same wife. And when the writer of Hebrews reaches back for that promise long after the cross, he does not widen the parties by so much as a word:

"For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah:" (Hebrews 8:8 KJV)

Even the vocabulary is contained. The words first testament stand twice in the Bible, at Hebrews 9:15 and 9:18, and first covenant twice more, at Hebrews 8:7 and 9:1. All four are in the epistle to the Hebrews, inside two chapters of it — which is exactly what you would expect of a letter written to Hebrews about their own covenant. The whole covenant question is worked out in The New Covenant Was Not Made with Gentiles or the Body of Christ.

So we concede the exegesis entirely. Hebrews 9:15 answers a covenant problem, and the covenant is Israel's. We have said so in print, and we will go on saying it.

Hold one thing about that phrase, though, because the argument turns on it further down. "Under the first testament" marks a covenant, and it also marks a time — everything under that testament lies on the near side of Sinai and the far side of Calvary. Both are true of the words, and the second will matter.

And now look again at the headline: Hebrews 9:15 Destroys Modern Christianity. A verse out of a letter written to Hebrews, about their covenant, turned to pronounce a verdict on Christians today. Follow the audience question honestly and see where it actually lands. If the letter is addressed to believing Israel — and it is, as Who Was the Book of Hebrews Written To? shows at length — then Hebrews 9:15 is telling those readers what the death of Christ accomplished inside the covenant they stood in. That is all it undertakes to do.

What it does not do, and cannot, is render a verdict on men who were never in that covenant. It does not include them and it does not exclude them; they are not in the letter's field of view at all. To get from this verse to a conclusion about you, the argument has to make it speak past its own audience — which is the precise move the whole position exists to condemn everywhere else. You cannot hold that Hebrews is Israel's mail and then read your own name in it, not even to find your name absent.

So the question is not whether Hebrews 9:15 leaves you out. It is whether anything else in Scripture speaks to a man outside the covenants at all. It does, at length, and it was written by Paul.

The argument turns on a premise it never states

Read the question again, slowly: If you were never under the first covenant, what transgressions under it were you redeemed from?

Now notice what has to be true for that question to have any force. It has to be true that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Grant that, and the conclusion is inescapable. Deny it, and the whole structure falls without touching Hebrews 9:15 at all.

In the post, that premise is never argued and never written down. It is carried inside the shape of the question, which is where the load-bearing part of a weak argument usually hides.

There is a second fault sitting underneath it, and it is a plain matter of reasoning. Hebrews 9:15 states a purpose for the death of Christ. A stated purpose is not an exhaustive list. He died to redeem the transgressions under the first testament does not yield he died to redeem nothing else. To get the second sentence out of the first, you must add the word only — and the verse does not supply it. The whole argument is a word the text does not contain.

Paul says guilt reaches men who never had a covenant to break

Here is the honest answer to their question, and it costs us nothing to give it plainly.

What transgressions under the first covenant were you redeemed from? None. I was never under it. And I was redeemed anyway.

That answer is not a dodge, because Paul teaches a guilt that never depended on a covenant at all. He states it as flatly as it can be stated:

"For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law;" (Romans 2:12 KJV)

Read that first clause again. There is such a thing as sinning without law, and the men who do it perish. Paul has named a whole class of sinners who had no covenant to break and no law to transgress, and he says they are lost all the same. If condemnation reaches a man outside the covenant, there is no reason in heaven or earth why redemption cannot reach the same man.

He is not making a novel point. He has already established how a man with no law is left exposed:

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:" (Romans 1:20 KJV)

And he presses it further still, to the man who never heard a commandment in his life:

"For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;" (Romans 2:14–15 KJV)

"Which have not the law." "Having not the law." Paul says it twice in one verse, and then holds those men accountable by a witness they carry inside them. Then he sums up both parties together and leaves nobody standing:

"What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin;" (Romans 3:9 KJV)

"Both Jews and Gentiles." "All under sin." That is the verdict Paul spends the opening chapters of Romans building, and it does not run along covenant lines. Neither does the sentence that follows from it: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

They will answer with Romans 5:13, and they should, because it is the strongest thing they have. Paul writes there that "sin is not imputed when there is no law" — which sounds, quoted alone, as though a man outside the law is a man with no account to settle. But read the sentence that comes next:

"For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come." (Romans 5:13–14 KJV)

"Nevertheless death reigned." Over whom? Over men between Adam and Moses — men who had no covenant, no Sinai, and not even Adam's one explicit command. What the law added was the formal charging of sin, as we have shown elsewhere in God Is Not Counting Your Trespasses. What the law did not add was the guilt, or the dying. Both were already running, and running over people wholly outside any covenant God ever made. The problem the cross answers is older and wider than Sinai — which is precisely why the remedy is too.

Romans 3:19 states their premise and draws the opposite conclusion

If this study offered you only one verse, it would be this one, because Paul builds the very restriction the graphic is using and then turns it in the opposite direction.

Read it first with the last clause left off, exactly as the argument would have it:

"Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law…" (Romans 3:19 KJV)

Stop there and the case seems made. The law speaks only to those under it. Nothing in it is addressed to the outsider. He is not in the conversation.

Now restore what Paul actually wrote:

"Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God." (Romans 3:19 KJV)

Everything hangs on the little word "that" sitting in the middle of it. It is a purpose clause. The law's narrow address is not a fence keeping outsiders out of the reckoning — it is the instrument by which the reckoning is made universal. God gave the law to one nation, watched that nation fail under the best terms ever offered to men, and thereby stopped every mouth on earth. If the people who had the covenant could not stand, the man who never had one has nothing left to plead.

The graphic asks its reader to take the law speaks only to those under the law and conclude therefore you are not addressed. Paul takes the identical sentence and concludes therefore all the world is guilty. One of those two is reading the verse Paul wrote.

And Paul never puts the fence back up. Follow the six verses from that sentence down to the propitiation and watch which way they run. "By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight" (Romans 3:20). "But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested" (Romans 3:21). "Unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference" (Romans 3:22). "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Then the remedy: "Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:24) — and only then:

"Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;" (Romans 3:25 KJV)

Every step widens. Not one narrows. The propitiation of verse 25 is the answer to the guilt of verse 19, and verse 19 said all the world — with no difference and all have sinned laid down twice more on the way. So the sins God had been holding over in His forbearance cannot be a narrower company than the guilt the paragraph has just finished establishing, because the propitiation is set forth as the answer to that guilt. The expansion is already complete when the reader arrives at the remission of sins that are past. It does not have to be argued for; it has to be left in place.

God forgave men who had no covenant to break, and the cross is what paid for it

An argument from guilt alone, this reading can absorb with a shrug. Yes, the nations were guilty. And they perished. The half the position cannot absorb is the other one — not the guilty Gentile but the forgiven one, and Scripture is full of men forgiven long before there was a first testament to be under.

Start with the rule that makes it a problem for them. Nothing is forgiven for free: "without shedding of blood is no remission" (Hebrews 9:22). So every sin God pardoned before Calvary was a debt held open against a payment not yet made — which is exactly what Romans 3:25 says God was doing, and why the propitiation had to be publicly set forth "that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). God's forbearance was never God overlooking sin. It was God carrying the account.

Now ask whose accounts He was carrying, and go back far enough:

"By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts." (Hebrews 11:4 KJV)

"By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith." (Hebrews 11:7 KJV)

Between those two stands Enoch, of whom it is said "he pleased God" (Hebrews 11:5). And before Israel had a priesthood of its own there was Melchisedec, "king of Salem, priest of the most high God" (Hebrews 7:1) — an office outside the chosen line altogether, and it was Abraham who paid tithes to him and not the reverse.

Not one of these men was under the first testament, and that is not an inference. Hebrews dates the first testament itself: Moses, the precepts, the blood of calves and goats sprinkled on the book and the people (Hebrews 9:18–20). Abel is not a lapsed covenant member. There was nothing yet to lapse from. And Hebrews states the terms of their access in a sentence with no nation anywhere in it:

"But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." (Hebrews 11:6 KJV)

Then comes the case that settles it, because Paul builds on it deliberately. "He believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness" (Genesis 15:6) — and Paul asks our opponents' own question about that verse and answers it:

"Cometh this blessedness then upon the circumcision only, or upon the uncircumcision also? for we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham for righteousness. How was it then reckoned? when he was in circumcision, or in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision." (Romans 4:9–10 KJV)

Add that the law came "four hundred and thirty years after" (Galatians 3:17), and Abraham's account was settled with no circumcision, no law, and no covenant of Sinai anywhere in sight. If redemption exists only as a covenant remedy, then the first man Scripture calls righteous was never paid for, and neither was Abraham — and Paul has made Abraham the pattern of every justified man since, "the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised" (Romans 4:11).

There is the whole error in one picture. This reading takes the covenant era and treats it as the shape of God's dealing with men — as though covenant were simply how God does business, so that a man outside one is outside everything. But that era has a beginning as plainly as it has an end. Before Abraham there was no chosen nation to come through and no first testament to be party to; men came to God directly on what He had revealed, and He counted them righteous. After Sinai a Gentile did come through Israel, by taking circumcision and the passover (Exodus 12:48) or by blessing her (Genesis 12:3) — and that arrangement is real. Today no nation stands between at all: "through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father" (Ephesians 2:18).

Three arrangements, and the covenant is the middle one. Note carefully that the third is not the first coming round again — the mystery was "hid in God" (Ephesians 3:9), not held over from Genesis and reinstated, and Abel had nothing remotely like our standing in Christ. What has never varied is the payment. One blood answered for Abel's sins, for Israel's covenant debt, and for ours, and it was never a covenant that made it sufficient.

"Salvation is of the Jews" names a source, not an owner

One verse is always quoted at this point, so let it be read whole. "Salvation is of the Jews" (John 4:22) is taken to mean that salvation belongs to that nation, so that a man outside it has none.

Read the words first. Scripture says salvation is of in one other place only: "Salvation is of the LORD" (Jonah 2:9) — said by a man inside a fish about the God who was delivering him, in the one book God gave to the saving of a Gentile city. Nobody reads that as salvation being the LORD's private property, withheld. It names where salvation comes from. And when the King James means possession it says so in different words altogether: "Salvation belongeth unto the LORD" (Psalm 3:8).

Then read the man who wrote it. Is of is John's settled way of naming an origin, and he uses it that way every time: "My kingdom is not of this world" — and he proves the sense in the same breath, "if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight" (John 18:36); "He that is of God heareth God's words" (John 8:47); and, with an abstract noun exactly like salvation, "love is of God" (1 John 4:7). Love is not God's possession locked away. It is from Him, and it goes out.

Then read the chapter He said it in, because it settles the matter by itself. He had already offered that Samaritan woman "living water" (John 4:10) and a well "springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14) — before He said it. He had just set aside both mountains, hers and Jerusalem's: "neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem" (John 4:21). And He told her outright — the first time in this Gospel He says it of Himself, every earlier naming of Him being somebody else's: "I that speak unto thee am he" (John 4:26). And twenty verses later the Samaritans of that city — who took no circumcision, kept no passover and went up to no temple — said the last word on the subject themselves:

"Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." (John 4:42 KJV)

If the verse means salvation is the property of one nation, the chapter contradicts itself inside twenty verses, in the mouths of the very people it would exclude. Read as a source, the chapter is one movement from beginning to end.

Salvation is of the Jews the way a river is of its spring. Genesis said where the water would run — "in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 22:18) — and Paul names the seed: "And to thy seed, which is Christ" (Galatians 3:16). One Jew, and through Him the nations. The verse produced to shut the door is the verse that names who opened it.

Paul locates our redemption in a Person, not in a contract

Now turn from guilt to remedy, and watch where Paul puts it.

"Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:" (Romans 3:24 KJV)

Not the redemption that is in a covenant. "The redemption that is in Christ Jesus." The thing is located in a Person. And when Paul names its measure, he does not name terms, conditions, or parties:

"In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;" (Ephesians 1:7 KJV)

"According to the riches of his grace." That is the yardstick. Not according to a covenant you were party to; not according to a debt you personally ran up under a legal arrangement; according to how rich God's grace is. Paul says the same again in Colossians — "In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1:14) — and again when he tells us what that blood reconciled:

"And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven." (Colossians 1:20 KJV)

Things in heaven were never under the first testament either. The blood reaches further than the covenant it ratified, and Paul says so in the same breath in which he mentions the cross.

This is not a new position on this site. It is the settled teaching of The Blood of Christ and the Preaching of the Cross: that same blood is what ratified Israel's covenant, and it belongs to no covenant exclusively. Christ did one thing at Calvary. It settled Israel's covenant debt, and it purchased a redemption preached freely to men who had no covenant at all.

Ephesians 2 answers their question by name

The strongest reply to the graphic is that Paul had already written it, addressed to exactly the people the graphic says have no standing.

"Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ." (Ephesians 2:11–13 KJV)

Take the description in verse 12 seriously, because Paul means every word of it. Aliens from the commonwealth. Strangers from the covenants of promise. Not junior partners in those covenants; not silent beneficiaries; strangers to them. Paul concedes the graphic's whole premise about their past standing, in stronger language than the graphic uses.

And then he says "But now."

They are made nigh. Not by being written into a covenant. Not by being naturalized into the commonwealth. "By the blood of Christ." Paul stands men who were strangers to every covenant God ever made beside the blood, and tells them the blood brought them home. The question what could the blood possibly have done for a man outside the covenant? has an apostolic answer, written to Gentiles, by name, in a letter that is ours.

Paul says the same thing again without the covenant vocabulary at all: "That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel" (Ephesians 3:6). By the gospel. Not by a covenant.

The mediator of a covenant and the mediator between God and men are two statements

Someone will bring Hebrews 9:15 back and press the word mediator. A mediator, they will say, stands between covenant parties — so if you were not a party, you have no mediator.

Look at the objects of the two statements, because Scripture supplies them.

Hebrews 9:15 says he is "the mediator of the new testament." The object is the covenant. That is covenantal mediation, and it is party-specific, and it is Israel's.

Paul says something with a different object entirely:

"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." (1 Timothy 2:5–6 KJV)

"Between God and men." Not between God and a covenant party — between God and men, followed immediately by "a ransom for all." There is your redemption language, in the same breath as the mediatorship, with no covenant anywhere in the sentence. And it is Paul, writing to the Body of Christ, which is where our doctrine is to be taken from.

Romans 15 names both channels in a single sentence

If the argument were sound, God would have only one way of dealing with men, and everything would have to come through the covenant. Paul names two, side by side, and distinguishes them:

"Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers: And that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy;" (Romans 15:8–9 KJV)

To Israel, promises — confirmed, because they were made to the fathers and God keeps His word. To the Gentiles, mercy. Two different words for two different things, in one sentence, from one apostle.

And the second word is the one that ends the argument. A promise is owed; that is what makes it a promise. Mercy is by definition not owed. It does not require that the recipient have a claim, a contract, or a standing — if he had any of those, it would not be mercy. So when the graphic demands to know what covenant entitled you to redemption, the answer is that no covenant did — and Romans 15:9 is Paul filing the Gentile's portion under a different heading altogether. "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all" (Romans 11:32).

What this teaching actually is, and where it goes

It is worth saying plainly what stands behind that graphic, because a reader who does not know will assume he is looking at a sharper form of right division.

He is not. The position grows out of preterism in its full form — the system holding that the prophetic Scriptures were fulfilled in the first century, chiefly at the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 — pressed to a conclusion that some are now calling Israel Only preterism. Stated at its strongest, and it is held by men who read their Bibles carefully, it runs like this: every covenant, every promise, and every apostolic letter in Scripture was addressed to Israel; Christ came to Israel; Paul wrote to Israel scattered among the nations; the whole book was fulfilled with that nation and closed at A.D. 70, and those saved in it were biological Israelites. There is no continuing program, no Gentile in the household of God, and nothing in the Scriptures addressed to anyone alive today.

A word on that name, since it matters how a label is used. It is not a name these men are here shown claiming for themselves — it is what the reading is being called by those describing and answering it. The post that prompted this study appeared in a group that calls itself preterist, which is the part that is not in doubt. Whether any given writer would accept the fuller label is his business, and nothing below depends on it. What is answered here is an argument, not a man.

Look at what they build it from, because their proof-texts are largely ours:

• Hebrews 9:15 — the covenant remedy answers a covenant problem. True, and this study concedes it in full rather than disputing a word of it.
• Jeremiah 31:31–32 — the parties are the house of Israel and the house of Judah. True, and the promise is restated four times over — Jeremiah 31:31 and 31:33, quoted back at Hebrews 8:8 and 8:10 — with both houses named together at Jeremiah 31:31 and Hebrews 8:8, and the house of Israel alone carrying the covenant in the other two.
• Matthew 15:24 — "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." (Matthew 15:24) True, and we teach it against every preacher who reads the earthly ministry as though it were addressed to the church.
• Romans 15:8 — Christ was a minister of the circumcision. True, and this study quotes the verse in full.
• Ephesians 2:12 — Gentiles were strangers from the covenants. True, and it is the verse that undoes them.

Every stone in the wall is genuine. What is false is the mortar — the unstated assumption that if a thing is not covenanted it does not exist. And notice what that assumption forces them to do with the passages above: Ephesians 2:12 has to be read without verse 13, and Romans 15:8 without verse 9. Two of the five have to be stopped one clause early, and Romans 3:19 — which the post does not quote at all — has to be handled the same way if it is raised. Each time, the clause left off is the one that would have answered them. The other three need no trimming, because we agree with them outright, and that is worth noticing. Their case does not rest on the verses we dispute. It rests on the ones we share, cut short.

Follow it to the end and see where you arrive. If no Gentile has any part, then there is no gospel for you to believe, none for you to preach, and nobody to preach it to. The Bible becomes a closed record of somebody else's business. That is not a doctrine of covenants. It is the removal of the gospel, arrived at by a route that looks like carefulness the whole way down.

Set it beside what we actually hold, because the two are only one sentence apart and the sentence is everything:

• Right division says: the covenant is Israel's — and redemption is preached to all men apart from any covenant, through the gospel committed to Paul.
• This preterist reading says: the covenant is Israel's — therefore there is no redemption for anyone else.

The first clause is identical. The second is the difference between the mystery and a locked door.

What we have that they cannot account for

There is one more thing to say, and it is the positive half.

The reason the graphic can find no channel for Gentile redemption is that it is looking in the covenants, and the channel was never there. It was kept out of the covenants on purpose:

"And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:" (Ephesians 3:9 KJV)

"Hid in God." Not hidden in Jeremiah, waiting to be excavated. Not implied in the covenant and overlooked. Hidden, in God, until the risen Christ gave it to one apostle for us. A man searching the covenants for the Body of Christ will not find it, and will conclude it is not there — and he will be right about the covenants and wrong about everything else, because he never looked where God put it.

That is why the honest answer to their question is not a defensive one. No transgressions under the first covenant were charged to me, because I was never under it. My sins were charged to me as a man "without law" (Romans 2:12), under a verdict that stopped every mouth on earth (Romans 3:19), and they were paid for by a death that had no obligation to me whatsoever. "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly" (Romans 5:6). He died for Israel's covenant debt, exactly as Hebrews says. He also died for the ungodly, who owed no covenant debt at all. One death; and the second of those is where I come in.

The question, answered

The graphic asked: if you were never under the first covenant, what transgressions under it were you redeemed from?

None. And that is not the confession they were hoping for — it is the gospel.

I was never a party to Israel's covenant and I never will be. I have no claim on a promise made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, and I do not want one. What I have is better and it is not a contract: I was guilty without law, condemned with all the world, and "justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:24). "By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8).

If you have seen that graphic and felt the floor move under you, put your weight back down. You were not foolish to be shaken by it — nearly every sentence in it is true, and it takes real reading to see where the true sentences stop and the false conclusion begins. But the conclusion never came out of Hebrews 9:15. It came out of a word that is not in the verse.

Read the whole sentence every time. Read Ephesians 2:12 and then read verse 13. Read Romans 15:8 and then read verse 9. Read Romans 3:19 all the way to the end of it. A case that needs you to stop one clause early has shown you where its weakness lies, whether or not the man making it ever meant to. "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15).

© 2026 Edward R. Cross