Justine Haupt may be a 34-year-old engineer, but she’s hardly a child of cell phone technology. She doesn’t text. She doesn’t spend much time on the web except when she’s on the job at Brookhaven National Laboratory. As an astronomy instrumentation engineer, she knows all about smartphone use— and hates it. She bought her mother a smartphone and set it up and even tried one for herself, but lasted less than a month before she went back to her flip phone. Even that didn’t suit her precisely, so she bought some parts, scrounged a dial from an old phone and created her own rotary-dial cell phone!

Oh, it still has a couple of speed dial buttons, for her mother and her husband. And a black and white display to show incoming numbers. But it has an external antenna and that old-style rotary dial on the front. When she described it and showed pictures on her blog (she’s really not opposed to technology!), the website crashed from so many people viewing and asking for information. Now she’s offering a kit for $170 but you have to find and repurpose your own dial. She expects soon to offer a full kit for sale; just insert a SIM card and you too, can have a cell phone that . . . makes phone calls. It’s a mixture of old and new that pleases Justine Haupt and strikes a nostalgic note in others.

“For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people and said: ‘The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah’” (Hebrews 8:7-8 NIV).

Six hundred years before Jesus, God promised a new covenant unlike the one He gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. This new covenant would be for all people, not just Israel. It would involve the forgiveness of sins. It would have no earthly Temple, no animal sacrifices, no special priesthood, no laws governing minutiae of food and clothing, and no commanded days of feasting and fasting. It would have different rules for worship: a different day, a special communion every Sunday, a common collection for helping the poor and preaching the good news, and an end to special priests, instruments of music, and the Sabbath. But some people long for the old days, the old covenant, and they want some of those things that seem so religious to them.

So, they include instruments in their worship, and they elevate certain people as priests, and they restrict certain foods, and they demand the observance of certain days. It’s a puzzling mixture of old covenant and new, without respect for God’s actual covenant terms. It’s personal preference instead of obedient submission. And it won’t work. We couldn’t tell the bank we would from now on use the interest rates from 2009. We couldn’t inform our doctor that we’d pay him what the insurance company paid him back in 1982. And we can’t tell God that we’ll covenant with Him on our terms. We’re responsible for the terms of the new covenant in Christ’s blood. It’s His way, not ours, and it’s our only hope for the forgiveness of our sins.