What if the Old Covenant was God’s final word to man?
What if the Ten Commandments were the only means available to us to gain entry into heaven, or to earn God’s love and acceptance?
Where would this leave us?
What would our eternal fate be?
How would this affect our lives here and now?
The Old Covenant was God’s word to Israel. Not His first word to Israel, nor was it His last. But it did define Israel’s way of life as a nation from Moses until Jesus. The teachers of the Law believed Israel’s role in the world was to live out the righteous requirements of the Law, and in so doing, become a blessing to all other nations.
Where did this leave them? The same place it leaves anyone who attempts to gain God’s acceptance through obedience to Law – judged, condemned, fearful and dead in sin.
That’s the Old Covenant, a ministry of condemnation and death.
When read correctly, the Law is God’s word about man, the plain, stark truth. It answers these questions: What is the destiny of a people caught in the throes of a lie? What will be their end? According to the Law, the final stop is death, but only if the Old Covenant is God’s final word.
The denouement of this story has a twist. It is revealed on a hill called Calvary, outside the walls of Jerusalem. A man hung there on a cross, suspended between heaven and earth. He was no ordinary man, and the death he died was no ordinary death.
The man whose hands and feet were pierced was the Lord Himself, the unblemished Lamb of God. His death was in place of ours. Live out the full story of the Law and it ends at the foot of this cross. Look up and see God’s final word to man – Jesus.
Death is not God’s end for man, it is Jesus. In Him we have forgiveness of sins, righteousness and a new way of life defined by the New Covenant. That leads to several questions.
What if we truly believed that Jesus was and is God’s final word to man?
Where would this leave us?
How would it affect us here and now?
The New Covenant answers – in Jesus totally forgiven, completely loved and fully alive!
Tag: Life
Who is in Control?
Are you saying that since you are totally forgiven you can just go out and do anything you want? Anytime the grace of God is discussed, the critics drone away with this ridiculous question. All it does is betray their shallow understanding of salvation.
In Christ, we have received much more than forgiveness. We have been made alive so that we could walk in the newness of life led and guided by God’s Holy Spirit. Is God’s Spirit going to lead you to sin? To the person who believes that salvation is nothing more than the forgiveness of sins, freedom doesn’t make sense. So they ask the question.
The question isn’t new. Paul was hit with it almost everywhere he traveled. He gave an alarming answer to these critics in 1 Corinthians 6:12: “everything is permissible to me.” Yes, he was free to submit to the desires of the flesh. And so are you. But what was more important to Paul was that in Christ he was free to submit to the desires of the Spirit. And guess what? You are too. Both are permissible, but only one is profitable.
Here is the real issue. When we give in to the desires of the flesh we put ourselves under the control of sin. For the child of God, this doesn’t make sense. Paul didn’t want to be mastered by anything. He had had enough of that as a lost person. He wanted to live his life under the control of the Holy Spirit and experience love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control.
We are not independent beings, we are dependent. But God has given us the freedom to choose who or what we will depend upon at any given moment. Who is in control? That is the question we should be asking. When we submit to the desires of the Spirit, we will experience the abundant life Jesus promised. Who is in control of your life?
Here's What Happened
What happened to you the moment you were saved? Each of us has a unique story to tell in response to this question. These stories are powerful and deeply moving. Today, however, I raise the question not to prompt personal testimonies, but to direct us to God’s work in our lives. In other words, what would He say happened to us the moment we were saved?
Although the list below is not an exhaustive one, it does show the magnitude of this great salvation you have received in Christ Jesus.
- God made you alive together with Christ (This was the subject of the first two posts). Paul explains in Ephesians 2:4, 5 and Colossians 2:11-14.
- He transferred you out of the kingdom of darkness and placed you into His kingdom : “For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13, 14).
- He added you to His body, the church of Jesus Christ: “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body–whether Jews of Greeks, slave or free–and we were all given the one Spirit to drink” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 13). “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is part of it” (1Corinthians 12:27).
- God declared you to be His child: “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1).
- He sent His Spirit to live in you: “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father'” (Galatians 4:6). “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).
As you can tell from these few verses, being saved is a big deal. It is much more than receiving a ticket for entry into heaven when you die, or even forgiveness of sins here and now. What happened to you and me at that moment of salvation is monumental.
We weren’t aware of all that happened. We simply responded to the message concerning Christ. When I did, I gained a sense of purpose in life. For the first time, I felt like I was anchored, that I knew I belonged. You may have experienced peace or freedom, or felt that you had been cleansed and a mountain of guilt and shame removed. You may have been overwhelmed by God’s unconditional love and acceptance.
All these experiences are real and genuine because Christ came to live in us. We are different, new creatures according to the Bible. What happened to us is a story worth telling.
First Life, Then Change
I grew up reciting the Apostle’s Creed every Sunday. “The third day He arose again from the dead”; I affirmed this statement with reverential gusto. But outside the confines of the sanctuary it had little meaning to me. I had never reasoned that God actually had power over death, my spiritual death. Quite frankly, I didn’t even know that I was dead in sin.
The summer before my seventh grade year, the death of Jesus overwhelmed me. It was the last night of church youth camp. The pastor graphically portrayed the crucifixion. My heart ached and tears rolled down my cheeks as I realized Christ died for me. Right then and there, I knew I needed Jesus. I prayed and thanked Him for dying for me.
I asked Him to come into my life to help me become the best person I could be. The irony is that my life got worse. Temptations and peer pressures got the best of me. I wanted to be God’s guy. I tried valiantly, but life kept spiraling out of control. The things I wanted to do, I couldn’t. The things I didn’t want to do, I did. I wondered, “Why isn’t God helping me be a better person?
Jesus wasn’t interested in making me a little better. He was not marketing the latest self-improvement program. That is what I was looking for, but self-improvement is not what I needed. Jesus’ work is this: to take someone dead in sin and make him eternally alive.
News that a close friend had taken a drug overdose stirred a sense of desperation in me. I was on the same path. Something had to change.
I started attending a Bible study in Atlanta. Dan DeHann was the teacher. I liked him, and I listened to what he had to say. His message on Colossians 2 answered my heart’s cry. It was so clear that I wondered why I had never seen it before. Here was the verse that connected: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins” (Colossians 2:13).
What this verse taught me boggled my mind. And it still does. God made me alive together with Christ. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead, God directed toward me. I was raised spiritually to walk in the newness of life. Until that moment, Paul’s words to the Colossians were meaningless to me. I had made mistakes, committed sins, but still I was basically okay — a good kid, just off track. My hope was that Jesus could help me get back on track and make me the person I wanted to be. The problem was that the “me” I wanted to improve was actually dead in sin.
Admitting my spiritual death lifted a huge burden. I no longer had to try to fix something that was unfixable. However, this admission was frightful. Death is final, the end. It is unchangeable. No amount of human effort or ingenuity can reverse this sinister state. Mankind has tried, but to no avail. Dead is dead, and that is what I was spiritually. Control of my destiny was out of my hands. Life had to come from another source.
The Bible declares that God has power over death. That first Easter was a glorious, earth-shaking demonstration. This truth authored a belief inside of me that God could raise me to life. And He did. Resurrection is Jesus’ story, and through faith in the resurrected One it became my story.
Change wasn’t what I needed. I needed life. In my mind, it was first change, then life. God’s ways are not ours. With Him, it is first life then change.
You may be tired of the struggle to improve, to make your life better. You’ve asked God a thousand times or more for help, but nothing changes. Perhaps it’s time to step into the faith of Abraham and experience the reality of resurrection.