I was recently made aware of a pair of bumper stickers – the first said, “Honk if you love Jesus,” and the second replied, “Text while you drive if you want to meet Him.”
It seems that often we ponder issues and discuss ideas on the basis of two contrasting statements. Hegelian academics use a thesis, a contradictory antithesis, and then resolve the dilemma with a coherent synthesis. This approach has also served America well as our political parties contrast Democratic and Republican thinking.
God who created us knows that we need this contrasting activity so that we might process and utilize reality. In Jeremiah 31 we hear, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah…”
With these words we are brought to the contrast between a new covenant and an old one, “not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord.”
The older covenant, which is focused on the covenant of Ten Commandments, carries legal language: if you do this and do not do that, I will be your God and you will be my people. Unfortunately for His people (and us all), we are unable to fulfill this first covenant. The resulting condemnation of God’s first covenant is now answered by God’s new covenant.
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. …For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
We note that in this new covenant, God is the one who does all the work. Gone is the language of, “If you will … I will.”
These contrasting declarations of God are illustrated in other passages. The real accusations of “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and “the wages of sin is death” are answered by “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” and “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Christians readily acknowledge and live in both covenants. If we accept one and not the other, they become useless. Without the old covenant to show us our sins, we need no “Gospel” new covenant; without the new covenant Gospel, which shows us our Savior, we languish in despair.
This is why Christians don’t speak and live only by the “You shall” and “You shall not” of the first covenant; but neither do we speak and live only by a “God is a loving God” platitude of the second covenant. Christians simply agree with both God’s Old Covenant’s condemnation and with God’s New Covenant’s vindication through Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus Himself has said, “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.” (Matthew 5:17)
I guess this is why Christians of all times and of all places are quietly and readily joining with St. Paul in saying, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God–through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25)
Each month a member of the
Cook County Ministerium will
offer Spiritual Reflections. For
July, our contributor is Rev.
Dennis C. Schutte, pastor of
Life in Christ Lutheran Church.
Pastor Schutte has lived in
Cook County (Lutsen) since
2000 serving as Missionary
and Pastor.
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