 
### THE NEW COVENANT

Fifty Biblical Meditations

by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole

See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author.

Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 About the Author

Chapter 1

OBSOLETE

" _In speaking of 'a new covenant,' he has made the first one obsolete._

And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear."

Hebrews 8:13

We do not know who wrote the book of Hebrews. But whoever he was, he is writing some very controversial ideas. He is saying we now have a new covenant, that the old one is obsolete and will soon disappear. What exactly is he talking about?

The old covenant is the Old Testament. The word "testament" means "covenant." So the author of Hebrews is saying the New Testament is taking the place of the Old Testament. But how so? Isn't the Old Testament inspired by God? How could it become obsolete?

He does not mean the Old Testament as a body of religious writings, he means the Law of God, the Torah, which governed the Israelites during the Old Testament period of time.

Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, as well as all their descendants until the time of Moses, none of them had the Torah to guide them in their service of God. All they had was a monotheistic trust in one God only, as contrasted with a polytheistic trust in many gods like the surrounding nations.

But when in God's judgment the time was right, he gave them his Law at Mount Sinai, his Torah, and from that time until the time of Jesus, that is what the Israelites had to guide them in their service of God. There were laws about almost everything in that Torah: laws governing their personal behavior and the administration of justice, laws about how to worship God, holy days, various kinds of sacrifices, as well as a short summary of the basic guidelines of life in the ten commandments.

But now, the author of Hebrews is saying, that Torah, that Law of God, has been replaced by something different, something new, a new covenant, a new way of obeying God. The Torah is becoming obsolete, no longer in effect. Something different and better is taking its place: a new covenant to replace the covenant of the Torah.

But try to imagine what the ordinary Jewish person back then might be thinking. We have had the Law of God as our guide ever since the time of Moses, over a thousand years. And now, all of a sudden, it's gone? Was that all a mistake then? How can we give up God's Law when it has been our guide all these centuries? What could possibly be better than God's Law, our beloved Torah?

And we today might be thinking the same thing if we consider ourselves as Christians bound to obey everything in the Bible, Old Testament as well as New Testament. We might be surprised by what the New Testament actually teaches!

Chapter 2

SHADOW

" _Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come_

and not the true form of these realities,

it can never ... make perfect those who approach."

Hebrews 10:1

What's better about the new covenant as contrasted with the old covenant? The author of Hebrews explains in this verse. The Torah could not make the Jews perfect. The Torah has only a shadow of the good things possible in the new covenant.

A shadow is not the reality. When we see a shadow we might be able to deduce what it is that casts it. If the shadow has four legs it is probably an animal, a cat or dog or horse or cow. Or it might be a chair. If it has only two legs it might be a human person. If it is small it might be a child. We might even be able to distinguish a boy from a girl from the shadow. But we would never mistake the shadow for the reality.

That's the analogy that the author of Hebrews is drawing in this text. The very best that the Jewish people could achieve under the Law of God, the Torah, is only a shadow of the reality that God wants.

Perhaps the most vivid way we can understand that is to remember what the Jews did to Jesus. They rejected him and persuaded the Roman authorities to crucify him. But Jesus was sent by God. So the Jews rejected the person God sent because they were devoted adherents to the Law of God. They rejected the Son of God in the name of the Law of God. They had the shadow but they rejected the reality.

No matter how devoted the Jews were to the Torah it did not make them sensitive to what God was saying to them in Jesus. They could not hear what God was saying to them in the living person of Jesus, even though they were listening to what God had said long ago at Mount Sinai. Something had to happen to change that, to make them sensitive to the Word of God that was living and active, as it came to them via Jesus.

So we may see the Jews of Jesus' day as the shadow of what people could become if they listened to Jesus as the reality. The Torah kept them obedient to the rituals but could not bring them freedom of the spirit. They could observe those customs rigorously while at the same time not serving from the heart. They could be jealous or greedy or proud or unjust while maintaining a faithful observance of the traditional Jewish rituals of worship in the temple.

That is what needed to be changed, the shadow that must give way to the reality. People must become people of God inwardly, not only outwardly, and that is what Jesus brought in the new covenant.

Chapter 3

BETTER

" _Accordingly, Jesus has also become the guarantee of a better covenant."_

Hebrews 7:22

Jesus did not come simply to change things; he came to change things for the better. The covenant that Jesus brought is not just a change from the covenant that Moses brought; he brought a better covenant.

Why is Jesus' covenant better than Moses' covenant? Because it brings God's purpose another step closer to his goal. God wants the entire human race to be his image, and now what Jesus brings enables people to come closer to that goal of imaging God in their daily lives. He is bringing people out of the shadow into the reality. Obeying the Law was the shadow, actually imaging God is the reality.

It was a major step forward at the time when Moses instituted the old covenant of the Law. In the time of Moses people needed desperately to bring some order and godliness into their tribal lives. The people of Israel had been just a conglomeration of related tribes before Mount Sinai; the old covenant welded them together as a coherent nation on its way to becoming a godly nation, a holy people of God. So the era of the Law, the era of the old covenant, was absolutely necessary for the people of Old Testament times.

But as the years and centuries passed, it became apparent that something more was needed to actually make Israel a holy nation. Just obeying rules and keeping feasts and going through the motions of sacrifices was not enough. They could obey the rules very diligently while at the same time being ungodly in their hearts. That is the situation to which the Law brought them, the old covenant, the situation that made them crucify Jesus rather than believe in him. Jesus described that situation as hypocrisy (Matthew 23).

We must avoid two mistakes. On the one hand we must not think the old covenant was unimportant; because it was exactly necessary for the times in which it functioned. On the other hand we must not think its provisions are permanent. The old covenant, the old testament of Law, is no longer valid because Jesus has given us a better covenant.

Jesus has introduced something much better for us to go by. Jesus enables us to obey God not merely because there are laws about how to do it, but because the Holy Spirit works in our lives to make us want to obey. We now live in a new era, under a new covenant, one that is vastly better than the old one.

Chapter 4

REVEALED

" _The secret things belong to the Lord our God,_

but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever,

to observe all the words of this law."

Deuteronomy 29:29

This is what Moses explained to the people of Israel after he gave them the Law of God, the holy Torah, to be the covenant that would control their lives and shape them into a coherent nation.

There are always lots of things we do not understand, Moses explains, so when we cannot find good answers to some of our questions, we need to leave all that to God. The secret things belong to him and we need not be bothered overmuch about them.

But there are things that are revealed, things we do know and understand. That is what belongs to us and what we need to live by. For the Israelites at Mount Sinai this meant that God has now revealed to the people things that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob did not know. God has given them a better covenant than their ancestors had, the covenant of Law, the holy Torah. God wants the Israelites to become a holy nation, and now he gives them the Torah to help them do precisely that, shape themselves into a people of God.

What Moses said to the people here about things that are revealed and things that are secret is not a one-time-only proverb. It is a principle that describes how God is governing the world, how God is gradually shaping the human race into what he wants them to become. At Sinai God revealed new things to the people, and now when he sent Jesus he was again revealing something new. God was sending his only-begotten Son into the world to bring a new and better covenant.

The point is that when the old covenant had run its course, when it had done all it could do, when the times were just right, God gave us humans a new covenant, a better one, one that could build on the old covenant but take it a step further.

God wants us to understand that the secret things, that is, the things we do not yet know, belong to God, and that he knows what he is doing. But the things that are revealed, that is, the things we do know, must become the controlling force in our lives, new ways to serve the Lord, new ways to bring us closer to becoming the human race that God envisions.

Change is always taking place. But it is not merely change for its own sake, it is change that brings us closer and closer to the kind of human race that we all want to become, closer to truth, justice, mercy, respect, honesty, goodness, success for all. It's what God wants, what he created us for, and what deep down we all desire: a perfect world. God wants us to keep changing, but always toward a better goal in the better covenant he has provided.

Chapter 5

THE HOLY SPIRIT

" _Nevertheless I tell you the truth._

It is to your advantage that I go away,

for if I do not go away, the Advocate [Paraclete] will not come to you,

but if I go, I will send him to you."

John 16:7

When we read passages like this in the Bible we need to put them in the context of what God is doing. God wants Jesus' disciples to understand that Jesus is not going to stay around with them and drive the Romans out of the land and set up himself as a king on the throne of David. That isn't going to happen because it is not what God wants to happen.

What God wants to happen is that people learn how to serve God, that is, how to become the kind of people God created them to be, his images, without being forced to do it by other people or by a set of strict laws. He wants them to become holy people because that is how they become good people. God wants them to learn how to be good people by bringing their minds and hearts and will into control, not under the control of other authorities but under the direct control of God himself.

But how can God do that? How can God make the disciples who desperately want Jesus to lead them into political independence by a military uprising against Rome, how can God get them to change their minds and recognize that there is a better way to get to a good life than they now envision?

The disciples had to be brought safely through a time of deep disillusionment. When Jesus told them he was going away they would be terribly disappointed. All their hopes and desires were hinged on Jesus leading them to victory in a great battle against Rome. How could Jesus all of a sudden now let them down? How could he lead them on for three years to get ready for a violent revolution and then back off when the time to act came? The disciples would have their world drop out from under them. Disappointed not only, but thoroughly disillusioned. One of them would betray him. Another one would deny ever knowing him. All of them would run away when Jesus was arrested.

So what managed to help them out of that terrible time of uncertainty and disgust and disillusionment? Jesus' promise that when he went away he would send a Paraclete, a substitute, someone to replace him as their leader. The disciples would not know at the time who that might be, but we do. It's the Holy Spirit. Not another person, but a spirit, the Spirit of Holiness. That's what managed to bring the disciples through, and they emerged on Pentecost into an entirely different way of understanding how Jesus would be working, how God was working.

From that time onward the disciples stopped depending on military means to establish God's kingdom, and relied on spiritual conversion and inner divine power to accomplish God's purposes.

Chapter 6

FREEDOM

" _Now the Lord is the Spirit,_

and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."

2 Corinthians 3:17

To be a Theist is to be God-centered. You begin with God always in the way you think and in the way you live. What is God doing in the world? What is God doing in time and history as the years roll by? In my life and in my children and in my church and in my country? Your entire life is wrapped up trying your best to live as your Creator wants you to live.

You respect the opinions and concerns of other people. You listen to sermons. You read the Bible. You absorb everything you can about Christianity. But through it all you maintain your own sense that it is the Spirit of God working inside you to lead you in the way he wants you to go.

That's basically what Paul meant when he reminded the new Christians in Corinth that "the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." You learn what you can from other people but you absorb into your own personality only the things that the Holy Spirit convinces you of. To be a genuine Theist you put yourself under the Holy Spirit as your lord and guide, and when you do you find yourself strangely freed from dependence on other people and ancient traditions. Respectful but still independent, still free.

We sometimes hear church leaders speak about accountability. They are concerned that in the name of Christian liberty people do all kinds of strange things, even so far as to claim that God told them to shoot certain people or kill prostitutes or do some other wicked thing. They seem not to be accountable to society in general for their behavior.

So what about that: accountability? If you sincerely believe the Holy Spirit is leading you to assassinate some political leader, should you do it? Are you accountable to the police or to God?

We are accountable only to God. This may, of course, involve a high degree of accountability to human authorities, but only because it would be included first in accountability to God. So what about the person who hears God telling him, for example, to murder doctors who perform abortions? Or to do any other clearly wicked thing?

We are led by a holy spirit, not by an unholy one. Murder is clearly wrong, as we learn from the ten commandments as well as from nature itself. The impulse to kill does not come from a spirit of holiness so it does not come from God's Holy Spirit. To be accountable to God is to be guided by God into a life of holiness. Murder does not comport with that kind of life.

Freedom in the Spirit is not the same as freedom to do anything we please, it means freedom to do what our Creator desires us to do. Christian liberty is the freedom to be a dedicated Theist.

Chapter 7

A YOKE OF SLAVERY

" _For freedom Christ has set us free._

Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."

Galatians 5:1

The way the Apostle Paul taught about freedom was more specific than what we examined in the preceding meditation. Writing to the churches in Galatia Paul contrasts Christian freedom with a yoke of slavery. There were two things Paul had in mind when using the phrase "yoke of slavery." First, what it meant for Jewish Christians and second, what it meant for non-Jewish Christians.

Both groups of people were coming out of one culture into another culture, out of one way of life into a different way of life. Paul describes both of those original cultures as involving a yoke of slavery. Not slavery in the sense of one person owning another, but slavery involving the main assumptions as to what makes for a good life.

Jewish Christians were coming out of the old covenant, the covenant of Torah. Life under the Torah was a yoke of slavery to the written requirements of the Law as well as to the traditions that had built up for centuries in their history. Paul wanted the new Jewish believers to be freed from that type of bondage.

Gentile Christians were coming to Christ out of Greco-Roman religion and philosophy. That lifestyle enabled people to accept all kinds of things that were wrong, like slavery, military power, political oppression, disrespect, pride, greed and the like. All of that was inhibiting to the lifestyle of godliness, and Paul wanted them to understand that Jesus frees them from that overwhelming power of evil in their past.

But at this point, early in his apostolic career, Paul also had in mind the preachers who insisted that to be a Christian meant that belief in Jesus as messiah needed to be added to what the Jews already had. Not replace it. The old covenant of Torah needed to be retained intact, and whatever it was that Jesus came to do needed to be piled on top. Christians must continue to circumcise their sons, eat only kosher food, observe the sanctions about sabbath observance, continue to keep the festivals, and bring the sacrificial offerings.

For these preachers, we call them Judaizers, Jesus did not bring a new covenant that made the old one obsolete, he merely added some more duties to the already oppressive list of Jewish traditions. So Paul was very insistent throughout his entire evangelistic career that it was no longer necessary for Christians to obey Jewish Torah regulations.

For us today, this insistence means we must not make new lists of legalistic duties. They do nothing to replace the old covenant mentality. We are free from that. Christ has set us free in order that we may live daily and joyfully in the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 8

KOSHER FOOD

" _Food will not bring us close to God._

We are no worse off if we do not eat,

and no better off if we do."

1 Corinthians 8:8

Here is a specific example of the teaching of Paul about the freedom we have in Christ. The Judaizers were very insistent that all Christians, Gentiles as well as Jews, must continue to obey all the basic requirements of the Torah of God. They must eat only kosher food. Paul says, Not so.

Apparently there were some Gentile Christians in the Corinthian church who were purchasing their meat at a local butcher shop. The problem was that this butcher shop was getting its supplies from a local pagan temple. People, pagan people, would bring their offerings to their temple. The quantity was so large that the temple priests and priestesses had large surpluses of meat on hand that they did not need for themselves. They sold the surplus to local butcher shops. So Christian people would purchase meat that had been previously sacrificed to idols.

This made the Judaizers in the church furious. How can you eat food that you know has been offered to idols? When you do that you are worshipping that idol as much as the people who sacrificed it earlier. You just cannot do that as a sincere Christian.

Paul said, Not so. Meat is meat. Nothing happens to the meat when it is offered in a pagan temple. Eating that meat does not do anything negative to you. Not eating it does not do anything to make you a better person. It doesn't matter one way or another whether you eat it or not.

Besides that, the god to whom the meat is offered is no real god. All food, including all meat, is created by the only God there is, so even if someone offers meat to a non-god, what difference does it make? Everything belongs to the only true God, so if we worship the only true God we may in good conscience eat whatever food he makes available to us.

The lesson we may take from this example of Christian freedom is to avoid legalism in the practice of our faith. Legalism is a matter of thinking that to be a good Christian we need to keep a lot of rules about our behavior. Do this, don't do that. Detailed rules about all sorts of choices that we should or should not make.

Somehow Christian communities seem to have a strong tendency to do just that. Don't go to movies. Don't smoke. Don't use alcohol. Go to church twice on Sunday. Give tithes to your church. Support Christian schools. Don't join fraternal organizations. Don't wear short dresses. Of course there are the ten commandments that are applicable always to our lives, but such rules go well beyond the Decalogue, and the implication always is that you are compromising the faith if you fail to keep the rules. But Paul (and Jesus and God) would not want us to succumb to such legalism. It destroys the freedom for which Christ sets us free.

Chapter 9

A STUMBLING BLOCK

" _But take care that this liberty of yours_

does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak."

1 Corinthians 8:9

A stumbling block. What does Paul mean? He means that there is more involved when you decide whether or not you can eat meat previously sacrificed to an idol god. More than simply what you yourself feel is right for you to do.

What else is involved? Other Christians. Weaker Christians. Perhaps newer Christians who are just now getting out from under the rituals of pagan religion. What might they think when they see you buying your steaks in a butcher shop that sells idol-meat? They might well think that if I did that I would still be worshiping that idol-god. They would be confused, not properly understanding that to be a Christian means a radical break from pagan Greek religion. They might think we can do both, keep on doing our previous pagan things and be a Christian at the same time.

If that should happen, Paul writes, you have become a stumbling block to weaker Christians. It may well be perfectly OK for you to buy and eat idol-meat, but you are being a bad example to others who have big problems with that and whose new faith might be jeopardized.

Paul is not giving in to the Judaizers, as if it would be inherently wrong for any Christian to use such idol-meat. He is, on the contrary, preserving one's freedom to do it, but modifying such freedom voluntarily. He says, "If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall." (8:13) You can limit your own use of freedom, Paul means, in order not to become a bad example that results in others compromising their faith.

There is an important principle involved here. The new covenant with its precious spiritual freedom involves not only individual persons but the entire Christian community. It would be a sad misuse of Christian freedom for any given individual to go his own way, even if it were perfectly justified in the abstract, if such freedom resulted in real harm to the Christian community of which he or she was a member. If the integrity of other people with regard to Christ becomes compromised as a result of the exercise of my freedom I am responsible for doing such damage. I must have the maturity of faith and the maturity of self-discipline to be willing to limit my own behavior in such a way as to avoid doing harm to others.

This does not mean capitulating to vociferous legalists in the church, who may very well be offended, but is a faithful response to the needs of Christians somewhat less advanced in Christian living. This is what Paul is advising in this passage of scripture. Be considerate of the weaker brother and sister in faith.

Chapter 10

SLAVE

" _So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God,_

but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin."

Romans 7:25

Now here is an anomaly. The same writer, Paul, who is so insistent that in Jesus Christ we are free from the Torah, now explains that he is a slave to the law of God. A slave? And to the law? How so?

What Paul writes here about the law of God does not mean the Torah with its multitudinous regulations. He means simply living in obedience to God in general, without reference to the traditions of legal Jewish piety.

What he is getting at in this seventh chapter of Romans is that it is not easy to actually do what we want to do as Christians. There are other pressures on us that often make us do things that we know we shouldn't. Paul explains that there are two pressures involved in our lives. He calls them laws. One is the law of God, that is, our desire to do what God asks us to do. The other he calls the law of sin, that is, the pressures to do what we know is wrong.

So that is what Paul means when he complains that mentally he is a slave to God, but physically he is a slave to sin. He sometimes does things with his body that aren't exactly what God wishes him to do, and he knows it, and he regrets it afterward, but too often he does it anyway.

We can see, then, that what he says here does not at all contradict the other things he says about being free. It is when he actually exercises his freedom of choice that he sometimes goes wrong. So what Paul wants us to understand here is that just because we are Christians we are not yet perfect in our exercise of our Christian freedom. We have to be aware of our weaknesses and our temptations, and we need to resist them with prayer and self-control.

We need to be realistic about ourselves and keep working hard at bringing our wills under the control of the Holy Spirit. We need to become better slaves of God!

Chapter 11

DESIRES OF THE FLESH

" _Now the works of the flesh are obvious:_

fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy,

anger, quarrels, dissension, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing,

and things like these."

Galatians 5:19-21

In our previous meditation we noted that Paul distinguishes two forces in our lives, the desire to serve God, and the actual deeds of the flesh that belie that wish. He calls them the law of God and the law of sin. That is also what we have here in the fifth chapter of Galatians, a contrast between the desires of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit.

So in this chapter Paul makes two lists. One is a list of the kinds of things we do when we violate our faith commitment to Jesus and do things contrary to his will, the desires of the flesh. He mentions sexual sins, idolatry, hatred, conflicts, jealousy, anger, quarreling, envy, drunkenness, "and things like these." The other is a list of the virtues coming from the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Perhaps we can see evil character traits in other people, but we need to do more than that. We need to see if there are things like that in our own lives. Are we always quarreling, for example, ready to contradict others about anything and everything? How about finding fault with others, and thinking we are superior to them in some respects? Do we really love other people as much as we love ourselves? Do we lose our temper too easily, shouting and screaming about the faults of other people? Do we occasionally go out on a drinking binge? Do we indulge in pornography? Are there people in our lives that we really hate? Do we create or support factions?

Perhaps a word of caution is appropriate here. We should not conclude that Paul thinks the body itself is evil. He speaks of the deeds of the flesh, but this does not imply all the things we do with our bodies. He means such deeds as violate our life in the Holy Spirit.

In Paul's day a widespread opinion among non-Christian people was that since the body itself is evil, it does not much matter what we do with our bodies. Such matters as adultery, conniving, greed, selfishness, drunkenness, and that whole list of things Paul mentions can be tolerated to a great extent. As long as we can get away with it.

Paul does not argue from that point of view. He argues from the point of view that we are created to image God, to live in such a way that the holy characteristics of God are mirrored in the things we do. Sin is what does not mirror God, what does not proceed from the Holy Spirit. And that is what Paul means by the deeds of the flesh, the things we do that violate the freedom of the Spirit that we as Christians enjoy. Our bodies are created by God and are therefore good. But when we exercise our will in such a way as to violate the image of God we sin. And that is what Paul is warning against in this fifth chapter of Galatians.

Chapter 12

FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT

" _By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,_

patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control."

Galatians 5:22-23

Here is the second list that Paul writes in Galatians 5. The first list was about the desires of the flesh that pressure us to violate our faith in the Lord Jesus. This list is about the actions and attitudes that characterize the life of holiness.

Paul wants us to think about what we consider to be virtues. Is it better for us to hate or to love? To be perpetually angry about life or to find joy even in the midst of big problems? To have a peaceful soul even when life is turbulent? To be harshly critical or to be gentle even when others make trouble for us? And the like.

Perhaps you recognize some such attitudes in yourself. How do you respond? There are those who say, "That's just who I am. If people put pressure on me, that's the way I respond. I get angry and lose my temper and shout and rage until they quit. That's just me; it's the way I am."

Or perhaps you recognize in yourself an addiction of some kind that keeps coming back again and again, and you don't know what to do about it. Perhaps an addiction to pornography or to a substance abuse or to perpetual dissatisfaction with a spouse or with one's work. Do you indulge it or do you fight it with prayer and penitence?

There are two extremes to avoid. First, never accept anything you know as sin to be part of your personality. You may have been fighting something in your life for years with little progress, until you are tempted to give up to it and accept it as a part of your character. Do not do that.

Second, never give up on yourself in the sense of thinking you are worthless in the sight of God. You have been created by God and therefore you are good in the sight of God. Yes, you have addictions and sins that make you consider yourself lost and unredeemable. Don't do that either.

What you should do is adjust your opinion of yourself in the light of what you know about God and about human beings. Perhaps you have made a mess of your life, but that's where you must start in making improvements. Concentrate, for example, on controlling your temper. Or on learning to see the good in other people instead of what's wrong with them. Cultivate the fruits of the Spirit as much as you can. Self-control is one of them. Work at controlling the way you think, the way you react to other people, the way you handle your addiction.

And keep repenting, Keep turning to the Lord for forgiveness and for strength to do what is good and right. Little by little over the years, if you do this, if you cultivate the fruits of the Spirit, there will be progress. Perhaps never complete success but enough that the Lord can use you too in the progress of his kingdom. But don't let yourself be a hypocrite, just pretending to be a Christian when you aren't really trying. God knows. God loves. But you mustn't try to fool him.

Chapter 13

A NEW COVENANT

" _The days are surely coming, says the Lord,_

when I will make a new covenant

with the house of Israel and the house of Judah."

Jeremiah 31:31

What would have motivated Jeremiah to predict that God would make a new covenant for the people of Israel? He lived more than five hundred years before Jesus; how could he know what Jesus would do?

Jeremiah could see that the people of Israel and Judah were very close to abandoning their trust in God altogether. They were worshiping idols. They were sacrificing their sons to idols. Their morality was sadly compromised. They were violating the sabbath day with impunity. They were becoming indifferent to the requirements of the Torah, the Law of God as given to Moses.

Jeremiah knew the ten tribes of Israel had been carried off into the lands of Assyria a hundred years earlier. He predicted the kingdom of Judah would soon meet the same fate at the hands of the Babylonians, and he lived to see it actually happen.

What would he have thought about it all? He would have figured out that, as good and necessary as the Torah was for the people of Israel, it simply was not doing the job of making the people a holy nation.

But Jeremiah's confidence in the Lord God was great and he knew that God would do something to rescue his chosen people of Israel. Jeremiah would not, of course, know just how that would work out in the future, but he was certain that God would do something to keep his people from disappearing into the throes of foreign countries.

Jeremiah would also be able to figure out that something different from the Law of God, the Torah, was needed. And that is what Jeremiah meant by the words of this text, "I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah." God would figure out some way to rescue his people and to provide something to guide the people that would actually do the job of making a holy nation. There would be a new covenant to replace the old covenant of the Law.

So, for us living today, we need to understand that what God sent Jesus to do is what the old covenant did not do, make a holy nation. That starts, of course, with individuals like ourselves being honest and godfearing and living as images of God should live. But it goes farther. What has to happen is a holy nation. Truth and goodness and virtue and overall godliness needs to become part and parcel of our national life as well as our individual lives. That is what the gospel is all about, the new covenant.

Chapter 14

ON THEIR HEARTS

" _I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts,_

and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."

Jeremiah 31:33

There is a difference between being forced to obey a law, and wanting to obey it because you know it is the right thing to do. There is a difference between having someone else tell you what to do, and knowing yourself that it is what you want to do. There is a difference between having rules written on a piece of paper and having them imprinted in your character. And that is what Jeremiah is saying in this text. God promises to write his law on their hearts.

We could make a bad mistake thinking about that. We could think that God is promising to write all the rules of the Old Testament, which is the old covenant, on our hearts, so that we memorize them. We would then become responsible to live exactly the way the old Israelites were supposed to live. If it's in the Old Testament, we might argue, God holds us responsible for obeying it.

But that isn't what God means. God's law is bigger, much bigger, than the set of laws in the Old Testament, the Torah. God's law covers the entire world, the entire universe, nature as well as human beings. We talk about the laws of nature, but those laws are really God's laws because God created them.

We need to go back to Genesis One when we try to understand what the Law of God contains. What's the very first thing God says to human beings in Genesis One? "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it." That's really the basic law that God gives to all human beings.

And that is what God writes on our hearts when we become Christians and want to be obedient to our Creator.

But did you notice something else in Genesis One? There is something more involved. This command comes immediately after the information that God created us in his image. Try thinking about "image" as a verb, something we _do_ , in addition to something we _are_. God wants us to live in such a way as to image him, to display what we are, images of our Creator. And when we connect that idea with the idea of subduing the earth, then we understand God's law for us. That's the law Jesus writes on our hearts: that we image God in the way we go about replenishing and subduing the earth.

Not just individual persons, but the entire human race. People in general. All nations in the world. That's what God wants us humans to be and to do. Go about our business as humans in such a way that we image God in our daily lives, in our employment, in our homes, in our recreation, in our churches, in our schools, in our music, in our government, in our factories, in our science labs, everywhere in everything we do. That's what the new covenant is and what Christianity is for.

Chapter 15

IN JESUS' BLOOD

" _This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood."_

Luke 22:20

Come again? This glass of wine is a new covenant? How so? I drink another glass of wine and this imprints God's law on my character? But perhaps something like the opposite might happen if there have been too many previous glasses.

And blood? How does blood get into the idea of covenant? Red wine may resemble red blood, but how does that translate into God's law on my heart? It's Jesus' blood, of course, but how does the fact that Jesus shed his blood carry over into making me an image of God? What does Jesus mean when he tells the disciples that a cup of wine is a new covenant in his blood?

Let's understand first that Jesus is making a contrast between his blood and the blood of animals. Under the provisions of the old covenant, the Torah, the Israelites were required to bring various kinds of offerings, many of them involving sacrificing animals. This would serve at least three purposes, it would signify giving God something of human value, it would assure them of God's forgiveness, and it would provide food for the priests serving in the tabernacle or temple.

What the Israelites did under that old covenant is now passé, Jesus says. You don't have to bring animals any more to signify your repentance from sin. I will shortly be killed, Jesus is intimating to the disciples. My blood will be shed. And my blood will signify for you that God forgives your sins and that he is providing an entirely new way for you to serve him, a new covenant to replace the old covenant sealed by animal blood.

But how does the cup of wine fit into this scenario? It was part of a regular meal in those days. You have something to eat and drink at mealtime. Whenever you do this, whenever you eat, Jesus says, the food you eat should remind you of my body, and the wine you drink should remind you of my blood. Together the bread and the wine should make you think about my death (which of course had not yet happened when Jesus was speaking to the disciples).

Churches have made this into a special sacrament, but Jesus is simply telling the disciples that whenever they have a meal they should be reminded of Jesus. Every meal. Bread represents Jesus' body; wine (or coffee or water or tea for us) represents Jesus' blood.

The new covenant involves all of our lives. It enables us to serve the Lord wherever we are and with all of our activities and interests. That is why the common everyday matter of eating and drinking is a very appropriate reminder of the covenant we have in Jesus. Mealtime is a repeated time of helping us remember how important Jesus is in our serving of God. One way many of us do this is by praying regularly at mealtime.

Chapter 16

JUSTIFIED

" _Much more surely, then, now that we have been justified by his blood,_

will we be saved through him from the wrath of God."

Romans 5:9

The new covenant is a covenant sealed by Jesus' blood. By his death. So how does Paul get from the notion of Jesus' death to our justification? And then, beyond that, to the idea that all this saves us from God's wrath? How does the fact that someone died two thousand years ago imply that we are justified? For that matter, what does Paul mean by that term "justified"?

It's interesting, but a bit confusing, that Paul writes we _have been_ justified, and we _will be_ saved. Justified: past tense. Saved: future tense. Just as surely as we have been justified we will be saved. This, of course, is an English translation of the original Greek that Paul wrote. And we need to think of the Hebrew ideas involved as well. So it gets rather muddled to figure out exactly what Paul is getting at.

We have been justified, we will be saved. Aren't the two ideas synonyms? Isn't to be justified the same as to be saved? Well, Paul does say the two go together. If we have been justified, past tense, we will also be saved, future tense.

We can find Paul's meaning when we compare the old covenant, past, with the new covenant, future (from Jesus' point of view). The old covenant sacrifices were the way God assured the people that he would forgive their sins – they would be _justified_. But the passing of centuries of time showed that the old covenant did not in fact make the people righteous, holy – they were not _saved_. So Paul is assuring his readers in Rome that what the old covenant could not do, save people, the new covenant would surely do, that is, make them holy.

The wrath of God came upon the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah: both of them were carried into captivity because of their idolatrous violation of the old covenant. That same wrath of God came on the people who pressured Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus: they were cut off from the new covenant. Only those who repented and believed in Jesus were given the gift of the Holy Spirit to forgive their sins and also to change them inside as well.

So Paul is telling the people that it is not enough only to have one's sins forgiven, they must also be made holy inwardly and show this in the way they live. They must not only be justified but also be saved. The old covenant did not do that, but the new covenant does.

And of course that is true for us as well. Forgiveness is necessary, but it looks only to the past and says nothing about the future. We can think ourselves to be forgiven by Jesus when we believe in him; but if this does not carry over into our human relationships and activities, then we are not yet in the new covenant, we are not living in Jesus' spirit. God wants us to carry over our love for him into our love for people. This is what it means to be in the new covenant and to be saved.

Chapter 17

GOD AT WORK

" _Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;_

for it is God who is at work in you,

enabling you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure."

Philippians 2:12-13

The Apostle Paul was a thoroughgoing Theist. In his own personal life and in his missionary preaching Paul was constantly beginning with God, not with himself. He did indeed write several times about himself, but always in the context of what God was doing in his life, not about merely what he was doing.

Paul understood very clearly that it was God at work in him when he was converted at the gate of Damascus, converted from persecuting Christians to proclaiming the good news that people could become better people by believing in Jesus.

That is what Paul is saying here in the text from Philippians 2. God is at work in them when they believe in Jesus, when they move out of the old covenant into the new covenant. _In_ them. God is working in such a way as to make them holy, to make them righteous, to make them good people, good on the inside not merely on the outside.

But this does not in any way mean the people themselves don't do anything. Paul insists that they must work out their salvation with fear and trembling. They must do this precisely because they know God is working inside them to make them images of God, people who image their Creator in the way they go about their daily business.

It's debatable what Paul meant by saying they must work out their salvation "with fear and trembling." Perhaps that was a local way of saying they must take it seriously. God certainly does not want us to serve him constantly cowering in fear and by trembling all the time about how we are doing. But he does want us to do what Paul suggests, to work seriously at being faithful and consistent Christians in our daily occupations.

Also, Paul does not mean by working out our salvation that we save ourselves by doing good works. The new covenant is designed to enable us to become the people God created us to be, living as his images in this world. Of course this includes doing good things, but more importantly it means cleansing our own consciences, controlling our own passions, adjusting our desires to correspond with God's law, setting personal goals in terms of the kingdom of God, and living in all respects within the holiness that the Holy Spirit provides.

This is how Jesus Christ saves us, by giving us the Holy Spirit within and by thus persuading us to work seriously about becoming the persons that God wants us to be.

Chapter 18

PREDESTINED

" _For those whom he foreknew_

he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son,

in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family."

Romans 8:29

I once had a conversation with a young father who had consciously abandoned himself to alcoholism. He explained that he was destined for hell. When he was younger he was brought up in a church and somehow got the impression that God created two kinds of people, those whom he decided would go the heaven, and those whom he decided would go to hell. He was in the latter group.

Nothing I could say to him got through. He was lost eternally because God had predestined him to hell. There's nothing he could do, he thought, to change that decision of God.

Well, that's the impression of the doctrine of predestination that some people have, and sadly, they get it from the churches who are preaching the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, the new covenant. There wasn't any good news in that teaching for this young father.

When thinking about predestination we need to begin with Theism. That is, with God. And we need to think Biblically about what God created the human race for. Why are we here? Where is God leading us as a human race? What does God have in mind for the future of humanity?

So we begin by recognizing that God does have a purpose for his whole creation. He knows what he wants to accomplish and he knows also how to get it done.

God has all the time in the world. He can take hundreds of years to accomplish one little point of advance toward his ultimate goal. We say, do we not, that with God a thousand years is as a day, and a day as a thousand years? So Theism requires us to recognize that God has purposes much larger than we can understand or know, and that we live in a mere blip of time as God works out his sovereign will for his world.

What Paul is saying about predestination, then, is that God's purpose in starting a new covenant is to enable people to be "conformed to the image of his Son." The circumstances of life and history are such that the time was right for this to happen. It was in that sense predestined. It was in God's plan from the beginning that when the time had fully come Jesus would be born and the new covenant would be established.

So we must not make the mistake of the young father thinking that we have no responsibility for what happens in our lives. His responsibility, and all of ours as well, is to believe in Jesus and live by his Spirit under the terms of the new covenant.

Chapter 19

CONFORMED

" _For those whom he foreknew_

he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son,

in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family."

Romans 8:29

The young father mentioned in the previous meditation thought, mistakenly, that the purpose of predestination was to get persons either into heaven or into hell. That's wrong. Paul gives us a better idea of the purpose of predestination. It is to get us conformed to the image of Jesus.

There are some valuable theological insights in that sentence. It tells us, for one thing, that God's purpose is not to get people out of this world but to shape them while they are in this world. Predestination is not concerned with life after death in some other locale, but with what happens to people while they are still alive.

For another thing, Paul tells us that what happens when we believe is not defined simply in terms of our own maturity or personality or career – be all you can be – but by Jesus. God created human beings in his image and now God is showing us just what that looks like. It looks like Jesus. Jesus is the true image of God, and what God wants is for us all to be like Jesus, true images of God.

So Paul says we need to be conformed. Formed like Jesus. That's what must happen when we believe in Jesus. Jesus' spirit, the Holy Spirit, begins to shape us as soon as we decide that we are Christians and take seriously our responsibility under our Creator. The Spirit shapes us from the inside by writing God's law on our hearts, that is, by persuading us to work honestly at overcoming the sins and temptations and failures that we see in ourselves, and in developing the godly traits of honesty, love, justice, respect, honor, patience and all the rest of the fruits of the Spirit.

So we constantly look to Jesus for the picture of the kind of person we are predestined to become. And we are forever in prayer to keep us on the right path. We do the things that help us conform our lifestyle to that of Jesus. We go to church, we pray, we sing, we read the Bible, we discuss our questions, and we keep trying diligently and honestly to carry our faith over into all the interests and activities of the day. We keep testing ourselves by the standard Paul points out: how close are we living to the pattern of Jesus? Are we being conformed closer and closer to his image?

Chapter 20

A LARGE FAMILY

" _For those whom he foreknew_

he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son,

in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family."

Romans 8:29

Here is some more about predestination. God predestines believers to be conformed to the image of Jesus. Why? In order that Jesus would be "the firstborn within a large family."

So predestination, while it is indeed concerned with individual believers, you and me, also has a larger view in mind. God's concern is not merely that individual persons be saved. It is that, but it is more. God's concern is that the entire human race be saved. That's the ultimate goal of God's predestination.

But it takes time. It doesn't happen all at once, in a year, or in a century, or in a millennium. We don't know how long God will take to get it done.

In the meantime there is that "large family" that Paul mentions. The whole world is not yet saved, but there are a lot of people who are. That's the "large family" of Christians that predestination is in the process of creating.

What Paul wants us all to understand is that we aren't in this process of Christianity all alone. We are indeed responsible personally and individually to conduct our lives in the Spirit, but we aren't alone as we do it. The entire family of Christians in the world is being guided by God to achieve gradually the purpose of salvation that he has in mind and which he has predestined us to take a part in.

Ever since the time of Jesus the gospel has been growing, expanding, drawing more and more people into the embrace of the Lord. Not many of these individuals stand out as important, but taken all together, as the number of Christians keeps growing, their combined influence in the shaping of governments and businesses and entire cultures has been massive.

What we call western civilization is the product of people who have been taken out of barbarism into constructive citizenship by the church of Jesus Christ during the middle ages. There has indeed been a "large family" of which Jesus is the firstborn, and their influence in shaping life and civilization has been enormous in Europe and America.

That family of Christians is still growing and expanding and it will continue to have formative influence as time passes. This is guaranteed by the God who is in the process of predestining the world to be conformed to the image of his Son. So we need to make sure we live also in the way that God lays out before us, the way of Jesus, within the "large family" of others who are also on the way.

Chapter 21

A VEIL

Indeed, to this very day,

when they hear the reading of the old covenant,

that same veil is there,

since only in Christ is it set aside."

2 Corinthians 3:14

An ancient Jewish tradition has it that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai after receiving the Law from God his face was all aglow from the experience, and that he then put a veil over his head to keep the people from gazing at the effects of the glorious experience he had in the presence of God.

In this text Paul is taking that tradition and using it to describe what happens when unbelieving Jews read what Moses wrote way back then. When they read Leviticus, for example, it's like they have a veil over their heads, meaning they don't really see what the Law of Moses is getting at.

What they see is a lengthy bunch of rules about everything under the sun. They want their rabbis to take all those rules and explain what it means that they should do. Religion, Paul is saying, is for them a matter of following the rules as best they can. And Paul means to say that this idea of what religion calls for is like having a veil over your head about what God really wants. He says that only in Christ is that veil removed.

God wanted a great deal more from the ancient Israelites than merely going through the motions of obeying religious rules. He wanted them to become a holy nation, serving him from the heart. God did not get what he wanted from them, since in the end they crucified the Savior who was sent to them. So that's the background of what Paul is getting at here.

The Jews about whom Paul was writing here were meticulous about reading the ancient scriptures and about discovering how to obey the rules they found there, but they were doing all that with a veil over their minds. They still did not get it. Obeying rules does not do the job. They need a new covenant, a new way of practicing the religion of what God wants from them. They can get this only from Jesus Christ, whom they had rejected as their messiah.

We need to keep this insight clear in our minds also. There can be so many different ways of reading the Bible. When we miss the main thrust of the gospel, that God is in the process of making the entire human race into a holy nation, then we are reading the Bible with a veil over our heads. So, living within the new covenant of Christ's Spirit, we should be concentrating daily on following wherever the Spirit leads us, surrendering our will to his guidance, coming ever closer to being a vital image of the Lord Jesus Christ. Don't let anyone throw a veil over your face!

Chapter 22

GOD SPOKE

" _Long ago God spoke to our ancestors_

in many and various ways by the prophets,

but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son."

Hebrews 1:1-2

It's interesting that at least three books of the Bible begin by saying something about God speaking. Genesis One repeats often the phrase, "And God said." The Gospel of John begins by telling about the Word of God becoming flesh. And now here in Hebrews we read about God speaking by the prophets and by a Son.

One important thing we can learn from this is that God does not stop speaking. He spoke in the beginning of time; he spoke all during the history of Old Testament Israel; he spoke through Jesus. We should understand that God is constantly speaking to us. He speaks through the world of nature ever since the time of creation. He speaks continually in the process of human history. He speaks by the gospel as it keeps coming to us always through Jesus.

The writer of Hebrews is here explaining that what God is saying now through Jesus his Son needs to be heard in the setting of what he had been saying in the past by the prophets. What God had been saying in the past was of vital importance to the people of the past, but now the writer wants his readers to understand that God is saying something new and important through Jesus his Son.

The rest of his letter shows that what God is now saying is significantly more than what he said in the past. God is in the process now, "in these last days," of introducing a new covenant to take the place of the old covenant under which the prophets spoke.

Jesus came "in the fullness of the times." History is a developing process. God is moving the human race closer and closer to the goal of a perfect world. We are still a very long way from that goal, but God has all the time in the world. What we need to do always is to listen carefully to what God says, especially when he has something new and challenging for us to learn.

We may well be in a time like that in the twenty-first century. God spoke long ago by the prophets, he spoke again decisively two thousand years ago in his Son Jesus, he is now speaking through the scientific community. Astounding new things are being discovered by our scientists when they examine what God is saying in the physical and tangible universe.

We must be careful not to close our ears as so many people did at the time of Jesus. Whenever and however and by whoever God speaks, we must listen, understand, believe, and obey. We need to adjust our thinking and our activities always to the things we hear God saying to us, even when they require substantial change.

Chapter 23

DISCIPLES

" _Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,_

baptizing them ..."

Matthew 28:19

Note the similarity between the words _disciple_ and _discipline_. A disciple is a person who is being disciplined. This discipline usually begins by some external force, such as parents or teachers or governments, but eventually produces self-discipline.

The new covenant envisions people attaining a degree of self-discipline by being disciplined by the Holy Spirit. The first step in this process of discipline is being baptized. What Jesus means in this Great Commission is not merely the sacrament of baptism but the reality to which that sacrament is pointing. In this reality a person does himself or herself truly believe and commits to following Jesus. That's the heart of baptism.

Parents raise their children in such a way that as they grow to adolescence they make this a personal commitment of faith. Evangelists and missionaries work for the same goal, often among adults.

So when Jesus instructs his disciples to "make disciples" by baptizing them, he has this process in mind. When an adult person makes this beginning commitment he or she has been baptized by the Holy Spirit, and when that happens the church administers the rite of baptism.

In some churches the sacrament of baptism is administered to infants born to Christian parents. This sacrament indicates that the child has been born into a Christian community and will be raised to never know himself or herself as an unbeliever. And then when he or she becomes a responsible adult, he or she will need to make the personal commitment to affirm the sacrament. If such a child refuses or neglects to make that commitment as an adult, he or she becomes a covenant breaker.

What is important is not so much the sacrament of baptism but the reality of personal commitment of faith in Jesus. A person can be baptized with water, perhaps, without making the commitment of faith; and in that case the sacrament means nothing at all.

What God wants, and what he is accomplishing through the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that all of us become self-disciplined by the internal functioning of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit of Jesus produces a holy spirit in those who believe and commit to follow Jesus. That's what it means to be a disciple, to be disciplined.

Chapter 24

ALL NATIONS

" _Make disciples of all nations."_

Matthew 28:19

In the new covenant God is expanding his concerns from the nation of Israel to all the nations of the world. The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, the new covenant, is not merely for the Jews but for all people. God wishes the entire world to function as his image, to move out of its sinful concerns and habits into the holy life of God's people.

That is the intent of the Great Commission. Jesus instructs his disciples to disciple the nations. Our English translations of this Great Commission of Jesus could be a bit misleading. We sometimes get the impression that Jesus is telling his disciples to work in such a way that a number of individual persons be converted from all the countries in the world. These persons would form churches all over the world.

While that is, of course, correct, there is a larger dimension to Jesus' words. A more literal translation from the Greek would be, "Disciple the nations." In The Greek original the words "make disciples" are really one word, "disciple." It is used as a verb, and the object of the verb is "all nations." Make all nations disciples.

So the immediate thrust of Jesus' instruction is, "Disciple the Romans," "Disciple the Greeks," "Disciple the Egyptians." And so forth to include all the nations on earth. And God's ultimate goal, of course, is the entire human race.

Jesus' words are the marching orders for the Christian church, all the churches all over the world. It's the same task as envisioned already in Genesis One, where God creates the human race in his image and requires of them to replenish the earth and subdue it. It doesn't happen by sheer natural development, but it requires the work of the Holy Spirit to penetrate into the heart and soul of the nations, of all people, in such a way as to bring them to want to do what God created them to do, and not to follow the deceptive blandishments of the devil serpent.

In the previous meditation we noted how this process begins, the first step in discipling the nations: baptism, bringing them to a conscious commitment to follow Jesus as Lord. In the next meditation we will consider why baptism must be in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 25

TRINITARIAN BAPTISM

" _Make disciples of all nations,_

baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

Matthew 29:19

When Moses gave the people of Israel the old covenant, that is the Torah Law of God, at Mount Sinai, he required of them a pledge to obey all the words of God, of Yahweh. The people, newly delivered by God out of Egypt, were only too ready to do whatever this mighty God might ask of them. So they said, "Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do." They pledged to obey all the words of God as given them in the Torah.

But, as we know from reading the history of Israel in the Old Testament documents, that commitment didn't last and did not produce the holy nation that God and Moses envisioned.

So now we see in the Great Commission another important development in the pledge that new believers must make. Not only must they promise to obey everything God says, but they must also understand that this involves listening to what God says through Jesus and also to understand that this involves a definite function of the Spirit of God within their hearts, changing them on the inside.

It was not enough to have God's words out there in the Torah, written on papyrus or vellum. There has to be a listening within, a hearing that changes the insides of a person. The new covenant is, accordingly, a covenant in which God's word is written on hearts of flesh not on tablets of stone or manuscripts or paper.

So that is the significance of the requirement that believers be baptized in the trinity. We must recognize first that we have been created by God and that this Creator defines for us what he wishes us to be and to do: Replenish the earth and subdue it.

Second, we need to understand that the kind of person God created us to be is incarnated in Jesus Christ. The same divine word that brought human beings into existence also brought Jesus into existence. So we need to listen to what God is saying to us via his Son Jesus, what Jesus teaches us, and how Jesus lived and worked as a child of God.

Third, all of this must be integrated into our very existence as believing humans. It must control the way we think, the attitudes we take, the goals we set, the desires we entertain, the relationships we sustain, our philosophy, our theology, our life in all its dimensions. That's what it means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.

All three of those aspects of faith and obedience are required in baptism, and we do well to study how the trinity works in our own life and experience.

Chapter 26

TEACHING

" _Teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you."_

Matthew 28:19

To make a disciple it takes much more than a commitment to believe in Jesus. It takes a lifelong process of learning how to do that, how to live in every respect as a disciple, as a person disciplined within by the Holy Spirit.

That's what this second step in the Great Commission involves. First, bring people to baptism, meaning securing the initial commitment; and then, keep teaching them little by little what it means for daily living.

The same process is involved for entire nations. First, bring the nation to recognize that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the way to go for the people as a whole; and second, keep working at it to discover how the gospel should shape the various institutions and functions of government and society. Honesty, justice, truthfulness, respect, prosperity, education, scientific advance, running businesses, enacting fair laws – all of the virtues that make for a viable and godly culture.

At the risk of overkill, however, we should continue to emphasize that what the gospel envisions is exactly the same as what creation emphasizes. God created people to be his image, and now the gospel is working hard at accomplishing that very condition. To be an image of God we must also work at imaging him. What we are by creation must become what we are in practice.

The story of Adam and Eve in the third chapter of Genesis shows us that the human race did not function as an image of God way back in the origin of human life. When we look at the ancient civilizations, such as that of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome, as well as such other civilizations as the Incas, the Aztecs, the Chinese, and then again at primitive societies, it is abundantly clear that more is needed than simply natural development.

We need precisely what the gospel of Jesus Christ provides, the faith that Jesus is the incarnated Word from God, and that faith in him will bring also the inner conviction and discipline to become what God wishes us to be. But, just as this is a lifelong process for us as individual Christians, so too it is an ongoing slow process for nations as a whole. The second step of the Great Commission is constantly needed, teaching ourselves as nations to obey everything that God commands us.

So that too, the discipling of the nations, is an essential part of the new covenant. In the Lord Jesus, God is in the process of creating a holy human race, just as in the old covenant he was in the process of creating one holy nation. And if we wonder whether this process is doing any good, more for example, than the old covenant did for Israel, then we simply need to understand that God has all the time in the world to accomplish his purposes. A thousand years are as one day to God, and a day as a thousand years. Discipling the nations is a work in process.

Chapter 27

THE ROMAN EMPIRE

" _Disciple the nations."_

Matthew 28:19

The new covenant was made with Christian believers who lived within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Rome ruled with an iron fist over all the territory around the Mediterranean Sea. So, the command to disciple the nations would understandably be first applied to the Roman Empire. How would the few disciples of Jesus go about discipling the entire Roman Empire?

Well, back up a bit. Originally when Jesus appointed these twelve men as his disciples, they, to a man, were willing to follow him on one condition, namely that he would be the messiah that all good Jews were so devoutly waiting for. Make sure you understand that point. For the Jewish people of the time, the messiah would be the political and military strong man to drive out the Romans and re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem.

That's how the Jewish people under the old covenant expected God to work: send a messiah to get back the independence we once had a millennium ago. You can understand then how disappointed the disciples were when they saw him arrested, tried, executed, and buried. Disillusionment of a very strong pressure. We had expected so much from this man from Galilee, and what do we have? Nothing.

Well, they did retain something. They were thoroughly convinced that Jesus came from God. He did all those great miracles, did he not? So for several days after Jesus ascended into heaven they kept meeting with each other, talking things over, remembering the sayings of Jesus, until the Spirit of Jesus flooded their minds and hearts. They finally understood that what they had been expecting from Jesus was absolutely incorrect, and that a new way of conquering the world had come, the way of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. A new covenant was replacing the old covenant.

Now jump ahead four hundred and fifty years. Take a look at what the Roman Empire was like. Emperor Theodosius, about AD 490, issued a series of edicts that made Christianity the only legal religion in the Roman Empire! Can you believe it? It was now illegal to practice a pagan religion!

Rome was conquered, not by armies but by the gospel. Earlier in that century Emperor Constantine stopped all persecution of Christians, and he himself became the first Christian emperor. The popularity of Christianity grew, accordingly, by leaps and bounds until Theodosius made Christianity the only recognized religion in the empire.

We can look at that event as the equivalent of the Roman Empire being baptized. A national commitment to follow Jesus had been made. What remained to be done was, as we know, to teach the empire to obey all the teachings of Jesus.

Chapter 28

BARBARIANS

" _I am a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish –_

hence my eagerness to proclaim the gospel to you also who are in Rome."

Romans 1:14-15

We are roughly about twenty years after Jesus gave the Great Commission to the disciples. Paul has become a missionary to the Gentiles and he is so close to Rome (in Corinth) but finds it impossible for him to make a personal visit to the church there. So he writes a letter instead, containing the things he would have taught had he been able to come in person.

The item we wish to notice now is the term barbarian.

In this passage the word _barbarian_ is paired with _Greeks_. Greeks and barbarians. And, note well, this pair is paired again with the terms _wise_ and _foolish_. Wise and foolish. Greeks had the reputation of being philosophers, hence wise. Barbarians had the reputation of being uneducated, hence foolish.

Now let's jump ahead five hundred years from the time of Jesus and take another look at the Roman Empire. It was in shambles. The barbarian tribes from the east and from the north had been invading and destroying the empire all over Europe. The empire, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist, destroyed by the barbarian hordes, like the Vandals, the Goths, the Franks, the Burgundians, and others as well.

The gospel had brought the Roman Empire to its knees before the Lord Jesus. But in very short order the empire in the west ceased to exist, so that the church had no opportunity to proceed to the second part of the Great Commission, teaching them how to obey.

Instead the church now had the task of making the barbarians disciples. From discipling the "wise" the church was now faced with the task of discipling the barbarian tribes of Europe, the "foolish." How did that go?

By the year AD 1000 or thereabouts almost every tribe on the continent of Europe had come to accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior, showing this commitment by recognizing the Roman Catholic Church as their religious supervisors. Europe was now an acknowledged Christian continent.

But again, as we have noted repeatedly, this commitment was the equivalent of the first stage of the Great Commission, baptism. What remained for the church to do was to implement the second stage, the teaching. The church had to find ways to teach the newly converted barbarian tribes how to change their national commitment from violence and destruction to peace and constructiveness. And, without going into detail, we may recognize that what we now enjoy as western civilization is the product of that effective teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.

Chapter 29

AUTHORITY

" _Let every person be subject to the governing authorities,_

for there is no authority except from God,

and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God."

Romans 13:1

Now here is a really surprising thing for Paul to write. Consider that he is writing to the church in Rome, the capital city of the Roman Empire, where the emperors reside, cruel despots like Caligula and Nero. Paul advises the Christians in Rome to be subject to such governments because they "have been instituted by God."

We today may wonder how the Christians in Rome received such advice from Paul. God appointed Emperor Nero? Really? Or, in our times, God appointed Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein?

We should, however, think in somewhat larger terms than individual persons. Paul writes about "governing authorities." He means the system of government, irrespective of the actual persons who are in power at any given time. The Roman Empire was what it came to be through Julius Caesar and the others who transformed the republic into an empire. Paul is affirming that all of this, in any and all countries, happened under the sovereign control of God.

We don't necessarily have to think God approves of everything done in such governments, but only that they are not out of God's control. God will deal with them all in his own good time.

But the point to be taken here in terms of the new covenant is that God is also in charge of the way the barbarians of the middle ages were developing their new civilization. Not that everything they did met with God's approval, but that nevertheless God was working out his own plan for development of human life.

Christians live in countries which have different traditions, different forms of government, different social and economic features. Under the terms of God's new covenant we are to live respectfully within those settings. Not necessarily destroy them but improve them. It may well happen that any given cultural setup needs to be destroyed, as did the ancient Roman Empire and the modern Nazi and Communist experiments, but only when its foundations are incompatible with godliness and truth and justice.

In our western civilization, it would seem Paul is suggesting, we need to maintain the Christian foundations upon which it is based, be aware as best we can of where improvement should be made, and work cooperatively and diligently toward a better situation.

These are, of course, generalities. The Bible gives no blueprint for such efforts. But if we understand that God is at work in our countries in such a way as to enable us to work for a better world, then we will work out our national salvation also with fear and trembling, just as we do in our individual lives.

Chapter 30

LIFE

" _Those who find their life will lose it,_

and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

Matthew 10:39

Everything Jesus taught comes under the rubric of the new covenant. Here Jesus says something that goes against much of the attitude non-Christian people have. If you live in such a way that you do your best to develop your own abilities and desires, you will "lose it." If, on the contrary, you abandon all efforts to develop your own interests and desires out of a desire to be the kind of person God wants you to be, you will "find it."

This is not easy to understand. After all, it is God, is it not, who gives us the characteristics that make us what we are, unique persons? Aren't we supposed to develop these gifts and interests as best we can? Why would we want to "lose" them? Why would we lose our lives if we do all we can to develop our God-given abilities? It doesn't make sense.

So what did Jesus mean?

He means letting go of everything we want to get out of life, and instead allow the Spirit of Christ to work in our lives to make us want to do what God wants us to do. Not what we want to be but what God wants us to be.

Moses did not particularly want to be the person to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Jeremiah didn't really want to become a social misfit bringing an unpopular message to God's people. Paul didn't want to be a preacher of the gospel. Luther didn't want to be excommunicated from the Catholic church.

But God worked in their lives in such a way that they denied their own original desires and did what God assigned them to do. If they had gone their own way they would have missed the reason for their existence. But, trusting in God, they lost their original expectations and hopes and instead found the true reason for their existence.

Jesus wants every person who believes in him to experience that same thing. He wants us all to lose our natural desires, learn to listen to the Holy Spirit within, and find the reason for our existence from him. We lose our natural desires only to find them better disciplined by the Spirit of God.

We do this by prayer, by a constant concern to discover what God is calling us to become. It often happens that a young person will change his or her mind about the meaning of his or her own life because of this concern to discover where the Spirit is leading. There may well be some career that doesn't appeal to you at all, but that God is nonetheless preparing you for. Moses and Paul are good examples of that. You find your life by losing it to Christ.

Chapter 31

HUMILITY

" _All who exalt themselves will be humbled,_

and all who humble themselves will be exalted."

Matthew 23:12

Humility is more than just a feeling. You can feel worthless, but that is not humility. You can persuade yourself that you are not proud, but that is not humility either.

You can pray that the Lord will give you the grace to be humble. But if you do, be prepared to accept how the Lord answers your prayer. He may cause you to be a failure in some venture of life in which you really want to do well. He may take away something that is important to you. You may simply be ignored while others get a good hearing. In other words, God may humiliate you if you need that to make you humble. Are you really willing to undergo public humiliation as the path to genuine humility?

Humility as Jesus uses the term means being put down. The opposite of being put up.

And of course Jesus himself is the most dramatic example of that process. When the Jewish people should have been listening to the voice of God as it was coming from the mouth of Jesus, they instead shut their ears to his message, rejected him as their messiah, and sent him to the humiliation of the cross.

But as we know, God overruled the Jewish nation. He raised Jesus from the dead, and then exalted him to his right hand in the sky. From public humiliation to divine exaltation.

And that is the pattern Jesus is recommending to the crowds who were listening to him that day. Note, however, that Jesus does make it a matter of their own will power: "all who exalt themselves," and "all who humble themselves." It isn't simply a matter of passively accepting anything God does in your life. It's a matter of bringing your own decision, your own will power, into line with God's will and word.

If you can truly deny yourself, as we noted in the previous meditation, you will find it congenial to be humble, even humiliated if that is what the Lord sends. If you try to find your life apart from God, you will find yourself outside of God's will.

So success in life is not simply a matter of getting ahead in this world, it is matter of gaining the approval of God by surrendering your will to the Lord Jesus. Humility is knowing yourself to be in the will of God, whatever position in life you may have. And if God does grant you worldly success, you will not attribute it to your own excellence or prowess. You will know that success to be a gift of God and you will thank him humbly for it.

Chapter 32

LIGHT

" _You are the light of the world._

Let your light shine before others,

so that they may see your good works

and give glory to your Father in heaven."

Matthew 5:14-16

One might suspect this instruction from Jesus is contradictory of the teaching in the previous meditation. There Jesus was recommending humility. Here he seems to imply they are the best in the world. How can I be humble if I am the light of the world?

But of course Jesus knows what he is talking about. He doesn't contradict himself. We need to think about it, humbly!, until we can see what Jesus is getting at.

The decisive clue is in what Jesus has said elsewhere. In John 8:12 Jesus says, "I am the light of the world." So which is it? Is Jesus the light of the world, or are his disciples the light of the world.

Well, of course, both. His disciples can be the light of the world only by reflecting the light that comes into the world by way of Jesus. The point is that all by themselves the disciples are not the light of the world, but only because Jesus first of all is that light.

Still, it is important that the disciples then, and all Christians since the time of Jesus, are also the light of the world. What Jesus means is that the way for the human race to move onward, to improve conditions in the world, is to follow the light that Jesus has brought.

We today still see all kinds of wickedness in the world. Wars are just as bad today, if not worse, causing all kinds of personal and societal suffering and disaster. Our prisons are overloaded with men and women who have functioned in such a way as to endanger other people. We know there are people who deliberately flout the laws if they can get away with it. Every so often even our political leaders are exposed as using their office for personal gain rather than for the benefit of the public. Even more sad is to note that occasionally ministers and priests in the churches are guilty of sexual sins. And, for that matter, we see similar impulses in ourselves as well. Perhaps we squelch them to a large extent, but they are there contesting the work of the Holy Spirit in us.

So when Jesus designates Christians as the light of the world, what does he mean? He means that living under the terms of the new covenant is the way the whole world should go. Let the inner light of the Holy Spirit, writing God's law within us, be the internal motive that guides the whole human race in seeking a better world.

That also defines how we should look at ourselves as individuals. The light of Christ shines in us in such a way that it becomes a powerful beacon to others that this is the right way to go.

Chapter 33

YOUR WILL BE DONE

" _Your kingdom come._

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven."

Matthew 6:10

This is one of the first things that Jesus teaches us to pray for. Pray that God's kingdom will come. But isn't it already here? How can it come if it is already here?

True, it is here, because Jesus brought it here in the new covenant. When we believe in Jesus and begin to order our lives by the indwelling Spirit of God, then we have entered God's kingdom. Then God is our ruler. We live willingly under his authority and rule.

But not all people do believe in Jesus and live under the authority of God according to his Spirit guiding them from inside their hearts of faith. And that is what needs to "come." We need to pray that God's kingdom will grow and expand until the whole earth is full of his glory and every knee shall bow before the Lord Jesus and every life be filled with the Holy Spirit.

But such a prayer means little or nothing if it is not accompanied by obedience. What message would be sent to others if they see us praying for God's kingdom to come, and even talking about it a lot, but they see us motivated by selfishness and pride and greed? So we need to be as faithful in our daily occupations as we are in praying in church. There would be no point in praying for something to happen in the world at large if we ourselves aren't showing that we are living by that same light.

Just what exactly are we praying for when we pray for God's kingdom to come? How can we tell whether or not it is happening? Could good Christian people be praying for God's kingdom for centuries, and even living and working for it to happen, but nothing happens? What do we look for if we want to see whether or not God's kingdom is coming?

For one thing we do see that since the time of Jesus the gospel has spread all over the world, coming mainly to the nations of Europe and then to the Americas. It is now being proclaimed by missionaries all around the globe. Local churches are beginning to work hard in those mission countries to do their part in bringing the gospel to their countrymen.

But there is still another thing to look for. What effect has the gospel been having on the way the nations who embrace the gospel live? Do they work for justice for all the people? Do they work for the benefit of all citizens? Are their political leaders guided by Christian principles of government? Are their businesses run fairly without diminishing their employees and customers? In other words, is the gospel sanctifying the culture in which it is having its success?

This too is what we are praying for when we pray that God's kingdom will come.

Chapter 34

CONTENTMENT

" _I have learned to be content with whatever I have."_

Philippians 4:11

Contentment. How rare a virtue this is!

Do you find yourself constantly complaining about something? Nothing seems to be going right. You are doing all you can, honestly and diligently as a Christian person to correct something that is going wrong, but nothing happens. So you get antsy, inwardly disturbed, pressured, not happy. Or perhaps you know of someone who seems to be a perpetual malcontent, always complaining about someone or something.

On the other hand, perhaps you know of someone whose life has obviously taken a turn for the worse, but who has responded in quiet acceptance, seldom complaining about it, mostly always cheerful, dealing with the difficulty in humble modesty. What makes the difference? Why does one Christian person seem to be a perpetual complainer, while some other Christian person may endure very similar difficulties with a perpetual smile?

This situation seems to be very common, the pressure of disappointment from such disasters as disease, accident, failure. Sometimes the cause is our own irresponsible or mistaken judgments. Other times it is a matter of adversity beyond our control. What is it that enables one person to smile and another to complain, especially if both are committed Christians?

If anyone had a reason to complain in discontent, it would be the Apostle Paul. He had brought from the mission field a large monetary gift for the poor people in Jerusalem, only to find himself ostracized by the Jewish population and then put into protective custody by the Roman authorities.

When writing these words Paul had been imprisoned for nearly four years, unjustly accused and unable to secure his release. He had now received a monetary gift from one of his mission churches, Philippi, and is explaining that he much appreciates their assistance, but that he has learned the secret of being content whatever happens to him.

What was that secret of contentment? He writes, "I can do all things through him who strengthens me." Whatever happens to him, Paul explains, I know it comes from God and that God has some purpose in it even if I don't know what it is. That gives me the strength to accept it calmly and trust that somehow God will lead me through.

So that's the example that we should recognize and follow. It's what Jesus shows us also, is it not, by his willingness to let himself be crucified? It's the way the new covenant works, giving us internal peace and contentment even in the face of small or large problems.

Chapter 35

ENEMIES

" _But I say to you, Love your enemies_

and pray for those who persecute you."

Matthew 5:44

I suspect there aren't very many Christians who find this easy to do. How can I love people I despise? The very persons who are making life difficult for me?

For that matter, why should I even try to love them? I know Jesus said I should, but what good could that possibly do? It won't stop them from being disrespectful to me or from making trouble. Why does Jesus want us to pray for our enemies, and even love them?

I know also that Jesus himself provides the best example of doing just that. He was praying for the soldiers who were crucifying him at the very moment they were driving nails into his hands and feet. But, perhaps I feel, That's fine for Jesus, but I'm not Jesus; I can't even imagine myself praying for the people who are doing such evil things. Could you ever imagine Jewish people in Germany during the second World War loving and praying for Adolf Hitler?

So how do we understand Jesus' instructions, and how is it possible for ordinary Christian people to do what he counsels?

First, in terms of myself. What effect is it having on me when I hate someone, or even secretly despise him? It creates an adversarial relationship. He and I become adversaries, opponents. But then it becomes fighting, me to win, he to win. Only one can come out on top. No real progress toward mutual cooperation and imaging the love of God. I am either confirmed in my own insights, or I am shamed into defeat, but without changing my attitudes at all.

Second, in terms of my enemy. The same thing goes on in his life. He is either a winner, happy to have defeated me; or if he loses, entertaining even stronger disrespect for me. And that does not encourage the mutual love that God wants for all his people.

So Jesus wants us not to take an adversarial stance toward anyone, even those we disagree with most, as well as toward persons who may openly despise and harm us. If someone becomes your enemy, Jesus is saying, it does not mean that you should become his enemy. Your opponent may take up sinful attitudes and relationships with you, but you do not have to reciprocate the same.

You may develop sinful attitudes yourself, but you may repent of them and instead pray that the Spirit of the Lord may work in both of you that will at least keep you both from hatred, and at most restore the mutual respect and cooperation that Christians should have for each other and for all people.

None of this comes easily, but it is something that living under the new covenant does make possible: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Chapter 36

THE WAY

" _I am the way, and the truth, and the life._

No one comes to the Father except through me."

John 14:6

Sometimes we feel that we do not know how to make our way through life. We want to do something and it just doesn't happen. I once wanted to go to Scotland to study theology, but no matter how much I struggled I could not make it happen. Very likely most people could say something similar. For a variety of reasons circumstances develop that prevent us from doing this, that, or the other thing we really would like to do. You want to be a major-league baseball player but you only make it to the minors. You want to make a living as a musician but you aren't quite good enough to get such a position. You would like to become foreman of the factory department you are working in, but somebody else gets the appointment. You would like to teach in some prestigious high school but can't survive the interview.

And so it goes. How disappointing it all is! How can I make my way in life if I can never get the things I really want to do?

You can learn to recognize what effect it has on you. You tend to be constantly unhappy, perhaps critical of the people who are doing better than you. Perhaps you carry long-time grudges against those who have thwarted your progress. You become sullen, difficult to live with, seem to have a negative attitude toward almost everything and everyone. All because you haven't been as successful in life as you had hoped to be.

Jesus is telling the disciples that he is going away. They ask where is he going, how do we get there? Jesus answers, "I am the way."

That 's a rather enigmatic answer, is it not? He doesn't say, I'm going to Nazareth or Bethlehem or Samaria. He just says, "I'm the way."

The disciples will find out soon enough how Jesus would go away, and when he is gone they will be absolutely flabbergasted. They will have no idea whatever what to do with their lives now that Jesus is gone. They would be disillusioned, disappointed, sorrowful, uncertain. Where do we go from here? How can we follow Jesus if he isn't here? They are getting nothing of what they had hoped for from Jesus.

Well, they remember the things Jesus said earlier. They keep talking it over. And all of a sudden it dawns on them how they had been wrong, and then at the same time a vision of what Jesus wants them to do now. They become apostles, sent ones, telling the story of God as it comes now through Jesus. They proclaim the gospel to all comers.

Something like that Jesus wants for us all. Give up on our own personal ambitions and hopes, and instead listen to Jesus, follow him. He will show the way for you to go. Jesus is the way to go.

Chapter 37

THE TRUTH

" _I am the way, and the truth, and the life._

No one comes to the Father except through me."

John 14:6

One of the saddest features of modern life is the notion that truth is not available. All we can get is opinion. You think this way, I think that way. Who is right? Nobody knows, so all we can do is live and let live. You go one way. I go the other way.

So that's how we exist in our modern world. There is no way to get at the truth so we all have to live with each other's opinions. And don't try to cram your opinions down my throat. I have my own commitments, and even if I can't prove anything, that's the way I believe and I don't want you looking over my shoulder all the time, criticizing and rejecting and trying to force your stupid opinions on me. That's the way many people think about politics and religion.

Fortunately there are consequences about the way we choose to live as a result of our beliefs, and those consequences do tell us there is a difference between truth and falsehood. What terrible consequences came in the twentieth century from communism in the USSR and fascism in Germany. What distressing results are coming in the US as a result of people rejecting Christian faith and turning to pure narcissistic lifestyles. No sense of higher responsibility. Persuaded by the devil to shoot people indiscriminately. Anarchistic protests with no alternatives. Cutthroat competition in business matters.

Consider also the notion that one religion is as good as another: it's only a matter of personal commitment, not a matter of truth or falsehood. However, there are consequences of religious commitment. What kind of life, social and economic conditions, political structures, develop in the context of one religion as compared to another? Compare the civilizations developing in the past in areas where primitive religions are practiced; compare the conditions created in Buddhist countries, Hindu societies; compare Islamic culture; and then contrast western civilization.

There are consequences for life and civilization that stem from religious commitment, and this should tell us that one way is indeed better than other ways. And we may conclude also that, even if we cannot prove logically that Christianity is better than other religions, truth does lie in Christian commitment because it is producing better conditions of life and civilization.

Jesus says, "I am the truth." He can say this because he is the incarnation of God's truth. God created the world and he knows how it is supposed to run. He created human beings and he knows how humans should function. And he, the Creator, shows us how humans should function in his Son Jesus. Jesus is the man who lives perfectly tuned to the will of God. Truth, God's truth, is therefore embodied in him, in the way he lived, died, rose, and ascended. And that is why Jesus is not only the Way, he is also the Truth.

Chapter 38

THE LIFE

" _I am the way, and the truth, and the life._

No one comes to the Father except through me."

John 14:6

The Apostle John writes many surprising things about life in his Gospel and letters. Here is one, "Indeed, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomever he wishes." (John 5:21) God raises the dead? How many persons in your acquaintance have been raised from the dead? And the Son gives life to anybody he wants to? What is John talking about?

Well, John is clearly making a comparison between the Father and the Son. Both give life. John is trying to explain to his readers just what God is doing through Jesus. Earlier he had written that "in him [Jesus] was life, and the life was the light of all people." (1:4) So, by the term life John means more than physical existence. God the Creator has given physical existence, life in that sense, to all people. But more is needed to make that life what it ought to be. People spoil their own lives by the choices they make, and that is what needs to be straightened out. That is what God sends Jesus into the world to do.

God sends Jesus into the world as life. The way life is supposed to be run. To demonstrate what God wants us all to be like. So that is why Jesus is the Life, and why his life is the light of all people.

So John is saying God the Father gives us all our physical existence, and also then sends his Son into the world to give us the life that is best for us, the life that images God and makes our own existence worthwhile and good.

Consider the circumstances in which John lived. People in general had their existence from God the Creator, but they were not using that existence for the glory of God. They executed the Son whom God sent to be their savior. So they did not live in such a way as to image their Creator. They did not fulfill the purpose of their existence. That had to be changed, and that change is what God accomplished by sending Jesus into the world.

Jesus is the Life. He is what God desires every human being to become, an image of God in the way they conduct themselves. So Jesus introduces a new covenant to accomplish what the old covenant could not accomplish.

What is required of us, accordingly, is to deny ourselves, that is, to forget the personal ambitions and hopes and desires that we have, and thus find our lives in Jesus. He may indeed provide the guidance and opportunity and ability to do the things we really want to do, but only after we have yielded ourselves to his service. Our prayer should always be: Here I am, Lord, what do you want me to do? Eventually the way will open up, the truth will appear, and a good life will ensue.

Chapter 39

RESURRECTION

" _If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,_

he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also

through his Spirit that dwells in you."

Romans 8:11

Here is a very important analogy. Paul is trying to explain to his readers in Rome just how believing in Jesus is of benefit to them. He focuses on Jesus' resurrection to find this connection.

He writes that it is the Spirit of God that raised Jesus from the dead, and it is that same Spirit who gives life to their mortal bodies. He is saying that something comparable to Jesus' resurrection happens in us when we believe and when the Holy Spirit works in us.

We ordinarily think of the final resurrection from the dead that we expect to happen after this world ends. But this is not what Paul is writing. He is writing about now, about what happens when a person becomes a Christian and lives by the indwelling Spirit of God. The Spirit dwells in us and gives life to our mortal bodies. That's what Paul is explaining to the Christians in Rome.

"Our mortal bodies" means the bodies we now have that will someday die. They are mortal. But already now, in these present bodies of ours, God's Spirit is working. And Paul describes that working as _giving life_ to our mortal bodies.

Obviously Paul does not mean physical life. We already have that. He means life in the sense of how God wants us to live it. True life. When we live a life of sin we do not meet the expectations of the God who made us. When we believe in Jesus and begin to live according to his Spirit, then we begin to live the way God wants us to. That is what happens when the Holy Spirit controls our lives, and it is what Paul is talking about.

What is especially interesting about this analogy is that it suggests that a kind of resurrection takes place in our lives when we believe, a resurrection comparable to Jesus' resurrection. The same Spirit who brought Jesus back to life physically brings us to life spiritually and morally. In that sense we experience already now something like Jesus' resurrection. Now, when we believe. In this life. Before our mortal bodies die.

Often, when we discuss how believing in Jesus benefits us, we connect with Jesus' crucifixion. Certainly this is proper, but here Paul makes a connection with his resurrection. Not only did Jesus die for us, but he also rose again for us. Both aspects of Jesus' life are of benefit to us: Jesus died physically, we die to a life of sin; Jesus rose physically, we rise to a life of holiness.

So when we think about how believing in Jesus benefits us we need to remember both of these aspects. We are blessed both by his crucifixion and by his resurrection.

Chapter 40

ASCENSION

" _Even when we were dead through our trespasses,_

[God] made us alive together with Christ ...

and raised us up with him

and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus."

Ephesians 2:5-6

Here is the same analogy of the previous meditation from Romans 8, only this time extended to include not only Jesus' death and resurrection, but also his ascension. Ephesians was written several years later than Romans, so maybe Paul's own insights had matured in such a way as to see the connection with Jesus' ascension as well as his death and resurrection. At any rate, this is a really remarkable analogy.

After Jesus rose from the dead what happened to him? Why didn't he stay around on earth to help his disciples grow in faith rather than have them flounder around without him, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do now that he was gone? He ascended into the clouds and that's the end of his physical association with the disciples on earth.

We say theologically that when Jesus ascended into the clouds this means he now sits at the right hand of God. It is difficult to figure out what that means physically since God does not have any hands. But it means, symbolically, that God is now ruling the progress of human life on earth by means of what Jesus has done on earth. Jesus' life and death and resurrection and ascension now becomes the gospel, and the gospel is what controls the progress of humanity. That's basically what it means for Jesus to sit at God's right hand. He rules the world by means of the gospel.

So how can Paul now say that when we become Christians we sit with Jesus in the heavenly places? We share the meaning of his ascension? We rule the world with Jesus? How about that, do you envision yourself sitting at God's right hand with Jesus up there in heaven? What does Paul mean?

The gospel is a call to the whole world to come out of a life of darkness and sin into the life of light and goodness. Jesus shows us the way to do that, and this is God's way of taking the human race one more step toward the goal of having the entire human race image himself in the way it creates its civilizations.

The gospel is given to the disciples and the church, and thus to us all as Christians, to do two things. First, to bring people and nations to baptism, to faith in Jesus and commitment to serve him. Second, to teach them – and that includes ourselves, does it not? – to obey everything that God wants from us.

And that is what it means for us to sit with Jesus in the heavenly places. We do our part personally and collectively to extend Christ's rule to more and more people, as well as growing ourselves in the pursuit of goodness.

Chapter 41

PENTECOST

" _In the last days it will be, God declares,_

that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh."

Acts 2:17

Luke is quoting Joel in this passage of Acts. Hundreds of years earlier the prophet Joel envisioned the time when not only Jewish people but all other nations as well would live by the Spirit of God. That time has now come, writes Luke, and through the preaching of the gospel all nations are being invited into the kingdom of God.

The decisive transition point was the day of Pentecost when all the disciples were gathered together in the temple and the power of the Holy Spirit was poured out on them and they began the process of speaking the gospel to all nations in the multifarious languages of the people present.

Luke himself was not one of those original disciples of Jesus. He was a Greek physician who became a Christian and then spent the rest of his life in the missionary team of the Apostle Paul. Luke did not have the extensive background in Jewish history that Paul had, so he did not employ the concept of covenant a great deal, but what he is describing here is in fact the beginning of the new covenant, at least so far as its implementation is concerned.

The old covenant, the one in force during the time of the prophet Joel and which he found already then to be deficient, is now being replaced by a new covenant, a covenant being implemented by the Holy Spirit.

Theologically we like to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. This is true and it is very important to understand. The Holy Spirit in our lives does not operate independently of God and of Jesus, as if we can claim that the Spirit is directing us to do something in violation of God's will. God's Spirit goes into Jesus and controls the way he lives, and when we believe in Jesus God's Spirit comes into us as well. That's the only way we can develop a holy spirit ourselves, by receiving it from God our Creator through Jesus our Savior.

So when we think about the holy trinity, we do not need to speculate about what God is like in himself, we need to recognize what he is to us and how we come to a holy method of living. We receive this incentive to live godly lives, not from merely natural forces but from the guidance of Jesus, and Jesus receives it from his Father God.

God creates us and gives us natural life; God sends his Son Jesus into the world to incarnate the kind of life he wants us all to live; and we benefit from that by acquiring the spirit to obey through faith in God and in Jesus. So the Holy Spirit comes into our lives by proceeding from God to Jesus to us.

That is how we need to think about the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that is how the new covenant is implemented, in trinitarian fashion.

Chapter 42

AFTER THIS

" _After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open!_

And the first voice, which I heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said,

' _Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.'"_

Revelation 4:1

Most of us would like to know what will happen in the future. What will the world look like a hundred years from now? What will my great-great-grandchildren be like then? Will there be a nuclear war to set back civilization a thousand years? Will the United States and Canada survive? Will the gospel succeed in creating a better world? Will there be colonies on the moon? Or on Mars? There is no way we can know that in detail.

But the Apostle John, in one of his glorious visions, is invited to come up to heaven and look through an open door to see what the future will be like, "what must take place after this." So he does that, and all the visions after this in the book of Revelation show what the future of the gospel will be like. There will be conflicts and disasters, but in the end the gospel will prevail and a new Jerusalem will emerge where there is no ungodliness whatever.

We have a great deal of difficulty in figuring out exactly what all those mysterious visions of John mean, but we can see the overall pattern of the book of Revelation as it shows us what will happen after the time of Jesus' ascension into heaven.

There are seven churches that John has in mind, all there in what is now western Turkey. John wants them to know what they should be doing to advance the cause of the gospel.

So the next section of the book shows Jesus in heaven opening a scroll that has seven seals. As each seal is opened something happens, and this tells the churches something about what the gospel is doing on earth. Or better, what God is doing through Jesus by means of the gospel and the Holy Spirit.

Then comes a section about blowing seven trumpets. Blowing a trumpet is often, in ancient culture, a call to action, to do something, whether soldiers to get ready for battle, or citizens to welcome a visiting dignitary, or some public action on the part of a group of people. So we can understand John's visions here to be a call to the churches, once they understand something of how God is working by means of the gospel, to get busy and do what God is sending them to do.

The last major section of the book of Revelation is the pouring out of bowls. Here we see the results of the church's actions, the battles that result in the defeat of evil and the triumph of good. This section concludes with visions of the perfect civilization toward which the work of the churches is directed, symbolized by the new Jerusalem, the city of God.

So all of this is still valid for us, showing us still today how God is working, what our task is as churches, and the goal toward which we are working. Those visions of John should be the controlling factor in our understanding of God's new covenant and our function in it.

Chapter 43

THE END OF THE AGE

" _The disciples came to him privately, saying, 'Tell us, when will this be,_

and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?'

Jesus answered them, 'Beware that no one leads you astray.'"

Matthew 24:3-4

The disciples are not asking Jesus about the end of the world. They are asking about the end of the age. What age? The age of Roman domination over the Jews. They want to know when Jesus is going to get the revolution started, when he is going to start the war that will drive out the Roman soldiers and put Jesus on the throne and themselves in the government. What's the sign of your coming to do this? How are you going to get the ball rolling?

Jesus replies, "Don't let anyone mislead you about that." Jesus knows their expectations of what he will do are all wrong. He won't be doing anything of what the disciples expect him to do, what they are anxiously waiting for him to get started on.

So, as Jesus continues his explanation he first tells the disciples some things that will happen but have nothing whatever to do with his purpose, and then he tells them some other things that will happen that do result from his work but which are utterly unexpected by the disciples.

First, the things that have nothing to do with his mission: false messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes.

Second, the things that will happen as a result of his mission: the disciples will be arrested, tortured, and killed; they will be hated wherever they go; people will fall away; false prophets will lead many astray; lawlessness will lead many astray. And then one more thing: the good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world to all nations. And that last item will be the clue to when the "end" will come.

What "end" does Jesus have in mind? Not the end of the world. The end of the previous era of time, what we know as the Old Testament period or the end of the old covenant. The Greek word translated _end_ here is _telos_. It means _end_ in the sense of purpose or goal. To what _end_ is Jesus working? It is suggesting a time of transition from the past to something new that Jesus is accomplishing. Jesus is replacing the old covenant with a new covenant. That's his purpose, the _end_ toward which he is working, so it closes out an era of the past and begins a new era of the future.

So we ought to be a bit taken aback by the things Jesus says will happen to the disciples: being hated, despised, even killed. But in spite of all that negativity from others, the gospel will continue to be preached all over the world, and that is the sign of the success of Jesus' mission.

Chapter 44

ACCEPTABLE

" _I truly understand that God shows no partiality,_

but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him."

Acts 10:34

Peter is speaking. He is in the house of a Roman soldier, Centurion Cornelius. Cornelius was a proselyte to the Jewish religion and has heard about Jesus and wants to know more. Peter himself has just had a curious vision in which a voice said to him, "What God has made clean, you must not call profane."

After puzzling about this for a while, Peter comes to understand the vision means non-Jewish people. And then he receives this invitation from the Roman soldier Cornelius. Suddenly Peter understands that God is as much concerned with non-Jewish people, Gentiles, as he is with the Jewish people. As a result of Peter's visit Cornelius believes in Jesus and is baptized.

We may note about this incident that it was very difficult for Peter himself to make that transition from thinking of Jewish people as God's people to thinking of all humans as God's people. All during the centuries since Abraham the Jewish people had understood themselves to be God's special people. That's what the old covenant was all about. The Torah was for the Jews not for the Gentiles.

So what was happening in this account of the conversion of Cornelius is one example of the transition to the new covenant in which there is no longer any "partiality." One person is as good (or bad) as the next in the sight of God, regardless of nationality.

But the difficulty that Peter had about accepting non-Jewish believers was typical of many Christians for a long long time. The Apostle Paul had confrontations again and again with that mentality. Jewish Christians had a very difficult time treating non-Jewish church members with the same degree of respect and status as themselves, often insisting that the traditional Jewish religious practices were obligatory for Gentile Christians as well. Paul acquired a very bad reputation among Jews as a result of his work as a missionary to the Gentiles.

So that presents a word of caution to us still today. Few of us are Jewish by nationality, but the same kind of prejudice is sometimes found in modern churches. The kind of people who form the majority in any given church tend to think of others as somehow a bit out of touch or a bit inferior or just different, so that the others tend not to become truly participants in the ongoing life of the church.

It is difficult, to be sure, for people of differing cultures to sense their true unity in the Lord, but we do need to do our best in that regard to be brothers and sisters in Christ. In him we are all children of God.

Chapter 45

SUBDUE THE EARTH

" _God blessed them and said,_

' _Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,_

and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air

and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

Genesis 1:28

This little book is about the new covenant. But it will be helpful to understand that to say it is a new covenant implies that there was also an old covenant. And that suggests further that the covenant has a history. So that is where we will be going now for a few meditations, to follow the course of God's covenant throughout history.

The word covenant is not used in the stories about creation and Adam and Eve. So if you do not wish to regard the creation of human beings as a covenant, that is OK. However, the circumstances described in Genesis One do contain elements that would fit the idea of covenant very well. God does the creating. God tells us what we are like, his images. God tells us what our task is: fill the earth and subdue it. Our responsibility as humans is to be what God created us to be, and to live accordingly. This sounds very much like a covenant.

One might, on the other hand, consider the very idea of covenant to be associated with sin, arrangements made by God to overcome the power of sin and evil in human life. Still, what we have in Genesis One lays the foundation for all of that. Sin is a violation of what God created us to be. So, even if we think of covenant as occasioned by sin, we do need to think of it in connection with the image of God and the command to subdue the earth.

God made human beings with a purpose. He states that purpose in a combination of terms about what we are and what we are to do: the image of God, and the cultural mandate. We are to image God in the way we go about our work day by day, and we are to gain control over the entire world of nature. When we put these two ideas together we get the command to create our civilization in a way that reflects the goodness of God. That means a godly civilization.

When we do not do this, when we do not make a godly nation, we are violating the command of God. The facts are that when we fail in any way to create a civilization that is good and holy, then we are in the way of sin, and then of course we must understand that something has to be done to correct our mistakes.

And that means that God will have to do it. We don't do what we are created to do. God knows that and he does what is necessary to bring us out of our failure. He makes a formal covenant with us, some new things that will lead us closer to the goal that he set already in creation: a human race functioning in such a way as to image him in its developing civilization.

Chapter 46

NOAH

" _I have set my bow in the clouds,_

and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth."

Genesis 9:13

The first usage of the term covenant occurs here in Genesis Nine, the story of Noah. The term is used several times, and when we take a look at all of these instances we get the impression that there is not much that is new. Most of the elements of the covenant have already been stated in similar language in connection with Adam and creation.

For example, God says to Noah after the flood, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." (9:1) And again, "... for in his own image God made humankind." (9:6)

What is new is the promise "that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood." (9:11) Instead, in this covenant established with Noah, God promises, "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease." (8:22) And God tells Noah that the rainbow in the clouds shall be a reminder, a sign, of this covenant.

Note especially that God intends that rainbow to be "a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." Not just people, but the entire earth, including plants, animals, as well as humans. All of the at reminds us of what we have already seen in Genesis One.

So, at heart this covenant with Noah is an affirmation that the conditions of creation, of nature itself, will continue in spite of human failure, sin and evil. The conditions of creation are not undone by our sin. Nature remains what it is, what God created it to be, even though the human part of the creation fails to perform as created. We do not overturn what God created. We cannot uncreate what God created.

Does this establishment of the covenant with Noah make things better on earth? Sadly we would have to say no. There is not much evidence in the Bible that human civilization improved after the flood. Further, there isn't anything in secular history either that shows that human civilization in the ancient time was any more godly than earlier. Civilizations of that ancient period were full of deceit, violence, cruelty, pride, and a wide variety of ungodliness.

The human race was continuing to expand and fill the earth; they were creating civilizations; but their civilizations were far from imaging their Creator. That failure is what the covenants that God established were designed to correct. But it didn't happen with this phase of the covenant with Noah and the earth. It reaffirmed the original conditions of creation but it did not do anything to make humans live as images of God in their task of subduing the earth. The ordinary natural conditions of human life back then were not enough to achieve progress in holiness.

We need to jump ahead to the time of Abraham to see a beginning of that effort.

Chapter 47

ABRAHAM

" _I will make my covenant between me and you,_

and will make you exceedingly numerous."

Genesis 17:2

Abraham moved out of Babylonian polytheism into an innovative monotheism, from belief in many gods to belief in one only God. But where did polytheism come from to begin with?

I do not know what scientists say about this, but it seems to me that polytheism came from people who used their own experience among themselves to explain things they did not understand. They saw themselves doing different things, and when they saw nature doing different things they assumed there were big natural gods doing them.

Sometimes it was windy, sometimes it was calm, so maybe there are two supernatural beings doing that, fighting among themselves to see who would be in control.

Sometimes it rained, sometimes there was drought, so maybe there are two supernatural beings out there making it happen.

Sometimes there was lightning and thunder, sometimes there wasn't, so maybe thunder is the way some nature god speaks, and lightning is his way of getting attention.

Sometimes a baby would be born, sometimes a person would die, so perhaps there are nature gods responsible for such matters.

Babylonian mythology is full of such imaginary accounts, describing the gods conniving with one another for supremacy, fighting against more powerful gods, even killing some of the older ones. So we can imagine Abraham, thinking seriously about such matters, gradually coming to the conclusion that there is only one God in charge of all nature, actually having created it all.

Of course it was God himself who was leading Abraham to think and believe that way, and the Bible informs us that this was God actually speaking to Abraham. What is especially useful for us to know is that Abraham understood all of that as a covenant that God was establishing with him. He would see himself as the first person to become a monotheist, and he would see his descendants working and living in such a way as to see what kind of a world would come from believing in one God only. He was convinced that this was the way of the future for the human race.

But that was all that Abraham had to guide him, only a mature confidence that there was only one God and that he and his progeny would be blessed if they lived consistently in that faith.

So we today need to understand that our belief in one God only is at the very root of what is required to become the people God intends us to be, and that it is at the heart of the kind of civilization that holds blessing for us in the future. God's covenant requires monotheism.

Chapter 48

MOSES

" _Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant,_

you shall be my treasured possession out of all peoples."

Exodus 19:5

It's best if we think of God's covenant as being only one, not as if God makes another covenant every time we read about it in the Bible, forgetting the previous one. It's better to understand that each time God establishes a covenant it is building on the previous one. It would be new to the people to whom God is giving it, but it would presuppose that the previous one is at least partially continued. There would be changes, additions and improvements, but always to make the covenantal arrangements better.

What we mean by better is that the new arrangements are designed to enable the human race to move a little closer to the original requirements that God imposed on us. That means going back to Genesis One. God created humans to be his image in the way they populated the earth and developed its resources. The accounts of Adam and Eve show that our natural endowments are not enough all by themselves to get it done.

So God guides the human race, step by step, beginning with simple monotheism, to bring us to a higher and better standard of living in which we fulfill the natural requirements of creation.

When we read Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, therefore, we need to see this vast welter of regulations, called the Torah, as God's way of taking one more step forward in getting us to live the way we are supposed to live. It's basically saying, Granted you are monotheists, now this is the way this one God wants you to live to show how your monotheist faith should work out.

God's Law, Torah, is by no means the final step in the process, but it is one step higher than what Abraham and Israelites had prior to the exodus from Egypt. It is a stage in God's covenant that specifies what is required, a willing and comprehensive acceptance of our responsibility first of all to God. It is not enough for us to say we believe in one God only, and then go about our daily business with little or no regard to what that faith means in the way we live.

Further, we need to understand clearly that this stage of the covenant with Israel is designed to produce a holy nation, not merely holy individuals. God wants the entire world to be a holy people, including their home life and their public life, their institutions and governments, their businesses and their associations. And here at Mount Sinai he was beginning to do this with one particular nation, detailing in fine print everything in their national life that would contribute to shaping them into a holy nation.

In time, as we know, despite much progress being made, this stage of covenant did not produce the kind of result God wishes, and that set the stage for the coming of Jesus in the fullness of time.

Chapter 49

JESUS

" _But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry,_

and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant,

which has been enacted through better promises.

For if that first covenant had been faultless,

there would have been no need to look for a second one."

Hebrews 8:6-7

The writer of Hebrews observes that the first covenant was not faultless. He means the covenant that had been in force since Mount Sinai. That was full of rules and requirements that covered just about everything people did. Where was its fault? What was wrong with it?

Well, for one thing, see what it resulted in. That nation, shaped by God's Law for over a millennium, rejected Jesus and sent him to the ignominious death of the cross. That's hardly what God desires. God sent Jesus, why would God's people reject him?

More specifically, the fault of the Sinaitic covenant was that it was inscribed on tables of stone and on scrolls of papyrus, not on the inner feelings and knowledge and decision-making of the people. People could be fastidious about keeping the external requirements of the Torah but not be shaped very much inwardly about what it was that God really wanted from them.

God wants us to do what is right, not because there is a law written down in a book or in a scroll, but because we hear God himself speaking to us in our very nature, in our minds, our wills, our emotions, our inner being. God wants his Law, what he created in the beginning as the right way for us to live – God wants that to become part and parcel of how we actually do live.

That is the fault that the new and better covenant remedies. The Holy Spirit writes the will of God on our hearts in such a way that we instinctively and naturally live godly lives: honest, reliable, truthful, hard-working, patient, loving, kind, and whatever other virtue you can name. And when we as individuals live that way, when enough of us do, that has a real effect on the way society at large functions. There are always conflicts with people of other persuasions, but when enough people become Christians they press successfully for better ways to live as a country.

So that is one very important way to think about Jesus, what he came to do. He became the mediator of a better covenant, and he did this by everything we read about him in the Bible, but especially by sending his Holy Spirit to create a holy spirit in us. We live today by the inner guidance of the Spirit of God, not by laws and instructions written elsewhere. It is the Holy Spirit who shapes our thinking and values and hopes and goals and relationships, and this is how God establishes his new covenant with us, the one mediated by his Son Jesus.

Chapter 50

AUTHORITY

" _All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me."_

Matthew 28:18

We come now to the last of these meditations on the subject of the new covenant. How shall we bring all of this to a strong conclusion? What text shall we examine to sum it all up properly?

Well, how about this one: Jesus says all authority both in heaven and on earth is now his. All authority. That's a profound observation. What does it mean? Jesus is the boss-man in heaven? I thought God the Father was; he created everything, doesn't he control it too?

And Jesus is the boss-man on earth also? He runs America, he controls the Moslem countries, he is the control factor in China and Japan and India? He has authority in the primitive societies still found here and there in Africa, the East Indies, South America? How so?

All authority, anywhere and everywhere. That's what Jesus claims.

But there are good Christian people who think it is the devil who is in control of the world today, ever since the fall of Adam. They give up on this world, waiting for God to create a new world when Jesus returns. Christianity, in this way of thinking, is the way out of this world into that other world of the future. Believe in Jesus, be assured that he will take you out of this fallen world of the devil into the better world of heaven.

Sad to say, this view of things does not comport at all with Jesus' claim that all authority, no matter where you find it, belongs to him. The devil is not in control of this world, Jesus is. The fall of Adam, however we may wish to interpret Genesis Three, did not wrench control of the world out of God's hands into those of the devil.

God raised Jesus from the dead and brought him into the clouds to sit at his right hand. God rules the world now through Jesus, and Jesus rules through the gospel and his Holy Spirit. We need to see, accordingly, that the one greatest single power operative in human history now is the power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit as they function in the Christian church.

We can, of course, identify all kinds of influences that affect the way humans function and that guide the nations of the world in their international disputes and ambitions. At any given time in history we can see non-Christian forces at play. But what Jesus wants us to see is that God is in control of it all, allowing the human race to learn by trial and error, and that the new covenant that Jesus has brought is behind the scenes always, leading the nations of the world inexorably toward a better way of life.

God created us as a human race in his image, he commanded us to populate the earth and subdue it, and Jesus by means of the gospel and the Holy Spirit, is accomplishing exactly that. It's taking longer than we would like, but God knows what he is doing and is taking all the time he needs to get it done. That's the new covenant at work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edwin Walhout is a Minister Emeritus of the Christian Reformed Church currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has extensive experience in teaching, pastoral ministry, editing, and writing. You may find additional titles by this author at Smashwords.com.
