2002-01-01
Good Morning Dear Ones,
The Lord leads me to continue discussing what it means to participate in the Covenant of Grace. It is important for us to appreciate its origins in the old covenant, so we can appreciate what a great improvement it is over the latter. We are also given a bird’s eye view into the content of God’s generous and loving heart this way. The old covenant of the OT was characterized by the need to seal it by passing the symbol of the covenant between cut halved pieces of an animal sacrificed for it. We see this in GN 15: 17 for example. “When the sun had set and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch suddenly appeared and passed between the pieces of the animals.” It was then and there that the Abrahamic Covenant was sealed. The next verse goes on to clearly delineate the boundaries of the land which God was giving to the Jews by divine right. In other places, this sealing of the covenant was handled by passing a hand between the thighs of the persons participating. This act was symbolic of the “karath briyth” (Hebrew for “cutting an alliance or agreement”). An example of that was the covenant between David and Saul’s son who was his dear friend, Jonathan, in 1 SAM 18: 3.
I was curious about what it meant to cut the sacrificial animal in half. When I researched that issue, the answer came to me. One half represents the “old self” and the other half represents the “new self.” This salient concept is dealt with very clearly in the NT in the citations we examined the other day, e.g. 2 COR 5: 17; EPH 4: 22-24; RO 12: 2. I hope you will review these to see what I mean. How blessed we are that the Lord loves us enough to be a Lord of second chances. His sacrifice of His Son on the cross made it possible for us to shuck off the old self driven by the appetites of the flesh and take on the new self led by the Spirit to seek God and to thirst for eternal life now available through Him. JN 14: 6 lays it on the line. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one goes to the Father except by Me.”
The language of the OT represented this another way. The metaphor is used repeatedly of putting on a white linen robe representing righteousness. In ancient Israel as well as the Orthodox practice of Judaism today, that is done by a purification ceremony of ritual washing in the mikveh (a pool of clean water that has been blessed). That is why archeologists digging around the edges of the Temple Mount area uncovered a number of these mikvot (pleural for mikveh) used by people prior to entering the ancient Temple. The use of linen in this metaphor is very meaningful. This material when stained in a small area has the property of allowing the stain to spread quickly. It is also difficult to wash linen. IS 64: 6, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins seep us away.” The use of the linen metaphor is very dramatically exemplified in the story of Jeremiah’s shorts in which God directs him to bury the shorts near water, they get wet and shrink in JER 13: 1-11. JER 13: 11, “Just as shorts fit tightly around the waist, so I intended all the people of Israel and Judah to hold tightly to Me,” God says though Jeremiah. The personage who appears to Daniel in DN 10: 5-6 to explain his vision of the seventy weeks is dressed in a fine linen robe with a gold belt to remind us of his righteousness. It isn’t totally clear if this is Gabriel, God’s chief messenger angel, or Christ Himself here. But the message of righteousness is crystal clear. When Christ directed us to walk through the narrow gate in MT 7: 13-14, He was making the point that to live in righteousness wouldn’t be easy, but it is the only way to eternal life. IS 1: 18 supports the concept of white linen representing righteousness. “The Lord says, ‘Now, let us settle the matter. You are stained red with sin but I will wash you as clean as snow. Although you stains are deep red, you will be as white as wool.” This same metaphor is carried out in the NT with descriptions of how the Lord appeared in REV 1: 13-16 and the martyrs in REV 6: 11.
While we are blessed to live under the Covenant of Grace today, knowing that the messages and goals that God has for us have been in place since OT times, helps us to appreciate all the trouble that God is going to on our behalf to give us motivation toward eternal life. The motivation is for us to hold up our promises in the Covenant of Grace. While He makes that path through the narrow gate open for us, we have to make the choice to walk that path. It goes back to the two parallel issues of God’s sovereignty and our responsibility to respond righteously to it. Let me suggest a worthwhile issue upon which we can meditate today. What changes must we make in our individual lives to don the white robes of righteousness? That asks us to examine the areas of our lives where there is still some residual or subtle sin and ask God how we can get rid of it. If we will seek Him out this way, He is eager to help us to accomplish this “purification” task successfully. It may mean we have to do something that is hard for us like cleaning stained linen would be, but the blessings that would come from doing this are definitely worth the effort.
PRAYER: O Lord, we come before you as sinners dedicated to confessing our sin and asking for Your help through the Holy Spirit in expunging that sin from our lives. RO 3: 23 reminds us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” There are none of us that are exempt from this admonition except Your Son, Jesus Christ. But through His death on the cross, You have provided us with a way out from under slavery to our sin. For that, we are eternally grateful. In RO 10: 9-10 You have made it clear just how important our confession and our faith really is. Your patience and compassion toward us is amply demonstrated by the sheer number of times You have repeated Your invitation to us to come to righteousness through faithful obedience, messages that we see from the OT citations here began long ago. We beseech You to know that Your patience with us will not be wasted. We take Your message with all due reverence and seriousness. We humbly offer our thanks that by sending Christ to earth to be incarnate and then sacrificing Him on the cross, You prepared Him to be our Intercessor in heaven-to sit at Your right side, open the heavenly Holy of Holies to all, to plead for us, and to take our prayerful supplications to You. Your love does not go unnoticed. We offer You our adoration, worship, loyalty, trust, obedience, glory, honor, praise, and thanksgiving. In Christ’s name, amen.
Tomorrow, we will look at some of the elements of the Covenant of Grace from the NT. In doing this, we will see how those of the OT foreshadowed the new covenant or Covenant of Grace. God has given me a special blessing in writing these daily messages to you, one that gives me great pleasure. That blessing is the privilege of writing to you about the uncountable ways that He shows His love to each of us. I also get to indulge in the warmth and peace that it brings me to examine the depth of that love as it is revealed to us in the Scriptures. Through writing to you each day, He is teaching all of us how essential to our lives and our hopes His presence is. God is truly our awesome Abba Who wants nothing more that to have us in eternal proximity with Him, sharing in His glory and enjoying eternal peace and fellowship with Him. Peter and I send you our love too.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn