Mankind holds to a lot of different views about what causes people to change. Some people believe that if a person commits a behavior and then meets with negative consequences, they will stop performing the behavior. The penal system was built on this idea, with the hope that if a person was imprisoned they would think about the cost of their actions and refrain from committing more crime when they were released. What was learned was that while being incarcerated stopped further criminal behavior in some cases, in many other instances, the person just left prison and picked up right where they left off. For the more seasoned criminal, it became a matter of counting the cost in a different way. The “cost” of being able to make “quick money” was worth being sentenced to a few years in jail.
In the Old Testament, we read an account of how hundreds of laws were given to Moses by God so that he could share them with the Israelites. God was pretty clear about the cost of disobeying Him when He said through Moses:
15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. 17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.” Deuteronomy 30:15-18
There it is….
Do good and you will be fine…..
Do bad and negative consequences will come….
As you read The Old testament, you learn that despite what God said, Israel repeatedly disobeyed God. God warned them over and over again and kept offering them grace and help and forgiveness and restoration and they kept sinning. You would have thought that at some point they (or we…) would have said, “Hey..this isn’t working out too well. We keep disobeying him and we are getting invaded, or subjected to disaster, or exiled….maybe we should knock this off”, but they didn’t.
So, whether we are talking about then, or now, the record of human history reveals that consequence alone does not deter negative behavior. No, something else is needed that is much more important and that is a changed heart. God has always known this and after centuries of watching Israel disobey Him, He revealed His most powerful plan to enact change as it was spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
“31 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— 32 not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them,[a] says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. ‘ Jeremiah 31:31-33
The heart. That is what must change. God needs to write His law on a person’s heart. God’s promise that in the New Covenant is that He would make a way for us to know Him first-hand. It would no longer be a matter of only knowing him through external rules, or the teaching of the law, but that under the New Covenant believers would have a change of heart and a very personal desire to live in obedience to Him. Under the New Covenant God has made Himself known in a very personal way, through the revelation of Jesus Christ and His Gospel. The law no longer calls to us from afar and demands compliance. Instead we now know that through God, our hearts can be changed . We can be encouraged when we read God’s promise through the words of the Apostle Paul:
“ In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” – Philippians 1:4-6
God has begun a good work in each of us – salvation, and now He will continue the process of making us more and more like Jesus. The Scriptures tell us that we must “work out our faith” but indeed God is at work in us, for His glory and our good.
The problem I see is that many people, even believers in Christ, are still depending predominantly on the Old Covenant to keep them in line and live holy lives. If you ask them they will tell you that there is a certain way that God has commanded them to live and with every ounce they can muster, they are striving to do that. What didn’t work for Israel will not work for us. They seem to put God’s transforming power and the self-control available through the Holy Spirit on the back burner and look to muscle their way through their sinful behaviors. Of course I am not advocating for a complacency in which the believer just sits back and says, “Well, God will transform me so I just need to wait until I am all better.” You won’t find that approach in the Scriptures. The point that I am making is that indeed God has written His law on our hearts and we can know Him in ways that Old Testament believers never could – especially when we consider that the Holy Spirit now indwells every believer in Christ and is at work in them.
So, which covenant are you hoping in for change? Will you parade what you have defined as God’s laws in front of you and repeat to yourself over and over again, “Just say no. Just say no.”? Or will you acknowledge that God alone needs to do a mighty work in your heart and He invites you to be part of the process as you walk out your life in faith and hope towards God.
Israel stumbled over and over in their attempts to keep God’s law. We stumble over and over again in our attempts to “be good”.
For each of us, shall we not call on the power of God even more so, to help us live lives that are pleasing to Him?
For Him,
Rob