and I found that he had been charged with questions about their law, but under no charge deserving of death or imprisonment. 3. We are forgiven. In the new covenant, God said, “I will forgive them their wickedness and remember their sins again.” Is that not what you want? God does not forget His promises, His lost sheep, or His laws. The only thing God forgets is our sins. Isn`t that what you want: to be forgiven and to know that you can start over with God? The great psychiatrist Karl Menninger once said that if he could convince patients in psychiatric hospitals that their sins were forgiven, 75% of them could leave the next day. I wonder if an internist could say the same about his patients. We carry such a burden because of our failure and guilt. It has broken our relationship with God and threatens to break our bodies and hearts. In the new covenant, you can be forgiven and the relationship can be restored. Many Christian theologians have explained that the law that is placed in our minds and written in our hearts is related to the Holy Spirit, which leads believers to follow the selective laws that the Spirit follows them, not the whole law. This is based on an out-of-context reading of Galatians 5:18, which says, “If ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law.” It is clear that when Galatians 5:18 is read in the full context of verses 16 and 17, it means, “If ye are led by the Spirit, ye are not among the [unrighteous desires of] the law [of the flesh].” Many believers think that the Spirit will lead them to follow the laws that God imposes on them and writes in their hearts. Some then cease to study God`s laws through the Scriptures and follow only their consciences, hearts, and minds (Deuteronomy 12:8; Judges 17:6, 21:25; Proverbs 12:15; Jeremiah 17:9).
Many believe that God`s laws are abolished, and if they are not, then the Holy Spirit will convince them differently. The other passage is Hebrews 10:16-17. He quotes the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31: “This is the covenant I will make with them after these days,” says the Lord, `I will impose my laws on their hearts, and write them in their minds,`” and then adds, “I will no longer remember their sins and lawless deeds.” The point here is that Christ bought the promise of the New Covenant, and that involves forgiveness of our sins and replacing an old, unbelieving and rebellious heart with a new heart of faith and obedience. So I think these two passages—Romans 2, Hebrews 10, and the other New Covenant passages, like 2 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 8—teach two very different things and address two very different situations. Yeshua (Jesus) came from heaven to earth, obeyed all the commandments, suffered terrible tortures, and died on the cross to atone for the sins of mankind. The lazy and lawless Christian says, “Jesus obeyed the law, so I don`t have to” and “The law is too difficult to obey.” Real? Yeshua (Jesus) did all this for you, and it is too difficult to remember His holy feasts (Leviticus 23), His 7th day Sabbath (1. Moses 2:2–3; Exodus 31:16), and it is too difficult not to eat unclean creatures (Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14) or get a tattoo (Leviticus 19:28)? HEBREWS 8:8-11 (NKJV): “Behold, the days are coming,” saith the Lord, “because I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant I made with their fathers on the day I took them by the hand and led them out of the land of Egypt; because they did not remain in My covenant and I ignored them, the Lord speaks. For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after these days, saith the Lord: I will put my laws in their spirits, and I will write them in their hearts; and I will be their God, and they will be my people. None of them will teach his neighbor and none his brother saying, “Know the Lord,” for all will know me, from the least to the greatest of them. 2.
We have direct knowledge of God. This is what the Lord says in Jeremiah 31:34: “They shall not teach one another any more, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest.” I think the preachers will be unemployed! You will not need me as some kind of mediator to tell you about God, because you will know God for yourself. The Hebrew word for “to know” here is the same word used in “Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived.” It means intimate personal knowledge that is only possible when two people are committed to each other. By God, to know him is to love him. There is, of course, a “not yet” aspect to this triumph. The same is true of the kingdom of God. But there is also an “already” aspect. God is already writing His values in our hearts. His Spirit transforms us day by day to make us more Christlike. Philippians 2:13 says, “God works in you and gives you the desire to please Him and the ability to do so.” A few years after Jeremiah, the prophet Ezekiel heard Yahweh say, “I will give you a new heart with new and righteous desires, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will bring your stone heart out of sin and give you a new and obedient heart. And I will put my Spirit in you, that ye may obey my laws, and do what I command” (36:26-27).
Deuteronomy 30:6 And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your seed, that you may love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, that you may live. This is not a word you would have expected from Jeremiah if you had known him. Jeremiah was known as “the crying prophet” and he was always upset about something. The message God gave him was one of judgment, the truth that God`s people were not exempt from judgment and that Jerusalem itself would be destroyed. This did not make Jeremiah popular. He ended up in prison and in a pit, and he became angry with God for giving him this job. What Jeremiah kept telling people was that sin has consequences. They could no longer disobey God`s moral law and think that nothing would happen to them. Jeremiah entered the temple and said, “You think you are safe, for this is the house of God, this is the house of God, this is the house of God.
God says: If you change your ways, I will let you live here. If you start treating yourself fairly, if you take care of widows and orphans, if you give up violence and stop worshipping other things for me, then I will let you live here and you will be safe. But you are deceiving yourself! You deceive each other, lie to each other and sleep together, and then you enter my house and chant “A mighty fortress is our God.” Go to Shiloh, where my house used to be. There`s nothing! This is what will happen here if you do not change and begin to obey me. If you go to Jerusalem, you can see where the temple was. Twice, God used foreign armies to destroy His own home because people were just talking, not obeying. There is no temple at all in Jerusalem, only a mosque. Then he heard God speak, “The time is coming when I will make a new covenant.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, even though I was a husband to them. Why should God make a new covenant? Was there anything wrong with the law he gave them on the stone tablets? The reason a new covenant is needed, God says, is “because they broke my covenant,” even though I was like a faithful husband to them.
