Andrew spoke quite a bit about the Old Testament and the New Testament. I'd like to share with you what I learned. The Old Testament law lasted about 2,000 years. Before that, there was a period of about 2,000 years without the law where God fellowshipped with everyone on the earth openly. Spoke to them constantly and so on. Adam and Eve experienced that in their time with God in the garden. Well, man fell, bought satan's lies and then gave satan an inroad into their lives.
God took Adam and Eve from the tree of good and evil because He had something better for man than to live forever in a corrupted body and world.
After 2,000 years of the human race self destructing and rejecting hearing directly from God, our good God gave the law so people would know what He expected without hearing directly from Him. The law was meant to strengthen sin. If you think about it, when someone tells you "do not touch that flower" you want to touch the flower.... you keep thinking about the flower.... and eventually, you touch the flower. Well, God knew that if He gave man a list of "do not's", they would SEE how imperfect they are and that it's impossible to be perfect and keep the law. The law was meant to bring people to their knees and cry out for God, realizing that He was everything they need. They can't be perfect without Him.
After 2,000 years of this law, God sent His son Jesus into the world, to save the human race and bring them back to the way God wanted things to be in the first 2,000 years. God wanted people to not be conscious of sin (Hebrews 10:2) but to be conscious of Him always. He wanted to restore the human race to himself. So He sent Jesus to die for all our sin.
"It's the sin nature that sends people to hell, not their individual actions of sin." -A.W. This really impacted me. There is no plural for "sin". So many people say "sins", but the truth is Jesus came and died for our sin nature, not the individual sin of man. Human nature desires sin until they discover God. After that, any sin committed has already been washed clean by Jesus' perfect blood. "Therefore, there is now no condemnation (no adjudging guilty of wrong) for those who are in Christ Jesus, who live in and walk not after the dictates of the flesh, but after the dictates of the Spirit." Romans 8:1
God doesn't look at your sin. He looks at Jesus, who bore all your sin 2,000 years ago! Praise God, He doesn't look at our sin... because man in the flesh, we aren't perfect! In Jesus we are :)
So, the world has existed for 6,000 years with people on it. 2,000 of those years the world was under the law (the Old Testament) and the other 4,000 years was under GRACE (The New Testament). So why is it that a lot of today's churches still preach that we're under the law? That was only 2,000 years out of 6,000 years of existence. Clearly the 4,000 years of Mercy and Grace is what God intended. Come on CHURCH!
Let me leave you with this until later: will you DARE to let the Word get in the way of what you believe?
No comments:
Post a Comment