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.
Over the past several weeks, we've been hearing a lot about covenants between God and God's people. We heard about the covenant God made with Noah – how God would never again destroy all life on the earth. Then we heard about the covenant God made with Abraham – that his descendants as numerous as the stars. Then we heard about his covenant with Moses and the children of Israel – the covenant of the Ten Commandments, the basis of Jewish law and teaching. Last week, we heard the renewal of that covenant as the people crossed the desert wilderness. The Old Testament if full of promises and covenants; in fact, you might say that the history of the Old Testament can be described as an endless cycle in which God makes a covenant, the people break the covenant, the people repent and ask for forgiveness, and God makes a new covenant. This is the history of the Israel. It is the history of God's people. It is the history of our relationship with God.
As people of God, our history mirrors the history of Israel's relationship. We make a covenant with God; we promise to follow God's laws. We promise to love God and honor our parents. We promise not to lie, or cheat, or steal; to not commit adultery, or murder, or covet. And we mean those promises, we really do. But we fail. We break our promises. We sin.
Now sin is a word we don't use very much these days. It's a word that carries a lot of baggage. We don't like to think of ourselves as sinners, probably because it means that we've broken a promise. We've either broken a promise to God, or we've broken a promise to someone else – but either way, we've broken a promise. And that causes a crack in our relationship with God. A sin is anything we do that damages our relationship with God. And if Lent is about anything, it is a time when we reflect on our sins. In other words, Lent is a time when we reflect on our relationship with God. It's a kind of an "annual checkup" on our relationship with the One who created us. We look inside ourselves, and we see that time and again we have broken trust...we have sinned.
In the previous covenant with Moses, the Ten Commandments, God gave his law so that we might shape us as a people. God gave it to form a relationship with his people. God gave us the commandments to define who we are as the people of God. But as we know only too well, we break these laws, and so break our covenant, again and again. In fact, you might say that the only problem with God's covenant is that it depends on us to honor our the covenant. But we are sinners, and it is our nature to sin.
So what does God do? God decides that a mere revision of the law isn't going to work. This time, God takes a radically different approach to the covenant. This time, God intends to fix the one problem the covenant with Moses and his people had – that it depended on us following the Law in the first place. This time, God sets out a covenant that defines our relationship once and for all. And the covenant is this: I shall be your God, and you shall be my people. Period. End of story. In other words, God defines the terms of our relationship – He's God, and we're not. And, so that we all might realize how radical this covenant is, instead of writing it on stone tablets, like the Ten Commandments, God writes in a place where each of us will never loose sight of it. God writes his new covenant on our hearts... or perhaps more accurately, in our souls.
Imagine. A new covenant that doesn't depend on us keeping our side of the bargain. A new relationship that doesn't depend on us at all. For the first time, our relationship with God is defined not in terms of how my tribe or my nation keeps the law. For the first time, God has established a personal basis with each and every one of us, so that we might know him, and in knowing him, know our relationship with him. No matter how we sin, no matter how we try to wreck our relationship, God is still my God, and I still belong to him. In other words, the basis for this new covenant is not our actions, but God's forgiveness. God forgives our sins, and remembers them no more.
A lot of people think that Lent is about "fixing' ourselves; they might think, "If I give up chocolate, I might lose a few pounds." Or, "If I give up television, I might spend more time with my family." They think about Lent as a time of fixing something. But Lent really isn't about fixing ourselves; it's about fixing our relationship with God. And we can't do that. We can't save ourselves. We can't "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps." And sometimes our problems – losing a job, or troubles with our families, or money issues – distract us from our relationship with God. But the Good news is that God bypasses all that, with his promise to be our God forever, no matter what... and you are my people.
As we come around to this final week of Lent, and as we reflect on our relationship with God this week, let us remember that the new covenant is a personal commitment from God to all his people. God's promise of hope, of grace, and forgiveness, are held in our hearts forever.
Thanks be to God.
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