Keeping God's Commandments
Keeping God's Commandments
The trend today is to say "commands," rather than "commandments." But for my purpose in this present essay, I think "commandments" probably will be understood more readily by most readers.
Today I received a letter from a young lady.
"Hi Pastor,
"So I've read in some of your books and recently in your daily word that we are to keep God's commandments, but I'm not sure where to find them. I'm assuming that it's everything that Paul wrote in his letters to the churches. Is this correct? Do you happen to have a book on all of His commandments by any chance?"
Here is my response.
"Yes. What Paul wrote are God's commandments.
"A good place to start is the twelfth chapter of the Book of Romans. That has lots of commandments, beginning with presenting our body a living sacrifice.
"It is very important that we obey the New Testament. Jesus will help us do this and give us wisdom if we ask Him."
*****
Where does a Christian find God's commandments? I think in the present hour there is a great deal of confusion about this question.
And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. (I John 2:3)
What commandments. The Ten Commandments? There are many Messianic Jews who would say yes, I am given to understand, especially the Sabbath commandment.
But given the nature of the new covenant, the only Christian covenant at this time, keeping any part of the Law of Moses, including the Sabbath commandment, conflicts with the new covenant..
Please let me hasten to explain.
The new covenant has replaced the first covenant. The first covenant in particular was the Ten Commandments. The Ark of the Covenant bore this title because the granite slabs of the Ten Commandments were kept inside the Ark.
The Law of Moses contained many regulations other than the Ten Commandments. However, the Ten Commandments were the "Covenant"!
Now notice carefully:
By calling this covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear. (Hebrews 8:13–NIV)
By saying "will soon disappear" instead of "has disappeared" God is revealing His willingness to phase out the first covenant instead of cutting it off abruptly. The Lord understands how difficult it is for a Jew to just throw out all he has been taught.
To the present hour, many Jews who recognize Jesus as Messiah keep the Sabbath, some of the dietary regulations, circumcision, and the literal observance of the seven Levitical celebrations. God has no problem with them doing this, and does not regard their observances as sin, even though those commandments now are obsolete. They are entwined in the faith of the believers.
Christ would have you and me act with understanding toward Christian Jews who keep part of the Law of Moses, and not abuse them with our own attitude toward the instructions of Moses.
But let me now explain why, given the nature of the new covenant, keeping any part of the Law of Moses, including the Sabbath commandment, is not necessary. The explanation has to do with the manner in which the new covenant operates.
Following is the new covenant that has superseded the first covenant:
This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. (Hebrews 8:10)
We Gentiles who are part of Christ are "people of Israel," being an integral part of the one Olive Tree.
Now, exactly how does the new covenant work.
I will begin with the victorious believer who overcomes sin.
Let us say a believer is tempted to steal an item.
The Apostle commands us not to steal.
Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. (Ephesians 4:28)
When an Apostle issues a directive such as this, it is the same as the Lord Jesus commanding us not to steal. It is not a mere suggestion, even though Paul did not say "You shall not steal!"
When we refuse to yield to the temptation to steal, the Lord Jesus feeds us from the spirit world with His body and blood.
Following are two passages that inform us that when we overcome we are authorized to partake of the body and blood of Jesus Christ:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. (Revelation 2:7)
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, . . . .(Revelation 2:17)
Victory over the temptation to steal, which is contained in the body and blood of Christ, the living Word, is now written in our mind and heart. The body and blood of Christ become the Resurrection and the Life that is engraved in us for eternity.
Now when Satan attempts to involve us in stealing, the Word of God that has been written in us gives us special strength to say no.
We might note that we overcame the temptation to steal before we had received the special strength. That is where our will comes into play. We choose to do what is righteous. As we do, Christ, who is the Law of God made flesh, imparts His conquering strength to us.
Adamic strength goes just so far, but it is not of the eternal quality that Christ gives us.
If the Seed, Christ, is to bear eternal fruit, it must be planted in an honest and good heart.
But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience. (Luke 8:15)
It may be true that the "lawless grace" teaching of our day has left the impression that it is useless for us to battle against the temptation to sin.
It absolutely is true that we are not to wear ourselves out struggling against sin. On the other hand, if we pray and read our Bible every day, we will discover that if we call upon the Lord Jesus for help, we will receive help and Satan shall flee!
The Lord Jesus did not "do it all," as it taught commonly. Rather it is the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. We must do our part if Christ is to do His part.
Man chose to do the will of Satan, and so Satan gained mastery over man. God did not send Christ into the world to do all the overcoming of sin for us but to make it possible for those who will make the effort to overcome as He overcame.
It is in the choosing to do the will of Christ and renounce that which is against the will of Christ that ruling character is formed in us.
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. (Revelation 3:21)
The verse above indicates that if we expect to rule with Christ we must lead a victorious Christian life.
The strength we receive from Christ becomes, as I have pointed out, a permanent part of our personality.
Christ Himself is the Word, the eternal moral Law of God. If we will keep making the effort to lead a godly Christian life, "yielding not to temptation" as the old hymn exhorts, Christ will change us from the adamic flesh to the Word, the eternal moral law of God.
It is the will of God that we become conformed to the image of Christ. Isn't that true?
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. (Romans 8:29)
Such is the new covenant. Can you understand from what I have written how infinitely superior the new covenant is to the first covenant?
By calling this covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear. (Hebrews 8:13–NIV)
The first covenant as well as the rest of the Law of Moses, including the seven Levitical feasts, the Sabbath commandment, and the kosher regulations, are outdated and soon will disappear. However, what the observances portray spiritually are in force under the new covenant.
When I was in the United States Marine Corps, we drilled every Saturday.
A Seventh Day Adventist minister heard somehow that I recently had become a Christian.
He came from downtown Honolulu and reasoned with me from the Scriptures, "proving" that I was to observe the Sabbath (Saturday.)
This caused my more mature Christian friends and me great consternation because we did not believe we were supposed to regard Saturday as especially holy.
I will not go into the details, but I finally was free from this well-intentioned falsehood and resumed drilling on Saturday.
But from that experience I learned a lesson that has stayed with me throughout my Christian life. In order to keep the Sabbath commandment, and regard Saturday as an unusually holy day, I no longer looked to Jesus as to what I should do. I was to do no form of labor on Saturday. It was not necessary to look to Christ. It is what Moses has commanded.
Should I look back to the old covenant to see how I am to behave on Saturday?
To think, say, or do anything without going to Jesus to learn His will is to leave the new covenant. This is true seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. We are crucified with Jesus. It is not we who are living but Christ who is living in us.
I look to the Lord for every aspect of my life. In over sixty years as a Christian, the Lord never once—never once!—has spoken to me that Saturday was different from any other day of the week.
If Christ said to me, "Keep the Sabbath," I would do so. "He walks with me and He talks with me," and He never once has told me to make Saturday a holy day.
By the way, James tells us if we keep part of the Law and do not keep the whole Law we are guilty of breaking the entire Law. Did you know that?
For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. (James 2:10)
It is against the Law of Moses to keep one part of it and not the entire Law!
James spoke of the Law of Liberty. The Law of Liberty signifies that we are free from the Law of Moses and now are at liberty to look to Christ at all times, being perfectly righteous although ignoring the Law of Moses.
But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. (James 1:25)
The "perfect law of liberty" was foretold as follows:
And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. (Ezekiel 36:27)
Such is God's new covenant. That the Spirit of God will cause us to walk in God's statutes and keep His judgments and do them is about as wonderful a promise as one could hope for!
We Gentiles may not realize it, but the Law of Moses was a burden to the devout Jews.
Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? (Acts 15:10)
So we who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, that He is our Righteousness, are under no part of the first covenant. The first covenant required that we follow the letter of the Law of Moses. The new covenant requires that we look to the Lord Jesus every day and night for what we think, say and do. The two cannot be mixed.
Yet, as I mentioned earlier, we are to be considerate of those who still are following part of the Law of Moses and not harass them with our liberty. We will worship with them after their fashion, unless Christ forbids this.
I said I would outline the procedure for those who successfully resist temptation. This I have done. Now we will turn to the Christian who sins.
By the way, there is no more sacrifice for sin for the believer who sins wilfully.
For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins. (Hebrews 10:26)
Let us say we see an item we covet intensely, but do not have enough money to pay for it. So we steal it. What must we do?
We are to go to Christ immediately and tell Him what we have done.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (I John 1:9)
What does Christ do then? He forgives our sin and cleanses us from all unrighteousness. It is an eternal judgment against Satan.
From then on, it is much the same as if we had overcome the temptation in the first place. Christ feeds us with His body and blood and we develop resistance to that particular temptation, much as one develops resistance to a disease. We remain a victorious believer.
But let me present a disclaimer at this point.
Someone may reason: "If the result is much the same whether I refuse to yield to the temptation, or do yield and then confess my sin, why can't I just continue to sin and keep confessing it?"
Perhaps the Catholic confessional contains some of this idea accompanied by the totally unscriptural idea that we can atone for our sin by a religious exercise.
No, we cannot atone for our sin by a religious exercise.
The crucial issue is our determination to overcome the sin.
If we confess the sin but do not at the same time vehemently renounce it, telling Christ we never will do this again for eternity, we are playing games with God. Believe me, the person who plays games with God always loses!
With the pure You prove Yourself pure, but with the crooked You prove Yourself shrewd. (Psalms 18:26–Holman)
If our confession is not wholehearted, then we will not be forgiven nor will we be given additional strength to overcome in the future.
The virtue is not in the act of confessing. No deliverance occurs when we merely list our sins. It is in the sincere regret and desperate desire to turn away from such behavior and to please God in the future. Otherwise we do not receive help from the Lord.
Even if the priest were able to forgive the sins we confess, he still could not deliver us from the compulsion to sin. Deliverance from the power and compulsion of sin is part of the new covenant. Christ cleanses us from all unrighteousness.
In addition, Christ may impress us to make restitution in some manner, by returning the property if possible, paying for it, or in some other manner. It is important that we look to Christ for guidance in the act of restitution.
Also, in the case of a moral lapse, it may be advisable that we do not notify our wife or husband in order to appease our sense of guilt. Christ will lead in this also. We may do more harm than good if we go around confessing to people, trying to appease our conscience.
However, sometimes praying together with a mature believer of the same gender as ourselves will bring relief as we confess what we have done and we pray together for deliverance.
God always knows what is in our heart. If He sees we are determined to serve Him, like King David when he sinned, God will make a way for us to continue in the path of victory.
But in no case is there an easy path once we yield to sin. Sometimes years of trouble follow, as they did in the case of King David.
So the current blithe attitude concerning Christian sinning, the idea that once we "accept Christ" we have a perpetual forgiveness, is totally erroneous and has destroyed the moral strength of the Christians in America. Our whole nation is going to suffer because of the lack of moral guidance from the Christian people.
Generally speaking, the attitude today is that we do not have to obey God's commandments, except maybe we should go to church on Sunday if it is convenient, thinking by so doing we are observing the Sabbath commandment. Confusion heaped upon confusion!
The truth is, while the new covenant is the Law of Liberty, it is liberty from the first covenant, not from sin. The demands of the new covenant are summed up in the words of the Apostle Paul: "I beseech you that you present your body a living sacrifice."
Because Paul said, "I beseech you," does not mean that this is a suggestion. It is as though Jesus Himself said: "This is My commandment, that you present your body a living sacrifice." And thus with the other commandments in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Romans, in the Book of Galatians, the Book of Ephesians, the Book of Colossians, and the Book of First John.
The New Testament is filled with commandments. If we are careful to pray continually that the Lord Jesus will help us obey them, the time will arrive when the Day Star, the Lord Jesus Himself, rises in our heart. When that takes place we will keep God's eternal Law by nature. We will be the flesh having been made the Word.
Throughout our discipleship the Lord Jesus is standing at the door and knocking. In this sense we enter salvation every moment of every day.
By opening to Christ continually, we attain to the inner resurrection so that in the Day of Resurrection our outer form will be clothed with a robe of eternal life.
And that is the end product of the new covenant!
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:1,2)