#DailyDevotion The Spirit & The Torah Of The New Covenant Are One & The Same

2 Cor. 3:4-11 ⁴That is how Christ gives us confidence in God. ⁵We can’t do anything by ourselves and so claim to produce it ourselves, but God gives us our ability. ⁶He has made us able servants of a new covenant, not of a written Law but of the Spirit, because the written Law kills, but the Spirit makes alive.

Here we see the wonderfulness of the Good News of Jesus Christ. We have Christ who gives us confidence in God. Our confidence in God and before God is not in ourselves but in Christ who has accomplished all things for us. Even our living before God now that we have been saved is not of ourselves. We do not produce this new life of ourselves. It is Christ who lives in me. (Gal. 2:20) It is God who wills and works in me. (Phil. 2:13) So here, “God gives us our ability.” You will often hear theologians banter the word “monergism.” It means one work or one power. The work and the power is God’s when we as Christians do anything good in thought, word and deed.

Paul then directs us to where this comes from. Christ made us servants of a new covenant, not of the written Law but of the Spirit. Anytime you hear the words “new covenant” your mind and spirit should take you to Jeremiah 31 which I quote here, ³¹“The time will come,” says the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with Israel and Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by their hand to lead them out of Egypt — My covenant that they broke although I was their Husband,” says the LORD. ³³“But this is the covenant I will make with Israel after those days,” says the LORD: “I will put My law within them and write it on their hearts, and so I will be their God, and they will be My people. ³⁴ And no more will anyone have to teach his neighbor or his brother, and say, Know the LORD,’ because they will all know Me, from the least to the greatest of them says the LORD, because I will forgive the wrong they did and not remember their sins anymore.”

When we are made partakers of the New Covenant/Testament through baptism, faith in Christ, and the LORD’s Supper this is what the LORD of Life is and has and will do with us. Law here, the Law written on our hearts should be understood as the LORD’s instructions (Torah) and not as the covenant instructions He gave to Israel, though there is much overlap, particularly in the moral code of it. But here in Jeremiah, when we hear he puts his Torah, we should also hear Spirit. That is what Paul is saying here in 2 Corinthians 3. The Spirit writes himself onto our hearts. He makes our hearts new through the New Covenant.

This New Covenant consists of giving us the Holy Spirit. It also consists of knowing the LORD Jesus Christ. It is not enough to know Jesus existed. What does this New Covenant say? It knows, it believes it trusts, “I will forgive the wrong they did and not remember their sins anymore.” Jesus who is the sacrifice of the New Covenant, whose blood washes us clean from sin, makes atonement for us before God, and is our propitiation to God gives us this knowledge, this type of knowledge wrought in us, written on our hearts. The written Law (Torah) of the Old Covenant, killed because it could not be kept with fallen hearts. The New Covenant, written by the Spirit of Christ, is written on our hearts and is kept by the LORD, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who gives us the ability to trust in Christ and his work.

Heavenly Father, always give us your Spirit that we may know Christ and be known by him through faith in the forgiveness of sins won by him. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.