Inscribed By God - Part 1
I am OBSESSED with the word inscribed right now! The idea of being inscribed by God keeps rolling around in my mind, shedding layers with each turn. So when God released a song in my heart on this concept I was THRILLED. But pounding out the chords and melody on the piano wasn’t quite enough to curb my excitement, so I decided to share more here. This one is a bit heavy, so I divided it into three parts.
Being inscribed by God is a reality for each and every believer according to Jeremiah 31:33. This verse says, “For this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord: “I will put My law within them and write it on their heart; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people” (KJV). Covenant? Writing on my heart? The Law within me? What does that mean? Let’s start at the very beginning.
We’ll start with the word “covenant”. The word “covenant” comes from the Hebrew word “barah” which means “to eat,” and according to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, the specific concepts borrowed from that verse were “cutting” and “passing between flesh.” Interestingly enough, each time we see God establishing a covenant with people, there is cutting (i.e., the sacrifices Noah made after the flood, the sacrifice Abraham made in Genesis 15, and animal sacrifices). Therefore, the word “covenant” is associated with cutting. And in this verse in Jeremiah, God is saying He will make a covenant with His people.
Wait. Hold up. Didn’t He already have a covenant? Yes. But…this verse uses the future tense? Correct. Therefore, God was promising a NEW covenant. This would have required the flesh of something to be cut. And not just another clean animal, the Jews had been doing that for years. This then begs the question: what flesh was cut to create this new covenant? Jesus’. Hold that thought.
Now, onto the second part of our verse in Jeremiah where God says He will write the Law on our hearts. Let’s take a look at Exodus 31 where we are introduced to the idea of God Himself writing the Law.
In this scene, we find Moses on the top of Mt. Sinai, receiving the Law that testified to God’s covenant on a pair of tablets. According to verse 18, God provided the stone and He used His finger to write the letters into the stone. The word used for “written” here is “kathab” means “to describe, write down, inscribe, engrave” (Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance). I don’t know about you, but I’ve never attempted to write anything into a rock. I can only imagine how difficult that would be.
Now, if it’s so difficult to write into a rock, why would God choose such a difficult medium to record His Laws? In a day and age before pen and ink or Cloud-based storage, this was the most permanent method of writing. The time-consuming challenge of painstakingly etching stroke after stroke into stone until the entire message was written makes me shudder with dread at the thought. But God wanted it done this way because it was that important. It was that important to God that His code of righteousness and the testimony of His covenant with His people endured for more than one or two generations. He wanted His code and covenant to last, unaltered by time and conditions, from generation to generation. Not that writing into stone was difficult for God; He is, after all, omnipotent. So here we see God, in His power (NOT Moses’), chiseling stone tablets for His people, engraving them with His love and embedding within them with a code that demystified righteousness and at the same time set up the greatest wonder and mystery of all time—salvation.
Unfortunately, we know the end of this particular scene. Moses, in a fit of fury, throws these precious stone tablets and destroys them when he gets to the bottom of the mountain. Not that his anger wasn’t justified, after all, the people DID create a new, false god for themselves and even convinced Aaron to help them worship it. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Moses did not treat those tablets with the reverence they deserved. And what happened? He had to go get his own replacement tablets…by himself. It almost reminds me of the proverbial schoolteacher punishment, Write ‘I will not talk in class’ 100 times on the board. I can only imagine how Moses felt and what he thought as he chiseled away at those stones hour after hour until they came free from whatever bigger rock they were a part of. I’m sure there were a lot of “if only (fill in the blank)” going through his mind. But I bet he didn’t forget the lesson he learned; maybe it was reverencing God or maybe it was obedience or patience. We can only speculate, but regardless, it appears he was given ample time away from his duties to the people to focus on whatever heart issue God was putting His finger on in Moses’ life.
Bottom line: God had a code that was written by Him and His power. This code was engraved onto stone tablets. The stone was CUT in order to make a physical representation of a spiritual covenant between God and the Israelites. This cutting of stone fulfilled the requirement of cutting inherent in a covenant. The law was cut into stone in order to establish a code that would last from generation to generation for His people.
“Barah.” Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance Updated Edition. Retrieved from BibleHub.
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1262.htm
“Kathab.” Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance Updated Edition. Retrieved from BibleHub.
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3789.htm