In Part 1, we discovered that God establishes covenants with cutting of something. When He established His covenant with the Israelites, He used His finger to cut His code of righteousness into stone tablets. Recall our launch verse, Jeremiah 31:33 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).
If the law written by God was on stone tablets, how in the world does it get written onto our hearts? And how does God write it on our hearts? Recall that the code in stone was written in God’s power, not Moses’. This foreshadows that only God can write His law, on any medium, whether it is stone, papyrus, paper, or a human heart. Humanity cannot write His code, nor can we fulfill it. It was written by God and meant to be fulfilled by God, which was accomplished in Jesus. We know this because Hebrews 12:2 says, “Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith” (KJV).
If humanity could not fulfill it, then why give it to us at all? Galations 3:24 says, “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith” (KJV). The law was sent to teach us about and lead us to Christ. Without His law, His code of righteousness, we would have NO IDEA that we even needed help. We would have no compass to direct us. Each of us would most likely create a standard for ourselves. But whose is correct? Who needs to change? Who has achieved perfection? No one would know. This is why God gifted us His code, His standard. And guess what? NO ONE comes even close. When we realize what a desperate impossibility it is to adhere to THE code, we realize we need help. Big time. We need Jesus. The law teaches us we can’t do it, not in a million years, and at the same time, it leads us to the One who can.
Before we accept Jesus, we are “dead in our sins” (Ephesians 2:5, KJV). Hmmm…sounds a bit like a stone. Absent of life. Seemingly unable to change. Hard. Dead in sin…like, stone dead.
Stones don’t grow, but they do erode. The elements take their toll over time, and bit by bit they reshape and shrink it. The stone can’t make changes for itself. It can’t move or protect itself. It just is. And as it lies wherever it happens to be, it is subject to wind, rain, earthquakes, and more. These external elements exert their forces on the stone. Kinda like how we were before Jesus.
Before Jesus, we were absent of His true, eternal life. We were unable to overcome the force of sin nature and were subjected to it. Sin takes its toll on our lives over time, reshaping us and eroding us. In and of ourselves we have no protection from this force. But thank God, He does! He, in His glory and omnipotence, has the ability to cut into the stone that controlled our lives. His power is able to cut through something that seems impossible to change, impossible to overcome, something as hard as a rock—our sin nature—and carves away until it is removed and replaced with something new.
But HOW do we get to the point where we are able to have something new? How do we cut out and toss the stone? Through Jesus. Romans 6:3 says, “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” (KJV). When Jesus died, He TOOK OUR death. It was OUR death! Obviously, we all still die a physical death, but what He took was our spiritual death…our metaphorical heart of stone, our sin nature.
The word “baptized” means “to dip, sink” and can be translated as “submerge” (Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance). This means that our sin nature, that which causes our spiritual death, was dipped or submerged into Jesus when He was placed on the cross. Recall that this very moment is what established the new covenant with God. Remember that thought you’re holding onto? That a covenant means something gets cut. If we could have seen Jesus on that day, there would be no doubt that the cutting requirement of the covenant was met. Horrific lashes on His back, a crown of thorns on His head, nails into His hands and feet. Not to mention the bruises and who knows what else from when they beat him up. That was all for us. That was so our spiritual death was paid in full and so the requirements of a new covenant, a new way of living for and relating to God, could be established. That is how God cuts through our sin nature and does a spiritual heart transplant.
“Baptizó.” Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance Updated Edition. Retrieved from BibleHub.
https://biblehub.com/greek/907.htm