Sanctification: Law versus Spirit

Romans 7, 2 Corinthians 3

 

Open your Bibles to 2 Corinthians, chapter 3.  While you are turning there I thought I would just mention someone that some of you know.  About 15 months ago a good friend of mine, a pastor we ordained at Berachah Church last century, a couple of decades ago now it seems, by the name of John Hite, just dropped off the radar.  John and I were very close and we communicated a lot.  Then all of a sudden I just couldn't get a phone call returned; I couldn't get an e-mail returned.  John had been doing various things to help us with the ministry.  Then John called me tonight. I looked down at my phone and saw John was calling me after 15 to 16 months and hundreds of e-mails and phone calls.  I thought, “You know if John is calling me, I better answer.”  It turns out that right at the beginning of that time, he and his wife were moving into a new house.  His oldest son who's very bright and is a professor of music in a small town in Wisconsin was at a movie theater where there was a lot of activity going on behind him.  It was a young couple, the girl was 13, and they had been having sex during the movie.  He reprimanded them.  The next day the police showed up at his house.  The girl had found out who he was and accused John's son of rape and kidnapping and Lord knows what else.  So John went up there as a good father and ended up spending the next year and a half working to do the research to get the evidence to help the lawyers get everything they needed to clear his son.  His son was acquitted.  There was actually no physical evidence other than the girls charge.  So that's why I hadn't heard from John..

 

 I thought that was so remarkable and it's an example of how God prepares things in our life.  We never know what happens, why things happen a certain way.  Sometimes we get a glimpse of this.  About three years ago John started to drop off the radar about 50%.   He is a retired Army sergeant and he had been asked by two or three soldiers to help defend them in a court-martial case where they were accused of forging documents for various things.  I forget the details now.  In the military you can ask anyone to defend you.  It doesn't have to be a JAG officer, a lawyer, and so John did work on that for two years and got them all off in the process.  It exposed the facts and I think a bird colonel and at least one general had to retire. I think criminal charges were brought against a couple of other field grade officers who were involved in this forgery cover up.

 

 So John wondered why is this going on and on and everything gets deeper and deeper?  It was preparation for what would happen with his son so it's just really interesting to see how God works those kinds of the details out in a person's life. Some of you think you have problems in your life or maybe you don't.  Your problems are better than other people's problems.

 

We're in second Corinthians chapter 3 because I am taking the time to look at the other key passages in the New Testament that emphasize the end of the Law.  This is important for several reasons.  One is because there are a group of conservative Christian scholars who go by the name of the Theonomous who seek to resurrect the law of God as the normative standard for society. That's what Theonomy means. theo, the  first part of the word for God, nome from nomos meaning God's law.  Their position is that only the ceremonial part of the Law ended at the cross but the civil part of the Law is what God expects all nations to come under and apply to all civil society. That position is usually associated with a prophetic position or eschatological position known as Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism, in their view, is that the mission of the church is to reconstruct society according to the norms of God's law, according to the norms of their Theonomic position.  They are post-millennial.  They do not believe, as is often misrepresented, that it's the role of the church to bring in the kingdom not in an active sense. But that it is the role of the church, as the Holy Spirit works through the church, to expand Christianity until it brings in the kingdom.  Then Jesus comes back after the kingdom is positioned.

 

 Tommy Ice's first book, written with Wayne House, was a critique of theonomic post millennialism. That's a lot of big words. Now and then just say that and you'll impress yourself. Now that's one group.  One reason that's important is because there are a lot of people of an anti-Christian persuasion in this country, a lot of liberals within the Democratic Party and some within the Republican Party, who want to take that extreme position and spin it.  It truly is a minority position among conservative Christians; there are very few who hold that position. 

 

Two of the men who are best known for their writings promoting theonomics are Rousas John Rushdoony who most of you have never heard of before and his son-in-law, Gary North, who is also well known as a conservative libertarian type economist.  Rushdoony is dead now but they didn't speak to each other for years over some minor disagreement over the observation of  the Lord's table. That view is usually resurrected when you read certain articles dealing with Christian evangelicals, the Christian right.  That's what they go to.  This is like one half of 1% of all conservative Christians who would even come close to holding their view.  Very few people read Rushdoony or Gary North or any of their material.  They get a lot more play because of their websites and they're on some of the libertarian websites, Gary North writes a lot on Lou Rockwell and his economic advice is sometimes colored by his theological viewpoints but I understand a lot of time it's not.   At one time Gary North accused me of standing naked in the public square and then in Y2K he sold everything he had up in Tyler and moved to the deep dark backwoods of the Ozarks and built a compound so his family could survive Y2K.  If you read him he's the most convincing writer.  You just knew that the world was going to implode at midnight.  Nothing happened so that's the scary Gary as we sometimes call him.

 

That's one group who believe that God's Laws are for today. Then there's another group of Christians who have held that the moral law of God is in effect for today. They don't see a real distinction between the Old Testament Mosaic law economy and the Church Age economy or administration of God or dispensations.  Often this group, usually just simply referred to as legalists, are the ones who often try to observe the Sabbath but they do it on Sunday.  Somehow they switch the Sabbath from the seventh day Shabbat on Saturday to Sunday. 

 

I remember some years ago a conversation with one of the better-known and better respected Old Testament scholars who was the head of the Old Testament Department at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by the name of Gleason Archer.  He was a brilliant man, probably knew 30 to 35 different languages.  He observed the Sabbath on Sunday afternoon and when asked how he did that he said, “I don't watch television or watch football.

 

I had a retired missionary in my first church who was a Moody Bible Institute graduate.  See a lot of people pick up these ideas and she didn't think you should work or do anything like that on Sunday which is the Sabbath.  But she and her three or four elderly friends who came to church every Sunday and, of course, they are always there on Wednesday night prayer meeting, had a ritual every Sunday of going to Wyatt's Cafeteria.. And as I became aware of her views on the Sabbath I asked her if she had a problem with the fact that Christians who work at Wyatt's Cafeteria were having to come into work and to serve for her Sunday meal.  She quit going because the food never tasted the same again.  I believe she didn't quit right away but it just put such a load of guilt on her.  I'm not making fun of people like this.  There's a superficiality to it.  I've heard other people like Michael Berry go off on something about this.  Yesterday morning he was dealing with liquor stores not being open before 12.  His arguments were totally inane.  Not that he was advocating for a legalistic position; he was attacking it.  His information was all wrong and that's usually the kind of thing that happens.

 

 Historically since the first century, since the time of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, actually since Peter walked into Cornelius's house, the church has had a problem with how to apply the relationship of the Mosaic Law to the Christian.   That is what Paul is showing in these passages, that there is no relationship.  The Law ended.  The Law had a limited, temporary purpose. The Mosaic covenant was a finite covenant that was only given for a specific people for a specific length of time and that purpose was completed and fulfilled by Christ on the cross.   It's been replaced by the new covenant and it's been replaced by a new factor in the spiritual life of Christian believers in the Holy Spirit.

 

As we've seen in our study in Romans chapter 6 what Paul emphasizes is that what makes the difference for our spiritual life is what occurs in a judicial sense at the cross instantly the moment we trust in Christ.  We're identified with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection.  That identification is known as the baptism by the Holy Spirit and in that identification with Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection the sin nature is crucified with Christ.  It's not dead but its power is broken and we move from being the old man we were before we were saved to being a new creature in Christ.

 

The sin nature is still there.  We still live in a mortal body.  We still have the corruption of the sin nature. But the authority and power of the sin nature is completely broken.  So when we feel those urges, when we feel those seemingly overwhelming emotions that we really can't avoid responding to them and going with them, the reality of Scripture is that yes, we do we have a choice.  And that's what Paul is hammering home in Romans chapter 6.

 

I don't think, at least for me, that until we did this last study in Romans six that I fully appreciated the fact that the Old Testament believer did not have that kind of an ending for the sin nature.  There is no identification truth for the Old Testament saint.  The sin nature's power is not broken for the Old Testament saint.  He has the Law which simply tells him what the standard of God is but there's no internal empowerment or transformation to enable the Old Testament believer to apply the Law and to do the Law.  It is truly a different dispensation in every single facet.  This is why Israel always has this negative spiritual trajectory even though there are high points that we see in certain heroic individuals in Hebrews 11.  They knew they never have a positive trajectory and that is because the Law was not designed to give them that.  It wasn't designed to show them how to live but that they really can't live that way and that there will always be failure.

 

I have taken the time to look at Galatians 3.  We'll probably come back to that part in 2nd Corinthians 3  tonight to help us understand just these dynamics because I think with this study in contrasts between what we have and really understanding what every believer up until the day of Pentecost had, we don't appreciate what it is that we are able to do as believers today.  It is absolutely remarkable.  It is a complete renovation.  This terminology that Paul uses in Colossians and in Acts of a transfer from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light is what happens. 

 

There is a metaphysical shift that occurs that impacts the entire universe with the death of Christ on the cross. There really is a sort of a shadow, a veil of darkness over the human race until that is broken at the cross.  The power of the sin nature is truly broken so that we do not have to be slaves to the sin nature. That's what has brought us to this passage in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3.  In this passage there are things that Paul brings out that relate to the permanent aspect of grace and to the shift to the new covenant in contrast to the limitations of the Old Testament.

 

Paul starts off asking a couple of rhetorical questions.  In verse one he is just simply asking do they need to commend themselves again.  No, they don't because he truly establishes his credentials as an apostle in the first epistle to the Corinthians.  The backdrop for this is, as I pointed out last week, these false apostles who had infiltrated the congregation in Corinth claiming to be the true genuine apostles of Christ and claiming that Paul was a fraud.  They attacked his authority; they attacked his credentials; they attacked his testimony; they attacked Paul's doctrine again and again and again.  So Paul has been put in a position of defending and validating his claims to be an apostle. 

 

So he gives them an experiential argument in verse two, saying, “You are our epistle...”  In other words, everyone knows the transformative impact of “the gospel that I preached among you when I was in Corinth.”   When I came and proclaimed the truth that Jesus was the Messiah and that by believing in Him you would have life in His name, you changed from darkness to light, from death to life, and that was manifested to everybody in the community in Corinth.  They saw the change that took place.  It was a real change that had a flesh and blood impact. 

 

“You are our epistle, written in our hearts.”  Notice how he shifts.  “You're our epistle [our letter] written in our hearts.”  I want you to notice this contrast. He talks about “this epistle written in hearts and read by all men.”  See that's that visible testimony to all human beings.  Then he goes on to say, “Clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God...”

 

So there's this contrast between an epistle written with ink and an epistle written not with ink but by the Spirit of God.  “Not on tablets of stone..”,  which is in contrast with the Old Testament that the Law which was written on tablets of stone but now this contrast is the present epistles were written on tablets of flesh which is the heart, the inner life of a person.  So what he's emphasizing here is that what is new is this internal dynamic transformative change that occurs in people's life when they are saved because they instantly become a new creature in Christ.  Then when there is spiritual growth there is a transformation.  If  anybody here is thinking, then one thing you should think about is that when you read first Corinthians you don't really think there's a big change that's taken place in the church at Corinth.  Remember their divisiveness; they've got problems with being judgmental toward one another; they've  got problems with licentiousness in the congregation.  They've got problems with being judgmental towards weaker brothers and eating meat sacrificed to idols.  They've got problems with mystics in the congregation who were speaking in tongues.  There are all kinds of divisions and problems and in the church.  Sometimes it's easy to sort of focus on that but that's normal because every Christian and every church and  every congregation made up of fallen sinful believers is going to manifest different problems like that but there is a radical shift that's taking place in their lives because of grace.

 

That's what he's describing here and when he responded to their first letter with his first letter he's saying that it had an impact.  They changed to conform to the instructions he gave them in that first letter.  So he says you are an epistle of Christ ministered to by us.  As I pointed out last time, the couple of words that we need to pay attention to includes this one “ministered'.  It's the verb on which the noun deacon, diakanos [diakonoj] is based on.  This is an important word because it has to do with this aspect of Christian service, serving one another in the body of Christ.  And so they, as apostles and those who are serving with Paul, have ministered, have served the believers in the congregation in Corinth.  This is empowered by God the Holy Spirit.  It is not based on their power, their credentials, their background, their intelligence, their achievements, their academics, or any of those things.

 

When we get into verse 4, the topic shifts a little bit and Paul begins to emphasize the foundation of his trust.  Actually that should be translated confidence.   On the basis of their confidence, this is a Greek word based on the root of the word, a synonym for confidence, that is related to the word for faith, pistis [pistij]. I think confidence is a much better concept there.  That's what we have here in Philippians 3:4 where Paul talks about we are the circumcision who worship God, that is, the spiritual circumcision, “We are the circumcision who worship God in Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.”   See this is the emphasis here that he's bringing:  where's your confidence, where's your strength, what do you think enables you as a believer to obey God?  He's saying that confidence is not in the flesh, it's not in our natural abilities.

 

In Philippians 3:4 he goes on to say, “though I also might have confidence in the flesh” [this is the same word, pepoithesis [pepoiqhsij], and then he lists all of his credentials.  It's not based on academic achievement; it's not based on native intelligence; it's not based on past accomplishments; it's not based on the possession of certain natural skills or talents but it's based on what God provides and that's true for every Christian.  It's true for you.  It's true for every Christian you know and not just for the apostle Paul, not just for pastors, but for every single Christian.

 

Our confidence has to be in God.  He's the one who gives us that ability in order to carry out God's mission.  It's His work and He provides the means for doing so.   So in 2nd Corinthians 3:4, he uses that same word that was used in Philippians 3: 3, “We have such confidence through Christ toward God.”  This is a radical departure from the kind of thinking that dominated second Temple Judaism.  This is a bold, brazen confidence but it's totally based in God, not upon our works.  It's a radical departure from the kind of confidence that Paul had as a Pharisee where all the emphasis was on his genealogy, his background, his training, and all these other things.   That's not to minimize those as unnecessary.  It’s to say that is not the focal point. The focal point is on the provision of God.

 

So we come now to the next couple of verses in 2nd Corinthians 3: 5 and 6.  Now Paul says, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves.”  That excludes anything we can come up with, everything is excluded, nothing comes from our own abilities, our own natural talents.   Everything is excluded that comes from us, “but our sufficiency is from Christ.”  Now the word that's used here for sufficiency versus the word that's used for sufficiency later on in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 11, is a different word.  It is the word hikanos [i(kanoj], meaning enough or worthy.  It's sometimes translated 'ability' or 'able' or 'competent' or 'qualified'.  I think the idea of ability or competence is what is emphasized here in 2nd Corinthians 3: 5 and 6.  It's not that we have the ability in and of ourselves to fulfill the ministry of Christ. None of us can do that.  We can't do that in our spiritual life.  The spiritual life is not a system of morality.  This is the problem with Theonomy; this is the problem with various forms of legalism; this is the problem with all of covenant theology because covenant theology does not talk much about the Holy Spirit as the centerpiece of the spiritual life.  This is true of reformed theology which is those theological systems that have their root in John Calvin, one of the great leaders of the Protestant Reformation. What day did the Protestant Reformation start?  That's right, it started October 31.  I had a conversation with my chiropractor about that today.  He said you can come in next week and see me on October 31.  He said, “Do you celebrate Halloween?”  I said, “No, I celebrate Reformation Day.”  He asked, “What's that?”  So you see you get an opportunity to witness about all kinds of things.  You just have to know stuff.  We had a good conversation and he asked me all kinds of questions.  He's a real sponge.

 

 Martin Luther was the father of the Protestant Reformation.  He nailed the 95 theses as debating points on the door of the church at Wittenberg on October 31 because it is the day before All Hallows or All Saints Day, which was a holiday.  And on a holiday people would come to the Catholic Church, to the Cathedral, and there would be discussion points that they could debate on that day.  The night before the event is All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, which is how the name derives.  It is the night before when all the spooks and goblins and ghosts were running around.  But that night, at midnight, they would all have to go back to the grave because it was going to be All Saints Day, just medieval superstition and mysticism. 

 

Luther led the charge.  Calvin was the number two leader that came out of a different geographical area. He was in France, southwestern Germany and Switzerland primarily.   His main service ministry came out of Geneva.  Out of Calvin's ministry you have Presbyterianism and Congregationalism and several other different kinds of denominations.  A lot of the Anglican historic, not modern Anglican, beliefs were grounded on Genevan Calvinism.  In historic Calvinism there was no recognition of the role of the Holy Spirit because they didn't see this heavy dispensational shift between the Old Testament and the New.  So it wasn't until the end of the 19th century and the 20th century when the charismatics and Pentecostals began to emphasize the Holy Spirit a lot.  Then some in the Calvinist tradition began to wake up and to start spending some time on it but in a strict Calvinist reformed theology view of the spiritual life, it's all about just doing the right thing, just obeying Scripture.  It's a 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' kind of Christianity.

 

This is not what Paul is saying here.  Our sufficiency is not of ourselves.  We can't just go out and do what the Bible says to do.  That's the problem he's going to come up against in Romans seven.  That the more he tried to do the Law, the more he realized what a failure he was.  The more he tried to obey the Law on his own without dependence on God or the Holy Spirit, the more he realized that he did what he didn't want to do and he didn't do what he did want to do.  He was completely, completely frustrated so 2nd Corinthians 3:5 and 6 is emphasizing this confidence that Paul has in God.  God is totally sufficient.  He is the one who gives us our ability and our capability.

 

So as we look at this we recognize that Paul isn't looking at the topic here of contrasting legalism versus grace but Law versus grace.  He is contrasting the age of the Law as being insufficient.  The Law is insufficient but now because of grace and the provision of the Holy Spirit, our sufficiency is in God. So he says, “ Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” 

 

Now that brings in a whole other realm of doctrine that's very important to understand.  We went through this a lot in our study of Hebrews and we need to go through it again just in terms of review as we go through this chapter because understanding the new covenant is extremely important for our spiritual life. It's emphasized in Hebrews.  It's emphasized here but it's something that is terribly misunderstood today.  I'm not sure that even though we have studied this several times that we have got a good grasp on the new covenant.  I want to review that to some degree as we go through this and after I finish looking at these verses I'll come back and take a look at the new covenant.  What Paul does here is he connects the fact that under the Law we were incapable; we were unable to do what God wanted us to do.   The Law was insufficient but in the age of grace, because we have been given the Holy Spirit, our sufficiency, our ability comes from God because it is the Holy Spirit who enables us, who gives us the strength and the ability to live a spiritual life and to have true victory over the sin nature.  Not just legally in terms of our position in Christ but actually in terms of our day to day experience.   The sad thing is that there are too many of us who don't seem to ever quite grasp how we see this applied in our own lives.  The sin nature still seems to be just as powerful for us now that we're saved as it was before and so Paul emphasizes this distinction.

 

We have to understand this.   Paul says that the our sufficiency is from God in 2 Corinthians 3:6, “Who...” [that is a reference back to God],  “who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant..”   So as I've taught before, remember the new covenant doesn't go into effect until the future.  The new covenant, everywhere it is mentioned in Scripture, is a covenant between God and the house of Judah and the house of Israel.  There is not a new covenant with the church.  Well, wait a minute. It sure seems like that's what Paul is saying here that we're ministers of the new covenant.  But this is what is known as a proleptic, a future type reference.  Something's not going to happen until the future.  The new covenant between God and Israel and Judah doesn't go into effect until Jesus Christ returns at the Second Coming.  What laid the foundation for the new covenant?  The sacrifice of Christ on the cross; that is the foundation of the new covenant.

 

We say this once a month, “This is the new covenant of my blood which is given for you.” That's the legal basis for the new covenant.  The new covenant doesn't go into effect until the Second Coming but because of the new covenant and its future certainty we have a related application of it today.  It's not much different from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament God made a contract with Abraham and God said,  “I'm going to make this contract with you and on the basis of this legal contract with you, I'm going to bless your next-door neighbor. 

 

Let's just think of this real simply as a mortgage contract. You have one person entering into a mortgage contract with somebody else and on the basis of this contract he says, “I'm going to bless your next-door neighbor.”  Is the contract with the next-door neighbor?  Not at all.   The legal contract between these two parties is the basis for the benefits that go to the next-door neighbor. That's the Abrahamic covenant. God is the party of the first part.  He enters into an unconditional, unilateral covenant or contract with Abraham and tells Abraham that “through you I will bless all the nations.”  That's the foundation for the salvation of Gentiles from that point all the way through the Old Testament and all through the New Testament and until human history ends and the last human being is saved. It's all because God made a contract with Abraham, that through Abraham and his seed He would bless everyone else. It doesn't mean that they are a party to that contract. Now that's the Abrahamic Covenant.

 

The new covenant is the same kind of thing.  It has different provisions.  It's between God and Israel and on the basis of that contractual arrangement God says, “I'm going to be able to bless with a new spiritual life and a regenerative spiritual life, something that never was experienced before.  Now they had regeneration in the Old Testament but it didn't come with all of the extras, all of the optional benefits that we get in the Church Age.  They were made a new creature but they weren't a new creature in Christ. They were transformed from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive but they didn't get all of the other accessories and assets that you and I get as believers in the Church Age.

 

So anyone who is involved in evangelism is a minister of the new covenant because that new covenant, which goes into effect in the future, is the foundation for all of the blessings that accrue to believers today. It doesn't mean the new covenant's in effect.  It means that because the foundation for that sacrifice has been completed on the cross that certain benefits accrue today, but not all.  They're similar in many ways to the new covenant and this goes back to some of those difficult things that we covered at the beginning of the study of Acts. 

 

We talked about the promises of the kingdom to the Jews which is specifically related to the establishment and the activation of the new covenant with the House of Judah and the House of David.  So these things are related but what we get today is a confusion on the part of a lot of Bible teachers.  I'm not holding myself up today as someone who's arrived.  This is historic dispensationalism and it's been taught by numerous people.  It's just gotten muddied today.  We've lost sight of this and people are teaching that we're in this 'already but not yet view the Kingdom' and its dialectics applied to Biblical theology so that we're 'something but we're actually not that' or 'we are in the kingdom but we're not in the kingdom.'  This kind of terminology is the foundation for what some at Dallas Seminary are now teaching called progressive dispensationalism.  It's the idea that the kingdom is progressively coming in today but those who are pre-millennial historically and dispensationalists believe that the kingdom was postponed completely when Christ was rejected as the King and the kingdom won't come into its own until Jesus Christ returns. 

 

Jesus is not yet crowned as we saw in our study in Revelation. Jesus isn't crowned until the Second Coming.  He goes to heaven and in Revelation chapter 3 verses 18 and 19, He is seated on His Father's throne but He is not seated on His throne yet.  He does not become the King of Kings and Lord of Lords until the end of the Tribulation. So there's no kingdom until the end of the Tribulation.  There's no new covenant until the King comes to establish the new covenant.  We become participants with Him with a new covenant by virtue of our position in Christ, not our identification with Israel and Judah.  That is the point that comes out of Hebrews chapter 8.   We’ll get into that a little more in just a minute.

 

So Paul emphasizes the fact that God has made us sufficient because of the Holy Spirit as ministers of the new covenant.  Here we have the noun form, diakanos [diakonoj].  This relates to that verb earlier where he said they were ministering to the church in Corinth.  In verse three he says, “clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us...”  That's their role serving the body of Christ.  And then he says “It's not of the letter but of the Spirit [Spirit is rightly capitalized] for the letter kills but the Spirit gives life.”   Now what in the world does this mean?  I'm going to try desperately in the coming weeks to work through this, not to confuse you too much, but we have three different doctrines that come together in this particular passage. It's really exciting when we can work our way through this.

 

The first doctrine is this whole issue of the new covenant and the promise of the Spirit that comes out of Old Testament prophecy.   The second aspect that comes out of this is the role, the unique and distinct role of God the Holy Spirit, and the Church Age.  Then the third thing that comes out of this relates to the ending of the Law as it's replaced by this much superior spiritual life of the Church Age.   We can't understand what's going on in this passage if we don't understand the role of the Law, if we don't understand what's going on with the new covenant and its replacement of the Law with something new and we don't understand the role of God the Holy Spirit.

 

So let's look at just a couple of passages in the Old Testament.  I don't want to drill down as deeply in this study as I did in Hebrews.  I covered it in about 11 or 12 hours in Hebrews and that's a good sufficient study but we'll hit some of the same high points.   In Exodus 31:18, which is one of the passages that would form a background to Paul's thinking as he's writing these verses to the Corinthians, we read, “When He had made an end of speaking with him on Mount Sinai [referring to God speaking to Moses] He [that is God] gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone written with the finger of God.”

 

Now is there anything negative about the fact that God wrote on tablets of stone?  Not at all, as I pointed out last time, this is one of the negatives in this study that people have said, “Well, stone on the heart that means it's got to be bad.”  It's not that it's bad; it's that it's insufficient but it was good because Paul says in Romans seven that the law is good and just and holy.  So I don't want you to forget that the law is good.  It's just not sufficient; it didn't provide everything.  It had a limited purpose, both in scope and time. Now the law was clearly seen to be temporary.  This is the argument that the writer of Hebrews uses when he cites the Jeremiah 31 passage in Hebrews, chapter 8. As I pointed out when we studied that, even though he quotes four or five verses from Jeremiah 31. the only thing that he's making a point about is that because the writer in Jeremiah uses the term 'new' that shows that the old covenant of the Mosaic covenant was always understood to be temporary.  It was never understood to be permanent. It was a temporary covenant and was going to be replaced by a greater permanent covenant.

 

Now this covenant is emphasized in several passages in the Old Testament.  ((CHART)) A couple of these verses I'm putting up here before we get into a little more detail.  Ezekiel speaks of this in Ezekiel 11:19, “Then I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within them, and take the stony heart out of their flesh, and give them a heart of flesh.”  We have many of the same kinds of imagery here that we have in 2nd Corinthians 3.  A stone versus flesh and the reception of a new spirit.  What God says in Ezekiel is that at the time [even though the word new covenant is not used here, this is new covenant terminology].   This says that when the new covenant is put into effect they will, in the future, have one heart. Is that true today?  Is that true in the church?  No, we don't have one heart; we're not united.  We don't have one heart.  I remember when I first went to seminary getting confused because I would hear some professors say things like in Acts this is the beginning of the new covenant because there was unity there; they were all one heart.  But it doesn't really fly; it's only a superficial unity; it's not what is described by Ezekiel in Ezekiel 11.  “I'll put a new spirit within them.”   Did we receive a new spirit at salvation?  Yes, but it doesn't bring with it the same qualifications or the same characteristics that we get in these passages in Ezekiel and Jeremiah. 

 

That's what I want to pay attention to because there are similarities but there are differences and it's the differences that tell us that what is happening in the Church Age is similar to what will happen in the future. It's based on that future new covenant but it's not the new covenant.  We're not in the kingdom.  In Ezekiel 36:26 God says “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.  I will take a heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”  That's very similar to the kind of thing we have in the Church Age where we are a new creature in Christ. Jeremiah 31:33 says “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days says the Lord.  I will put my Law in their minds and write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

 

Now see that restricts the covenant to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It says that God puts the Law in their minds and goes on to say that no one will need to teach their neighbor the Law because everyone will know it.  See that's not true today. If that were true then you wouldn't need to be here and I wouldn't need to be here and I would not have needed to go to seminary because we would just automatically know the Law.  So that tells us that whatever we're experiencing today, even though it has similarities of regeneration, that we have become a new creature in Christ and we have a new heart, but it's different because we're not given the innate knowledge of the Law that is described in these  passages.

 

We have to understand that there is a new covenant in the future.  That new covenant will bring about certain spiritual transformative events in the life of believers under that new covenant in the kingdom. While they are similar to what's going on today, they are different.   Actually what we have today is even greater than what there will be in the kingdom.   Now the other thing we need to do is understand a little bit about this metaphor that Paul is developing here about the letter.  If you look at 2nd Corinthians 3:6 he says, “Who [that is God] also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit...”  So he's contrasting the letter with the Spirit.  Now the letter is physical and that is related to an epistle written with ink or written on tablets of stone and it is talking about something that is literal and is contrasted to that which is written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God [verse three], not on tablets of stone or papyrus but on tablets of the flesh. 

 

Then he says that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life, so how in the world are we supposed to understand this?  Is Paul talking about interpretive methodologies?  Let me rephrase that a little bit.  Is Paul talking about how to interpret and understand Scripture?  Not at all but that's how a lot of people take this particular verse so I've listed out here four options.  ((CHART)) You've probably heard at least one or two of them for how to understand this 'letter versus the spirit' analogy in this chapter. The first is that the letter is the Law and the Spirit, of course, is grace in the New Testament.   But this is wrong.   Under this view of what Paul would be saying is that we're not ministers of the letter, that is the Law, but of the Spirit for the letter kills.  Now the Law didn't kill. The Law wasn't bad. That's the implication here that the Law would be bad.  The Law condemns though and the Law puts us under the condemnation of death as a result of the Law and so that is true.  The letter kills, in that sense, but the Spirit gives life.  It is not saying that the letter is the Law and if we abide by the letter of the Law we're not going to have life.  That's the implication of that position and that's what's wrong.

 

The second wrong approach is to say that what Paul is saying here is that we shouldn't obey the literal sense of what the Scripture says but a spiritual or allegorical sense.  This is very popular and became very popular in the history of Christianity.  It developed in the late second century or early third century. It was developed mostly by an early church father by the name of Origen.  Origen bought us some good things and a lot of bad things.  But Origen, like many in that day, was heavily influenced by what's called Neoplatonism.  Neoplatonism was sort of an upgraded version of Platonic philosophy and in Platonic philosophy the physical was just a shadow of the real which is in the realm of the ideal.  So the physical really wasn't significant or important.  It's the ideal, the spiritual, that's important.  So there are two different levels of reality and material is inherently evil and the spiritual is inherently good.  What Origen did was he took it another step further.  He said there are three levels.  Just as we have the body, the physical, the literal, we have a soul which is somewhat immaterial and spiritual but then we have a spiritual.  So there are three levels of meaning in the text.  There's the literal meaning, so if it says that Jesus went to Cana in Galilee, that would be the literal meaning. 

 

Then there would be a soul meaning that would have to do with something allegorical and that slips off and becomes subjective so anybody could come up with any meaning because it wouldn't be anchored to a literal walk to Cana of Galilee.  And then the spiritual meaning would be even deeper than that.  So it gets completely cut off from the literal, historical, grammatical interpretation of the text.  So there are those who see this terminology “the letter versus spirit” as having to do with interpretation that if you interpret the Bible literally according to the letter it will kill you.  You can't do that.

 

Then that leads to the next meaning which is that kind of literalist interpretation just leads you to legalism. So they then understand the letter to be a reference to a legalistic interpretation, in contrast to a grace sense, based upon the spiritual meaning which is an allegorical meaning which has no relation to the grammatical, historical, exegetical meaning of the text. Then there's the fourth way where letter refers to usually some sort of warped sense of twisted interpretation, in contrast to whatever interpretation the teacher is espousing at the moment.  But that's in contrast to passages such as Romans 2: 27and 29 where letter refers in those verses to the possession of the literal Law.

 

So what Paul is really saying here is the letter kills, the Law written on stone kills, not because of the hermeneutic issue but because the letter, the Law tells us what to do but does not enable us to do it.  So we're shut out under the condemnation of death but it's only with the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Church Age that we're enabled to fulfill the commands of God.   It's not talking about how you interpret Scripture at all; it's not talking about legalism versus grace at all; it's talking about the limitations of the law and the sufficiency of grace in the Church Age.  That's what this is emphasizing: “so we've been made ministers of the new covenant.”

 

Now we have to connect this and I'm going to wait until next time so we can cover that at one time. This is going to be very important, extremely important, because it will connect some dots for us as we look at this and as Paul covers this in the epistle of 2nd Corinthians, which is not taught that frequently.  He brings us to a point where it emphasizes liberty.  Just skim down to verse 17 in 2nd Corinthians, chapter 3, he says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”   There's true freedom.  Now where does Paul end up when he goes to all this discussion on the Law versus grace as you go through Galatians?  Where does that end up?   Galatians chapter 5 verse one says that in Christ we have liberty. Christ died to set us free.   And in Romans 8 Paul ends up, “there is no condemnation now to those of you who are in Christ Jesus” so it helps us to understand the foundation of true spiritual liberty, not licentiousness.  We're not free to do whatever we want to do but we're free to do what God wants us to do because he has given us the divine enablement to do so through the transformative power of God the Holy Spirit who indwells us.

 

All these passages mirror one another but they come at this from a completely distinct viewpoint.   We'll come back to this next time. I won't spend an inordinate amount of time on the new covenant because I've done that in detail in the past but just enough so we remember to focus on this in contrast to what we had in the Old Testament before we're able to go forward in Romans seven.