Real Deal, New Deal

by Maurice Pujol
Published December 1, 2006

“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33)

In the course of my daily Bible reading, I recently started over at the beginning once again. What struck me most about the Book of Genesis this time around is that all the groundwork for the coming of Jesus was set in place at the very beginning.

We all know that God promised a Savior even as He banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The earliest prophecy about Jesus is found in Genesis 3:15.

Throughout the book, though, the very foundations of our present-day faith are established. When God called Abraham, He made a blood covenant with Him, an agreement to be His guide and protector for all his days. And Abraham, called out of a pagan, polytheistic culture, declared his faith in the one true God.

At this very early point in time, we learn the key to man’s salvation -- and Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness (Genesis 15:6). The greatest revelation in the Reformation, which was to come centuries later, is that we are saved by faith alone.

The term “righteousness,” as used in the Bible is a legal concept. It means “right standing” before God. It’s a term designating innocence in the highest court there is. And because Abraham believed, in spite of his background, his faults and his mistakes, he was declared righteous before God.

We also learn in Genesis that God’s disciples don’t work to get saved, they work because they are saved. Because Abraham believed, he obeyed God even to the point of sacrificing his son Isaac, the child of promise who was finally born to Abraham when Abraham was 100 years old. Of course, we know the rest of the story. God stopped Abraham at the last minute, and Isaac’s son, Jacob, became father of the 12 tribes of Israel.

This unusual story in Genesis is a foreshadowing of God’s ultimate sacrifice of His Son, Jesus, on our behalf. We learn in Genesis that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. With the shedding of Jesus’ sinless blood, our sin debt was paid in full, once and for all.

All that’s required on our behalf is that leap of…you guessed it…faith.

Finally, in the story of Joseph and his brothers, we learn the key concepts of love and forgiveness, perseverance during tribulation and, once again, faith. We also begin to get a picture of God’s providence. As Genesis ends, we begin to see a great plan unfolding. God will preserve and protect His people, and He will alter the course of human events in unusual ways in order to do so.

The plan begins to take definite shape in Exodus. We learn once again that it’s never too late to answer God’s call. Abraham was 75 and childless when God promised him he would be a father of many nations. Moses was 80 and a fugitive from justice (for murdering an Egyptian) when God called him to be the one who would lead God’s people back to Canaan, the land promised to them back in Abraham’s day.

God had sequestered the Israelites for 430 years in Egypt, where they grew from a small band of about 70 people to a nation of over one million. In the course of making their escape possible, God showed His power over all the false gods of Egypt, devastating each in succession to the very top of their pantheon, overcoming Ra, the sun god, with three days of total darkness.

Of course, it took the slaying of all the firstborn in Egypt, human and animal, for the Pharaoh to finally let God’s people go. In this story, we have the next foreshadowing of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. When each Israelite family killed the Passover lamb and sprinkled its blood around their front doors, they were protected from the curse of death God had declared in Egypt.

When Jesus shed His sinless blood, all the faithful – past, present and future – were delivered from sin and its penalty, death.

There’s so much more to God’s plan, though, the details of which unfolded as people grew less primitive. In the beginning, the Israelites were very rough around the edges and needed to be taught the will of God in very basic ways. God covered it all when He gave the Law to Moses, even down to rules about sanitation and good dietary practices.

This sort of covenant was needed then, both to preserve the people who would bring the world a Savior and to set them apart from the decadent pagan cultures around them. But the prophets were given visions of a day when the Law and all those rules would no longer be imposed from the outside, but would rise up from the inside of people who had been transformed by the power of God.

The prophet Jeremiah did not experience the New Covenant, but he saw it in his spirit. When people now enter into this New Covenant through repentance from sin and faith in Jesus, external rules are no longer needed.

Why? Not because the rules are bad or shouldn’t be followed, but because believers really do have the Law engraved on their hearts. The Law is good; it expresses God’s will for us, outlining the way we should live in order to lead happy, healthy and productive lives. Jesus said He came not to do away with the Law, but to fulfill it.

So, this is the believer’s new deal today. We don’t need to consult a rulebook before we make choices. We don’t need to figure out ways to keep the letter of the Law while avoiding its intent, one of the great faults of those who lived under it.

Believers who are honest with themselves know right from wrong because the Holy Spirit dwells within them as a teacher and guide. We know that if we have to think twice about doing something, then it’s probably wrong – because that still, small voice is telling us so.

This is our new deal, and it’s the real deal. There is no other way to eternal life.

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