The Law and the Heart (5/10/2020)

Today we are asked to meditate on:

Jeremiah 31:33

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Personally I would have put it in a more visible place.  But no, the law (the tablets) was placed in a box (the Ark of the Covenant) and put into the deepest part of a tent (the Tabernacle).  But from that place came a pillar of smoke (visible by day) and of fire (visible by night) that lead them through the wilderness and into the Promised Land.

Sounds like today, right?

Instead of having an external law, God has place the Law is the deepest part of our being (the heard), so that we may use it as our guide through the wilderness we call life.  

James, he put it this way:

James 4:17

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

We don't look into scripture for the specific "do"s and "don't"s of the day, instead we are given just one law, again from James, called "the Royal law" (James 2:8), which he echoed from the Sermon on the Mount, where he heard Christ say:

Mark 12:29-31

Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

And that in turn was echoed from the passage that Derek will open for us today Deuteronomy 6:4–9.  

You may notice that Jesus said it slightly differently.  He added "your mind".  For the Greeks in the audience, I suspect that He wanted them to hear the same idea that was given to Israel -- that no part of them should be excluded from the governance of this Law.