Jer. 33, 21
Time after time throughout the Old Testament, God offers His people a choice. It is a simple choice. As He says in Jeremiah 21:8b, “I set before you the way of life and the way of death.” In this case, the way of life was to surrender to the Chaldeans and go into exile in Babylon. The way of death was to stay in Jerusalem. We see the same choice being laid out by God in the Garden of Eden. There the way of life was to abstain from eating the fruit of one particular tree. And again, when God brought His people to the Promised Land, where they could walk in God’s ways and live, or turn to other so-called gods and die.
When it comes right down to it, all of these choices are the same. We can trust and obey God or turn away from Him to our own ways. It’s God’s way or our way; it can’t be both. And because our way is not God’s way, we are naturally inclined toward death. As it says in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick”. It is only when we humbly set ourselves aside and actively seek to keep God first, putting Him above all else, that we find life. Thanks be to God, who knew this about us from before the beginning and put into place a plan to give us hearts that seek His ways, that we might choose and have life.
Heb. 9
Hebrews is an amazing book. It systematically explains Jesus as God’s promise and the fulfillment of His eternal covenant with man. It shows how Jesus is the “better version” of the system God put in place in the Old Testament (the “scriptures” of the time). And it shows how Jesus makes that old system obsolete, not by replacing it, but by fulfilling it. Jesus is the solid object that created the shadow that was the old covenant.
I see it, but I still can’t fully wrap my head around it all. The more I learn and understand, the more I am in awe of how good, how great and how amazing is our God. If I could just hold on to that every second of every day, then surely I would walk unfailingly in His ways, loving and serving Him with every fiber of my being. Thankfully, God promises that someday I will.