Light of the New Covenant 1975

The longer we walk with Jesus, the more we appreciate this book which, for many of us at least, for a long time was very dry and extremely hard to understand. Numerous times since we've come to know the Lord, we've been refreshed by reading the words of men and women whose lives were invaded by the Spirit of God and who were used in a special way to point men to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Just as we have to have food and drink constantly to sustain our bodies, we absolutely need the truth which pervades this book daily.

When we come to this book, truly seeking God, not trying to prove our own arguments, but seeking God and a word from Him, it's like getting a good meal, it's like taking a refreshing bath, or it's like looking into the eyes of one you love, or like breathing clean air after having to breathe dust and dirt for a whole day. This is a book that never wears out and it never gets stale, always refreshes, provided we use it rightly, provided we approach this book always remembering our own limitations. What I mean is this, all we have to do is look around us at all kinds of sects and cults, which may call themselves Christians or may not, but the characteristic of them is that they divide people and that they mess up and ruin life after life.

And they bring people into bondage and they don't bring them to God, they don't bring them to Jesus, but they bring them under their own power. And yet on what do they base their strange myths and genealogies? On the Bible. And many of us can look back in our own lives on times in the past when we were so sure of ourselves and we were so wrong.

And on what did we base our rigid self-righteousness? On the Bible. Now, in order to use the Bible rightly, the first thing we have to learn is that you can no more contain the truth that is found in scriptures with your mind than you can contain God with your mind. When you come into scriptures and the truth of God jumps out and talks to you, you have to remember that what you are grasping is a mere fragment, that you're touching truth, you're not containing it.

And what I'm getting at is that the modern fundamentalists, like the scribes and Pharisees of old, labors under the illusion that you can take scriptural truth, as he calls it, and formulate it into systems of thought, into principles, as he often uses the word. But when you take scripture and its truth and try to formulate it into systems of thought or principles, what you end up with is not God's truth, but your truth, a truth which is cut down to the size of your own puny intellect and which is just about as reliable. I want to read from Genesis 15, starting at verse 7. And God said to Abram, I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to possess.

But he said, O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? He said to him, bring me a heifer three years old, a she-goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. And he brought him all these, cut them in two, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in two.

And when the birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And lo, a dread and a great darkness fell upon him.

Then the Lord said to Abram, know of a surety that your descendants will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying to your descendants, I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.

Abraham took a heifer and a she-goat and a ram, each three years old, and cut them in half and laid the pieces opposite each other. Then as the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon him and a dread and a great darkness. And God began to show Abraham awful things that were to come.

And then in the middle of the darkness, Abraham opens his eyes and he sees between these broken split pieces of these dead animals, a light beginning to shine, a smoking firepot, a blazing torch, and it moved toward him. And in this light of God's glory, a covenant is made with Abraham that lasts down to this day. Many times since that night, God has spoken to his people by causing his glory to shine between the halves of the heifer, the she-goat and the ram.

Scripture is made up of opposites, which just don't seem very often to us to make any sense. And the harder we try to grasp these contradictions we find in Scripture with our minds, you know, the more confused we become and baffled. But if we hang on and look at both sides of these contradictions and don't let go of either side, after a while, in the darkness that presses down, in the dread that comes to us, in our confusion, suddenly light begins to blaze between the opposites and out of the light, God speaks.

For instance, the central truth of Scripture is Jesus himself. And who is Jesus? Jesus is two opposites that absolutely cannot be reconciled in our minds. Jesus is God.

And yet if you stop with just that, you don't really have Jesus at all. Because Jesus is also man. Now how can Jesus be God and man at the same time? You know, if you really look at that and really think about that and just don't pass over it because you learned it in Sunday school, what do you have? See, but as you look at these and hold on both to Jesus' humanity and his divinity and don't let go, suddenly light begins to blaze out of this contradiction and out of the light, God speaks to you.

Now every truth that Jesus gives us, like himself, is light that burns forth out of a paradox. In Scripture, Jesus manifests to us God's love. In such beauty and such tenderness, it's enough to break our hearts.

A father standing at the door waiting for his prodigal son to come home. A shepherd that leaves the ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness and goes out looking for that one lost one behind every crag and under every rock until he finds it. A king that forgives his servant a million-dollar debt.

A God who opens the eyes of the blind and cleanses the leopard and causes the lame to run and the dumb to speak and brings good news to the poor of this earth whom everybody else forgets. But over against this amazing love which Jesus manifests to the ultimate by laying down his own life for our sins, this same Jesus also reveals a wrath of God which is enough to make us shudder the rest of our days. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.

It's better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire, says Jesus. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It's better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, where the fire is not quenched and the worm does not die.

Now, only when you look at both the love and the wrath of God and hang on to them both do you begin to see God's glory. And every other truth in Scripture comes home to us as light blazing out of what seems at first to us to be a contradiction. For instance, when Jesus offers us life, he always connects it with death.

You want to live? This means you have to die. He offers us exaltation. And what does he do? He offers it to us by calling us to humility.

He who humbles himself will be exalted, and he who exalts himself will be abased. And when the laborers in the vineyard are gathered together and lined up to receive their pay, who's put first in line? The ones who are hired last, because the last shall be first. Never let yourself get misled into thinking that you have mastered Scripture.

Nobody has mastered Scripture except the author of Scripture. And when you look at the two extremes of each paradox that you bump into when you really honestly face the Bible, what happens is that your mind is pulled in two directions until it almost cracks. All we can do is wait between the severed pieces of the heifer, the she-goat, and the until the light comes on, and it all was done.

When our Lord died on the cross, for his followers at least, this meant that the unity of their Messiah was broken. His human body was laid to rest in a tomb, and his divine spirit goes back to the Father. And they are in darkness.

On the third day, they see Jesus again, alive from the dead. And for 40 days, he makes occasional appearances, speaking to them of the things of the kingdom of God. But the light that always appears, and through which God always speaks, did not come to them until this day that we celebrate today, Pentecost.

It was only after they no longer were going to be able to see Jesus with these eyes, he had gone back to heaven. And they were waiting in obedience to his command, that the fire pot, the torch that came to Abram and changed his life, came to them. And they were never the same again.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a rush came from heaven, like the rush of a mighty wind. And it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. When the Spirit fell on them, and gave them utterance, and stirred their hearts with God's love, then, and only then can you say, that the results of Jesus' death on the cross had finally become theirs.

Now the promise that Jesus gave them, that the Holy Spirit would take what was his, and give it to them, began to be fulfilled. From that day, the power of Christ began to flow out of them, causing other men and women to see God's glory in Jesus, and to taste God's mercy in Jesus, and to call on Jesus' name, and to be baptized into Jesus' light. Now whether you have had a Pentecost or not in your life, and my belief is that every believer, sooner or later, has a Pentecost.

Maybe it happens at the beginning, maybe it happens at a later point, but you have one. We need to learn to live in the light of that blazing fire pot, that burns between the severed pieces of the sacrifice. Not just one blazing experience of God, and then darkness again, but that we have to learn to live in the light of the new covenant, as long as we are in these bodies of flesh and blood, and forevermore.

We are to have a Pentecost that goes on and on and on, but most of us are resisting the very things that would make this possible. We want everything to fit together real neat and pat, and we want to have control over our own lives, insulate them against all uncertainties, so when we find, as we always will, that as we get near to Jesus, all these neat arrangements we have in our minds and circumstances start falling apart and exploding all over the place, we just become confused. Why is it that when I get close to Jesus, everything seems to go haywire, and instead of everything fitting together, it all seems to fall apart? How come? And the answer is simple.

How else can we learn to be poor in spirit? And how else are we ever going to learn to mourn? And how else are we ever going to learn to be meek, or to hunger and thirst after righteousness, or to be merciful, except as God brings us to the place where we no longer have the answers, and where our very understanding of ourselves is broken in half, and where our life and our knowledge and our self-assurance are split open and laid apart like Abram's heifer, she-goat, and ram? Darkness presses down on us, and just at that point where it seems like you can't stand any more of that darkness, the fire pot appears, light comes, and God begins to speak. And a covenant is formed with you, between you and God, that never ends. Now what is this light, this fire pot that comes between the broken pieces of our severed lives? He is none other than the Holy Comforter, the Blessed Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of Life, the Revealer of Jesus, the Fountainhead of Love.

So if God happens to be doing a job on you right now, so that you're so confused and bewildered you don't know which end is up, and all the things that you thought were fitting together so neatly are just falling apart all over the place, don't presume to think that you understand it any more than Job understood it, or Paul understood it, or Elijah understood it, or the Apostles, or Mary, or anybody else. And don't run away, and don't lie down and quit. Just wait between the broken pieces of your life, and hang on to the promise which Jesus gives to each of us.

If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? And just when it seems like you can't take any more darkness, the light will come on, and out of that light God will speak personally to you. And the light that you see and the word that you hear will never leave you until Messiah comes. Now the covenant God made with Abraham was made in blood, and it was sealed with light.

So the covenant God makes with us was made in blood 20 centuries ago, and it is sealed with light now. For the Spirit who came to our brothers and sisters back in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost has never left this earth. He is still here, and He will surely shine upon our hearts if we will but open them.

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributed and resting on each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? Heavenly Father, You know our hearts, and You know how desperately, Lord, so much better than we do, we need to have the light that comes only through the Holy Spirit.

And we're asking that before we leave this place today, Lord God, that You would just refresh Your people here assembled, and that that sacrifice of the Lamb on that cross would not be wasted on us, but that the death Jesus died for us, Heavenly Father, would open the door right now for the mighty rushing wind, and that utterance to come forth from us, and that love to burn in our hearts, that we may see Your glory, Lord God, in the midst of our own confusion, and pursue the light, and leave the darkness forever. Help us, Lord God. We ask it in Jesus' name.

And Father, we ask that before we leave this place, should there be any standing on the verge of a new start, that they would just be encouraged in every way, while the prayers are going on, or a hymn is being sung, or at any time, to just open their hearts and receive, and to thank You and praise You for what they receive. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.