The promise is that they will be numerous and prosperous, He
will "sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man
and the seed of beast." They will
multiply and their flocks and herds will increase. Not only, however, will they prosper, there
is something more important announced. They
will not only have the written Law, they will have the Law written on their
hearts. Their desire will be to do the
Law, it will no longer be an external thing, it will be who they are. We need a change of heart in order to desire
the good. Our hearts are indeed corrupt
and unable to do God's will, our desires are too great and we live too often at
the level of the gratification of those desires. What needs to change is that we need to see
properly in order to desire properly. We
need to see the kingdom as the pearl of great price, that thing which is
desired above all else. That is the
promise here.
Yes, He must have loved Lazarus but that doesn’t mean Jesus
is immune to their criticism. Surely,
they say, He could have prevented this death, why does He now weep when He
failed to come when we called Him. Sounds
like some of my prayers. Yes, He could
certainly have prevented this death but they have no faith at all now that He
can do anything. They don't want to roll
away the stone, as the King James version says, "he stinketh." Decay has set in, there is nothing left which
can be brought back to life, but Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the grave and
behold, the man. We, likewise, were dead
and now that life is within us. Do we
realize that or do we think He saved us from dying? Grace is more amazing if we realize that we
were already dead and restored to new life than if we simply allowed Him to be
our rescuer.
Mercy is the way we all get in. No one gets in on merit. Paul says there is a "partial
hardening" of the Jews in this time but that will be changed, the gifts
and calling of God are irrevocable, there is no rejection of the Jews. That mercy is meant to change us, to cause us
to see that the old way was the way of death and the new creation (2 Cor. 5) is
intended to have a new set of desires, the desires of life. In our liturgy the most common term for God
refers to the quality of mercy. In more
recent Prayer Books and in the church we have replaced that expression of God's
character which also points to us as "miserable offenders" with
"no health in us" with some vague sense that God has done something
for us because we just needed His assistance to get over the hump, that He
simply lowered His standards a bit. That
change leads to less extravagant praise and worship. We need to be made new and not simply
accepted.
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