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The Daily Word of Righteousness
Dealing With Sin Under the New Covenant, #9
This is what the LORD says: "In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances," (Isaiah 49:8 NIV)
Christ formed in us is the new covenant. Christ Himself is the new covenant. The forming of Christ in us is the highest covenant of all. There never will be a Divine covenant given to man that is superior to that of Christ formed in us.
As Christ is formed in us we obey the eternal moral law of God by nature.
As Christ is formed in us we become a covenant of God with saved mankind. The saved nations of the earth will come up to the new Jerusalem, the glorified Christian Church, to be blessed; to receive the Divine Life of the Holy Spirit; to learn the righteous ways of the Lord. In this way Christ in us becomes a covenant of God with the peoples of the earth.
We see now how God deals with sin under the new covenant. He forgives us, furnishes us with every Divine grace to make it possible for us to grow in the knowledge of good and evil and in the strength and wisdom to embrace the good and to renounce and totally resist and reject the evil, conceives Christ in us, ministers to us by the Holy Spirit and by the members of the Body of Christ until Christ comes to maturity in us, and then comes Himself with Christ and dwells in us for eternity.
Christ came to destroy the works of the devil in us. He came also to inhabit us, to make us part of Himself so by nature we would obey the eternal moral laws of God Almighty.
What a salvation! So infinitely superior to the Law of Moses that to add any part of the Law to the Divine salvation is to add that which cannot improve but only detract from the operation of redemption.
Yet, sometimes some part of the Law is entangled in the faith of a believer. In this case we are not to judge our brother but to live peaceably with him so his faith is not injured. If he does not eat pork we will not eat pork in his presence while the world stands. Yet under the new covenant eating or not eating pork adds nothing whatever to the work of salvation, nor does circumcision or any other aspect of the old covenant.
We have an infinitely better covenant, an infinitely more powerful grace. Let us not sin against God because we are not under the Law of Moses. Let us rather fully grasp all that God is offering so we finally will be in the moral image of our Lord and at rest in the center of God's will.
The final answer to the problem of sin is to follow the Spirit of God until Christ has been fully formed in us. Then we will keep the eternal moral law of God perfectly because of our new nature.
But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:6 NIV)
No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. (I John 3:9 NIV) (from Dealing With Sin Under the New Covenant)