Day 2844 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 9:15 NIV

You've heard the saying "out with the old, in with the new"? Well, Christ perfected it! He embodies it. He is the most perfect example of that phrase in every way possible. He came to this earth to wipe out everything which had come before and offer us something entirely new in its place. He slammed the door to the past closed and opened up to us a new life, a new hope, a new future, a new everything. He gave His life to overcome death and to leave behind everything that had existed before His arrival in the process.

Problem is that we're still adjusting to all that newness. We're still kind of stuck in this weird middle ground between the old and the new. Our hearts have been remade through the death, burial, and resurrection of our Savior, and they're slowly but surely learning how to live this new life we've been given. We're learning how to take advantage of this fresh start. We're learning how to set aside the old and strive to behold a new outlook built on new priorities aimed at fulfilling the will of our Father rather than the empty hopes we'd always clung to before.

But our minds, well, they're struggling. They're kind of lagging behind. Our minds are still toying with the lives we lived in the past and because we keep replaying it over, and over, and over again, we just can't seem to get over how badly we screwed it all up. We still get tripped up looking behind us rather than fully accepting this new reality that tells us that everything back there was nailed to the cross and left in the tomb when our Savior walked out of it.

In short, we’ve heard that our guilt has been cleared yet in our minds it still remains in the form of memories of who we’ve been.

We still think about things in terms of the old covenant, you know, the one we literally couldn't abide by even though our lives actually depended on it. We still see our faith, or at least part of it, through the lens of the Old Testament where God first set His law in stone. We can't help but harken back to the many times we fell so woefully short of what was made perfectly clear in and throughout Scripture. In fact, we now read through Scripture and can basically check off everything we’ve gotten wrong.

It makes it hard to step into the new when so much of the history of our faith reminds us of how horribly we’ve lived. Reading through the Bible is like reading through an account of all our misdeeds. And so we just can't help but hold these reminders of all we've gotten wrong, simply because we're finally able to allow ourselves to see the truth of what God has always said is right.

One of our biggest issues is that there's this lie that's been allowed to take root in our minds that reminds us constantly of all we've done to render ourselves unworthy of God's grace. It's not hard to look back on our lives, the choices we've made, all the mistakes those choices led toward, and see an endless list of reasons as to why we deserve nothing other than eternal misery. Where there's law there's punishment for breaking it. That truth underscores the entire idea of justice. And like it or not, we can't help but firmly agree that justice must be preserved no matter what.

In this case however, no matter what means our eternal punishment. You see, God didn't just define truth because He was bored. He didn't define right and wrong just because He wanted to make things hard. He didn't literally carve His law in stone because He wanted to watch us struggle to uphold it. He did it all because the truth, the law, the commandments, the desire for us to be holy as He is holy aren't just hobbies of His. They are Him. He is truth. He is justice. He is holy, and all of our failures to be anything close to holy have rightfully landed us on the wrong side of His wrath because we’ve not simply broken His law, we’ve wronged Him.

And yet, in the midst of our crystal-clear guilt, we hear this Gospel that was written to a bunch of lawbreakers telling them of how their cell-door was opened and their guilty verdicts erased.

How is that possible? How can God look at me and see me as anything but guilty in the first degree? How can I have hope when I know full well that I slammed the door shut that led to eternal peace long ago by running away from the God who defines peace? How can any of us have any hope whatsoever when our lives have been lived in such a way that sends a very clear message that we didn't care?

Well, because Christ. He is the very best at bringing dead things to life! He came to this earth to fulfill the old covenant and set forth a new one in which all the old infractions have been atoned for. He wiped our slates clean and gave us a whole new approach to faith. No longer do we travel to Jerusalem to present our burnt offerings. No longer do we measure out the exact prescribed requirements to be burned upon the altar to atone for our sins. No longer do we watch the priests splash the blood of bulls, goats, lambs, and rams against the sides of the altar to pay for our debts.

Christ ended all of it by becoming it. He is the lamb without defect that poured out His blood to cover our transgressions. Now those other spotless animals are no longer needed as they're no longer sufficient. He offered Himself upon the cross rather than a bunch of livestock on an altar. He atoned for, paid for, died for our complete and full redemption. The old covenant is literally settled with the death of Christ. And in His new life there is a new law, a new covenant, a new hope found in our new start.

Are all those laws found in the Commandments still just and right and holy? Absolutely. Are they still ways in which we should live our lives? Absolutely. But they're not enough. It's no longer enough for us to just aim for making sure we get ten things just right. No, now we have one. We have Christ. We have the requirement of loving Him. We have the responsibility to build a relationship with our Savior, because in doing so, in following Him, learning from Him, aiming for Him, serving Him, all those other things will be taken care of.

Our entire lives have been lived with a very clear inability to adhere to God's demands. But being the loving and just God that He is, He offered to start over. He let us start over. He sent His Son to satisfy the old and usher in the new, a new that we could achieve. That's the thing about the old law, we can't satisfy it. Anyone who fails to uphold one part of it is guilty of failing to uphold the rest. We have utterly failed in every way possible to uphold the righteous law of God. And even if we somehow managed to never go against Him again, we still did and so we're forever imperfect.

God knows that we can't uphold His law because we've already failed to do so. And rather than simply wiping us out, He sent Christ to satisfy His wrath so that we wouldn't bear the brunt of it. He gave the Spotless Lamb to end the need for sacrifices. He shed His blood so that no more would be needed. The old way is gone as Christ fulfilled its every demand in every way. He did everything we couldn't so that we wouldn't remain guilty for all we'd gotten wrong before.

Our old sins are gone, and if we're smart, the old way of life that caused them will be left behind as well. See, that's the beauty in all this. Everything that happened before today no longer matters. If it was a sin, Christ paid for it. Now does that mean that we have a free pass to sin as much as we please? Not at all. It means that we can now see the cost of our foolishness and hopefully strive to do better going forward. It means that we're now aware, and having been made aware by the unmistakable sight of our Savior hanging on the cross, we have no reason to continue doing what we now know is unacceptable.

Friends, long ago God offered us an eternal inheritance. We threw it away. We gambled it and lost it all to the lies of sin. We literally squandered every good gift and promise that He ever gave us. In an act of sheer mercy, grace, and immeasurable love, He sent one final offer, one final chance. He sent Christ to tell us everything that was possible, everything that was promised, everything that our sins had stolen away. He doesn't force us to follow Him, to believe in Him, to trust in Him. But He does leave us with absolutely zero reason not to.

Our sins left us owing a debt. Christ offered to settle it with His selfless sacrifice on the cross. Accept it, don't accept it, completely up to you. Just know that the only way to get out from under the reality of our guilt is through hearts kneeling before the cross. If we choose to reject His gift, rest assured that another will not be offered. Christ is our one final chance. In Him our sins are gone. Apart from Him, they remain firmly upon our shoulders and we will bear the full weight of all they owe.

The whole point of the Gospel is that God knows we failed but that we can't make up for it. We made mistakes which we cannot pay for. We owe a death, and in His mercy, He paid it for us so that our sins wouldn't keep us from the gift of eternal peace in Heaven. That's the new covenant brought to us by Christ. We're no longer under the law but under grace. Our sins don't define us anymore, the cross does. God is willing to see us through what Christ did on our behalf, but we have to step into that new life and leave every shred of the old life behind.

There are very few second chances in life. But for us to have a second chance at eternal peace, that's a gift we cannot afford to let slip out of our hands!

#LeaveNoSoulUntold