"On That Day..." - WaveSTAFF (formerly NewSTAFF) Insight #2

"Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Jeremiah 31:31-33 (ESV)

God was given many chances to leave (and even destroy) us because we were unfaithful to Him. But He never did. It brings to mind a book in the Bible that talks about God's love for His people, Israel: Hosea. In this book, God commands Hosea to be married to an adulterer, who has openly committed adultery and is not sorry about it. Even with Hosea's ardent passion for his wife, she continues to lie in bed with other men. How horrible is that for a marriage, even by today's standards!?

God humbled Hosea in the very beginning: "Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord" (Hosea 1:2). This was difficult for Hosea to accept, and it would be for me. Confession time: if I was Hosea, I would not have listened to God and, instead, chosen a chaste woman. But what happens here? Hosea follows God and marries a prostitute! The level of commitment that God asks of Hosea is incredible, if not mind boggling. However, God is trying to reveal something about His nature that is guaranteed to challenge us in our daily walk with Christ.

No matter how many different gods of this world we have slept with (money, sex, greed, lust, to name a few), God will remain faithful to His promiscuous wife (read: us), even at a great cost. On that day, as was prophesied by Jeremiah, while people, from the past to the present and to the future, continue to wallow and enjoy their adulterous relationships, God demonstrated His love in this manner: He sent His ONLY son to die on the cross for our sake. God did this because He loves us so much, and His love cannot be measured. It extends as far as East is from the West, and He zealously desires us to give Him our all in all.

At the very hour of our belief, the Mosaic Law ordained by God on stone tablets is permanently engraved in our hearts, actively working through our lives by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The God of Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and Moses is now our personal Father, and we are His adopted children. Just like Hosea, He has forgiven us for all of our iniquities, and remembers them no longer. How amazing is His grace!

Do our teens realize the magnitude of His grace? When we reach out to our teenagers, do they see God as a distant, impersonal being, even as a judge? Or as someone who is jealous, passionate, full of adventure, and even righteously wrathful? Do they know that He actively pursues our hearts daily like a Shepherd who willingly abandons His flock to find a lost ewe?

As believers, we have been enshrined as ministers of the new covenant. Paul points out: we have been made "competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:6). God has empowered us through the Holy Spirit to do this: to bear a single message of never-ending hope: God is Love, and Love is God. Has every aspect of your lives illustrated this eternal Truth?