Lines are commonly used to divide things. Whether you're in high school taking notes in class, sketching out a few ideas, or trying to solve a problem, it's a relatively normal process to make a line across a piece of paper and create a new section. We see lines everywhere as natural dividers.
But, did you know that there's a dividing line to be found in the scripture, and it doesn't fall where most people think.
Most people assume that the dividing line in the scripture is found in moving from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and that's certainly natural to think. There is a division from Old to New and they clearly seem to represent something different, but that is not where this dividing line actually occurs.
The demarcation occurs at the cross. The cross is the dividing line. Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Ok, why does that matter? There's still most of the New Testament after the cross." While this seems minor, friends, this is of utmost importance when it comes to how we understand the scripture.
We have to recognize this division. If we don't we'll read things in the scripture like Jesus saying to the disciples that if they don't forgive others God won't forgive them and be tempted to bring that concept forward into the New Covenant.
That was the pattern that we see throughout the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 28, among other passages makes it clear that God's blessing was contingent on their obedience, that forgiveness was conditional, and that there were many conditions that needed to be fulfilled in order to satisfy the requirements of the law so that the Israelites could walk in the fullness of the forgiveness of sins, but after the cross, we see a marked shift in this coming from the Apostles.
“If we don’t [recognize the dividing line of scripture] we’ll read things in the scripture like Jesus saying to the disciples that if they don’t forgive others God won’t forgive them and be tempted to bring that concept forward into the New Covenant.”
In Ephesians 4:32, we see that now, instead of forgiving to be forgiven, we forgive because we are forgiven. 1 John 4:19 tells us that we love others because He first loved us. Instead of a transactional system where we see that we do these things so that we can receive them back from God, we now see a system that has taken the weakest part of the covenant agreement that God made between Himself and Abraham out of it - people.
This is what is revealed in Hebrews 8. We see the writer saying that there was a need for the covenant to change because the beneficiaries of the covenant did not carry out their end of the deal. In response, we see God disregarding His covenant with them, and then telling us starting in verse 10, "10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 11 None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. 12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” 13 In that He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away."
Notice who is doing all the action in this new covenant after the cross. God tells us repeatedly, "I will put my laws, I will be their God, all shall know me, I will be merciful, I will remember their sins no more." In other words, God is now making His covenant available and accessible to all, and removing all the performance requirements that go along with it.
This is the shift that occurs after the cross. Now, instead of requiring good behavior to be the root of our relationship with God and our lives, it becomes the fruit. Instead of a transactional system where we must work to appease God, we get what God intended all along in the Garden: for us to simply be the beneficiaries of His goodness.
But, if we don't understand the dividing line of scripture, we'll continually misinterpret it and use it to misrepresent Jesus and what He desires to do through us on the earth.
The cross is the dividing line. We live after the divide.
By Grace,
Dave