06 Does the Holy Spirit Give a New Heart?

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for joining me today for Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. This is the sixth talk in my series, Who's the Holy Spirit? And we're going to be looking at several passages in the Old Testament today. Lecture notes for today's talk are on the link below the podcast, and you can also find them on my website, just go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Holy Spirit Six. Thanks for listening. My goal in this series is to understand what Scripture says about the Holy Spirit, and I've argued for a certain framework for understanding who the Holy Spirit is and what he does. When we see the Holy Spirit in Scripture, he is almost always intervening in creation to change something, to accomplish God's purposes. Generally speaking, the Holy Spirit works in two ways, and I've called them the universal work and the individual work. The universal work of the Spirit is the way the Spirit transforms the hearts of all believers such that we now embrace and believe the gospel, and we can say and mean that Jesus is Lord. The individual works of the Spirit are the different opportunities or roles or gifts that He gives to each individual to serve the kingdom of God. For some, these are miraculous works, what we would call signs and wonders, but for most of us, they're what we think of as spiritual gifts, the varied and diverse ways each of us is given to serve the body of Christ in this life. Now, for the last two podcasts, we've been looking at the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, and I argued that the main way we see the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is in the individual works, and often miraculous works. Primarily, we see the Holy Spirit empowering the judges, the kings, and the leaders of Israel to lead with wisdom, with military might, or with strength, or whatever they need to fulfill their role. So we saw examples of this in Moses, the judges, and both King Saul and King David. We also see the prophets being empowered to understand revelation such that they can then speak that revelation or that word of the Lord to the people. So God reveals to the prophets his purposes for the present and the future, and then they tell us. Or God gives the prophets a warning or a rebuke or a correction, and then the prophet tells the rest of the people. Today we want to look at the universal work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. Now remember, I've called the universal work of the Spirit this transforming work that the Spirit does in each believer to give us saving faith and the desire to embrace the gospel as true. The first week we looked at the words of Jesus where he says, No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of the Spirit, and we talked about that transforming work of the Spirit, which is mentioned frequently in the New Testament. Today we're going to explore the question of does the Old Testament speak of this same spiritual renewal or this same transforming work of the Spirit? I think every Old Testament believer did experience this transforming work of the Spirit, but the New Testament talks about Jesus bringing in a new age, the age of the Spirit, where the Spirit is poured out or given to believers in a way that is different than it was in the Old Testament times. And we're going to explore that difference and ask the question in what sense is this age of the Spirit new after the time of Jesus? And I will give you my conclusions right up front. The Old Testament makes some important claims about the need for God to spiritually renew us and change our hearts, but it does not address the topic as often as the New Testament does. Similarly, the Old Testament does associate this spiritual renewal with the Spirit of God, but it's not as clear as the way the New Testament does it. In fact, I think there's only one really clear Old Testament passage on the topic. So my conclusion is that the New Testament and the Old Testament agree about our need for the Spirit of God to change our hearts, but the New Testament gives us a much more fully developed understanding of the topic. Before we look at the Old Testament passages, I want to make sure that we understand the problem. Because in order to understand the teaching about our need for a transformation, we first have to understand why we need transforming. What is the problem that we need to be changed or transformed? Well the obvious answer is that we are sinners and we need to be freed from our sins. That is the ultimate goal, but let me explain that in more detail. Romans tells us that the wages of sin is death, but that means more than the end of biological life. When the New Testament talks about death as a consequence of sin, I think the authors mean all the corruption, the futility, and the evil and tragedy that marks our daily lives. And we see this as divorce, alienation, war, murder, strife, frustration, corruption, hatred, hostility, and futility. In this life, we're constantly struggling against things going wrong. We're struggling against life falling apart, against relationships breaking down, and all the futility and despair of daily life. And that's all death, and that is part of our lives because of sin. So in Scripture, death is this phenomenon of human existence where everything physical and spiritual breaks down. It's this long process of decay and corruption. And we can see this immediately after the fall in the garden. God told Adam and Eve that if they ate from this particular tree they would surely die. They eat from that tree and they don't die immediately. There's one sense in which they didn't die because they continued to live a long life on earth after the fact. But there's another very important sense in which they did die. And the clue we're given is Scripture tells us they were aware that they were naked and they were ashamed. Their existence fundamentally changed so that it's now marked by shame, futility, corruption, and decay, and that decay will eventually lead to their physical deaths. The bad news of the gospel is that we are ruled by death because of our rebellion to God. As a result of mankind's rebellion, our evil, and our ignorance, just like the physical universe, we are ruled by death and decay. So death is the natural, logical consequence of rebellion to God. And death is manifested in such tragedies as divorce, murder, alienation, isolation, frustration, war, strife, terrorism, hatred, hostility, and all the things that mar and frustrate human existence. All of that is a result of our sin, and we will be ruled by that as long as we remain in rebellion to God. But there's more to the bad news of the gospel. Not only is death or corruption the inevitable direction of human existence, we can't stop it. We are prisoners of death. Though we can work really hard and grasp and claw and overcome some of the frustration and futility in our lives, we cannot change the fact that our life is falling apart, and that when we scramble to snatch one kind act, we lose two others in the process, and sometimes even the righteous acts we do are laced with selfishness and sinfulness. We are prisoners of sin and death because we are inherently rebellious to God. From a biblical perspective, God is the only being that has this principle of life, which is the opposite of death, in and of himself, and we can have life because he imparts it to us. But when we rejected God, we lost his offer of life, and though we kept on existing, we have a different kind of existence, one that is ruled by futility and death. So eternal life is the opposite of death. Imagine an existence where the normal tendency of all human relationships was toward good and support and intimacy and fulfillment. The promise of life in the kingdom of God is not merely a promise to live forever free from physical death, it is a promise to live a life freed from all the consequences of sin and death that we've just talked about the corruption, the futility, the pain, the suffering, the bitterness, the tragedy and the frustrations and everything that mars and ruins our existence now. The kind of life we will have in the age of ages or in the kingdom of heaven will reverse this moral entropy. We will be subjects of life rather than death. We will be people who naturally enhance goodness, who promote righteousness, who encourage and support others, and we will all be creatures who naturally do the right thing. Instead of destroying everything through evil and ignorance, we will nurture and strengthen and uphold the goodness around us. So that's life and death. There are two consequences to our rebellion from God. The first is that we cut ourselves off from the source of life and we are stuck with death. We are cut off from God and He is no longer offering us life. This is the logical natural result. This is like the law of gravity that if you push a book off a table, it's going to fall to the floor. If you rebel against God, you're going to be stuck with death because he withdraws his offer of life. So that's the first consequence. Because of our rebellion, we now have this existence that is marred by death. But there is a second and even greater consequence, and that is the rebellion itself is wrong and deserves punishment. Justice demands recompense. We have broken the law. We have broken God's law, and now there's a judicial penalty that must be paid. Think about it like this. Before the fall, before there was ever rebellion or sin in the world, it's as if we start out face to face with God. We're in fellowship with Him. He is blessing us with life and granting us the kind of life I just described. But when we rebelled, we metaphorically turn our backs on God and we cut ourselves off from the life he offers. At this point, we experience the first consequence of our rebellion. We now live lives marked by sin, futility, corruption, and death. But the second consequence of our rebellion is that God metaphorically turns his back on us. And that consequence is devastating. Because in that state, if we repent, it does no good. If we get fed up with sin and death and turn back to God, he says, No, there's this problem. Justice has to be satisfied. And I can't grant you life until that debt to justice is paid. And the Bible describes that as being under the wrath of God. So until justice is satisfied, God's back is going to remain turned. Something has to happen to get him to turn his back around and face us again. So the natural consequence of our rebellion is death. The wrath of God is the judicial decree against us, not just that we're going to experience death, but that we are slaves of death, that he is no longer offering life and there is a debt to justice that must be paid. Now the biblical concept of justification is the forgiveness of our debt to justice. And when that debt is forgiven, that qualifies us once again to receive life. So to be justified is to be in a position where God's justice has been satisfied, we no longer owe a debt to his justice, therefore God can turn back around to face us and offer us life again. We are justified because God is profoundly merciful, not because we have earned it or merited it in any way. And as Scripture unfolds, we learn that it is in fact the death of Jesus on the cross that pays that penalty for our sins. So Jesus' death is the substitute for the death that we deserve. And God is so profoundly merciful that he wanted a way for us to escape his wrath, but he is also just and he knew that he couldn't just overlook sin, that debt to justice had to be paid, and that's why Jesus died, in order that God might be, as Paul says, both just and the justifier, he might be both merciful and just, so he sent Jesus to solve the problem for us. So that brings us to our question. How do we become people who want to turn around and face God again? I painted this picture of when we rebel, we turn our backs to God, and then God turns his back to us, and it is Jesus' death on the cross that allows God to turn back around and face us, but how do we become the kind of people who want to turn around and face God again? I think scripture teaches that left to ourselves, we're perfectly fine with our backs to God being rebel sinners. We have these two big problems: God's back is turned and our back is turned. Jesus solved the problem on God's side by dying in our place. What solves the problem on our side so that we look at ourselves, see that we're sinners in need of mercy, and repent and turn back to God. And I've been arguing that that is the universal work of the Spirit. That transforming work in our hearts to make us people who believe the gospel, to make us people who repent, is what we truly need. That's what it means to be born again, to be born of the Spirit, and to have our hearts changed. How do we get that repentance? It's through the transforming work of the Spirit. And what I want to look at today is how do we see that in the Old Testament? So how do we get repentance? That's the story the Old Testament tells with the nation of Israel. God made a covenant with the nation of Israel that he would be their God and they would be his people. But they needed to worship and obey him. They needed to strive to keep his commandments and refrain from following other gods. And there was a prescribed process for sacrifice and repentance when they failed or when they sinned. But they had to take God seriously and they had to want to repent. They needed to turn back to God and seek him out. And much of the Old Testament is the story of how the nation of Israel failed to turn around and seek God. Now not every individual, there's always a remnant that remained faithful to God. But as a general rule, most of the nation abandoned God, forgot his promises, and ignored his prophets. In the Old Testament, we tend to see this discussion of the need for spiritual renewal in the context of this general failure to repent. God brought the nation of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he established them in the land. God promised he would bless them in the land if they were faithful to him, but they were not faithful to him, they failed to keep his commandments, they failed to follow him, they turned and started worshiping other gods, and he disciplined them by allowing them to be conquered by their enemies and ultimately to be taken into exile. And most of the discussion of this problem in the Old Testament rightly focuses on Israel's own stubborn choices. The nation wasn't faithful, the nation ran after other gods, the nation ignored the words of the prophets, they didn't keep the law. But there are a few key places where the Old Testament looks at this situation from the other side of the coin. In another sense, Israel's problem is that God has not changed their hearts. So this is where I want to start looking at the Old Testament. We're going to start in Deuteronomy twenty nine. This is Moses speaking to the nation, and he's speaking to them right before they enter the promised land. I'm going to read Deuteronomy chapter twenty nine verses two through four. And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs and those great wonders, but to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see, or ears to hear. Moses is addressing a generation of Israelites that left Egypt and saw the power of God displayed in a way no other generation before them had seen. And yet, he says, You didn't get it. They didn't really trust God as their Lord and deliverer. And Moses says this is so because God did not change your hearts to understand. God did not give you the eyes to see or the ears to hear. So they're about to enter the promised land, and what's going to keep them in their in the land? What will secure their peace and prosperity? Well, God has promised to give them peace and prosperity in the land so long as they were faithful to him, and yet to be faithful to the covenant, they need a new kind of heart that wants to remain faithful to the covenant. And Moses is saying that has not yet been given. And the result will be that they lose the land and are taken into captivity. Hundreds of years later, the prophet Isaiah is writing from the perspective of that captivity, and he pictures the exiles in his time looking back and remembering how God had done mighty acts of deliverance among them at the time of Moses. This is Isaiah sixty three verses fifteen through nineteen. Look down from heaven and see, from your holy and beautiful habitation, where are your zeal and your might? The stirring of your inner parts and your compassion are held back from me. For you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us. You, O Lord, are our Father, our redeemer from of old is your name. O Lord, why do you make us wonder from your ways and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? Return for the sake of your servants, the tribe of your heritage, your holy people held possession for a little while. Our adversaries have trampled down your sanctuary. We have become like those over whom you have never ruled, like those who are not called by your name. Well notice 63 17, O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? Moses said earlier that God had not given them hearts to understand and eyes to see, and now hundreds of years later Isaiah is speaking to God and saying, God, why have you still hardened our hearts? Why are you doing this so that we don't fear you? I think Moses and Isaiah are saying the same thing. Moses is speaking of a time before they enter the promised land. Isaiah speaks about the time when they're in captivity, but the problem is the same. God has not intervened to change their hearts from rebellion to faithfulness. Now that gives us the framework, I think, to understand three very important Old Testament passages, and that's what I want to spend the rest of our time on. The first is Deuteronomy 30, verses 1 through 10, and this is the very next passage after the one we just looked at in 29. Moses has spelled out the blessings that will come to them if they're faithful to the covenant. He's also spelled out the curses that will befall them if they are faithless, and he just said in chapter 29 that God has not given them a heart. To understand, and now this is what he says in chapter thirty, the very next part. And when all these things come upon you, the blessings and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, and return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice and all that I command you today with all your heart and with all your soul. Then the Lord God will restore your fortunes and have mercy on you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. If your outcasts are in the outermost parts of heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will take you. And the Lord your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed, that you may possess it, and he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers, and then this is verse six. And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. And the Lord your God will put all these curses on your foes and enemies who persecuted you, and you shall again obey the voice of the Lord and keep all his commandments that I command you today. The Lord your God will make you abundantly prosperous in all the work of your hand, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your cattle and in the fruit of your ground. For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you, as he took delight in your fathers, when you obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that are written in this book of the law, when you turn to God with all your heart and with all your soul. Moses is looking ahead, and he predicts the exile from the land because of their disobedience. They haven't even entered the promised land yet, and here he is predicting a time when they will lose the land and be conquered and taken into captivity. But he also tells them then there will come a time when God will gather them back to the land and will circumcise their hearts so that they love him. He will cut away the rebellion and the hostility toward God and make them instead people who love God. And the result is that they will be a people who love God and will live and prosper in the land. This is a life or death choice. The result of turning away from God is judgment and death. The result of following Him is life and prosperity. If God is going to save them from the judgment, then God has to change their hearts, and the result of a changed heart is that they will live. Now notice Moses confidently asserts both God's choice and their choice. On the one hand, God will circumcise their hearts so that they love Him and live. On the other hand, they will be blessed when they choose to love God. Throughout Scripture we see this affirmed. So back on the point, the text doesn't say this explicitly, but I think when you put all the pieces of scripture together, the picture that emerges is that all genuine believers, no matter when they lived, had this transformation of the heart. In other words, I would not understand Moses' words here in Deuteronomy to mean there were no believers in Israel until after the captivity when God does the circumcising. Rather, I think all believers in all times, including Abraham, Moses, Caleb, Joshua, and every believer in the Old Testament, received this transformation or what Moses called the circumcision of the heart. There is always a remnant. There is always a group of people who believe. But Moses is speaking of a time when God will do this for the nation on a much larger scale, and that will happen after they have rebelled and gone into exile. That's our first passage. Our second is in Jeremiah. Jeremiah also speaks about this very same restoration to the land and announces a new covenant. This is the famous Jeremiah thirty one, thirty one through thirty four. 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 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. For 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 it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his brother saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Jeremiah is speaking about the same thing Moses was, a restoration from captivity and the coming of a new kind of a covenant. And what is new in the new covenant? God is going to write the law on their hearts, and the result is God will be their God and they will be his people. They will become people who remain faithful to him. Right now they have hearts that turn away from God, which results in their judgment. To rescue them from judgment, God is going to change their hearts. He has to give them the kind of heart that seeks after him rather than rebelling. Or to use my earlier analogy, their backs are turned in rebellion to God, and God has to make them the kind of people who want to turn back around to him in repentance. The old covenant didn't result in blessing because their hard hearts turned away from God. That's why we need a new covenant. God needs to transform the inner nature of his people such that they want to repent and embrace the good news of the gospel. But this time in this new covenant, God's not going to write the law externally on stone tablets and scrolls. He's going to write it internally. He's going to make his people the kind of people who want to keep the law, who embrace it and see it as right and good. What's distinctive is that God is making a covenant with the whole nation. I would say all old covenant believers had the law written on their hearts, but the problem was there were so few of them that the nation as a whole turned away from God, and God is promising a time when that will change. And notice how this new covenant is connected with forgiveness. Look again at verse thirty four. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his brother saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Our sin deserves punishment. Our sin deserves judgment. A holy and just God cannot just pretend that sin never happened. He can't just overlook it. And though Jeremiah doesn't say this, we know as the story unfolds that Jesus Christ will secure our forgiveness so that God will no longer hold our sins against us. That's what he means here by I will remember their sins no more. I will wipe them off their account. Our debt will be paid by the blood of Christ, and God will wipe the slave clean. I want to look at one more Old Testament passage, and this one's in Ezekiel. Again, the topic is exile and captivity and how God is going to restore them. This is Ezekiel chapter thirty six verses sixteen through twenty eight. The word of the Lord came to me, Son of Man, when the house of Israel lived in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds. Their ways before me were like the uncleanness of a woman in her minstrel impurity. So I poured out my wrath upon them for the blood that they had shed in the land, for the idols with which they had defiled it. I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries, in accordance with their ways and their deeds I judged them. But when they came to the nations wherever they came, they profaned my holy name, and the people said of them, These are the people of the Lord, and yet they had to go out of his land. But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came. Therefore, say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God, it is not for your sake, O house of Israel that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came, and I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them, and the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you, and I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. Ezekiel is talking about the same thing that we saw in Moses and in Jeremiah. Once again the issue is captivity, because they were faithless and disobedient, God took them into exile, and now God is going to resolve that situation, not only by bringing them back to the land, but also by changing their hearts. And the result of having their hearts changed is that they will follow him and walk in his statutes. Because they will become people who walk with God in faithfulness, they will again be established in the land as his people. Now Ezekiel uses very evocative language. He says God will replace their heart of stone with the heart of flesh. God will give them a new spirit. What is this new spirit? And here Ezekiel specifically says, I will put my spirit in you, and that's God speaking. God will put his spirit in you. I would argue that Moses and Jeremiah and Ezekiel are all talking about the same idea. Israel lost God's blessings because their hearts were unfaithful. They turned away from God, they abandoned him and followed other gods, and so they were exiled and judged. They violated the old covenant because they had hard hearts that were set on rebellion to God, and so they lost his blessings. And Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel tell us that a day is coming when God will restore his people, and the way he's going to accomplish it, so that this time it's different, this time it works, is he will change their hearts. Moses says he will circumcise their hearts. Jeremiah says he will write the law in their hearts. Ezekiel says he will remove their hearts of stone and give them a heart of flesh. And I think all those metaphors refer to the same thing. They will become the kind of people who repent and turn back to God because God is changing them from the inside out to make them those kinds of people. And the result is they will follow God in faithfulness and obedience, and so they will not lose the blessings. They will no longer be under judgment. Now only Ezekiel mentions the Spirit of God in 3627. He says, I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. I think this is a reference to what we would call the Holy Spirit, but the Old Testament often calls it the Spirit of God. I suppose you could argue that Ezekiel is saying something like a spirit like mine or a character that reflects my character or something like that. But I'm inclined to think even in the Old Testament, when we see this language of my spirit or the Spirit of God, it is what we think of as the Holy Spirit, the invisible working of God. And here Ezekiel is saying, I, God, will go to work inside you to bring about this needed change. The Spirit of God is intervening to bring about this renewal or this transformation, or what I've called the universal work of the Spirit. Now we see New Testament writers referring back to these passages with just this idea. The New Testament authors clearly connect this idea with the Holy Spirit. Paul writes this in Romans chapter two, twenty eight and twenty nine. For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical, but a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God. And Paul is making the point here that those who are truly children of Abraham are those who have faith, like Abraham had faith. So the true Jew is the one who is circumcised in the heart, not just by the letter of the law and the body, but on his heart by the Spirit. And we see this same contrast between the Spirit and the letter. We see this contrast between outward circumcision and inward circumcision of the heart. And I think Paul has taken that language from the Old Testament. We see that language in several places, including the one we looked at at Moses. And notice here again Paul is saying this circumcising of the heart comes about by the work of the Holy Spirit. It's the same idea Moses was talking about, and Paul specifically associates it with the Spirit of God. Perhaps the clearest example is 2 Corinthians chapter 3. Let me set the stage for this passage. A group in Corinth opposes Paul. They've rejected his authority and they're criticizing basically everything he does. Now not everyone in the church has turned against him. Some still respect him and listen to him. But there is a faction that has set themselves against Paul, and we see a lot of evidence of this problem in 1 Corinthians, and it the problem has intensified by the time we get to 2 Corinthians. In this part of the letter, Paul is defending himself and defending his authority, and he's walking this fine line. On the one hand, he says, You are absolutely right, I am nobody from nowhere. I persecuted the church before coming to faith, and I do not deserve to be an apostle. On the other hand, I, Paul, am an apostle. I have the authority to speak for Jesus, and you should listen to me. So he's walking this line. He's trying to defend his authority without sounding like he's bragging. He's trying to get them to look at his ministry the way they should, as the words of life given to him by God, without sounding arrogant. Now in this section, I think he's referring to himself in the plural. And we should understand the first person plural pronoun we in these verses as I Paul. Now I don't want to get into that argument here, but I do understand him to be saying I Paul am not a peddler of God's word. I speak sincerely as commissioned by God. It becomes more clear as we get into chapter three that Paul is speaking of himself and his ministry, even though he uses the plural pronoun. And Paul does this a lot. And in my series on Corinthians, I go through some of that argument. But I don't want to get into it here. So Paul has to defend his sincerity because they doubt his sincerity. This is Second Corinthians chapter two verse seventeen through chapter three verse six. And again it starts for we are not, and you should understand that we as I Paul. For we are not like so many peddlers of God's word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God, we speak in Christ. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you and from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation written on our hearts to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God, not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. So Paul starts out this section with these two questions. Am I commending myself again? Do I need a letter of recommendation? Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth teaching and living there. They know him. He shouldn't need anyone else to recommend him because they know him well. He says, You guys are my letter of recommendation. I came to Corinth, I preached the gospel to you, and the result can be seen among you in your changed lives. Some of you in Corinth are genuine believers who responded to the gospel, and you can see the fruit of that change in your lives. Paul is saying, look, you want proof of my gospel, you want proof of my ministry? Look around you at the changed lives in Corinth. That's my letter of recommendation. I shouldn't have to recommend myself to you. You should know you lived through it. And then he runs with that picture of them being a letter. This is three three. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, that's delivered by me, Paul, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. So first he makes clear I'm not the one writing this metaphorical letter. Jesus Christ is. The gospel is not about me, Paul. The gospel is about Christ. You are not my disciples, you're not followers of Paul, you are disciples and followers of Christ. I'm just the first one who told you about Christ. But then he makes another contrast. He says you, the metaphorical letter, are not written with ink, but with the spirit of the living God. And not only that, this letter is not written on paper or tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. That language ought to sound very familiar to us because we just heard it from Moses and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And Paul is speaking of the universal work of the Spirit that changes the hearts of believers such that we believe. This is the transforming work of the Spirit that changes us from the inside out into people who want to follow God. Paul's echoing the new covenant language from Jeremiah, and in 3.6 he says, look, God has made me a minister of that new covenant that Jeremiah was talking about. Paul sees his ministry of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ as being a minister of this new covenant. He uses the language of contrasting the tablets of stone and the tablet of the human heart to refer back to Moses writing the Ten Commandments on the tablets of stone. He's contrasting the writing of the law on stone tablets versus the writing of the gospel on our hearts, and this is the language of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And Paul is explaining that God does this through the Spirit. It is through the Spirit that our hearts are being transformed, and he's clearly spelling out that this transformation is accomplished by the Spirit of God. It's not written with ink, but by God's Spirit. So even though the work of the Spirit is not clearly spelled out in the Old Testament, except perhaps in Ezekiel, we see Paul describing his ministry as a ministry of this new covenant where Christ, through the Spirit, is writing on our hearts. And we see Paul in several places talk about how the work of the Spirit in transforming us is central to what salvation is all about. So what does this all add up to? Well, I would argue that both the Old Testament and Testament and the New Testament understand the nature of spiritual renewal in the same way. This is the way the Old Testament describes it. This is the language we see in the Old Testament. God gives you a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear. God circumcises your heart to love him so that you may live. God writes his law on your heart so that he will be your God and you may be his people. God gives you a new heart and a new spirit. God removes your heart of stone and gives you a heart of flesh, and God puts his spirit within you and causes you to walk in his statutes. Now each of those phrases talks about the same thing that the New Testament talks about, a work done in our hearts to make us people who love God and are no longer rebellious to him. Jesus speaks of being born of the Spirit or born again or born from above, and I think that's the exact same idea we see in the Old Testament. You may remember Jesus spoke of being born of the Spirit to Nicodemus, and Nicodemus was confused and asked Jesus what he meant. And Jesus responded to him, Are you a teacher of Israel and do not understand these things? I think he's saying, You're supposed to be an expert in the Old Testament law. Why don't you understand these things? This is in the Old Testament. It's right there in Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. How did you miss it? Jesus expects that Nicodemus, as an expert in the scriptures, ought not to be surprised at this thing Jesus is saying. So the Old Testament says that God needs to do a work in our hearts so that we might live and believe. And Jesus says, you have to be born again, you have to be born of the Spirit to enter the kingdom of heaven. And I would argue those are the same things. The nature of the spiritual change is the same, and it comes about through the work of the Holy Spirit. For Israel, the issue is whether they would take God's covenant seriously. For us today, the issue is whether we will take the gospel of Jesus Christ seriously. But the problem is the same, and the solution is the same. In order to respond to God rightly, our hearts must be changed, and Scripture tells us changing our hearts is the work of the Holy Spirit. Now there's a related question we might explore just really briefly. Moses, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah each spoke of God changing the heart, but they also made promises to the nation of Israel that God would regather them in the land and bless them. And the question is, has that happened, or is that still in the future? Or is this just figurative language? Does it apply to all New Testament believers? Or does it apply to only the Jewish nation? How are we to understand it? Well, I don't have all the answers here. I'm still trying to figure this one out. But Paul clearly connects his ministry to the idea of Jeremiah's new covenant. And yet Jeremiah is speaking to the nation of Israel, while Paul primarily ministered to the Gentiles. So clearly in Paul's time, Israel was not being regathered as a nation into peace and prosperity under God's rule. In fact, shortly after Paul's death, the Romans conquered Jerusalem and leveled the temple to the ground and send the Jews into thousands of years of exile. That happened in seventy AD. Basically, we're left with two choices. Either the language is metaphorical and not specifically addressed to the nation of Israel. And many people take this route. They applied this language in Jeremiah particularly to the universal church, to those who are not physically born from Abraham, but are like Abraham in his faith and therefore the true Israel metaphorically. That's one option. The other option is that it is addressed to the nation of Israel, and that there is a promise to the nation of Israel that is yet to be fulfilled. There is a day still in our future when Israel will be gathered in the land and experience a revival from the Spirit such that virtually every last one of them come to faith. And the more I study, the more I lean toward this second option. Paul talks about the mystery of the Gentiles, and he describes the age in which we live, in one in which there is a partial hardening of the Jews until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled. He pictures us Gentiles as being grafted into the branch that is Israel. So the branch of the plant, the root is Israel, and we Gentiles are like a foreign plant that's been grafted in. Right now a remnant of Israel and a whole lot of Gentiles are having their hearts changed, just as God said, and by the grace of God he gives us the blessing of Abraham and we experience this merciful change of heart, but there still remains a promise for Israel. The day is coming when Israel will be regathered in the land with a nationwide transformation of heart. And when that happens, that will be the work of the Spirit. That kind of renewal that has been promised to the nation of Israel is at work in all believers now, whether they're Jews or Gentiles. And I think, maybe wrong, but I think a day is coming when the Jews as a nation or as a people will receive a blessing promised to no other tribe or nation, and that is a nationwide spiritual renewal. And it seems to me that's going to happen near the end of history shortly before the second coming of Christ. But who knows? I could be wrong about that whole thing. In any case, these Old Testament passages are extremely helpful to us. They teach us that our hearts by nature do not want to turn to God, and left to our own devices, we would continue to rebel against God. This is what's so amazing about grace. We have done nothing to deserve God's forgiveness. We have done nothing to earn his favor, and in fact, we are not capable of earning his favor. And yet, in his loving kindness, God reaches out to us and does what we can never do for ourselves, and through his spirit, because of the blood of Jesus, he changes our hearts so that we love him and once again find life. The Spirit opens our eyes, and with open eyes we turn to God and God gives us life. So I would argue spiritual renewal in both the Old Testament and the New Testament is the only road to life, and that both testaments speak of the need for this same spiritual transformation. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what scripture means, but how we figure it out. Please subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, which is iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, or just about any place you get your podcast. You'll also find hundreds of past episodes on my website so you can browse for any topic or passage you're interested in. I have no ads on my website and I do not ask for donations. If you want to thank me, please tell a friend what you learned and ask them to tune in to Wednesday in the Word. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates of Heartfeltmusic.org. I invite you to check out his other music. You'll be glad you did. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I hope I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.