There are many times in life where we want to do something, maybe we even commit to doing it, but somehow life happens and we don’t do it. As a coach, I would often ask an athlete why wasn’t the play or drill executed properly. The answer was something like, “Coach, I’m trying.” My response was, “Well, trying ain’t doing.” The Apostle Paul had the same problem. He writes in Romans 7:18-19, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh; for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do.” If we know the Ten Commandments, for example, we know what is right to do, but we often struggle unto the law of sin.
In Exodus 24, Moses finished telling the people the laws of the covenant with God, and the people responded with, “Everything that ADONAI has spoken, we will do and obey.” Then Moses sprinkled the blood on the people saying, this is the blood of the covenant…” This is the Mosaic covenant, a type and a place holder of the better covenant to come. In Jeremiah 31:33, God speaks concerning a new covenant, “For this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says LORD, ‘I will put my Torah (law) in their minds and write it on the their hearts.” Now fast forward to Matthew 26:28, where Christ spoke to his disciples in fulfillment of this prophesy, “For this is my blood, which ratifies the New Covenant, my blood shed on behalf of many, so that their sins may be forgiven.”
Hebrews 10:1 says the Torah was a shadow of the good things to come, “but not the very image….Therefore, it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated year after year, bring to the goal those who approach the Holy Place to offer them.” In the Messiah, no further sacrifices are necessary, “For by a single offering he has brought to the goal for all time those who are being set apart for God and made holy (verse 14).” Christ Jesus is the true Torah of God. He said in Matthew 5:17 that He came not to abolish but to complete the Torah, and to complete our understanding of the Torah and the prophesies concerning Himself. Certainly, the fulfillment of these scriptures concern the final redemption of Israel, but Christ made the way for us to be included in the New Covenant by His blood! In this is the trying and doing of keeping of the Covenant.
Psalm 1:2 states, “Blessed is the man whose delight is in the Law of the LORD, and who meditates upon the Law day and night.” Paul writes in Romans 7:22, “For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and brining me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” So how do we keep the Covenant? There are 613 “Mishpatim,” or rules, found in the Law of God. Like Paul, we would have no chance but to try. Herein, is the Covenant Keeper within us—Christ Jesus made us free from the law of sin and death. Romans 8:3: “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” If Christ be in us, His Spirit of Life, we can be Covenant Keepers.
