A proper response to God’s provision for Israel under the Old Covenant was that they would circumcise their hearts. The meaning of this metaphor is that they should turn from their ways of sin, fear the Lord, obey his statutes, and serve him with joy! After all, remember who the Lord is and all he has done for them!
Moses writes, “Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart...” (Deut 10:14-16)
The command to “circumcise your heart” was easier said than done! It is the right response to the love of a sovereign God. The spirit may be willing, but the flesh is so very weak. As you know, the unfolding history of Israel will reveal this to be true. They should circumcise their hearts so that they would turn from self and serve the Lord. However, the fallen flesh will not circumcise the heart by command or by the will or by choice or by logic or by determination!
Thus the life-giving, soul-freeing promise of the New Covenant that God will in grace circumcise our hearts so that we will walk in his ways! (Deut 30:6) Grace accomplishes what the Law could never accomplish. The Law only tells us what we should do; circumcise your heart. Grace accomplishes what we can’t do as sinners and thus frees us to live as believers; I will circumcise your heart!
I can remember as a young girl having the story read to me of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments in his hands and seeing the people dancing foolishly around the golden calf. It is the pictures from that storybook Bible that still illustrate in my mind my reading today! I remember being horrified that Moses would throw down those precious tablets, written with GOD'S OWN FINGER! Surely this was an even bigger sin than what the people were doing down in the camp??? But no, my folks explained to me that Moses was showing the people that they had broken God's law, and their promises that they had made just a little over a month earlier, and that he was breaking those tablets to show them how serious their sin was. God never punished Moses for his action. I still think that it is a curious thing, a very costly "object lesson"!!
ReplyDeletePossibly this next idea is "arguing from silence" which isn't very strong, I know. But I don't find any section (neither in Ex. 34 or Deut. 10) that says that the second tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments on them were written with the finger of God, as the first ones had been (Ex. 32:16 + Deut. 9:10). Did I miss it? Is it significant that the second set had to be engraved by Moses? I wonder if tablets with God's own handwriting on them would have ended up being a dangerous thing to Israel, like the bronze snake that Moses raised in the wilderness (Num. 21:4-9 + II Kings 18:4), something that ended up being worshiped for itself instead of serving as a reminder of God's goodness toward Israel?
Wouldn't it be a wild, crazy thing if archeologists digging around the base of Mt. Sinai came across some fragments of stone with writing on them in ancient Hebrew that were bits of the 10 Commandments!!! Wouldn't everyone who DID think that these might be THE tablets want to see God's own handwriting?? I think we still might have the temptation to worship the THING rather than the God Who is spirit and seeks those who will worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). We're certainly not that much different in that regard from the Israelites way back in the Old Testament!