The Daily Word of Righteousness

The Holy Spirit Becomes the Life of the Believer, #4

Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. (II Corinthians 3:6)

The Law, the Torah, never will be done away. It is of the eternal Nature of God. Under the new covenant the Holy Spirit puts the Torah in our mind and writes it in our heart.

We are to keep the commandments of the New Testament writings, and of the old wherever applicable, until Christ, the Day Star, the Torah made flesh, is formed in us. It is the Holy Spirit of God who forms Christ in us until we keep the Torah by nature.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their heart: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: (Hebrews 8:10)

The Torah that is formed in us is not the Law found in the Book of Exodus but the eternal moral law of which the Ten Commandments are an abridged, negative excerpt.

When we walk in the Spirit of God we are legally free from the law of sin and death because our death in Christ releases us from the legal obligation of the Law of Moses. The Law of Moses has jurisdiction over the individual only as long as he or she is alive.

As we continue to walk in the Spirit of God we are becoming actually free from the law of sin and death because the Holy Spirit, working through the authority of the blood of the cross, gives us the wisdom and power to stop sinning—to put to death the deeds of our body.

There are practical admonitions written in the New Testament to which we must give heed. These admonitions are not of the essence of the new covenant. They are guidelines for our conduct and must be obeyed, by our adamic nature for the most part, until we are able to walk in the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit by our transformed nature.

As the Christian learns to walk in the Spirit, just as a baby learns to coordinate his muscles so that he can begin to take some steps, he starts to realize in daily living a measure of the enormous resources of resurrection life available to him in the new covenant.

It is the Holy Spirit who makes the new covenant operate, who changes our flesh into the Torah of God.

In its purest sense the new covenant is an impartation of the grace of God—Divine virtue that transforms us into the image of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who is the guiding Force that keeps on bringing us to a stronger grasp on Christ.

Every person, Christian or not, has a tendency toward sin and rebellion. Left unchecked our fleshly nature brings us down to destruction because it lusts for the things that are hurtful to us and that cause God to turn away from us. The law of sin and death is so powerful in us that we by nature sin against God, destroying our spirit, soul, and body in the process.

To be continued.