None of Us Is Getting Out of This Covenant Alive
Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage.
Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.
Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.
Romans 7:1-4 ESV Read More
When you make a covenant, that covenant is a promise until the agreed-upon time, typically until death.
Paul was writing to people that knew all about the biggest covenant ever – the covenant God made about Abraham. They knew about the next biggest covenant, between God (through Moses) and the people of Israel. They strived to keep their terms of that covenant every day and knew all too well the consequences of breaking that covenant (ie. Noah’s flood, the Babylonian Captivity, the Roman Occupation, etc.).
But that is the point. You were under the law of sin and death, but now that you have died, you are no longer obligated by that law. The law of sin and death no longer applies to Christians for 2 blunt reasons:
- Your sins no longer count
- You will never die
This isn’t saying you won’t do bad things and mess up, it just means that God won’t count them against you. And it isn’t saying that heart will stop beating and your body will never grow cold and decay. It’s saying you’ll never be separated from God again. (see all of the times Jesus talks about death to see that it has very little to do with pulses and breaths)
Getting out of a covenant is humiliating. Divorce is a huge bummer; foreclosure on a house is sad; even turning in your car because you can’t keep up the payments feels like a defeat. Here we have gotten out of the covenant of law by death, but it was Christ’s death in our place. Christ died and freed us from the covenant that Adam put us into.
Now that we are free from our old master, we are free to be joined to a new one that loves us. Now that we are free from the law of sin and death and judgment and punishment, we can bind ourselves to God. We can serve Him out of love, not fear, and bear pure fruit that will last.
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