Читать книгу Blessed Generation (First Edition): Unveiling Jesus In The Tithe - Kenny Mokoena - Страница 10

The New Testament is not about what you must do, but about what has already been done. This is one of the main distinctions between the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is about doing and the New Testament is about receiving. In the Old Testament, it did not matter whether you believed or not, the focus was on you doing what is written in the law. The problem with this is that the law was designed such that no one could perform it perfectly. It has been designed in such a way that, if you broke one law, you have broken all of them. The law is like playing a game where you have ten balls and you need to score all ten of them in order to win. If you score nine and miss one, you lose the game. The trick of the game is that it has been designed, intentionally, to prevent you from even scoring a single goal. I say this because when Jesus came, He lifted the bar so high that it is impossible to keep a single law perfectly.

The law was designed to point us to Jesus, to reveal our weaknesses and make us realise our need for help. The law is like a mirror, it shows you what is wrong with you but does not fix you and make you right. Don’t get me wrong, the law is good and perfect and holy, but its function is not to make us good, perfect and holy. Its function is to reveal and release Jesus Christ.

In 1 Samuel 17:49, David prevailed against Goliath with a stone. The sling was the picture of the law and the stone was the picture of grace. The anointing was not on the sling but on the stone. The sling without a stone is not useful and cannot kill a giant. It does not matter how much you swing the sling, without the stone it is useless. When we teach our members in our Churches the law (or principles) and not reveal Jesus or point the people to Him, we are giving them a sling to kill a giant without a stone. The sling is designed to release the stone and that stone is Jesus Christ. He is the stone that the builders rejected, yet He is the chief cornerstone (Matthew 21:42). Without the chief cornerstone, the building cannot stand.

The New Testament requires faith apart from works for us to receive from God. You will find as you read further that I have referred a lot to the word “works” throughout the book. All references to the word “works” means obedience to the law or our attempts to earn God’s blessing through self-righteousness. In Deuteronomy 28:3-13, the bible records a number of blessings but those blessings were conditional because they could only be attained by the children of Israel, if they carefully observed all the commandments of God. In verse 15, the bible says that if they failed to carefully observe all God’s commandments and statutes, all the curses recorded in verse 16 to verse 68 would come upon them and overtake them. The obedience of the children of Israel to obtain the blessings is called “works”.

The Law was never designed to bring the blessing but a curse. In actual fact, those who received the blessing in the Old Testament did not receive it because they kept the law perfectly, no one could keep the law perfectly, but they did because God is a good God. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were not blessed through the covenant of the law but through the covenant of grace. God gave the law to show man that he cannot live on his own strength. The source of man’s life is God and God placed the life of man in His Son, Jesus Christ.