Daily Lesson for February 28, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from 2 Corinthians chapter 3 verses 3 through 6:

3and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

4 Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. 5Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, 6who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Richard Rohr once said that just as Catholics made the word of the Pope infallibly united with God, we Baptists did the same with the Bible. 

The Bible is not equal to God. We have to come to understand that both to better understand the Bible and also to better understand what its many books and voices have to say about God. 

Paul writes in today’s Lesson of a new covenant, written not with ink or chiseled into tablets, but inscribed into the very hearts of God’s people. This is not to say Paul was simply throwing out the Bible.  On the contrary, he was using the Bible (specifically, one of the Books of Moses) to make his case. But he was making it from a point of view of “less to greater”. The chiseled tablets Moses came down the mountain with had their glory.  Yet they were less than the words God desired to inscribe into the very hearts of God’s people by the spirit. If the old covenant came with glory even while in stone, then how much more would the glory of the new covenant have. 

Indeed, the old words came in glory, Moses said, but they also came with death. This is an amazing statement and also a caution against setting the words of a stone or page up to be the same as God. For indeed, they may have been given in glory, but they can end in death. “The letter killeth,” Paul says, “but the Spirit giveth life.”

We see the glory of Scripture. But we do not worship it. For the Spirit gave the Scripture. And the Spirit gave us the Scripture. And the new covenant is a gift of the Spirit, that words of God Be written in all their glory, not on tablets or paper, but in the hearts and minds of God’s people. 

The letter kills; the Spirit gives life. And the glory of God, as Ireneaus said, is a human being fully alive with the Spirit of God.