Many years ago God made a covenant with Abram that he would make Abraham’s seed a vast nation that would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. God made this promise to Abram although he was about 90, and his wife Sarai was about 80 and unable to conceive. He also promised Abram that He would give Abram’s decendants a land that overflowed with milk and honey.
As you know Abram and Sarai became the proud parents of Isaac, and Isaac became the father of Jacob and Esau. Jacob had twelve sons, one of whom was Joseph who would become prime minister of Egypt. God kept the promise He made to Abram (who was later known as Abraham) and after 400 years of living in Egypt Israel numbered more than 2 million.
You may wonder why I am going down this road, and what the relevance may be to us in 2012. God made promises, and He made a covenant with His people when freed them from Egypt and lead them through the wilderness to Canaan for forty years. We may believe that we aren’t bound by the laws and decrees that were made to Israel, and that since we live under a new despensation (New Testament), the old is irrelavent.
The truth is that the God we serve today is the very same God that Abrham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, etc. served. He doesn’t change His moods, and He isn’t subject to the emotions we experience. We may be under a new despensation, but all that means in reality is that the Laws He gave Moses on the stones, has now be written in our hearts. Instead of offering a goat or a sheep as compensation for sin, Jesus became our sacrifice. Instead of going to a preast to confess our sins, we are able to go directly to God.
But the New despensation however does not make any of the laws and covenants that God made with His people (which includes all believers) redundant. The covenants were made with the view to bless obedience, but it also included curses for disobedience. These appear throughout the entire bible, and yet we seem to think it isn’t binding on us. We cannot want to have God in our lives but not accept His decrees. A relationship with God only exists if we accept His rules and His will for our lives, and when we accept His rules and will, we accept the covenants that He made with His people dating back to the original covenant He made with Abraham.
Thus although we are not under the law, but under grace, this simply means that by grace, God wrote His law on our hearts. If we break these laws our conscience forces us to repent and by grace we do so directly to the Lord. No sin commited wittingly will go unpunished, God will act, and God is just.
For God 