A NEW RULE OF LIFE
2 Kings 25:2-4 The city was kept under siege, the famine was severe, no food for people to eat. Then the city wall was broken through.
Matthew 7:27 The rain came down, the stream rose, the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell with a great crash.
I began expositing a Divine Truth from these two verses without a clue what God was going to teach me. But one thing I knew is that typically Old Testament tangibles become New Testament spirituality, i.e. the Old Testament Temple of Jerusalem became the New Testament ‘spiritual’ temple of a believer in Jesus.
Chapter 25 of 2 Kings is the agonizing finale, the last few breaths of the southern kingdom of Judah before being overthrown by the Babylonians. God’s people of Judea, under siege, were starved, enabling the Babylonians to capture the kingdom.
This siege was a brutal force, like the wrestling term 'full Nelson'. Nobody was going anywhere. No food or reinforcements of any kind were received. The Babylonians broke through the Jerusalem city walls; no more Israel. The God that had once been with them allowed their capture.
Consequences of a ‘spiritual’ siege result in a weakened soul starved of the word, leading to devastation, i.e. divorce, depression, anger and various sins of carnality. This is what happens when the word of God is not the foundation on which one builds a life.
Jesus spiritualized everything, even ‘food’ when he responded to the devil’s temptation. “People don’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4) But what exactly is that ‘spiritualized word’?
The Old Testament tablets containing the Ten Commandments became spiritualized as the mouth of God opened and the ‘O logos began to teach the New Testament Twenty Commands. Matthew and Luke captured these commands on papyrus. The Twenty Commands of the New Testament fulfilled and spiritualized the original Ten Commands.
A cell phone provides a good analogy of how this worked. Apple doesn’t support the iPhone 8 anymore. A later model like the iPhone 15 has the newest technological features. Similarly, the Ten Commandments needed an upgrade because they didn’t have the spiritualized 'heart-features' that the Twenty Commands provoke.
No disrespect to Moses, but the time had come for this needed change that the people could not manage on their own. Like an oil-change, it was time to drain a rusty temple that had stopped emitting holiness and replace it with high-grade spirituality. The ‘shall nots’ of the Ten Commandments can keep a person out of prison, but the Twenty Commands keep a heart from decay. For example, the discontinued oil of the command, “Thou shall not murder,” is replaced with the spirit-infused command to “Value and pray for your enemy.”
If Jesus is the Christ, and He is, then His Twenty Commands is the new spiritualized Rule of Life for anyone who would claim Him as Savior. But, if and when that choice is made, there is a cross we have to raise on the other side of that choice... "The one who wants to come behind Me; he is renounced, his cross is raised, and imitates Me." (Matthew 16:24)
For most of us, the only thing to be crucified on a raised cross is our pride and ego, no nails or blood, but doing so still has a painful pinch to persevere.
