RevivaLent 2018 - #37

Revive your will to understand the Covenant

Thursday, 5th week in Lent: 22nd, March 2018

Gen 17:3-9;Jn 8: 51-59

Though they claimed to be people of the covenant, they did not grasp the real meaning of the covenant that the Lord had made with them. They considered it to be only a material blessing, giving them prosperity and posterity. Jesus tries to drive home to their minds the holistic difference that the Lord makes in our lives, in and through the covenant. 

The covenant actually makes us like God - eternal and all spiritual. Whoever keeps my word will never see death, declares Jesus. In Jesus we have a much deeper reality to observe and accept: that God wants to share with the God's very nature -the nature of eternity, the aspect of timelessness, the quality that our earthly life is just a part of the entire existence we possess, in the mind of God earlier and in union with God later. 

If we accept this perspective, we would understand the folly of an exaggerated insistence and dependence on material prosperity. The entire prosperity theology that came up in

the West post middle ages, seems to be dominating the Christian minds: You choose God and you will be given all wealth and happiness. No, at times, we have to declare: you choose God, you choose all the difficulties, opposition and derision of the world today. But there is a meaning beyond all this, that none in the world or nothing in the universe can ever give you.

Are we ready to understand the true meaning of the covenant we have with God or are we picking up stones against it?