Bible Study Course Lesson 1 – 4
The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Stealing is all the way on the “sin” side of the spectrum; obeying that command has you doing nothing – neither doing evil, nor doing good. But the absolute opposite of that sin is found in Ephesians 4:28 – giving to those who have need. Now that you understand that this is connected to “thou shalt not steal”, you can see this positive side of the commandment all over the Bible, in such scriptures as Leviticus 25:35-37, Deuteronomy 15:7-11, Romans 12:20, etc. This is the correct answer to last lesson’s test.
Everything you’ve studied so far has been about doing or not doing. Fine stuff perhaps, but you’re probably thinking “But I’m a New Covenant Christian! That doesn’t matter to me!” To some extent that’s true – but do you really know what the New Covenant is? Are you sure? How – exactly – is it different from the Old Covenant? Are you positive you know the difference? You might be surprised to learn there are only four places in the Bible that use the term “new covenant”! One says Jesus is the mediator of the New Covenant (Hebrews 12:24), and the other three are all talking about the exact same prophetic event (Jeremiah 31:31, Hebrews 8:8-13).
Do you know what exactly they say the New Covenant is? (This is where you read those verses!) God says “this is the [new] covenant that I will make… I will put My laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts…”. THIS IS THE NEW COVENANT. This is the ONLY place in the Bible that strictly defines what the New Covenant is! It is God putting His laws in your mind, and writing them on your heart! Everyone today says “I’m a New Covenant Christian!”, and they believe that means that they are done keeping all laws, but that’s the exact opposite of what the Bible says! So, do you believe the inspired word of God?
The previous lessons have hopefully shown you that having the “holy, just, and good” law in our hearts isn’t such a bad thing. After all, if the laws are built on the principle of “do unto others”, and all of them lead you to love your neighbor, that cannot possibly be a bad thing for us to have written on our hearts. But because Hebrews 8 said God would write these laws in the hearts of “Israel”, some people assume this is just for the Jews; but wouldn’t that mean that only the JEWS have the New Covenant? We know for a fact that isn’t true – for ALL have access to the New Covenant through Christ, even those who were strangers from the Old Covenant – the Gentiles! (Ephesians 2:12, 19)
Can Gentiles who are faithful become spiritual children of Abraham? Galatians 3:7. Aren’t we therefore the “Israel of God” even if we are physical Gentiles? Galatians 6:16. Can’t the Gentiles be grafted into Israel by grace? Romans 11:24-26. The Gentiles were aliens, strangers from Israel; but through Christ, we can become fellow-citizens with them in the New Covenant! So all those who are of faith become a part of the Israel of God, the spiritual Israel, with whom God had made the New Covenant – which is to write His laws in their minds and on their hearts!
INTERNAL VS. EXTERNAL
With this understanding, a great many scriptures that confuse people become clear. In Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28 Jesus was telling us about the New Covenant He came to bring us, by comparing an “Old” law strictly about external actions, to a “New” law which applies to internal feelings as well! The Old Covenant law said “thou shalt not commit adultery”. Adultery is an external act that takes place outside the body. So it’s something you should not DO. But that law said nothing about THINKING! It said nothing about wanting to commit adultery!
So you could dream about adultery all day long and that was none of God’s business because that wasn’t part of the external old covenant! Only if your lust left your heart and turned into an action were you guilty of sin! But Jesus said that wasn’t good enough! He expected MORE from New Covenant Christians! So He told us a new, deeper meaning of that law – “thou shalt not look upon a woman to lust after her”. Why? Because if you do, you have already committed adultery in your heart!
This is not really a different law! It’s the exact same law – “do not commit adultery”. The only difference is WHERE you commit adultery! Do you do it in the real world, where others can see? Or hidden in your heart, where only God sees? The law of Moses only applied to things you actually DO. But the new way, Jesus’ way, applied the same laws to things you FEEL. When you broke Moses’ law, you committed an external sin. When you break Jesus’ law, you commit an internal sin!
THE NEW LAW
This new law Jesus brought no longer applies just to the flesh, to things you actually do – it ALSO applies to your spirit, to things you only WANT to do! Why would God make a law like that? 1 Samuel 16:7. Does what you think determine who you are? Proverbs 23:7. What happens if you allow lust to grow? James 1:14-15. This internal law is the first line of defense for external sins. Who ever committed adultery and didn’t first think about committing adultery? Who ever stole, who was not first envious? So if you can control envy, you will not ever need to control theft – for theft cannot exist without first desiring something which belongs to another! The external sin cannot happen without first committing an internal sin!
Where do the external things come from? Matthew 12:34-35. One way of defiling the Temple was to have an idol in it (2 Chronicles 33:5-7). But long before that, you’d have to love those other gods in your heart! So if you worship God in spirit, it will be impossible for you to have an idol! (John 4:21-24). The New Covenant is greater, because it is impossible to break the Old Covenant without first breaking the New! Long before you murder someone, you must first hate them or be angry with them.
Long before you lie, you must fear what people will say or do to you! (Isaiah 57:11). Before you break your oath, you must first make an oath! So if you “swear not at all” (Matthew 5:33-37), you cannot possibly take God’s name in vain, for you can’t break an oath you never made! If you are “content with such things as you have” (Hebrews 13:5), you cannot possibly steal – for who can steal what they have not first coveted? 1 Timothy 6:9-10.
COVETING – FEELING OR ACTION?
Since it is an emotion, you would think “thou shalt not covet” is strictly an internal law, and doesn’t belong on the list of “old laws” (Romans 7:7). But covetousness is both an emotion AND an action. If you THINK to yourself “wow, I’d like to have his wife!”, that’s an internal feeling of covetousness! But if you SAY it to your buddies that’s an action – the words have left your body, and now it is an external act of covetousness! Nearly everyone is guilty of this, drooling over things movie stars have, spraining your neck looking at women on the street, talking about how much money ball players make.
If you only FEEL these things, it’s judged under the New Covenant – because it’s still internal. But if you share your lust for things with your friends at bars and on FaceBook, your lust has left your heart and entered the outside world, and thus is properly judged under the external covenant! But if you can control the FEELING of envy and jealousy, there will be no danger of you SAYING covetous things! (Psalms 10:3). So if someone can learn to “take every thought captive so that it is obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), then there is no chance that they will ever actually DO evil, for where does evil come from? Mark 7:20-23.
Israel was required to keep a box with the law written in it upon the doorposts and in the gates of the town (Deuteronomy 11:18-20). But did God really want that? To have physical words written in physical boxes? The Jews think so, continuing with that practice to this day. But what did Paul say? Hebrews 8:10.
Note that this was part of the original commandment – “you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul”. But rather than do that INTERNAL part of the covenant, they preferred to adhere strictly to the EXTERNAL part. Do you need a box with the law written in it today? Yes! But in your heart, not on your doorposts! Remember, that’s the New Covenant! Jesus has freed us from the external rituals so that we can focus on the only thing that ever did matter – the internal application! Sins don’t come from your doorposts! They come from the heart. That’s why the NC requires the law to be written on your heart! Because if the law is written there, a daily reminder on your doorposts is meaningless!
The “old” law treated the symptom – the act itself. The new law treats the cause – the feelings and thoughts which led to that act! These are the exact same laws, but applied INTERNALLY as well as externally!
That is the law of the SPIRIT, and the difference between the letter and the spirit! That is why the New Covenant is so much better than the Old – it doesn’t REPLACE the old laws, it BUILDS on top of them! It doesn’t relax the requirement to treat all men as you want to be treated – instead it requires you to FEEL about all men as you would want them to FEEL about you!
FEEL UNTO OTHERS
You know how you want others to treat you, right? That gives us all external laws, for those are all ways people TREAT each other. And obeying the letter of all the external laws is the Old Covenant!But you ALSO know how you want people to FEEL about you! So, according to the greatest of all principles, you should FEEL about them the way you would want them to feel about you! That is the greatest principle of the New Covenant, from which all spiritual laws are derived! Do you like other men ogling your wife? If not, then you shouldn’t fantasize about theirs! Do you like it when people don’t forgive your mistakes? Then forgive theirs! (Luke 11:4). Do you like it when people flatter you with their lips, but don’t do what they promise? Then don’t do that to God! (Matthew 15:8).
All these things, and a million others, are the New Covenant! If the Old Covenant can be summed up in the phrase “do unto others”, the New Covenant can be summed up with the phrase “feel unto others”! (I know it’s grammatically incorrect, but it’s more memorable!)
Why is it wrong to hate? 1 John 3:15. Can you murder someone with whom you are not angry? Deuteronomy 19:4-5. Killing without hatred is manslaughter, not murder, and God treats it very differently. John said plainly that hating your brother is the same as being a murderer. Why? Because you have murdered him already in your heart! Again showing that the only difference about this law was the LOCATION of the sin, not the sin itself! Murdering him DOES to him what you would not want done to you. Hating him FEELS about him the way you would not want him to feel about you! And what’s even more important is that feeling leads to doing! James 1:14-15.
Lust is an internal emotion, and if tolerated by your soul becomes an internal sin; when that lust “grows up” it becomes an external action – an external sin. That, in turn, leads to death (Romans 6:23). This is why not only must we not steal, but we must not WANT to steal; not only must we not commit adultery, we must not WANT to commit adultery. Not only must we not kill, we must not even hate – not only must we make alive, but we must LOVE!
FOUR SIDES OF THE LAW
Each law has a positive and negative side, as you learned in the last lesson. But now you can see that each law also has both internal and external sides – which means each law can be expressed in four different ways! Do, don’t – the external side; feel, don’t feel – the internal side! Every law has four aspects, which are different for every law. Take the 6th commandment, “don’t kill”. The internal version of that commandment is “don’t hate”. Both of these laws are negative, based on the words “thou shalt not”. Therefore both of these laws must have a mirror image, a positive side, in order for them to be a WHOLE law! Something that says “thou shalt DO ___”, and “thou shalt FEEL ___”. From the last lesson, we already know that the positive side of “don’t kill” is “do make alive”.
So what is the exact opposite of “don’t hate your brother”? If you say “do hate your brother”, you’ve missed the point of
all these lessons and need to go back and study them all again. But by now, I think most people will answer that the opposite of “don’t hate your brother” is “do love your brother”. And that’s close, but not quite right. Remember, we want to put ourselves as far as possible from the sin we would be committing! If hating your brother is on one side of the spectrum, what could you feel that would be completely on the other side of it? Is it relatively easy to love those who love you? Luke 6:32-34. What is better than that, and thus farther from hating your brother? Verse 35. If the worst we can do is hate even our brother, loving our brother is neutral; neither good nor evil, it is simply what’s expected. This is where the Pharisees fell, as usual, in the middle. But the BEST we can do is to love even our enemy! Matthew 5:43-48.
We can make a chart, and put each of the four laws contained within every commandment in a box that looks like the one on the right. Pay attention here, because this is on the test: every law is different! The internal positive of “thou shalt not kill” is, indeed, “thou shalt love”. But the internal positive side of “thou shalt not covet” is not “thou shalt love”, but “thou shalt feel a desire for thy neighbor’s good”! Yes, all of the commandments can be summed up by “love”, or more clearly by “do unto others”, but if men were willing to do that, God would never have needed to say another word to stop all sin! The fact that we are selfish, stubborn, and proud is why God had to spell these laws out for us! And that is why it is so important that we break down each of these laws and fully understand all four sides of them!
If you know any one of the corners of the law, you can easily figure out the other three. If we knew only “thou shalt love”, we’d know that was a positive (thou shalt) and an internal emotion (love), thus it belongs in the top-right corner.
Simply by asking yourself “What is the precise opposite?” would lead you to the positive internal command “thou shalt not hate”. Then we simply have to ask what those emotions lead to; hate leads to killing, thus that is the external version. Love leads to making others live, even at the cost of your own life – and the box is filled out! You will have to do this yourself, with a different commandment, on the test – so make sure you fully understand how this works before you continue!
THE OTHER SIDES OF EACH LAW
All four sides of the law – do, don’t, feel, don’t feel – can be easily seen in an example with the fifth commandment: “honor your parents”. We’ve all seen kids forced to obey their parents, who grudgingly clean their room, muttering under their breath the whole time. It is possible to keep the whole external law, and still break the internal law! When the parent says “clean up your room”, that’s a positive external command. The child could even go beyond and obey the implied negative command “don’t let your room get dirty again”. But they can do it grudgingly, yearning for the day they can leave home and do things THEIR way!
They do what their parents say, and honor them with their actions – but they hate doing it, and so they dishonor their parents in their heart! They may be obeying perfectly, both positive and negative, in the letter, but their spirit hates their parent’s command, and wants to be free of their rule! Even if they “honor their father and mother” with their bodies, they can be breaking the spiritual version of the law which is to “honor your father and your mother in your heart”! They can obey the“do”, without obeying the “feel”!
In the Old Covenant you could feed your enemy because God commanded it, all the while despising him in your heart! Just because you treat him well does not automatically mean that you must FEEL love for him! you can do the right things for all the wrong reasons, and the OC allows that! The NC does not! Jesus said this old law was not good enough! He said we must be held to an even higher level than this letter-based covenant allowed! So in the New Covenant, God judges you not only on the action, but on the intention!
KEEP DIVIDING THE WORD
It doesn’t stop with the Ten Commandments, or the four ways each one of them applies; each of the laws can be subdivided again and again in many different ways. For example, “thou shalt make alive” – you can help someone live physically, and feed them. But you can also help them live spiritually, by giving them spiritual food. So you could break that into two separate laws “thou shalt make physically alive” and “thou shalt make spiritually alive”. Those, too, can each be divided, with “thou shalt make spiritually alive” implying such commands as “go to all nations and teach the gospel” (Matthew 28:19-20) – for who can be spiritually alive, who has not heard the gospel?
It also contains “be ready always to give an answer” (1 Peter 3:15) – for how else can you shine your light before men? And of course to be able to do that, you must “study to show yourself approved” (2 Timothy 2:15), etc. Each of these commandments is contained in “thou shalt make spiritually alive”, which is derived from the spiritual aspect of the positive side of the 6th commandment, itself derived by dividing “thou shalt love thy neighbor as yourself”, derived in turn from “do unto others” – for if you were in darkness, wouldn’t YOU want someone to “study to show himself approved” so that he could teach you the truth? Therefore, you are bound by the simplest of all commandments to do that for others!
But even those commandments, such as “be ready always to give an answer” can be understood as a positive and a negative. This one a positive, for it contains the idea of “doing” – giving an answer. So what is the opposite of that? “Thou shalt not hide the answers God has given you” – which you can see in such scriptures as Jeremiah 23:33 and Matthew 10:33. This can be done as often as necessary until you find how the law applies to ANY conceivable situation. And this works for EVERY commandment! Some are easier than others, because we understand some better than others. But how did David become wise? Psalms 119:96-104. By studying, and meditating on these laws, by trying to find the patterns, the opposites, and knowing where each law fits in to the plan of God!
What you’re seeing is that the law of God is designed according to a pattern, the pattern of merging and harmonizing, of dividing and magnifying; and as Jesus Himself said, every single word of it can be traced back to “all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12). Every law in the Bible can be expressed as some fraction of that principle; every conceivable act, good or evil, can be derived through a strictly logical process of “rightly dividing the word of truth”, proving that all the law and the prophets are indeed summed up in that one saying!
And if you really ARE a New Covenant Christian, then that principle is the highest law by which you rule your body AND your spirit (1 Corinthians 6:20) – for this law is written on your heart: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and feel about others as you would have them feel about you”.