Write it on their hearts

I will put my laws in their minds
and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.

For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.

Hebrews 8

As I’ve continued this series of posts through the book of Hebrews, I knew I wanted to write something on this passage, but it’s so rich it’s hard to know where to start.

So much of the big story in the bible is about the deep commitment in the relationship between God and God’s people – the covenant. There was the covenant with Abraham to make his descendants a great nation, and then the covenant with those descendants shared in the law of Moses. And then in the writings of another Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, acknowledges both the failings of that covenant, but also the deep love and commitment:

This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife.

Jeremiah 31

And then Jeremiah describes a new covenant God is making. And the few sentences he writes are elevated by the author of Hebrews to be a key to understanding Jesus’ work as high priest and his purpose here on earth.

So as I’ve been thinking about what to write, the challenge for me was to not jump at the first thing to write, but to meditate on it deeply. Memorise these couple of sentences. And let them do a deep internal work.

What’s happening for me here has been another instance of what I quoted in the first post in this series:

A memorized work (like a lover, a friend, a spouse, a child) has entered into the fabric of its possessor’s intellectual and emotional life in a way that makes deep claims upon that life, claims that can only be ignored with effort and deliberation.’ … A memorized text has a peculiarly character-forming effect on the memorizer. The text becomes part of his character; he lives in it and lives it out.

Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading

There’s so many things I could write about… but mostly I’d encourage you to meditate on the words of this new covenant and let what you learn about God’s heart go deep, to be placed in your mind and written in your heart.