When the Lord would cleanse His people,--those who professed to be serving Him,--from all their idols and their filthiness, (Ezekiel 36:25) He said to them, "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you shall keep my judgments, and do them. And you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God." (Ezekiel 36:26-28)
This is the only way that any person can be brought into a condition where he can walk in the statutes of God, and keep His judgments. He must experience a change of heart. The same thing is declared in the 31st chapter of Jeremiah. "Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. ... But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; after those days, says the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people." (Jeremiah 31:31-33)
The Israelites had the law of God written upon tables of stone and preserved in the sacred ark. They had heard the law spoken from the summit of Mt. Sinai by the voice of God, and had heard it repeated by Moses; but they did not have it written upon their hearts, and the result was they did not keep it. The record of their lives is a record of transgression, of worshiping idols, and other iniquitous practices by which they violated the Divine statutes and judgments. They intended to keep them, and professed to be keeping them; perhaps even persuaded themselves that they were keeping them; but they were not.
The conditions under which they tried to serve God made the keeping of His law an impossibility to them. Not that these conditions were imposed upon them; they were simply the conditions of every man in his natural state. The law of God was not written in their hearts. They were hardened through unbelief, so that their hearts would not receive the impress of the principles of God's great moral code.
A change of heart is the great requisite felt by the repentant sinner as he turns to God. "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." (Psalm 51:10)
Thus David prayed after he had gone in the way of the carnal heart and grievously sinned against God; and his prayer is echoed by every repentant soul. The clean heart for which he prayed is one upon which is written the principles of righteousness.
All who are truly converted have these principles upon their hearts, the agency by which they are written being the Spirit of God. Thus Paul writes to the church at Corinth: "You are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshly tables of the heart." (2 Corinthians 3:3)
As the heart is, so is the life; for "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." (Matthew 12:34)
It was the apostle's trust that the Corinthian brethren would in their lives be an epistle unto their fellow-men, wherein would be read the virtues of Christ and the power of God unto the salvation of believers. All persons who have the Divine law written in their hearts will be the epistles of Christ.
The Jews among whom Christ walked when upon the earth had the law of God everywhere about them, but in the one place where its living principles were most needed it was absent. It was held up before them in their synagogues; they wore it in letters upon their garments; they had it in their minds, so that they could repeat it from memory; but they were constant and flagrant violators of its requirements. "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" (Matthew 23:25)
This was the stern denunciation upon them from the lips of Jesus. "You make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess." (Matthew 23:25)
No one ever made a greater outward show of piety and reverence for God than did the Pharisees, yet all that did not save them from the most terrible condemnation. Neither will it avail anymore for the most respectable professor of Christianity today, who has not experienced the needed change of heart.
All along from their day to ours, the devil has led men to try to be servants of God without undergoing this change; and it has been one of his most successful devices. He has led men to think that if they kept the law of God often before their eyes and upon their lips, they would be living about as God would have them. So they have surrounded themselves with pictures of the Saviour and the names connected with His ministry, and with images of himself and His mother and the apostles and "saints," they have wore crucifixes upon their breast--as the Pharisees wore the law upon their phylacteries--and in every way by their surroundings and outward practices endeavoured to convince themselves and others that they were the true servants of God.
But however well they succeeded in deceiving themselves and their fellow-men, they did not in the least deceive God. His eye read their hearts, and He knew who were His and who were mere pious hypocrites, like the scribes and Pharisees. He knew whether they were His subjects at heart, or whether forms and ceremonies and imposing houses of worship and pictures and images served only to hide the secret iniquity of hearts that were still carnal. Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21)
It is Christ dwelling in the heart by faith; (Ephesians 3:17) it is God dwelling with the spirit that is humble and contrite. (Isaiah 57:15) We may have the precepts of God upon the walls of our churches and our homes, and upon the tablets of our memories, and sounding often in our ears--and all this is proper and well; but if they be not written upon our hearts we are but subjects of the kingdom of darkness. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3)--Present Truth, August 24, 1893--Ezekiel 36:26-28
E.J. Waggoner