Years ago we used to live in an old house in a city of a few thousand people. Built sometime in the early parts of the 20th century, this house had been called home by many different families over the years. The design of the floor plan of the house was rather poorly thought out as the living room was rather small, with doors leading to other rooms in poorly conceived locations. The kitchen, while smaller as well, was designed in a way that made it difficult to have a decent sized table to eat on while still being out of the way to cook and prepare meals. And then the upstairs! The second story of the house was almost the complete opposite. Just as the kitchen and living room were too small, the two bedrooms upstairs took up the entire second floor, absolutely massive rooms.
Anyways, one day we decided to redo the floors in the house. The carpet in the living room was older and stained, and the kitchen had linoleum that was heavily worn. We started our remodeling project by pulling up all of the old flooring. The carpet in the living room came up rather quickly as it was such a small room, and we quickly rolled up the old carpeting and tossed it out to the trash. Then came the kitchen.
As we began to pull up the linoleum, we noticed that there was another layer underneath that had been covered up. No problem, as soon as we finished with the top layer we would remove the other layer as well. If we were going to put new floors in we were going to do it right. So as soon as the first layer was off the floor and out the door we started on the other layer. As we started pulling back this second layer, lo and behold, there was a third!
I’ll shorten this story a bit, but by the time we had finished I believe that there were like 5 or 6 layers of tile and linoleum in total, each on top of the other. But we pulled them all up so that we would have completely new floors. We got rid of all of the old, and put in the new.
This example is similar to the Old and New Testaments. Like all of those layers of linoleum, the Law contained so many different things to try to do and remember. Things you couldn’t eat, things you couldn’t touch, things you couldn’t do, or things you had to do. Each one after the other. With so many things contained in the Law, there was absolutely no way that a person could possibly keep each one without fail. But that was the real purpose behind it all: to show you that you were a sinner.
It was there to show to that you couldn’t do enough to get to heaven on your own. No matter how hard you tried, you would always fail somewhere, somehow. It was there for a time until the time came for Jesus to come and do what no one else could do by keeping the law perfectly. For the first time ever, someone had kept the Law flawlessly. When Jesus died, it marked the end of the Old Testament and the Law. When He said “It is finished”, He pulled up and threw out the Old Testament laws, and laid down the New.
Hebrews 10:9 “Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second.”
Out with the Old, in with the New. Out with the bondage of the Law, in with the Law of liberty. The law of love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness.
The new floor has been laid down and it sure is beautiful. And yet… there are still some people who try to go back to the old again. There are people today who try to keep the entire Judaic Law, even though it has already been proven that the only One Who could keep it was the Lord Himself. They have been set free from the chains and demands of the Law, but they just want to go back to it again. That would be like us tossing all of that old linoleum back onto the floor of our kitchen once again!
The Old Testament is just that: old. It is “something that is no longer in existence; former; previous; obsolete or out-of-date.”
Grace. Mercy. Love. That’s the New.
In Christ,
Andrew
Teufer Lake King James Bible Church 