In Psalm 138:2 (Amplified) God made the declaration that He has exalted His Word even above His name. We know that according to the gospel of John 1:14 " the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." So, according to God's Word, Jesus and the Word are One and the same. Revelations 19:13 (Amplified) says that "the title by which He is called is the Word of God."
Jesus made the statement that "He and the Father are One," in John 10:30 (Amplified). When we put our trust in God, then it must be our faith in His Word. We see God in the Old Testament and Jesus in the four gospels and yet another revelation of them both is found in the epistles. Sometimes it's quite a difficult thing to bring them all together under the New Testament or new grace of grace.
We get tangles up in the way that God did things in the old covenant and miss what He did in the new covenant. When Jesus was here in the flesh, He couldn't reveal all that He was to the people at the same time. Remember that Jesus was talking to old covenant people or people who were under the Law about New Testament things. These weren't born again people. The Holy Spirit hadn't been poured out yet and these people didn't have the revelation of Paul's epistles that we have today. Some of the things we see Jesus preaching didn't make sense to them. They stumbled over the things that Jesus told them at that time.
However, we have the knowledge of what He was saying delivered to us by the Holy Spirit. When He talked about the Temple being destroyed and in three days it would be rebuilt, they had no idea that He was talking about the Temple of His body. Even now, some stumble at this idea that the new temple is us. 1 Corinthians 3:16 (Amplified) says, "Do you not discern and understand that you (the whole church of Corinth) (and now all over the earth) are God's Temple (His sanctuary) and that God's Spirit has His permanent dwelling in you (to be at home in you, collectively as a church and also individually)?"
The people in the four gospels didn't have what we have today. Many of the messages that we deliver to today's Church are derived from sermons we glean from the gospels. Of course, what Jesus said in the gospels was true, but misunderstood. We Jesus spoke about putting new wine into old wine skins, He was speaking to Old Testament people being able to receive what Jesus was saying about the new covenant.
If you can imagine yourself as an old covenant person and someone said that you would now become the temple of God and the Holy Spirit would dwell inside you, then could you absorb that? Suddenly, you were to become the Holy of Holies and God HImself would now live in you. No wonder people stumbled over what Jesus preached. Today, we still stumble over some of the same things they did.
We believe that our sin is forgiven and yet walk in condemnation as though it wasn't. We believe we were made righteous by Jesus' righteousness, but yet we're reluctant to say so. We believe we're God's children, but we're unsure of how our Father sees and deals with us. We see Jesus and the Word and God, yet we still have a difficult time seeing them as One.
It's difficult to believe (even for a believer) that this new covenant is so simple to live in. We keep trying to live for God instead of living from God. We try doing what's right and living uprightly with Him instead of receiving our uprightness or right standing from God and walking in that. We were never righteous and we're still not. "Only He is righteous and we have been made righteous through and in Him," according to 2Corinthians 5:17-21(Amplified).
We're no longer who we were, but are now Who He is. He is our life, He is our righteousness, He is our health and He is our favor with the Father. As long as we will remember that by His grace, and faith in that grace, we have all things. Once we forget that grace and try to obtain things by our own efforts, we missed it again.
Do I mean to just live any way I want? No! But, don't base what He wants to do on your good or bad behavior. Leave it based on His grace. If we let ourselves judge the goodness of God on our behavior, then we're back under the Law.
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