I began this blog to post my Bible study notes online so that my grown children would have access to notes and teaching which might help them in their own personal Bible study. Since 2009 I have been following different schedules of reading through the Bible in one year and posting notes on each day’s reading.
study notes organized by book of the Bible
But then after the election in America in 2012, early in November in 2012, the Lord spoke to me to do a topical study based on 2 Chr 7:14. The nation is off track, all the Christians agree on that. But why? And what will get us on track? Will politics save us? Will talk radio save us? Will bashing our elected leaders get us back on track? What does the Bible teach us? We learned that the Bible teaches that the nation is off track because God’s own people are off track. God’s own people need to repent and return, and then He will sovreignly restore the nation.
the roadmap to national restoration
To summarize several months of detailed daily study, God’s people must humble themselves, first of all. A humble person does not disgrace another human being. God’s people are to seek His face and pray. And God’s people are to repent of their own sins. God is not speaking here about the sins of the atheists, unrighteous, and unbelievers, but let His people first repent of their own sins.
What sins are those? We established that the Law of God defines sin and righteousness for God’s people, and that God’s people have abandoned God’s Law. They have been taught erroneously that because obedience to the Law does not save a person, then obedience to the Law has no value. Therefore God’s people have wrongly abandoned obedience to His standard of righteous living and behavior, and have by it brought shame and derision on His holy name. He cares for the integrity of His holy name.
We established that the Ten Commandments summarize the entirety of God’s Law, and studied the book of Deuteronomy in depth to understand what obeying the Ten means.
But, someone says, what about the New Testament and all the places it teaches us to not obey the Law? What is the gospel of grace, and does grace have any relationship to Law, or are they enemies? It might surprise people to learn that the Old Testament and the Law primarily preach grace and righteousness that is of faith, but we have not understood God’s way of teaching by big picture and living history, so it has escaped us.
In fact, God’s people have been lied to by the enemy of God and man (that shouldn’t surprise us). The enemy has said, not only has the Old Testament passed away, because God’s word is not eternal, but the God of the Old Testament is vengeful, wrathful, angry, and judgmental, and is nothing at all like the God of the New Testament, who is a God of love. Do you see what this lie has done? It has established two gods, moreover that God’s Word cannot be true or trustworthy because it is contradictory, furthermore that the Law and Love have nothing to do with each other. This is a great lie, because Jesus taught us that Love summarized not only the Law, but the entire Old Testament (Mat 22:34-40)!
the righteousness that is of faith
grace in the old testament
law in the new testament
So that is where we are now. We are going through the New Testament, studying what it has to say about the Law.
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