- The old can pass away and the new can come for…anyone.
On New Year’s Eve, I found myself with some good friends – the incarcerated at the penal facility that I visit a couple times each week. I wanted to share a verse that I had read earlier in the day: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
My mentor in seminary was a scholar named Allan Coppedge. Years ago, he wrote a book titled The Portraits of God which examined eight major roles through which God chooses to reveal Himself to us. The one I find myself drawn to again and again is the portrait of Transcendent Creator. God, who is above us and beyond us, created the world, including humankind. But one of the first things we are told in Genesis is that humans rebelled against God’s plan and marred the perfect world He had made.
We need God to re-create, heal, and restore that which has been broken by sin. The Transcendent Creator is the only One who can. While everyone needs to hear that message and is in dire need of His redemptive power, the prisoner who mourns his past choices and is now lurching towards God frequently senses that need more than most. The old life must pass and the new must come if there is any hope for the future. Those that gather with me twice weekly in that facility are well aware of this old-new continuum.
Tuesday evening I reminded them of an answer in the children’s catechism that I wrote year ago for my own family and has now been used by thousands of others. One of the questions is What does God know? The original answer – “Everything.” Simple enough. But I asked a theologian friend to review my work, and he marked through that answer with red ink and penned this correction: “God knows everything He wants to know.” His revision puzzled me for a moment until I recalled that in both Jeremiah and Hebrews, God promises, “I will remember their sins no more.”
That declaration elicited smiles from the guys I was talking to on New Year’s Eve. But I reminded them of the price: they would need by grace to follow Jesus, a decision that demanded they turn from their old ways and submit to His guidance. It would mean obedience to His Word and finding fellowship and daily practices to ensure a continuance of the “new” that had come.
One of my favorite passages to share with prisoners is Psalm 51 – the song written after David has been found guilty of adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband. He starts off pleading that his sin be wiped away, blotted out. But then he realizes that that isn’t enough. He wants a new heart.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence,
and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
“Create” in that verse is the same Hebrew word used for God creating in Genesis 1— ex nihilo (out of nothing). It seems as if David is saying “I don’t want you to work with my old heart…I want you to give me a whole new heart for You.” God as a Transcendent Creator can do that. But David adds an additional request – “cast me not away from your presence, take not your Spirit from me.”
David had a front-row seat to see what happens to a man from whom the Spirit departs. Saul (in 1 Samuel 16:14) was tormented by an evil spirit; entered into bouts of madness, fear, violence, and irrationality; and continued his descent into moral and spiritual decline. David pleads with God because he doesn’t want to go down that road. But this very result awaits any who push His Spirit out of their lives.
The great Winston Churchill is said to have made all the arrangements for his funeral. When the day came, at the end of the ceremony a bugler high in the dome on one side played “Taps” (universal signal that the day is over); then a bugler on the other side played “Reveille,” the military wake-up call.
Good night, good morning! Wouldn’t it be great, I told the inmates, if they could experience their own “good night, good morning” episode that very night? The Transcendent Creator could give them a whole new reality – a whole new heart – in Christ Jesus for the new year. It would be “good morning!” to a whole new life.
I think I noticed a gleam of hope in a few of their eyes.
Matt Friedeman
