When I was younger I didn’t really understand the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It seemed in the Old Testament that God was a very angry god and much kinder in the New Testament. In my ignorance I sought for a reason that made sense to me.

So what did I come up with? I applied purely human logic to the situation and decided that having children mellowed him. Sound perfectly reasonable from the human perspective. Many  a father became calmer and more tolerant once he had children. Let’s face it, we have to. Our children are not perfect. They draw on our walls, wake us in the middle of the night, spill there food everywhere and do all of those other things that children do when they are exploring and learning about their world. Our role is to guide them through this and hopefully give them the skills they need to function in an adult world.

None of this applies to God. Jesus is his son, but Jesus is also god “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God an the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jesus is the word. So what does that mean? It means Jesus would not have been the type of child to continually test his Father, he was the perfect child (I can’t hep but think that this must have been quite odd for Mary and Joseph).

So what does this mean? Well for one it means that God didn’t need to mellow out to deal with His child.

This left me thinking exactly what changed. The Bible tells us that when Christ came, He brought with Him a new covenant. The old one was done away and Christ sealed the new one with His blood on the cross.Now it’s pretty easy to go into great depths about the law being fulfilled and Christ’s commandments, but something dawned on me a little while ago that I don’t ever recall a pastor pointing out explicitly.

The old covenant was made with Israel. The whole nation, not just one person, although the head of the nation set the tone of obedience for all. The nation as a whole was punished for not following the Law and the nation as a whole was rewarded for following the Law. The new covenant is a personal one. It is between you and Jesus. It’s a one-on-one relationship. No longer does God deal with us as a whole, now we get to have an idividual relationship with Him.

I think that’s awesome.