The King and His Laws

I was reminded yesterday in Church of this truth. Any king can write his laws upon stone and parchment, but only the King of Kings can write His laws on the hearts and minds of men.

“But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Jeremiah 31:33

and

“For this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put My laws in their minds and inscribe them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people.”

Hebrews 8:10

and

“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them;”

Hebrews 10:16

What is more, God writes only His laws and His words upon the hearts and minds of men. God does not stoop to write the words of mere men upon the hearts of other men. Only God’s words are worthy and only God can do the writing.

He does this by the very hearing of the inspired infallible word of God and by the impelling power of the Holy Spirit who resides with and within each Christian.

Textual scholarship, for all of its work and research, is unable to account for this historical phenomenon, and so it doesn’t. But it is this very inability which makes modern textual scholarship unable to determine which words are the New Testament.

Textual scholarship’s inability to determine which words are eligible to be written on the hearts of men demonstrates that textual scholarship is equally unable to determine which words written on parchment are God’s words.

Put simply, if you can’t know which words God would have written on the hearts of men then you cannot know which words God had written on the original of the Old and New Testaments. It is also true, that if you can’t know which words of God are the words God originally gave, then you cannot know which words God would have written on the hearts of men.

How then do we know which words God originally gave? Well, they must be the words which God would have written on the hearts of men. And who knows the words which God would have written on the hearts of men? The Scripture is plain, just as the spirit of a man knows the things of a man so the Spirit of God knows the things of God (1 Cor. 2:11). So, only the Holy Spirit knows which words God would have written on the hearts of men. And where does the Spirit of God reside? The body of Christ, the Church.