When God gave Israel His law at Sinai it was in a way fitted to impress them with the greatness, glory and power of Jehovah, Israel’s God. The effect of the mount burning with fire, the blackness and darkness and tempest, the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words must have filled the onlookers with an holy awe and dread of Jehovah. Not only did the people themselves say “let not God speak with us, lest we die,” but so terrible was the sight that even Moses himself, the man of God, said, “I exceedingly fear and quake.” Such an experience ought to have left upon the minds of those who were eye-witnesses and hearers an indelible impression of the awfulness of falling into the hands of the living God.
The subsequent history of the children of Israel, as recorded in the books of Moses and elsewhere in Scripture, is not, however, a history of obedience to the will of God, but of disobedience, obstinacy and rebellion. Neither the miraculous deliverance at the Red Sea nor even Sinai’s thunders produced a lasting effect. The root cause of their trouble was a heart not right with God. “O that there were such an heart in them,” was the complaint of the Lord their God against them.
How much there is for us to learn from Israel’s history! However solemnly the thunders of Sinai may sound in our ears — and let us remind ourselves that the thunders of Sinai are sounding in the ears of all those who are under a faithful ministry where law and gospel are faithfully proclaimed — yet it is all in vain unless a new heart be given to us. Our hearts, as Scripture affirms, “are deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17, 9.) In us dwelleth no good thing. If we are to worship and serve God in spirit and in truth then there must be the implantation of a new nature by the Spirit of God. We cannot claim such a blessing on the ground of any righteousness of our own; yet it is one of the blessings, indeed the first blessing of the New Covenant for poor sinners. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” (Ezek. 36, 26).
The question we must now ask is: Do we possess this new heart? Is this new heart in you? Or is the Lord still saying concerning us — “O that there were such an heart in them”? If we do not possess this new heart then let us seek it from the Lord. He alone can bestow it. Without it we can never love God nor serve Him. Without it we must perish eternally. If it has been bestowed upon us, then let us remember that it was God’s gift to us — the gift of His grace. If this is so, then we are not our own but are bought with a price, and the exhortation of God’s word to us is: “Therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (1 Cor. 6, 20.)