Bill Vanderbush

We have spent generations blaming the commandments for a problem they were never designed to solve. The Law is not your enemy. Your independent self is. The Law is a perfect mirror. A mirror can show you that your face is dirty. A mirror cannot wash you.

When you try to establish your own righteousness, you are still living in the old administration. You are still treating the law as a path rather than a signpost. You are still saying, “If I just try harder, pray longer, perform better, God will finally be pleased.” But the Christic Covenant announces that the performance has already been rendered perfectly, once for all, by Another.

The Holy Spirit is taking us through a rehabilitation by healing broken and dysfunctional views of God. We must return again and again to the face of Jesus. Every doctrine, every system, every inherited picture of God must be held up to the light of the One who is the exact representation of the Father’s nature. If it cannot survive that light, it must be refined or released.

This is not a Psalm about God’s controlling surveillance. It is a Psalm about God’s intimate, relentless, affectionate knowing. It is the song of a person who has discovered that the One who formed him in the dark is the same One who walks with him in the light. The fact that God knows you is not a threat, it's the safest place in the universe.

Matthew tells us that from this point on, Jesus taught the crowds only in parables. He is not hiding truth from the hungry. He is protecting it from the hard hearted, and at the same time giving it in a form that only the humble can receive. Parables are not riddles for the clever. They are doors for the teachable. Which one are you?