The text deals with...
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The text deals with the contrast between the two covenants (of the law and of the gospel). French intellectual Blaise Pascal so well describes our circumstances according to the law (the Old Covenant), according to way we live without Christ in view: "Our imagination so magnifies the present, because we are continually thinking about it, and so reduces eternity, because we do not think about it, that we do not think about it, that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity" (Pensees, p. 164).
Famed preacher of the early Christian centuries John Chrysostom reminds us that God is a consuming fire and the old order cannot bear the new order he initiates (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 14, p. 511). This new order is a realm full of love so compelling that it makes us forget the present. Seventeenth-century French mystic Jeanne Guyon gives us a powerful glimpse of what life is like in this New Covenant: "God never shows you a past fault so as to lead you to remedy it. He acts in the same way as a skillful gardener who shows his child the weeds without letting him pull them up; he wishes to do this himself" (Elmer O'Brien, ed., Varieties of Mystic Experience, p. 242).
God will do everything for us in love. And in so doing his love removes our focus from ourselves in the present to his eternal loving goodness that never considers the weeds in our lives.
Famed preacher of the early Christian centuries John Chrysostom reminds us that God is a consuming fire and the old order cannot bear the new order he initiates (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 14, p. 511). This new order is a realm full of love so compelling that it makes us forget the present. Seventeenth-century French mystic Jeanne Guyon gives us a powerful glimpse of what life is like in this New Covenant: "God never shows you a past fault so as to lead you to remedy it. He acts in the same way as a skillful gardener who shows his child the weeds without letting him pull them up; he wishes to do this himself" (Elmer O'Brien, ed., Varieties of Mystic Experience, p. 242).
God will do everything for us in love. And in so doing his love removes our focus from ourselves in the present to his eternal loving goodness that never considers the weeds in our lives.
