OUT OF THE STONE AGE by Ray Prinzing

“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.” (Ezekiel 36:26)

“I will put My laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and thy shall be to Me a people,” (Heb. 13:10). Thus that which was written in the tables of stone must give way to that which is now written in heart and mind. There are plenty of people who still carry all their ‘tables of stone’, living in THE STONE AGE. Laws and standards, tenets of traditional creed by which they measure and brand all else as false, judging most freely, and using their ‘tables of stone’ to throw at, to beat, coerce others who do not follow their prescribed course. But God has a people which follow the promptings of the Spirit, because THE VOICE IS WITHIN, writing His laws in their heart and mind, and they are living a life which redounds to His glory, in freedom, joy, and peace.

He has to remove our stony heart just as much as we need to be loosed from the ‘tables of stone’, that it might be a living, pulsating, vibrant expression of truth. We are not left without a law, but no more is it engraved upon stone, as a letter that killeth, but it is a new ministration of the “Spirit, which giveth life”.

Many have rebelled against the restraints of the law; have cast it aside, to become lawless. They caught a glimpse of the freedom of the new, without possessing the SPIRIT OF THE NEW, thus use these truths for an occasion to the flesh. Jesus is our transition from the old into the new – not to abandon the old, He fulfilled it, and He will fulfill it in us, for “the righteousness of the law shall be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit”, (Rom. 5:4). The indwelling Spirit of God leads to a path of holiness far more exacting than the first covenant on tables of stone, yet it is wrought in freedom because it is HIS LIFE living the requirements in us.