How We Transgress His Covenant Today: No Grace

"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

7But they like men have transgressed the covenant: there have they dealt treacherously against me."  (Hosea 6: 6-7)

This  passage appears in the Old Testament, and yet even hear, the heart of God is about grace, not law. His goodness, not our efforts. Our growing communion with Him, rather than our straining commitments for Him.

Jesus indicted the legalist Pharisees, who were actually licentious in dumbing down the standards of God's law, with the above prophecy.

When the Pharisees challenged Jesus for eating with tax collectors and sinners, He rebuked them:

"But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." (Matthew 9: 13)

When the Pharisees faulted Jesus and His disciples for plucking corn to eat on the Sabbath Day, Jesus again rebuked them, reminding them that David the king had eaten the showbread, only for the priests, then quoted to them:

"But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless." (Matthew 12: 7)

When we make the law more important than God's grace, when we expect people to live by our rules, or even to live by the Ten Commandments, we are transgressing God's New Covenant.

Jesus Christ fulfilled every requirement of the Mosaic Law, and brought in a New Covenant, in which He lives within us and causes us to believe on Him and walk in love towards one another:

"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." (John 13: 34)

The New Covenant is all about what God our Father has done for us through Jesus:

"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:

11And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.

12For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more." (Hebrews 8: 10-12)

We recognize today that He is our God, and carries us through all things. He asks us to believe on Him and recognize that He has been fully gracious to us in paying for all our sins and thus annulling the requirements of the law against us (Colossians 2:13-15)

Today,  we transgress the New Covenant of grace if we try to be obedient to the Mosaic Law, and demand that others do the same.

It is all about the grace of God, today, revealed to us Christ Jesus, full of grace and truth. Let us believe on Him, and grow in faith to know Him!