Among the many passages in the Old Testament that reflect Christ, there are two passages that, with a little light from the New Testament, lead us directly to Christ. The first appears in Deuteronomy : If any of your people–Hebrew men or women—sell themselves to you and serve you six years, in the seventh year you must let them go free. . . but if your servant says to you, “I do not want to leave you,” because he loves you and your family and is well off with you, then take an awl and push it through his earlobe into the door, and he will become your servant for life. Deuteronomy 15:12-18)

The second appears in a psalm of David: Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but ears you have dug for me—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, “Here I am. I have come—it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will my God. Your law is within my heart.”

When I first read “ears you have dug for me”, I couldn’t understand the psalm, but one day I remembered the peculiar passage in Deuteronomy describing a person willingly entering service to another, and declaring a desire to stay for life in servitude. To the other. It was the word love, that resonated, for the whole relationship was wrapped in enough love for the servant to choose to make it permanent.

David, too , must have known the earlier rule, and experienced a relationship of service to his God that allowed him to feel that he actually belonged to God, and recognized the scriptural pierced ear as a sign of God’s ownership of himself. “Who”, I asked myself, “came willingly into servitude, and loved the ones he served so much that he chose to remain a servant forever, if it is not the Lord Jesus, himself?”

More than a thousand years after the words of Deuteronomy were given to the Hebrew people , the apostle Paul wrote about ownership of our own bodies and selves: Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit whom you received from God? You are not your own: you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) In two short passages authored in different times and by different people, we can see a loving relationship that transcends time and place, that chooses love above everything else, and that gives us a picture of our God, for the Holy Spirit of Christ has come to stay.

Love in Him,

Prue

9