ing for Him, who were attempting to in the law, readily recognized that here was the perfect sacrifice, that they would no longer have to offer sacrifices to cover their sin, but that Christ had covered them once for all and buried them in the deepest of seas. As we look into the New Testa ment, we find numerous passages where Paul will compare certain aspects of Christian living to certain aspects of the Old Testament law or certain customs that had spirit ual ramifications. For instance, in Romans 7:1-6, Paul compares the marriage of a man and a woman to the relationship of the body of Christ to Christ Himself. Also, you cannot move to the Book of He brews and catch the beauty and the profound statements that that writer gives us unless you have some idea of the Old Testament law that is the backdrop against which this new freedom in Christ is presented. We ought to be profoundly thankful that God gave men such as Paul the ability to understand these deeper things and to com municate them. We ought to be profoundly thankful, too, that the Holy Spirit empowers us to under stand the deeper things of the Word of God. May we not be like the people at Corinth who were just content to stay at their own level and not to progress. We ought to pray that we will have the de sire, the instinct, to move forward. God is able to apply to our lives the deeper things of the Spirit. Did you know that your room is alive with all kinds of voices and music? If you are driving in your car and you are listening to my voice, that not only is my voice but there are all kinds of sounds that
things of God are taught by com paring spiritual with spiritual. Let me give you an illustration. Some of you men, and perhaps even your wives, may have looked through a car manual. Maybe you purchased a new car and read through the manual to see some of the speci fications of your automobile. It may well be that certain aspects of the model you are now driving may be compared with a former model that that automobile com pany produced. It would be com paring natural things or temporal things with temporal, or (more correctly) mechanical aspects of this automobile with certain me chanical aspects of a former auto mobile that was produced. A housewife may purchase a new sewing machine and compare what she knows about a former sewing machine with the new one. The manuals use technical words and natural comparisons to other machines in an attempt to help you to understand a mechanical pro cess. These are assuming a knowl edge of mechanical principles. Now the Spirit of God guides Paul to compare spiritual matters with spiritual things. So Paul writes, "Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wis dom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing spirit ual things with spiritual." The Old Testament gives us a great deal of material on the Old Testament law, how man was ex pected to perform and to operate in a way that he could be accept able before God. Most of you, I think, realize that that law was simply a teacher, a schoolmaster, to help man recognize that he needed outside help. When Christ came, the people who were long
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