Psalm 15
A psalm of David:
YHVH, who can rest in your tent? Who can live on your holy mountain?
Those who live a blameless life, who behave uprightly, who speak truth from their hearts and keep their tongues from slander; who never do harm to others or seek to discredit neighbors; who look with scorn on the vile, but honor those who fear YHVH; who hold to an oath, no matter the cost; who refuse usury when they lend money and refuse a bribe to damage the innocent.
Those who do these things never will be moved.
We like checklists, right?
Anytime we can reduce Abba and His Ways into a sequence of checkboxes, let’s be honest, it just makes our life a little easier. We don’t have to think, we don’t have to try and “understand His heart”, we don’t have to remember -- no, we can get on with our busy lives while still keeping Him happy (well, happy on our behalf, anyway). And if He’s happy, we get blessed. The circle of life is complete.
And this is exactly what we want, correct? A simple relationship where our needs are met no matter what, and we “do our best” to meet the needs of the other party. Demanding from others while we are forgiven for “being a fallible human”, this is a recipe for self-justification. And it is oh so comfortable.
Ok, ready? Get those pens out and let’s check away!
So who is it? Who can rest in His tent? Who can live on His holy mountain?
Simple, it’s those:
We clearly can’t do this. We’re fallible and weak creatures that stumble continually. But that’s ok because (according to some people) God knew we couldn’t keep His standard of living when He gave the instructions way back when. It was a test put at the feet of His children to show once and for all that we are weak, broken, delicate beings that could never live up to their Father’s standard and make Him happy. They just needed to navigate through the generations hoping they could, before God’s Son was sent to remove them from the covenant altogether.
Wait, what?
Trouble-filled lives over hundreds of years culminate in a gigantic “I told you so”. And once the pivot occurs, old Israel gets replaced by the new Church? Sounds ok until you try to understand the justice of God. Why would a Father give a natural born child a set of rules He knew they couldn’t keep, then when they failed, kick them out of the House only to let an adopted child come in and be able to live rule-free? I get the feeling there is something here that does not sit well in terms of a just Father.
So, was Israel blameless? Is the Church? If there is a difference, what is it? The obvious answer is: Yeshua.
Through His perfection, and subsequent sacrifice, we can now be viewed as blameless. This is amazing! But what about those in Israel that lived hundreds of years before this ultimate sacrifice? Picture it. Time marches along with man falling short and he is guilty in the eyes of God, Yeshua appears then dies, time continues to march on, and man continues to fall short but now he’s innocent.
Great for us on this side of Calvary, but not so much for those on the other side. Maybe we're missing something here.
Did Yeshua come to be a sacrifice for us to be viewed as blameless, without anything within us changing? Is it a mental exercise that says “yes, I believe He was the Son of God who died for my sins”?
Nope. We are supposed to be filled with His Spirit so that we can walk in His Ways. The promise of the Holy Spirit was so that we could live a righteous life -- today. And if we can live righteously, we are clearly blameless.
“Ah, ha! I knew we’d get here. Works cannot make you blameless!”
Correct. So it’s best we understand the Biblical concept of “blameless” over our modern-day English understanding.
Blameless here is simple. It’s often translated as perfect. As in: Noah was perfect, before the Passover a perfect lamb was to be chosen, the offerings in Leviticus were to be perfect, and according to Psalm 19, the Torah is perfect.
Perfection (as we know it) is a standard well beyond anything us here today can attain. But it isn’t “perfect” as we interpret it:
H8549 תָּמִים tamiym (taw-meem') adj.
The point is that we are complete, we are made whole. This is the whole concept behind the word shalom (peace).
In order to live a whole and complete life (one of shalom), we have to walk as Yeshua walked. And He only did and said what His Father did and said. This has been Abba’s goal for mankind for all of time. We are to seek the Father's heart and live in the manner He prescribed in order to live well -- today. When we made a mistake, we’d come with a temporary sacrifice. Another mistake, another sacrifice. And eventually this turns into a business exchange. Hearts get lost because they found a way to make checklists.
This was the issue with Israel of old. And of course, the prophets saw this.
But they also saw a promise:
Jeremiah 31:31 "Here, the days are coming," says YHVH, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Isra’el and with the house of Y’hudah. 32 It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers... because they, for their part, violated my covenant... 33 For this is the covenant I will make... I will put my Torah within them and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they will be my people."
This prophecy speaks about a time when God’s Torah would no longer just be an external set of laws but would be written on people's hearts -- changing their very nature.
Ezekiel 36:26 "I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit inside you; I will take the stony heart out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put my Spirit inside you and cause you to live by my laws, respect my rulings and obey them."
This is even more direct: the Spirit inside us would empower believers to live by God’s laws -- not just outwardly but truly, from a changed heart.
Jeremiah and Ezekiel tell us that a time is coming (and has come) where Abba’s Spirit would come inside of us, and our hearts, not just minds, would seek to live by His Ways.
Yeshua promised that believers would receive the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) to help them live a righteous life. Several passages, especially in the Gospel of John, make this very clear. For example:
John 14:16 "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another comforting Counselor like me, the Spirit of Truth, to be with you forever. 17 The world cannot receive him, because it neither sees nor knows him. You know him, because he is staying with you and will be united with you."
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John 14:26 "But the Counselor, the Ruach HaKodesh, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything; that is, he will remind you of everything I have said to you."
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John 16:13 "However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own initiative but will say only what he hears. He will also announce to you the events of the future."
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Acts 1:8 "But you will receive power when the Ruach HaKodesh comes upon you; you will be my witnesses both in Yerushalayim and in all Y’hudah and Shomron, indeed to the ends of the earth!"
The purpose of the Spirit includes guiding, teaching, empowering, and transforming believers so they can live according to God's ways -- a truly righteous life not based merely on human effort but on divine power working within.
Paul later elaborates on this in his letters, saying:
Romans 8:13 "For if you live according to your old nature, you will certainly die; but if, by the Spirit, you keep putting to death the practices of the body, you will live. 14 All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons."
So yes, Yeshua promised the Spirit to help us not only know God's truth but actually live it. Yeshua’s promise of the Spirit directly fulfills Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s visions, and it shows that righteousness under the New Covenant is Spirit-empowered, not merely rule-keeping. Believers are meant to live out God's instructions naturally, with the Spirit's guidance and strength.
Paul, deeply trained in Torah, clearly understood that what Jeremiah and Ezekiel had prophesied, and what Yeshua had promised, was happening through the Holy Spirit. He explains it in powerful terms, especially in 2 Corinthians and Romans:
2 Corinthians 3:3 "You make it clear that you are a letter from the Messiah, placed in our care, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on human hearts."
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6 "He has made us competent to be workers serving a new covenant, the essence of which is not a written text but the Spirit. For the written text brings death, but the Spirit gives life."
Paul is directly referencing Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36 here. There are no longer external tablets (like Sinai’s stone tablets) but instead, God’s Word is now engraved inside us through the Spirit. And of course we know that the Spirit brings life, not death. The term "written on hearts" is exactly the New Covenant transformation.
Through this transformation, we now have the freedom to actually live righteously:
Romans 8:1 "Therefore, there is no longer any condemnation awaiting those who are in union with the Messiah Yeshua. 2 Why? Because the Torah of the Spirit, which produces this life in union with Messiah Yeshua, has set me free from the 'torah' of sin and death. 3 For what the Torah could not do by itself, because it lacked the power to make the old nature cooperate, God did - by sending his own Son as a human being with a nature like our own sinful one but without sin. God did this in order to deal with sin, and in so doing he executed the judgment against sin in human nature, 4 so that the just requirement of the Torah might be fulfilled in us who do not run our lives according to what our old nature wants but according to what the Spirit wants."
Notice that the Torah is good, but our old nature could not live it out. We choose checkboxes over relationship because we are just way too busy and distracted to do anything else.
Yeshua deals with sin at its root, and gives the Spirit so that the Torah's righteous requirement is fulfilled in us. Walking by the Spirit means that obedience to God's way is now natural and joyful, not forced.
Living righteously is impossible in the flesh, but natural when we are led by the Spirit. This is what makes us complete. All we have to do is yield to Him in full. No excuses, no justification, no self-deception. Instead, complete abandon.
Now that we have this out of the way, the rest should move along quickly.
Uprightly: H6664 צֶדֶק tsedeq (tseh'-dek) n-m.
Now that you have a heart of flesh with His Torah written on it AND you have agreed to let His Spirit guide you, walking a straight path is now second nature.
Righteousness radiates from within you and your way is straight. Piece of cake.
The Spirit cannot lie. So giving over your thoughts and mind to His Ways ensures you only say what the Father says. Think about that the next time you have some juicy gossip.
Why would you need to hurt anyone or discredit them? The fear of man has gone away and you see things others can’t see. Opening your eyes to see other people in the way that Abba sees them shows you their true value. And you would never want to hurt someone God sees as having value. Oh, if they are alive, Abba sees that they are still redeemable, giving every person the opportunity to repent.
If people are not in the habit of standing up for God, we do not esteem them above someone that does. It’s commonplace to sidle up to those that have something we want and even pretend to be their dear friends. We then turn and sit in judgment on a brother or sister in the faith.
We are to flip this script with sincerity: Being dear friends with fellow-believers, and carefully scrutinizing and staying away from those that reject God.
Your yes is yes, and your no is no. Very simple.
People are not commodities. Not a single individual on earth is worth only their monetary value. They are flesh and blood, real humans. No matter their disposition in life and no matter how you size someone up, they are not worth selling. They have been bought with a price we have no authority to try and monetize their lives for our benefit.
So how did you do?
Getting over the first hurdle makes the rest of the race as easy as pie, right?
Go ahead and let His Spirit genuinely fill you up. Not with lip service, but with sincerity and truth. If you’ve avoided this for a while, it may take some time before those around you begin to see the fruit of your transformation. Be patient. But know that:
Those who do these things never will be moved.