"But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people."
In the Old Testament the diviners or priests of other gods such as Ba'al would use a procedure called extispicy which is the practice of using animals entrails to predict or divine future events. The priest would cut open the animal before sacrifice and interpret the organs such as the liver, intestines, lungs & sometimes the heart. It was a medium for the gods; a way they could send messages to the humans on earth. The practice of extipicy wasn't fully complete until after the animal had gone through the sacrificial routine which ends as a burnt offering.
When the Lord says that He will write it on our hearts it is not in reference to our own benefit of having His word on our heart but it is in reference to extispicy. God is making us a medium for what He is wanting to reveal to the world about Himself & the future.
What implications does this have for us? We are the sacrificial animal for the world who is practicing divination. In giving ourselves for sacrifice we reveal to the world the message that God is trying to get across through us. So when He says He's going to write His law on our hearts it is for the world to cut us open and in our very being, the heart, God is revealed to the fullest. This is a realistic explanation of the scripture because God has used the things we put before Him several times for the salvation of people. One example is in Numbers with the plague of poisonous serpents; God gives the Israelites a bronze serpent that they only need look at for salvation from death by poison. God uses the things we make idols out of irony for our good because undoubtedly He knows that a dog always returns to his vomit like a man returns to his sin. He is willing to use whatever means he must to get our attention.
2 Corthinians 3:1-3 says,
"Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts."
