The Messiah and the Covenants of Israel (Continued)

The Mosaic Covenant (Continued)

The Mosaic Covenant – Its Purpose and Effect

The Israelites, when they were redeemed from Egypt, were a disorganized group of tribes, with poor leadership and almost no government. There was very little commitment to their leaders. Decisions could be queried – sometimes even rejected. There was little coordinated action amongst them. But crisis had brought them together.  The Egyptians had increased their suffering as they themselves suffered under the barrage of plagues inflicted from heaven. Adversity had bound Israel closer together as a unit. When they left their homes, with their backs towards Egypt and their faces towards Canaan, there would be new challenges before them. The new spirit of unity required consolidating and the nation needed structure and government. Moreover, if they were to meet enemies, they would need an army with order and discipline.

God, of course, was always working to a plan. Israel would be constituted as a kingdom, which was intended to be a pattern of the kingdom which is yet to grace the earth, the millennial kingdom under Israel’s Messiah, the Son of God. The leadership of the kingdom of Israel would reside in three anointed offices. Since the government of the nation would be a theocracy, the king, chosen by the Lord, would be answerable to Him. In this situation, the king would require support in two areas. Obviously, he would need to know the mind of God; this would be the domain of the prophet. He would come with messages from the throne, prefacing his utterances with the phrase, “Thus says the Lord”. This would also allow the Lord to make progress with His plan to mould the nation into a receptacle that would suit the incarnation. The first great prophet for the nation was, of course, Moses. He brought the mind of God to Israel at the time of the birth of the nation. And, even as the Tabernacle was a shadow of good things to come, so also Moses was to be a foreshadowing of the Messiah who would come. The second line of support for the king would come from the priesthood – in particular, the High Priest - who would intercede for the king and the people. Aaron and the Aaronic priesthood would also foreshadow the priestly ministry of the Messiah, and because of that, would educate the nation to understand and embrace the doctrines of substitution and forgiveness which were necessary if a meaningful relationship between them and their God could prosper. The main authority would rest with the king, but he would be supported by the prophet and priest.

With the first part of the redemption of the nation from Egypt behind them, God began the process of establishing the three lines of leadership. The intimacy of Moses with God sanctified him in the eyes of the people. His position as prophet was beyond question. The selection of Aaron by God, and his interview on the mountain, established him as High Priest. Initially, God Himself assumed the third role, that of sovereign Lord.

Clearly, if these people, descendents of Abraham, were to fulfill the high ambition that the Lord had for them, and also to be a witness to the surrounding nations, then a moral, ethical and social code by which to live was a necessity. Their leaders would need instruction on how to provide an environment that would be safe and equitable for its nationals. This nation, now constituted ‘the people of God’, is to be the cradle into which the Son of God will be born, so its administration will need to provide the conditions in which He could be raised in accordance with holy principles to live a holy life. Moses and Aaron, together with the elders of Israel, could have gone into conclave and produced some kind of constitution that would have been the basis for their legal and sacerdotal regimes, but that did not happen. This people, now separated to the God of Abraham, were privileged to have the Law disclosed directly from Him, and since He personally promulgated the code, it owned an authority that no other code could possess. He issued it in its entirety, amid great spectacles of majesty and glory. There was no human involvement other than using a mediator to receive and pass on what was His will. Moses, at no time, entered the presence of the Lord with a list of suggestions or requests. The Mosaic Law was entirely God’s idea, and therefore had the backing of Omniscience.

The Law as a Wall of Separation

Sometimes it is said, ‘It is not so much that Israel keeps the Sabbath but the Sabbath keeps Israel’. What this suggests is that the Law of Moses was an instrument that was used to separate the Jewish race from all other nations. There is much in Scripture to support this. The benefits that are available to the people of God were only accessible by those who embraced the Law of Moses. The Temple itself was a physical example of the separation. While Gentiles were welcomed on the Temple Mount and indeed into the Temple itself, they could only enter the court of Gentiles, and as observers at that. This court, the most outer of all the courts, was separated from all other areas of the Temple by a four foot six inch wall. In the wall there were thirteen openings through which Jews were admitted but Gentiles were barred. The openings were guarded by Levites and inscriptions in Latin and Greek were posted at each of the openings. In 1871 a limestone notice was discovered in Jerusalem which read, ‘No stranger is to enter within the balustrade around the Temple and its enclosure. Whoever is caught will be responsible for his own death, which will ensue’.Paul alluded to this wall in his letter to the Ephesians, when he said, “For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation”. (Eph 2:14)

Paul taught that the Mosaic Law was intended to maintain the separation of the Jewish people to the God of Abraham. The blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant were not available to Gentiles unless they embraced fully all that it meant to be a Jew, including, for the men, being circumcised. He describes the condition of those that were not Jewish. “At that time you were … aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Eph 2:12-13)

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