God Makes a Covenant

KEY VERSE: “If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people, for all the earth is mine.” —Exodus 19:5

SELECTED SCRIPTURE: Exodus 19:16-25; 20:18-21

THREE months after Moses had served God in delivering the Hebrew people from their bondage in Egypt, he was assigned the major task of giving them the divine law. The main features of the Law were epitomized in the Ten Commandments, which were spoken by the Lord on Mount Sinai.

While Moses is often referred to as Israel’s lawgiver, actually he merely acted as mediator between God and the people in connection with the giving of the Law. The Law offered the Israelites the opportunity of gaining life upon the basis of full obedience to its requirements. Since the Israelites, even as the people of all other nations, were members of a sinful and dying race, born under condemnation to death, none of them was able to measure up to the full demands of God’s perfect Law, so none gained life by this arrangement.

Nevertheless, the Law served a useful purpose in that it demonstrated that it is impossible for any member of the fallen Adamic race to gain life by reforming, and striving to keep God’s law. Up to the time of the giving of the Law there had been no demonstration of this, for all were dying because of Adam’s transgression.

Paul wrote that the Law served as a ‘schoolmaster’ to bring the people to Christ. It did prepare some of the Israelites to receive Christ at his first advent. But although, as a people, they did not accept him, the experience of that people under the Law will always stand as a lesson of the great fact that none can gain life except through Christ. This has been true in the Gospel Age, and the lesson will carry through to the end of the Millennial Age. Thus the Law served a vital purpose in the outworking of the divine plan.

While the Israelites for the most part did not make a serious effort to keep the Law, it served as a certain restraint upon them, and contributed to holding them together as a people until their Messiah came and presented himself to them. Since the Israelites were the natural descendants of their father, Abraham, they were the first in line, when Jesus came, to be the inheritors of the promise made to him concerning a seed that was to bless all the families of the earth. But in this also, love for God and a sincere effort to do their best to obey his Law as a demonstration of faith in him and in his promises, were the conditions of becoming the blesser seed, which the Lord, described as a ‘kingdom of priests’, and ‘an holy nation’.

Disobedience to God, climaxed by the rejection of their Messiah, the Head of the seed class, caused the Israelites to lose this choice inheritance. Jesus explained that the “kingdom” would be taken from them, and given to another nation, a nation that would bring forth the proper fruits of righteousness. The Apostle Peter identified this new “holy nation” for us: “Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.”—I Pet. 2:9,10

In Hebrews 12, Paul calls attention to other experiences in connection with the giving of the Law through Moses which were typical. At Mount Sinai there were “thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud, … and the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud.” (Exod. 19:16) In Hebrews 12:18-22,26-28 and Haggai 2:6,7 we have the explanation that the convulsions of nature and the sounding of the trumpet at Sinai typified a shaking time among the nations just prior to the establishment of Messiah’s kingdom, in which God’s covenant of life will again be offered not to Israel only, but to the entire world.

In this great time of trouble, Paul indicates, everything out of harmony with God will be shaken, or removed; but we, at the same time, will receive a kingdom which cannot be removed. As Moses, in the type, was the mediator of the original Law Covenant, so Christ—and associated with him, his church—will administer the laws of the promised New Covenant through which all the willing and obedient of the Millennial Age will receive everlasting life.—Jer. 31:31-34

“Let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a consuming fire [ending all unrighteous institutions and all unrighteousness].”—vss. 28,29

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