If Israel Had To Keep the Law, Why Don’t We?
If God killed those who did not obey the 10 commandments in the OT, wouldn’t law- keeping be conditional for salvation for the OT people of God?
How come they had to keep the commandments but we don’t have to?
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Unless you understand that the Mosaic Covenant was created by God FOR ISRAEL and that the entire Mosaic Covenant, including its central document—the Ten Commandments—were shadows of Christ—(see Hebrews 10:1), you will not understand that the Ten Commandments have absolutely NO authority over the church. (See Galatians and Acts 15 and 2 Corinthians 3, etc. )
Jesus came and fulfilled—filled full of meaning—all the shadows of the law including its sacrifices, its ritual purifications, its feast days and holy days. Every aspect of the Mosaic Covenant was a shadow of the Lord Jesus, the Messiah who was promised and foretold.
When we trust the Lord Jesus and His completed atonement for sin, His propitiation for all human sin, we pass out of death into life, as Jesus said in John 5:24. The issue is not how well we obey; the issue is whether or not we BELIEVE GOD and trust His provision
Abraham believed God, and the belief was credited to him as righteousness (Gen 15:6). He did not have the law. Israel did not yet exist except as God’s promised provision. All Abraham had was God’s command to leave Ur and go to a country he did not know. And God made promises to him and made a unilateral covenant with him in Genesis 15. Abraham did not participate; God made promises that He is still fulfilling. Those promises are based on God Himself, not on Abraham’s obedience. The nation of Israel was part of God’s fulfillment of those unconditional promises. Through Israel came the promised SEED, the Messiah, who would bring blessing to the world.
Israel was under a conditional covenant, and the Ten Commandments were the central statement of God’s covenant demands for Israel. He promised blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. When Jesus came, He became the FULFILLMENT of the law, and we are made alive in Him. We pass from death to life. Our need is not to become obedient; it is to be made alive. Ephesians 2:1–3 explains that we are all born dead in sin. Yet God made us alive in Christ when we believe Him (Eph. 2:5–10).
We are no longer under the law when we pass from death to life. We are placed into a new covenant, a completely different kind of covenant—another unconditional covenant—the new covenant. It is not a covenant of law based on natural man; it is a covenant of the Spirit, and we who have been made alive and indwelled by the Holy Spirit function in obedience to Christ on the basis of His Spirit in us.
Only when we are born again do the commands of the New Testament apply to us. Only those who are born of God can have any hope of doing God’s will!
We do not function by the law; we function on the basis of trusting Christ and learning to live in trust and dependence on Him. We learn to entrust our reactions and temptations to Him and allow Him to teach us to apply His New Testament instructions to our lives. We are NOT under the law in the new covenant! Israel was the only people group ever under the law. The church is under the Law of Christ, and it is not the law of the Mosaic Covenant. God’s word is our guide for life, and His Spirit, when we have believed and trusted the finished work of the Lord Jesus, is the power that enables us to do His will and to submit our natural desires to His. Law-keeping was never intended to measure or enable becoming righteous. The law was always for the purpose of accusation, of increasing sin, of showing people that they could not attain to the perfection God required because they themselves were DEAD in sin! The law’s primary purpose was a death sentence; a declaration that if people transgressed even one of the tiniest laws of the covenant, they had broken the entire covenant and were worthy of death.
Jesus came and took God’s wrath and died that death. That’s what He came to do. He fulfilled the entire purpose of the law and took its death sentence and shattered our curse of death by rising on the third day.
Also, you need to begin reading through the epistles of the New Testament. Begin with Galatians, and actually copy the book into a notebook and notice every word. Then go on to Colossians, and to Ephesians, and to Hebrews, and to Romans, and so on. Read how Paul explains the new covenant and God’s command to believers NOT to go back to observing laws and the visions of people who claim to hear from God.
We were lied to about who Jesus really is and what He really did. We were lied to about our own human nature. The only way to “fix” our Adventist worldview is to consistently and persistently read and learn the word of God. We are not under the law on this side of the cross, but those who do not believe in the Lord Jesus are still under God’s wrath and condemnation. The issue isn’t obedience or disobedience. The issue is spiritual death or spiritual life. We have to be born again, and when we are born again through faith in Christ, our immaterial spirits pass from death to life. Jesus Himself said this! (John 5:24).
We can’t read the Old Testament and assume that we are Israel. We are NOT Israel. Jesus had not yet come, and Israel was the nation God formed from which to bring salvation to the world. God’s governance of Israel is not His governance of those who trust Jesus. We have to read the Bible IN CONTEXT. The New Testament tells us how God interacts with the world on this side of the cross. The cross changes everything. Adventism utterly lied to us. Obedience to the law is not what defines God’s people. Only those who have faith in the Son of God are His people! And when we have His Spirit and life, we must not place ourselves under the shadow of the law. To do so is what Paul describes in Romans 7 as spiritual adultery. We cannot be married to the law and be the bride of Christ at the same time.
Thank You For the Resources
I just want to say that I was reading the “We Got Mail” section today and was reminded of the wealth of informative research available at ProclamationMagazine.com that is ready to give to those who have questions, and I want to thank you for the years put into this vast library of theological truth. I Las want to let you know that you are regularly in my prayers for protection, support, and witness.
—VIA EMAIL
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