Did God's people in Old Testament times have to live under the Old Covenant? Was all that horrible apostasy in ancient Israel something necessary because the people were living at the wrong time? Did God withhold something from them that He later on relented about, and then gave them the New Covenant? Poor people! Was He being fair to them?
These are questions stirring Christian denominations. Never can the Christian Church lighten the earth with the glory of a final message of Good News (like Revelation 18:1-4 speaks of) unless this problem of the Old Covenant vis-à-vis the New Covenant gets cleared up. Confusion paralyzes the finest church on earth.
Lukewarmness, apostasy, backsliding, are impossible for a church that is living in the knowledge and experience of the New Covenant. Too strong to say? Unless this is true, the gospel is forced logically to become a contradiction in terms--confusion, a failure.
The reason is that the New Covenant gospel is "the power of God unto salvation" (Rom. 1:16), not a program to failure or backsliding. Backsliding is due to the Old Covenant imported into the heart: 9/10ths New Covenant and 1/10th Old Covenant = failure.
No, ancient Israel were not programmed to failure. Their beginning was "the father of us all," Abraham (Rom. 4:16). God gave him the New Covenant in those seven promises in Genesis 12:1-3. All his descendants should be "children of faith" as Isaac was. They would become the greatest nation on earth, always the head, never the tail (Deut. 28:13), always "a kingdom of priests," meaning, a nation of spiritual geniuses (Ex. 19:6). They were to be God's missionary nation through whom "all families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen. 12:3).
They would evangelize the world! But they fastened themselves under the Old Covenant in Exodus 19:3-8. That thinking kept popping up forever afterwards in their up-and-down history.
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: September 6, 2002.Copyright © 2010 by Robert J. Wieland.
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