As far as I can tell, most of professing Christianity views the Old Covenant as a quaint experiment in which God gave Israel an impossibly strict law that they couldn't follow. They then view the New Covenant as God's "better idea" - to just drop all of those harsh requirements such as the Sabbath, tithing, Holy Days, and dietary restrictions, and to keep the essentials, such as loving God and not murdering.
The problem is that the bible explicitly states that those very same laws, which are often ridiculed for being impractical or too demanding, are God's laws. The Old Covenant law is God's law. Not only did He ask Israel to keep it, He claimed possession of it! There are dozens of scriptures that I could quote where God emphasizes that all of those laws are His, but I'd like to focus in particular on the Sabbath, since it is so summarily disregarded in modern Christianity, which assembles on Sunday instead of the seventh day (and doesn't even rest as commanded on that day!). Read the following verses (emphasis mine throughout) and ask yourself how you could reach any other conclusion than that the law that God gave to Israel, including the Sabbath and other disregarded commandments, is His law:
The problem is that the bible explicitly states that those very same laws, which are often ridiculed for being impractical or too demanding, are God's laws. The Old Covenant law is God's law. Not only did He ask Israel to keep it, He claimed possession of it! There are dozens of scriptures that I could quote where God emphasizes that all of those laws are His, but I'd like to focus in particular on the Sabbath, since it is so summarily disregarded in modern Christianity, which assembles on Sunday instead of the seventh day (and doesn't even rest as commanded on that day!). Read the following verses (emphasis mine throughout) and ask yourself how you could reach any other conclusion than that the law that God gave to Israel, including the Sabbath and other disregarded commandments, is His law:
Exodus 20:8-10
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work.
Leviticus 19:3
Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and keep My Sabbaths: I am the LORD your God.
Nehemiah 9:13-14
You came down also on Mount Sinai, and spoke with them from heaven, and gave them just ordinances and true laws, good statutes and commandments. You made known to them Your holy Sabbath.
Isaiah 56:1-2There is not one shred of evidence in the bible to show that God ever decided that the Sabbath, or any other part of the law, wasn't a good idea or that people shouldn't obey it.
Thus says the LORD: keep justice, and do righteousness, for My salvation is about to come, and My righteousness to be revealed. Blessed is the man who does this, and the son of man who lays hold on it; who keeps from defiling the Sabbath, and keeps his hand from doing any evil.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI cant remember which one of your posts mentioned something about the laws being a burden. I am interested to read your response to these verses of scripture in the Word: Acts 15:1-32.
Thank you.
I've mentioned that in multiple places - most recently in one of the tithing articles or the comments following it, I think. The scripture that I'm referencing with that is 1 John 5:3, which says, "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome."
ReplyDeleteActs 15 is commonly misunderstood as an indictment of the entire OT law except for, strangely, the following random assortment of commands: don't eat meat sacrificed to idols (which is later recanted by Paul - sort of), don't eat blood, don't eat strangled animals, and don't commit sexual sins. I'm sure that you can see the problem with citing this as an abolition of the entire law except for these 4 things - it makes no mention of teaching them not to murder, steal, or take God's name in vain, for example.
While there is a lot to be said along these lines, let me first address the conclusion of Acts 15 as far as circumcision goes: it says clearly that the Gentiles do not have to be circumcised... Not physically, at least. As a matter of fact, everyone who wants to come before God MUST be circumcised, it's just that physical circumcision is not the way a person does that. Under the Old Covenant, a person born in Israel was born into the covenant - it was purely a matter of one's physical ancestry. As such, the physical sign of circumcision distinguished a physical people that were dedicated to God, but whether they fulfilled that covenant and were faithful to it was still their choice - their physical circumcision was only useful if they obeyed the covenant when they came of age. For example, check out Deuteronomy 10:16 and 30:6, as well as Jeremiah 4:4 - from the beginning, God equated covenantal obedience with circumcision of the heart (this is especially potent in Deuteronomy 30 and Jeremiah 4, where the topic was repentance and returning to God, which required action on the part of the physical people rather than just the nature of their being born as Israelites.)
Contrast membership in the New Covenant with that of the Old: to enter the New Covenant, you must first repent of your sins and turn to God (Acts 2:38) - effectively becoming circumcised in the heart. Paul affirms this understanding of circumcision in Romans 2:25-29, where he reasons that circumcision is (and always has been) a spiritual matter rather than a physical one.
I left out the verses for brevity, but you can quickly look them up on biblegateway.com or whatever online bible you prefer :) I hope this is at least a suitable beginning to the response you requested! I am going to try to have a full article on Acts 15 and circumcision ready by tomorrow to more meticulously and thoroughly explain, but the above gives the gist of my view.