Are Law and Covenant So Different? Because of God, They Are Now. “Law” and “covenant” are different concepts, but are interdependent at times. A covenant is a relationship between parties. Law details behavioral requirements and punishments for failure to comply. God cleaving law and covenant was revolutionary and transformational. It was no longer, “I am king, behave or else.” The Lord’s covenant and law (instruction) became, “I’m the Lord who delivered you from captivity, and I’m inviting you into a covenant relationship with Me. And, the expression of your covenant will be that you do these things.” Obedience thus became an expression of chosen covenant relationship in response to what God has done.[1] In covenant context, law provides for a practical walking out, and preservation of relationship. Hebrew covenants “used a set form which was common all over the Ancient Near East...in a unique way - to express the relation between a people and its sovereign God, their real Great King, something which was far beyond any merely political relationship between human rulers and other states.”[2]
One implication of their covenant was a sense of historical perspective and destiny unique among the ANE (Ancient Near East).[3] God was now understood as a living Person who, by virtue of His covenant, was in intimate moral and spiritual relationship with those who accepted and obeyed Him. Unlike laws alone, God made covenant and law personal. He insisted Israel’s emotional involvement be centered in the God of Israel alone, prohibitions were in second person singular, He stressed man’s exclusive worship of one God, and the honoring of other people’s bodies, rights, and possessions.[4] Law in covenant context framed a special relationship of obedience and faith (trust) by those He pledged to protect. God is not, however, automatically bound to help upon request, He alone decides when to act. However, He is concerned with man’s predicament. In fact, relationship with God is based upon God’s acting in historical, concrete, relationships of man.[5] With Israel’s new understanding of the nature of the Divine and of living a life that reflects who He is (Be holy, because I am holy), there came to dwell within their faith, as it should in ours: a sense of personal relationship with God, awareness that implicit obedience to His will was an essential element in maintaining relationship, and a degree of spiritual insight enabling them to assess the nature and significance of divine promises.[6]
“We love, because He first loved us.”[7] As in Genesis 15, God is always the initiator. “By grace you [are being] saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God...we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works...so that we would walk in them.”[8] There are good works to do, but they flow from salvation. True faith works. “By faith Abraham...obeyed.”[9] True faith obeys. My better understanding faith as trust, and obedience as a natural expression of gratitude for what God did already, which points back to genuine trust, enables me to better use the law for which it was designed: as a schoolmaster leading souls to Christ, keeping Christians from wandering from Jesus, defining sin, and expressing God’s character. “I cannot for one moment omit the law any more than I can omit Christ. I need the law to keep me in Christ as much as I ever needed the law to bring me to Christ. Otherwise, my "evil, unbelieving heart" would cause me to "turn away from the living God." Indeed, God and his law each send me to the other. The law sends me to Christ, and Christ sends me to the law.”[10]
_____________________
- Dr. John Oswalt, Class Lecture 2008.
- Kitchen, K.A. Ancient Orient and Old Testament. London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1966, p.102.
- Harrison, R.K. Introduction to the Old Testament. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004. p. 401-402.
- Livingston, Hebert G. The Pentateuch in Its Cultural Environment. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1987, p.160.
- Ibid., p. 157.
- Harrison, p. 398.
- 1 Jn 4:19, NASB.
- Eph 2:8-10, NASB (emphasis reflects the Greek periphrastic).
- John Wesley, sermon 34: The Origin, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law.
