When the aim is seeking to discern God’s revelation regarding various issues in life, a fundamental consideration in reading Scripture is to recognize whether the issue, and the people involved, are inside or outside the applicable covenant.
Jesus operated from within the Covenant of Moses up until the approximate moment He rose from death. In virtually every debate He had with His Jewish opponents, the underlying message was that the Jews were just days away from losing their Covenant protections. He knew He was going to be executed, and that this would be the closure of the Covenant of Moses.
However, instead of ending that Covenant, He was going to translate it to a Heavenly realm. Instead of remaining a political law covenant rooted in this world, it would become a moral covenant rooted in Heaven. Behind all of this was the underlying point of the Covenant in the first place: a means of vivifying the revelation of God to the whole world. As the nation of Israel became more and more exclusive and racist, thinking to consume the blessings of the Covenant upon themselves alone, the more they misunderstood the very nature of the Covenant itself. Thus, Christ’s approaching death on the Cross would restore the purpose of the Covenant as a call to all humanity.
Our Lord’s brother James caught this very clearly in Acts 15:16-17, where he quotes from Amos 9:11-12. Amos quotes God as saying that in some day future to the prophet’s time, God would restore the faith of David and build a kingdom on that. Not David’s royal dynastic family or household, but Amos used the symbol of the tent David pitched in the courtyard of his fortress. In that tabernacle, David was a mere servant, huddling in the far back corner away from the Ark of Covenant (symbol of God’s Throne) as the least important servant in God’s court. David called himself unworthy. The symbolism is quite clear: David’s kind of faith would become the core identity of a people God had already marked as His People among the Gentile nations. In this, James silenced the Pharisaical insistence on excluding Gentiles from the gospel message.
Granted, these former Pharisees might have known that Jesus shot down the Talmud, and they were citing a rather pure Mosaic legal expectation, but their mental approach was still Talmudic, still legalistic. In other words, their position was arguably quite reasonable, but missed the whole point of faith by pecking away at semantic accuracy, when the substance of the Covenant was a mystical and largely symbolic expression of Jehovah’s divine moral character.
The Law of Moses was meant to instill humility and penitence, by reminding us that God would always honor a genuine heart of commitment to Him as Lord. But the Jews had pushed and deformed the Covenant into a weapon the kept Gentiles away from God, while Jews became convinced that God owed them, but did not own them. They had a claim on God; He didn’t have a claim on them.
Jesus strove to highlight this problem to His audience, and His audience was always Jewish. Virtually everything He said presumed the target of pulling His people back under the Covenant. That Covenant was the foundation for their entrance into the True Promised Land, so that they would be ready to make the transition from a political legal covenant in this fallen world to a moral covenant based in Heaven. They could not make that transition while out roaming in the wilderness of Talmudism.
The council meeting in Acts 15 turns on understanding that the synagogue is a rejection of the gospel. If people were going to cling to the earthly Law Covenant of Moses, then the only path open was back into the synagogues. If people wanted actual peace with God, then it would be via the path of His Son. Israel the nation was no longer Israel the People of God. Those Pharisaical Christians were trying to Judaize the Body of Christ, and they didn’t stop there. The Apostles continued to face the Judaizers until the last Hebrew Apostle died and Judaist rationalism took over the organized Christian religion.
Today the organized churches have long been the captive of the Judaizers. Mainstream Christians today cannot distinguish which covenant they are under. In common church teaching, the covenants are confused, and this perverts religion. It creates a false image of following Christ, with the attendant false choices between this or that brand of Christian religion. A lot of stuff is pulled under the label “Christian” which is most certainly not what Jesus taught, largely because that stuff refuses to recognize the contextual boundaries of what Jesus said.
A primary issue would be teachings on divorce. It matters a great deal whether the marriage in question was under any covenant, as does the covenant status of the people involved. This is all complicated by false assumptions about what it means to actually be under a valid covenant. A great many people profess to be Christian without actually embracing any valid covenant. A great many church organizations assume their members are de jure under some covenant which is actually imaginary.
We as members of the Radix Fidem Covenant are not bound by any previously presumed covenant. We insist that people be made conscious of the business of covenants, and that vows taken prior to embracing our covenant may no longer be binding. That is, we recognize the difference, as does Paul when counseling in 1 Corinthians 7 that such marriages have a weaker standing than those undertaken after redemption. Paul is not declaring “law” here, but wrestling with the complications in a particular context (history, location, culture, and prophetic warnings). The whole chapter is loaded with such struggling, as are other New Testament passages.
We expect stronger and wiser decisions from covenant family. We expect people who make life changing decisions after embracing the covenant to be ready to face the consequences. We don’t give anyone a free pass just because the stupid stuff they did came beforehand. And anyone at any time can decide that our covenant rules are wrong and simply walk away. The one thing we cannot do is decide for God what He will do to bless or curse anyone. We can only cite our best understanding of His revelation and march forward with what we have.
As a virtual community of faith, our Radix Fidem Covenant is quite gossamer, indeed. Very little that we do will affect each other, unlike how it was for New Testament churches. Those folks lived in each other’s armpits; few of us have even seen each other in the flesh. I don’t have such hard decisions to make as Paul or the other leaders did. On the other hand, the moral gravity of your choices will most certainly affect you. All I can do is advise you how I foresee it turning out. The likelihood of ostracism is really quite small. You’d have to work hard to earn that. This is the nature of a virtual community with a virtual covenant.
It puts a lot on your shoulders to decide where you’ll find God’s peace, and to vivify His revelation in your own life.
