This would be a kind of analog of Moses’ Law, but for the New Testament. I didn’t consult with any humans on this. Ya’ll tend to be reticent about such things, so I just went where the wind blew me.
As with the previous study, I’ll bounce through the text to find those passages that emphasize the central thesis. It starts with the Gospels because this is where Jesus ties together the Old and New Covenants. We’ve just finished the Old Covenant, so we need to see how the Messiah completed it and closed it out, by incorporating the underlying thesis into His New Covenant.
So keep this in mind: The whole purpose of revelation is to clarify where we are and what God requires of us. We are fallen creatures. Our progenitors rejected the proper ways for living in God’s Presence. We were thrust out of the Garden, out of ultimate reality into a false reality. We now live in the Shadowlands, where things are, at best, a mere symbol of what’s truly real. At worst, everything that is real has been perverted and hidden.
So the escape plan from this fake reality, and entrance back into the Garden, is recovering the divine revelation we left behind; we need to restore access to the Tree of Life, and that means we stop eating from the Tree of Judgment. Because it’s a living revelation, it has been adapted and expressed in terms that fit our circumstances. The written Word is not God, but a manifestation of what it looks like to obey Him as Lord.
We’ve seen the Covenant of Moses. We’ve looked it over with an eye to what the Covenant actually required, and what it offered. We’ve seen how it was intended to give shape to the mission of participating in divine revelation. Israel was a mission, not a people; their identity was the Covenant, not their DNA. It was meant to make them a shining light to clarify for the fallen world who God is and what He intended for us in Creation.
Having proved it could not be done on human terms, God now intends to show how restoring us to Eden is a matter of the heart, not politics. It requires a changed nature, and nothing less can substitute for that. Nothing external to the soul can provide the necessary shift in focus; it must come from inside.
But as we shall see, the Law still has meaning. Instead of the Sword, it is now the Cross. We still have to experience the death of the fleshly nature, to begin the lifelong process of separating ourselves from the fallen nature that comes with a mortal frame. Insofar as the Old Covenant painted a picture of the moral character of God, it remains an accurate portrayal. It points out the first few steps mankind must take in breathing life into the reborn soul.
Thus, in this study we will emphasize the continuity between Law and Gospel. If the Law is to be understood as divine privilege, and not a restriction, that the Law was the one best way to get the most of this shadowy existence after the Fall, then the Gospel even more so represents a set of boundaries that give shape to the spiritual goal.
Later today will come the first actual lesson.
This has been such a learning journey for me, Ed. Although my own Old Testament Biblical studies have helped me draw similar conclusions (your explanations are far more eloquent than mine could be), things are a lot clearer for me. What could have been for Israel, Christ made not only possible for us through Him but evident through His Life here. I look forward to this next series of lessons.