The New Testament clearly references the Old. Jesus was constantly correcting false impressions of what the Law of Moses required of Israel.
It helps to gain a Hebraic concept of the terms. Whenever you see the word “law” used in that context, you should insert the word “covenant”. The point is “law” was not legislation as we think of it, but a sovereign-vassal treaty. Further, God became sovereign quite specifically because He rescued the nation from slavery. He owned them; they were His property. It was ANE feudalism, plain and simple.
If you read through the history and prophets of the Old Testament, you’ll see how God tried again and again to make the nation of Israel into a large household fit for His name. Only rarely did they rise to the occasion. God warned that He would eventually have to renegotiate His covenant with Israel (Jeremiah 31:31-34). Finally, He sent His own Son to demand that renegotiation of the Covenant. The Old Covenant died and the New was born. Right up to the Cross, Jesus warned this was coming.
During the Last Seder, Jesus said that this ritual meal would be displaced by something fitting a new covenant (Luke 22:20). Then He announced that the code of the covenant would be shortened. There was still the original requirement of feudal submission as vassals to Him; that was assumed. He added that the whole of His personal law for the New Covenant was that we should love each other as He loves us (John 13:34-35). This was an echo of His teaching that everything in the Old Covenant could be summed up that way (Matthew 22:34-40).
The western mental reflex to focus on thinking or doing misses the point. The distinction is false. From the Hebrew outlook, everything was a matter of submission and obedience to the Master. Jesus did invest a lot of time teaching, but it was aimed at restoring the ancient Hebrew orientation. That western obsession with thinking versus doing had crept into rabbinical teaching and Jesus tried to pull the people back to their very personal devotion to His Father. What He wants is our loving commitment to pleasing Him; that’s what “faith” means.
The Old Covenant is couched in terms of priorities. The people were commanded to embrace those priorities; it was not about detailed rules. It was declared in terms of what they knew already. When Jesus walked back through the covenant priorities, He updated the imagery to match what the people already knew 1400 years later. He corrected a lot of false impressions, but His core teaching was always faith in God that resulted in a drive to live certain ways.
He was careful to distinguish between what the flesh could do and what it wanted against the clear priorities of the Father. It was never a question of performance, but of the desire to draw close to the Father. He kept calling Jehovah “Father” in order to establish the image of that personal closeness, that we should be like children clinging to Him.
And why do you suppose Paul spent so much time teaching? It was because Diaspora Jewish believers had a lot of false impressions to wash away, nonsense they had picked up living among Gentiles. Meanwhile, the Gentile believers had even more nonsense. It’s clear from his experience in Corinth just how alien covenant faith was to the people there. The things they took for granted required a detailed examination, a total renovation of thinking. It was hard enough for Israel still on the Exodus trail to ditch the misleading suggestions of the Devil and his allies on how to live in this world, living in a culture that wasn’t too terribly far from Eden. Gentiles in all their many ways, having been misled by false gods, had a very long way to go.
By the time we get to John’s Revelation, we see how he all but despairs of persuading the churches in his care to cling to the Hebraic outlook. He wrote a vision that simply makes no sense at all unless you embrace the Hebrew epistemology. It was never completely lost but frequently ignored. From time to time through the past two millennia of church history we see brief glimmers of light and hope, but here we stand today with a vast burden of religious mythology that alienates us from that primitive faith of the Hebrew people.
Our shared conviction is that the Lord is stirring the pot these days. Random believers are being led to consider the question of what separates Christians today from what Jesus taught His disciples. For now, just asking that question is much more important than the particular answers at which folks arrive. We don’t pretend to have all the right answers. What we do have is a very strong experience of blessing and power that is clearly different from what has been seen in a very long time.
The real issue is feudal submission: “But a time is coming – and now is here – when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such people to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and the people who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24).
That was a message Jesus gave to His nation’s presumed enemies. It was the foundation of the message He told His followers to take to the whole world. It’s universal in the sense that, in theory, every human could embrace that call to worship in spirit and in truth. But the New Testament warns over and over that only the Presence of the Holy Spirit can fulfill this demand. We’ve been warned that only a portion of humanity will ever receive the Spirit.
We belong to a Kingdom of resurrected souls, God’s Chosen in Christ.
