SOURcE - The First Covenant
Exodus 19:5 KJV
Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice, and keep My covenant, ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me.
Deuteronomy 4:13a KJV
He declared unto you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform, even ten commandments.
Deuteronomy 7:12 KJV
If ye keep these judgments, the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant.
Jeremiah 31:31-32 KJV
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers, which My covenant they brake.
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The two characteristics of the Old Covenant
- it was of Divine appointment, fraught with much true blessing, and absolutely indispensable for the working out of God’s purposes
- it was only provisional and preparatory to something higher, and therefore absolutely insufficient for giving that full salvation which man needs if his heart or the heart of God is to be satisfied.
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The terms of the Old Covenant
- Obedience as the condition of blessing
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How could God make a Covenant which He knew man could not keep
In taking Israel into His training, God dealt with them as men in whom, with all the ruin sin had brought, there still was a conscience to judge of good and evil, a heart capable of being stirred to long after God, and a will to choose the good and to choose Himself.
Before Christ and His salvation could be revealed and understood and truly appreciated, these faculties of man had to be stirred and wakened. The law took men into its training, and sought … to make the very best that could be made of them by external instruction.
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The law had promised life; but it could not give it
- Deuteronomy 4:1
- Galatians 3:21
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The real purpose for which God had given the First Covenant (the Law)
… it was meant by Him as “a ministration of death.” He gave it that it might convince man of his sin, and might so waken the confession of his impotence, and of his need of a New Covenant and a true redemption.
- “By the law is the knowledge of sin: that every moth may be stopped, and the whole world may become guilty before God.”
- “The law worketh wrath.”
- “The law entered, that the offence might abound.”
- “That sin by the commandment might appear exceeding sinful.”
- “As many as are of the worlds of the law are under the curse.”
- “We were kept under the law, shut up to the faith, which should afterwards be revealed.”
- “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.”
The great work of the law was to discover what sin was: its hatefulness as accursed of God; its misery, working temporal and eternal ruin; its power, binding man down in hopeless slavery; and the need of a Divine interposition as the only hope of deliverance.
The Old Covenant is absolutely indispensable for the preparation work it had to do; utterly insufficient to work for us a true or a full redemption.
- The two great lessons God teaches us by the Old Covenant
- the lesson of SIN
- the lesson of HOLINESS
The Old Covenant attains its object only as it brings men to a sense of their utter sinfulness and their hopeless impotence to deliver themselves. As long as they have not learnt this, no offer of the New Covenant life can lay hold of them. As long as an intense longing for deliverance from sinning has not been wrought, they will naturally fall back into the power of the law and the flesh. The holiness which the New Covenant offers will rather terrify than attract them; the life in the spirit of bondage appears to make more allowance for sin, because obedience is declared to be impossible.
In the New Covenant the Triune God engages to do all. He undertakes to give and keep the new heart, to give His own Spirit in it, to give the will and the power to obey and do His will. … The law cannot work out its purpose, except as it brings a man to lie guilty and helpless before the holiness of God. There the New finds him, and reveals that same God, in His grace accepting him and making him partaker of His holiness.
It is when a man sees that, as little as he could raise himself from the dead, can he make or keep his own soul alive, that he becomes capable of appreciating the New Testament promise, and is made willing to wait on God to do all in him.
The longing to be delivered from the life of daily sinning, and the extinction of all hope to secure this by our efforts as Christians, will prepare us for understanding and accepting God’s new way of salvation — Himself working in us all that is pleasing in His sight.