When you hear the term “Mosaic Covenant”, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of the Levitical priesthood, or the Law…and you would be right. Those are most certainly major themes of the Mosaic Covenant. But what if I told you that another theme of this covenant is the relationship between God and His people? In fact, the Bible makes a very clear connection between this covenant and the Abrahamic Covenant, where God chose Abraham to be the one through whom the whole world would be blessed. The Mosaic Covenant, though very different from the Abrahamic Covenant, is nonetheless a continuation of God’s redemption plan: to save a people for Himself, that He would be their God and they would be His people. Thomas Schreiner, in his book Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World, made a similar observation and wrote, “The same covenant relationship that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob enjoyed with God would continue in the covenant Yahweh made with Israel. Indeed, when the Lord appears to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-10), he emphasizes that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so that Moses and Israel will understand that the covenant with Israel stands in continuity with the covenant with Abraham”.

As we began to establish last time, the Mosaic Covenant was a covenant made between God and the people of Israel, that in exchange for the blessings that come from being God’s chosen people, the Israelites were to obey the Law of God, consisting of all the commandments that would be laid out in what would later become known as the Torah. In the first few months following the exodus, Moses led the people to a place called Mt. Sinai, where they would receive the Law directly from God. This great exchange was recorded in Exodus 20, in a passage containing what is commonly referred to as the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments. For the purposes of this study, I do not plan to go into detail concerning each individual commandment in the Decalogue, but it is necessary to point out that these ten fundamental commandments were given before all of the other hundreds of laws that we find in the Torah. The Mosaic Law is often divided into three main categories: moral laws, civil laws, and ceremonial laws. As important as the civil and ceremonial laws would be for the people of Israel, it all started right here in what serves as the backbone of the entire system.

The structure is pretty straightforward: the first four laws in the Decalogue are the laws concerning our relationship directly with God, whereas the latter six laws serve as the laws that govern our relationship with other people. We often associate the Ten Commandments with the stone tablets which they would later be written on, but when the commandments were first revealed in Exodus 20, God was speaking audibly to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai and as a result, the people were absolutely terrified (v. 19). The Israelites actually had a valid reason to respond the way they did after God spoke directly to them: they knew that they were sinners and could not simply approach a holy God apart from a mediator. Furthermore, there were very specific guidelines laid out in Exodus 19 regarding who could approach God’s presence on the mountain, and they knew they simply did not meet the criteria. When God did speak directly to the people in Exodus 20, they genuinely thought they were going to die. Moses responded by saying, “Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin” (v. 20). The Israelites responded to God in fear, and rightly so, but this fear ought not to turn into mere terror, which is that kind of fear that lacks the kind of loving, joy-filled relationship that produces obedience from the heart. The end result? Unbelief. This would be what would ultimately characterize their wandering years in the wilderness. Their descendants, even after entering the Promised Land, would later turn away from the Lord altogether to worship the false gods of the surrounding nations. Following the Babylonian captivity, the Jews’ relationship with the Law remained one of cold, dead observance, merely keeping the Law by external, mechanical performance, rather than out of a heart that genuinely desires the statutes of the Lord. Paul described the very nature of this standoffish relationship in 2 Corinthians 3, who likened it to a veil that lies over their heart (v. 15).

This remains true of Israel to this very day, though God promises to one day remove their “partial hardening” (Romans 11:25-26). But is this true of you? Perhaps you grew up in the church and know the Ten Commandments backwards and forwards. Yet, you find that something is missing: a genuine desire to please the Lord in your daily pursuit of holiness. You instead find that your apparent obedience to the Lord is just that: apparent. Your service to God is nothing more than external, mechanical religiosity from a cold, dead heart. If this describes you, there is good news. Your heart can be transformed from one that is stony cold to one that beholds the glory of God in the face of Christ! If you repent of your sin and put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, God will grant you a new heart that desires to live according to His statutes. In Christ, that veil is removed. As Paul goes on to say, “…whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:16-18).

This is the essence of what it means to be in a covenant relationship with God. As the psalmist wrote, “…the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep His covenant and remember His precepts to do them” (Psalm 103:17-18). The Mosaic Covenant was intended to showcase what separates God’s people from the pagans and how the fear of the Lord produces obedience in their lives, yet the Israelites completely missed the whole point by focusing on all the rules rather than on the joy and blessing of knowing the God of their fathers, whose holiness and righteousness all those rules were intended to reflect. Next time, we will continue to look at the narrative of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, and how they so quickly broke the covenant.