Spiritual Insight

I have asked myself the question about why God instructed Israel to live by the Law if He always knew (and He did) that He was going to redeem us by His Grace? But of course, the answer has always been there in God’s Word. 

God gave Israel His Law in the Torah to more fully define Himself and to begin to show us as a people more of who He is and what is needed to live in a right relationship with Him. 

In the years preceding the Exodus and the giving of the Law, God had dealt with the ancient peoples and their rebellions leading to Noah and the Ark and then Babel. According to The Bible those peoples had little to no intent to listen to God and we don’t have any Biblical documentation of personal/individual interactions with any of those people before Noah. Following those early crises, God evidently decided He needed/wanted to interact more closely and personally with His creation; that He wanted them to know and understand Him better. So, He starts the process of interacting with them beginning with one man, Abram, and builds first a family and then a nation to learn what’s important and how to relate to Him. This culminates with God giving The Law at Sinai.

Without His Law, we would not have known in detail who He is and how to properly serve Him. He would have continued to be a mystery and only a vaguely known divine entity to us. By interacting with us and teaching us His Law, He has made Himself familiar to us as our creator and God. He entered into a relationship with us as a people in addition to guiding us and leading us.

Paul has told us in Romans 4:15 and 5:13 that “without the Law there is no sin”, no holding to account for wrongdoing. Without the Law we were undisciplined, unruly creatures largely unaccountable to anyone, except when a ruler imposed discipline on us by threat of force. When God entered into a relationship with us, He gave us His Law to shape us and conform us to a way of living that would allow us to interact with Him and improve our lives with Him and each other. 

Israel, obviously, struggled to live in obedience to God’s Law even though there were provisions of sacrificial sin offerings for restoring them to a right relationship with God when they broke the Law as He knew they would. When the level of sin reached a certain level God would rebuke the nation and call them back into a right relationship. This happened multiple times until the people not only abandoned living by God’s Law, but turned to other gods, forsaking God all together. This led to a violent rupture in the God-man relationship with the people of Israel suffering physical harm and a prolonged (but not permanent) exile from the land given to the people by God. All of this God-man relationship was contained within the nation of Israel. While God dealt with other nations according to their sin and actions, particularly with regard to Israel, He didn’t have a direct relationship with them as He did with Israel. Israel was the people God chose to begin forming His earthly family.

So, why did God leave this Law relationship paradigm in place for so long before bringing Jesus and salvation by Grace to first the people of Israel and then all the Gentile world. In Galatians 4:4-7 Paul writes that, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”  When God knew that the time and conditions were right for this New Covenant to prosper and spread not only within Israel but to all people, He sent Jesus and inaugurated salvation by Grace for all. When He knew there was no further benefit to be had from The Law and that there was both a level of understanding by Israel of their continual sinful nature and a desire to embrace a better solution (The Messiah), He acted. It was also a time when others outside of Israel were now beginning to be open to something more. Men have speculated what made the time “right”, but God knew, as only He can, that the time for a New Covenant was at hand and would give us, all of us, a better way, a personal way, to interact with Him in keeping with His true nature of wanting to save mankind. The history of Israel’s singular life under The Law showed that we, as humans, were slow to learn and had trouble embracing and admitting our sin problem; we kept going astray. The time for a new faith relationship with God in the wider world was not viable in the preceding centuries; not until “the time was right.”

Next Question

The next question I asked myself was why did God intervene personally and physically in human affairs under the Law Covenant and now He does not under the New Covenant of Grace, no matter the level of evil we are involved in or subject to? I now understand that an important difference between the two covenants is that salvation by grace (Jesus) and God’s Holy Spirit, who now lives within each person of faith, is to guide, lead and help us. God’s intervention is now personal, individual and internal instead of external and collective. In Jeremiah 31:33 we read “God will put His law ‘within them’ and write it on their hearts, giving them a ‘heart of flesh.’” This is a major change in relationship and God’s dealing with and through us.

While the Ten Commandments are still the basis for our laws and proper interactions with each other, Jesus summed them up as love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and also love your neighbor as yourself. Matthew 22:34–40 Between the indwelling Holy Spirit and our relationship to each other, we are now responsible for the care, good treatment and well-being of our neighbor. We are to act, with the Spirit’s guidance and assistance, to protect, house, feed and care for ourselves and our neighbor.
The fact that we don’t is our failing, not God’s! We still want Him to swoop in and make everything right. I get it that big nation-sized sin is daunting and needs large collective efforts, but that doesn’t exclude us from asking God’s help to bring that together and show us how to proceed. We just don’t/won’t take the responsibility. And evil is rampant and we suffer because of it and our self-centeredness.