“Then the Lord said to me: ‘Even if Moses … stood before Me, My mind would not be favourable towards this people’.” (Jer 15: 1, NKJ)
God had the same expectation of Israel that He had of Abraham, namely that they should walk before Him. Put in another way: they were to be led by Him and live according to His direction. At Mount Sinai we saw, however, that they could not handle this immense intimacy with the living God. Deut 5:25 and 27 shows how they back away from a personal meeting with God: “Now therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God anymore, then we shall die …You go near and hear all that the Lord our God may say, and tell us all that the Lord our God says to you, and we will hear and do it.” The Israelites chose not to walk before God as Abraham did; they wanted to hear God through a mediator. Thus guidelines needed to be put in place about how mankind should walk before God if not through direct communication with God.
The original contract with Abraham was thus amended and a law-based covenant came into existence.
The Sinai-covenant unfortunately could not succeed in bringing man into relationship with God. Even though it is a perfect law (Ps 19:8), man’s fleshly nature and tendency to evil (Jer 4:22; Rom 7:19-21), his inability to watch over himself (Matt 26:41; 1 Cor 16:13; 1 Thess 5:6), to control himself (Gal 5:16; 1 Pet 4:2) and to guard against the Evil One (1 John 5:18 & 21), have all placed him under the heavy yoke of the law. The single obligation of Abraham to walk before God was expanded and replaced with approximately 631 Mosaic laws.
Because of this, the people could barely walk in intimate relationship with God. The many warnings that God sent through the prophets regarding the people’s distance from God and their breaking of the law bear testimony to this. After the time of Malachi there was a period of about 400 years where God was simply quiet.
It is clear – this covenant did not succeed in its goal. God had to eventually make the ultimate offer in order to ensure that He could have a meaningful relationship with humankind. And so a new covenant came into being.
- Sela: Bring before Him your inability to live according to the law. Pray Rom 7:14.
- Read: Judg 9; Ps 99; Acts 9
- Memorise: Acts 9:6
- Going deeper: Read chapter 5 in Arthur Pink’s The divine covenants.
