“We must give eleventy gazillion dollars to Israel because ‘they are God’s Chosen People’ and ‘those who bless you I will bless’” is a refrain Christians have been told their entire lives. There is no single theological issue that is the cause of greater confusion among Christians than what the status of Israel is in the New Covenant.
Christians are in the New Covenant. Most Christians understand this. But the confusion begins when we consider the Old Covenant. What was the point of the Old Covenant?
When God made a Covenant with Abraham and then developed it further with his descendants under Moses, what was the purpose of it?
How is the New Covenant made in Jesus’s blood so radically different?
These are questions that were sorted out throughout the New Testament. And despite much of the New Testament dealing with this issue, and millennia of Christian tradition extrapolating from it, confusion reigns today.
There is a whole panoply of false notions many Christians have unfortunately been taught to believe. For many Christians today, the Old Covenant was “the way you got saved before Jesus.” Despite a host of examples of non-Jews getting saved in the Old Testament (Jethro, Naaman, the whole city of Nineveh in Jonah, Nebuchadnezzar, etc.) many who think of it that way believe that only Jews in the Old Testament were saved. They think the special regulations that Israel was under in the Old Covenant—laws of clean and unclean, food regulations, sacrifices, etc.—were what you had to keep in order to go to heaven.
Because we don’t read and study the Old Testament, we fall prey to totally false notions like these. Because we don’t know the Old Testament, we have a hard time understanding the New Testament and what is new about the New Covenant. Because ignorance of the scriptures abounds, even from those called to teach it, we are in a very similar situation to the church at the time of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
It was at this point in the history of the apostolic period that the false teaching of Judaizing began to take off. Satan had done his best to attack the church through external persecution, through the killing of Christians, but these efforts failed—the church continued to grow. So instead he took a much more insidious tactic. He began to attack the church from the inside. False apostles went to the churches and taught that in order to truly be saved, one must come under the rule of the Old Covenant—you must be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses. In the Jerusalem Council, Paul and Peter successfully made the case to the rest of the apostles that, no, the Gentiles—the non-Jewish believers—were just as much a part of the faith as Jews were. Peter had witnessed the Holy Spirit come upon the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household in the exact same manner He came upon the apostles at Pentecost. Paul had just preached to the Gentiles in Asia Minor and masses of them came to the faith. James and the rest of the apostles had concluded that the prohibitions on occult practices such as eating food sacrificed to demons, eating blood and animals strangled so as to retain their blood, and sexually immoral practices that are found in Leviticus 17-18 had always been binding on Jew and Gentile alike, and remain in force. The Gentiles in the Old Covenant era were under a covenant with God, too—the Noahic Covenant. And so this determination by the apostles was that this part of Leviticus was a universal feature of God’s moral law, binding to all mankind in the Covenant He made with Noah. The rest, laws regarding food, clean and unclean, what clothing you could wear, and requirements to keep the liturgical calendar and feasts, were not binding upon Christians. The reign of the Old Covenant had come to an end with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
For us today, we are in a similar position as the church in Acts. In many cases, we are in a much worse place. We, generally speaking, don’t have any idea what the Old Covenant was about or what the Old Covenant was for. The best way to explain it is to look at the Nazirite Vow (Number 6:1-21). Samson, Samuel, and Paul later in this book, take Nazirite vows. A Nazirite was a special holy warrior who took on special restrictions during the time of his vow. He wouldn’t drink wine or eat grapes, could not touch anything dead, and could not cut his hair. But when his warfare was over, he cut his hair, made an offering, and resumed normal life. This is the Old Covenant that Israel was under in a microcosm. God had set apart Abraham with circumcision, and later the children of Israel with the laws of Moses with special regulations on clean and unclean, what they could and could not eat, even the clothes they could wear. The reason He did this is not because keeping these laws saved them, but because they were the people He chose to be His priests who led the nations of the world to Him. That is why they were under all these special regulations. And Jesus, the true Israel, came and kept this law perfectly, and kept the point of this law perfectly: going to the cross to die so the world could be saved. He did what Israel could not and would not do. And once His warfare was complete, the Nazirite cut his hair, so to speak. The Old Covenant had been fulfilled by Jesus Himself.
This is the point that the Book of Hebrews makes: you don’t need a priestly people because a new High Priest, not in the order of Aaron but of Melchizedek, the Gentile, was serving as High Priest and this High Priest would never die. The world is now in something like a redeemed Noahic covenant. All of mankind has access to God directly through Jesus.
So this is why it is so abominable to assert that Gentiles need to become Jews in order to be saved. The Jews thought they were the only saved people in the world, which was always false, but this error crept into the church subverting it. You must not go back to the Old Covenant which at that time was quickly passing away.
Understanding this is crucial in our day for several reasons. First, we don’t really get what the law is. God has revealed His eternal standards for righteousness in His Law. Modern antinomians—people who say there really is no law at all—will say that in the New Covenant, we are under grace not the law and so everything that God says is righteous and just in the Old Testament just gets thrown out. Similarly, unbelieving mockers like to attack Christians who don’t understand their Bibles as well as they should saying “Why are you saying homosexuality is a sin? Don’t you know that right next to all the passages about homosexuality being a sin is stuff about not eating pork and shellfish and not wearing clothing with two kinds of fabric? You eat bacon so you can’t say anything bad about Drag Queen Story Hour.” But James and the Jerusalem Council answered this objection. They took out their highlighter to Leviticus and said “These are the special regulations that God put upon the priestly people” and with another color, they highlighted chapters 17 and 18 and said, “these are the laws for all of mankind for all time.” They answered these stupid objections 2000 years ago for us.
The second reason we need to understand this is because many Christians are very confused about the status of Jews today. You have many popular teachers on TV who will tell you “Yes, Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through Me,’ but the Jews are God’s chosen people so they can somehow be saved apart from Jesus.” That is entirely untrue. And in fact, it is a species of what the Judaizers taught, just in the other direction. Being Jewish does not save you. Having the Torah does not save you. Only Jesus saves you. But many Christians today do not understand this, and so we are easily manipulated by all sorts of false teachings. We misunderstand the promise to Abraham and His Seed, that “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you, and all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:3) Paul makes very clear in Galatians that the Seed of Abraham is Christ, not those who reject Him (Galatians 3:16). Instead of being manipulated into wanting billions of dollars to flow to a foreign country, Christians should be concerned with Christ and His people being blessed.
Hebrews, written just before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple tells us very clearly what the status of the Old Covenant is: In that, He says, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away (Hebrews 8:13). The very locus of the Old Covenant, its absolute center and beating heart was the temple in Jerusalem. And when that temple fell, the Old Covenant was finished forever. There is no more Old Covenant left. All the promises God made to His people are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).
That is the great purpose of the New Covenant that all the nations belong to Jesus and they must fear God and glorify Him. Jesus has accomplished what Israel could not, He completed her warfare and now sits on the throne of David forever. We must have the same perspective as the apostles: that the world is Christ’s and we must announce the victory of Christ’s kingdom everywhere.
We must search out the scriptures deeply. We must recover the knowledge of the scriptures that we have lost. To not see the Old Testament as some kind of historical appendix to the New Testament that you can read only if you are interested, but rather to see it as one complete book that is unified. The Old Testament shows us God’s eternal purposes for the world not just one nation. It shows us the priestly people awaiting the King and High Priest who would finally do what they could not. It shows us a God who always wanted all the nations, who from the very call of Abraham had declared that all the families of the world will be blessed through you and your Seed. That Seed of Abraham has come and that Seed reigns over the entire world right now. That the world belongs to Him and you play a role in the conquest of His Kingdom.
