13.1 - Mount Sinai – The Law

Interlocked Series — Lesson #13, Part 1
Mount Sinai—The Law
March 12, 2024
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer 

“Our Father, it’s a great privilege to be here tonight, and it is a tremendous insight to work our way through these Interlocked lessons and to get a broad overview of the Scripture and see the major themes in the Scriptures that are repeated again and again as they emphasize the buildup in the Old Testament to the promised Messiah.  

“Father, we’re thankful that we have this to go through and that we can understand it and it will give us a better perspective on Your purposes and plans. Help us to focus and concentrate and see the connections as we go through this material tonight. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen. “ 

Slide 2 

We are in lesson 13 which is about Mount Sinai and the Mosaic Law. There are three lessons that relate to the law. We just had three lessons related to the Exodus and Passover

Slide 7 

Here are our 11 Old Testament events and our eight New Testament events. Let’s all stand up and go through the motions to try to see if we can remember all of this,. Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, Call of Abraham, Exodus, Ten Commandments, and then we have the Conquest, and after the Conquest we have the United Kingdom. 

Next comes the Divided Kingdom, and then God is going to eventually send first the Northern Kingdom out under discipline and then the Southern Kingdom out under discipline. Then there’s a partial return, so two hands for the two kingdoms going out, one hand for them returning because it’s a partial return. 

Next, we have the birth of Jesus and then He is crucified. He is buried, He rose from the dead and then He ascended to Heaven. He sent the Holy Spirit who established the Church on the earth. When the Church Age is over, the Lord returns in the air and we are raptured to be with Him in Heaven. There are the seven years of the Tribulation.

Then Christ returns to the earth, and He establishes His Kingdom for a thousand years and then there is the Great White Throne Judgment. You can sit down. All right. We went through the timeline. It starts off with Creation. God created everything perfect. There was no sin or evil in the human race. There was no death on the planet.

Man had responsible choice. That’s the first Divine Institution. He had genuine consequences so that when Eve, and then Adam, disobeyed God and ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were hit with the consequences. The penalty was spiritual death. 

That spiritual death affected everything on the planet. It affected the physical things on the planet so that now there’s going to be disease and there’s going to be decay and there’s going to be death. Then it affected relationships. It affected marriage as God described it in the in the outline of the consequences so that affected Divine Institution number two, and then it affected Divine Institution number three, which is family.

The next major sinful event is sibling rivalry when Cain killed Abel. That was just a precursor to the decline and deterioration of the human race. Genesis 6:5 says that when God announced that He would bring a judgment on the earth, it was because “Every intent of their thoughts were evil continuously.” That judgment was the worldwide flood which left only eight human beings alive. They were the ones on the ark.

After the Flood, God established the principle of human government, but it wasn’t long before sin reared its ugly head in the family of Noah. Noah got drunk. As a result of that episode, we see that the problem isn’t environment. The problem is internal. We are the problem. It’s our sin nature.

As the next few generations go by and the human race multiplied upon the earth, they began to build the Tower of Babel. They built this tower in opposition to God saying that man was going to make a name for himself and leave God out of it.

Nimrod was the mighty hunter who was antagonistic to God. God had told the human race that His plan was to have everyone scatter upon the earth. When they didn’t scatter, God then scattered their languages. The multiple languages caused the human race to divide into groups who spoke the same language.

As a result of that, we see the establishment of the fourth Divine Institution, which is government. The fifth Divine Institution was boundaries. God established the boundaries for the nations.

After that God shifted His focus to work through one man, and that was through Abraham. With the call of Abraham, God institutes a new program where He is going to work through Abraham and his descendants. God made a threefold promise to Abraham promising that He would give him land and his descendants land, and that He would give him an uncountable number of descendants and that they would be a worldwide blessing.

In about the third generation, it was clear that they had sin in that family as well. They were beginning to assimilate to the pagan religions around them and intermarrying with the pagan Canaanites, so God intervened.

First, he moved Joseph via the sinfulness of his brothers to Egypt, but God worked to raise him to be second in command of all of Egypt. That provided Joseph an opportunity to provide the salvation, the deliverance, for the people of Egypt. Remember in the Abrahamic Covenant, the command was to be a blessing, so Joseph is being a blessing to the Egyptians, and he is able to provide the storage for grain and to provide ahead a plan.

Eventually this means that his family can move to Egypt and there they are going to be isolated because of the prejudice of the Egyptians. We see that God even uses the evil and the wickedness of fallen humanity to accomplish His purposes. The Israelites are going to be isolated in the land of Goshen for the next 400 plus years before God is going to come to rescue them and deliver them through Moses. That brings us up to the Exodus, the Exodus event. 

Slide 3

Then we see we have four Divine Institutions now, the first of which is responsible choice. We see consequences, good and bad, marriage, family, human government, and nations and boundaries. With the call of Abraham, we have the sixth Divine Institution, which is Israel. All of those apply to any nation, and any group of people, whether they are believers or unbelievers. If they bless Israel, God will bless them. If they curse Israel, God will judge them harshly.

Slide 4 

We learned five lessons from the Flood. Grace before judgment. Decision of whom to save and whom to judge. What’s going to be the criteria for distinguishing between the two? There would be, third, only one way of salvation. Man and nature were impacted in the judgment. Fifth, how to be saved was by faith alone in God’s promise.

Then we looked at the issue of blood atonement in the Old Testament and in the Mosaic Law. We finished up with our response to the Word of God and answering the question, where do people go when they die? Before the Cross in the Old Testament, they went to Paradise that was located in Sheol. After the Cross, Paradise has been transferred to Heaven. 

Slide 5

Tonight, we’re going to get into the first part of lesson 13. The major divisions here are, first of all, Israel is adopted as God’s son.

It’s interesting that you have certain parallels between the nation and the Lord Jesus Christ in His earthly ministry. Both are called the Son of God. The Israelites are in the desert for 40 years, and Christ is in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. The Holy Spirit is leading both of them.

There is this parallel between Israel as God’s son and the Lord Jesus Christ as God’s son. So, because you have this family relationship, this is the whole theme of this lesson. God is the father of the Israelites. He has adopted the nation as His son. After the adoption, He gives them their deliverance. 

After their deliverance and after their redemption from slavery, He gives the law. He doesn’t give the law as a means of delivering them, but after He has delivered them, then He gives the Mosaic Law as basically family rules, household rules for how His son, the nation Israel, should behave, how they should handle the issues of life.

Next, we are going to look at the contract, the covenant, the Mosaic Covenant. What parties are involved? What promises are made? Then we’ll answer the question, is it true that history can be explained by human actions alone, or is God overseeing history?

This is a major issue if you study history. What are the causative factors in history? If you’re a Marxist, the causes are all economic, and it has to do with the wealthy classes oppressing the lower classes, and we see all of that coming out today. The Bible says that no, the ultimate causative factor is always spiritual. It’s not economics.

I’ve known many believers who look at economics is to look at it totally within the sphere of creation and not recognizing that ultimately cause and effect is determined by God, not by human actions. That is very important to understand. So we’ll go through that. 

Then we’ll go to the third category of the law. Who are the signatories of the covenant? What is the founding sacrifice of the covenant? What is the type of contract or type of covenant and then closing out with the reason that God gave the Israelites for obeying the law. 

They were to obey out of gratitude. It’s not a sort of legalistic list of dos and don’ts, but it is guidelines for how they should live if they are to experience the blessing of God. Blessing of God means to be enriched. It doesn’t always indicate something in a physical, material, or financial way. But it means to be enriched. If they’re going to have a rich life in the nation, then they need to be obedient, and God will bless them.

There’s a list of ways in which God will bless them. If they’re not obedient, then God will be extremely patient in long suffering, but eventually He will bring it to an end through His judgments.

There are six areas related to the characteristics of the covenant. Then one boxed question that we’re looking at in lesson 13. These are covered in about the first 12 and a half pages in the notes.

Slide 6

We looked at Exodus as a picture of the confrontation between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. And we can still see that today. We see various empires that have arisen over the period of the Church Age, that are parts and manifestations of the kingdom of man. And all of this is in contrast to the Kingdom of God, the work that God is doing among mankind.

The phrase the Kingdom of God has a nuance in terms of just His sovereign rule over His creatures. The Messianic Kingdom is distinct from just a general, broad, sovereign rule of God. That’s the specific rule of Jesus Christ fulfilling those promises in the Davidic Covenant and in the Land Covenant, because He will rule over that physical piece of property of the land from the throne of David in Jerusalem.

Slides 7 and 8

Tonight, we shift gears to looking at the law. Last time as we saw Israel coming out of Egypt. That’s a picture of their redemption from slavery. It is analogous to the fact that when we are saved, we are redeemed from slavery to sin. They were redeemed from slavery in Egypt. So that is their redemption. It is prior to the giving of the law.

The law was never a means of salvation either personally or nationally. The nation of Israel at that time is viewed as a saved people. There are numerous times all the way through the Exodus account where the text says that the people believed God. I believe that on that basis that the people who came out were believers.

They were rebellious believers because they had been reared in slavery and they had no appreciation for freedom and individual responsibility, but they are viewed as a saved people. The question that comes in relation to the law is the question, how should a redeemed people live?

First of all, how are they redeemed? They trusted in God. They did what God said to do. They were in the 10^th plague. The blood was applied to the doorpost. That is a picture of the application of the death of Christ by faith in Him. After that, they are given guidelines as to how to live.

All through the New Testament, you have guidelines, you have commands, you have prohibitions, you have statements related to various things that should be done and that should characterize the life of a believer. These are basically household rules, and it’s not to be taken as just sort of a legalistic checklist, which is what happens in a lot of churches.

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a good friend of mine that many of you know, Greg Allen, who’s a pastor up in Pennsylvania. It turns out that one of the churches that Jim and I will be speaking in in Romania, or maybe even in two churches, have a Pentecostal background, and we knew that. Greg told us to be careful. When you go into one of these churches there is on the wall a list of dos and don’ts.

The rules say things like you can’t be there too early, you can’t get there too late. You can’t dress like this. You can’t sit too close to someone else. So, there’s this whole list of dos and don’ts. As long as we’re prepared for that, we’ll just go and teach grace and God will use that.

Greg has contacts there who still work in that area and was telling him about some of the things that we should be careful of. Of course, we would be careful. You never go into somebody else’s house and start trashing their house. You always have to have good manners. We were just going to teach very, very solid, very basic things.

The word is that the people are very excited about us coming and they’re looking forward to it. It should be, at the very least, an interesting time. We have to recognize that when a parent, God the Father, is giving the son guidelines on how to live, it’s not to be viewed as just a legalistic checklist, but it is guidelines for how to do the best in life. 

Slide 9

In Hosea 11:1, in context, it is talking about this adoption of Israel by God. Hosea 11:1 says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Now that’s a historical event. It’s talking about literal Israel in literal Egypt and that they are the adopted son of God. This is later applied by typology to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Here we have this picture that Yahweh is the father over the corporate nation. He is going to emphasize that He has a new relationship with Israel and that He’s going to bring them into a new dimension in their relationship, which means He’s going to take them from being a people to being a nation.

In order to have a nation, what do you need to have? Number one, you need to have a piece of property where you’re going to have the nation. Number two, you’ve got to have people. Number three, you’ve got to have laws. Number four, you’ve got to have a ruler.

Under the Mosaic Covenant, the king is God. He is also their father. This takes us to a new dimension.

Slide 10

What takes place here is that this is the line that God had promised to Abraham.

He initially chose Abraham. Abraham had been born into a family that were pagan. They worshiped the moon. Who worships the moon? Think about this. Where did he live? He lived in the Fertile Crescent. He lived down between the Tigris and Euphrates [rivers] in the southern part of what is now Iraq. They were moon worshipers.

We saw this in Judges, if you remember, when the Midianites were attacking at the time of Gideon and they had camels and the camels had this crescent moon on them. Fast forward to Mohammad. Mohammad took the moon god, one of 360 gods in the Arab pantheon, and kicked out the others and elevated the moon god to be the god, Allah in Islam. It has no relation whatsoever to El, the God of Israel. He elevates Allah to be the god of the Arabs.

It’s really interesting how these ideas keep showing up through history. God chose Abraham. He did not choose Ishmael. He chose Abraham and a son named Isaac, not Ishmael, and then God chose Jacob and not Esau.

This doesn’t mean that Ishmael and Esau were not saved. This isn’t an issue of salvation. God richly blessed both Ishmael and Esau. Through the descendants of Jacob, through his 12 sons and one daughter, Dinah, then you have the development of the people of Israel. The covenant that God made with Abraham did not apply to Ishmael, to Esau, or to the sons of Keturah, who was the wife that Abraham took after Sarah died.

Slide 11 

This is the land that is involved here. So we can visualize it on a map. Here is Goshen, the area up here in the top left of the map you have the Ramses and Pithom. This whole area here really goes down like this. It’s sort of a triangle. It’s the delta of the Nile River. That was where the Israelites lived. They came down and crossed over the Red Sea somewhere down in this vicinity.

It’s approximate. Nobody knows exactly where or exactly how much water was in the Red Sea. It could have at that time gone all the way up to this lake up here near Succoth. We just don’t know. The red circle here indicates the most likely location of Mount Sinai in the Old Testament. Nobody agrees.

There are no five archaeologists that agree on where Mount Sinai is. Most of them will tell you it’s not down here. It’s not the traditional one. I think this is the Sea of Aqaba here, the Gulf of Aqaba. It’s not across over into Saudi Arabia. One of the reasons is there’s precise information given as to how long and how far the distance was that the Israelites traveled from Mount Sinai to Kadesh Barnea.

Kadesh Barnea is located here. You can’t come from down here, which is off the screen, and make it to Kadesh Barnea if you’re traveling at the rate of a caravan. Remember, there are 2.5 million people who are going through the desert. And they could probably make, at best, 8 or 10 miles a day. You’re really limited there.

It’s pretty clear. There’s a lot of good evidence out there. If you go to the Associates for Biblical Research website, you can search for articles by Gordon Franz, that’s F-R-A-N-Z. And Gordon has done an outstanding job of tearing apart all the so-called evidence for a Saudi location for Mount Sinai. Probably the Israelites leave from somewhere in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula and make it to Kadesh Barnea, which I probably would have put a little further northwest. I think that’s maybe a little south.

They’re on the edge of the Promised Land. Randy Price put a map up that showed the extent of the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. One of his maps showed the River of Egypt. See, when God described it to Abraham in Genesis, I think it’s Genesis 15, it’s from the River of Egypt to the Great River, which is the River Euphrates.

For many years, people said the River of Egypt would be the Nile. That would incorporate all the Sinai Peninsula. What’s the problem? The problem is that the text says that they left Mount Sinai. They were not in the land yet. And they went to Kadesh Barnea, which is on the edge of the land. According to Scripture, the Sinai Peninsula is not in the Promised Land. So, you have a wadi that comes down through here, maybe this way. I mean, without a topographical map, you can’t see, but that would be just on the edge of the land that God promised. That’s when they sent the 12 spies out.

Slide 12

But the theological issue, the doctrinal issue, is you see the contrast here between the kingdom of man, which is based on works and achievement, man will save himself, and this is represented in the Old Testament by Babel, which later becomes Babylon, and which defeats the Southern Kingdom, destroys the Temple. Babylon is a picture of the kingdom of man.

I believe a literal Babylon will be rebuilt in the Tribulation period because the word Babel or Babylon always refers to the literal location geographically. It never is used in a symbolic manner to represent just some important city. Babylon always means Babylon. Jerusalem always means Jerusalem. Israel always means Israel.

I thought Mike Stallard did a fabulous job demonstrating that on the first session of the conference last week. God chooses not for salvation, but for the outworking of His redemptive plan. He chooses Abraham and then gives a typological picture of the salvation of the Cross with the lamb without spot or blemish, the application of the blood representing death, and God saves Israel or redeems Israel from slavery.

After saving Israel, God gives them a law, gives them a national anthem, which is at the end of Deuteronomy, and gives them guidance for worship. First tabernacle worship, then when they get into the land, they are to build a permanent temple.

Slide 13

This charts it another way. You have the rules to live by in the Mosaic Law, but first they had to be born. There had to be the birth of the nation, the redemption from slavery in Egypt, and then the giving of the law. So, the giving of the law tells us how a godly nation lives, or it is analogous to how a believer lives.

We are not saved by law. We are saved by grace. We’re saved by grace through faith and not by obedience to the law. When you get into the law, what you discover is that there are 613 commandments. Now, I have never counted them, and I’m not sure how they were counted, but this is the historical view that comes from the rabbis, from Judaism, that they’ve counted that there are 613 commandments.

Slide 14 

Ten of them are what are called the 10 words. Literally in Hebrew, it just says the 10 words. They summarize the key principles that underlie the remainder of the 613 laws. We will see these 10 Commandments here in this chart. That is a tremendous diagram there that shows us the correlation of the 10 Commandments.

The first four commandments are related to worship of God. The next commandments, the remaining six, have to do with how human beings are to relate to one another. The first part deals with man’s relationship to God. The second part is man’s relationship with each other. These laws are the guidance for how they are to live.

Slide 15

With that, we come then to this chart, which gives us an understanding of the comparison of the Mosaic Covenant with the Abrahamic Covenant and the Noahic Covenant. The covenant with Noah and the covenant with Abraham are unconditional covenants. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have conditions within them for experiencing certain blessings, but they are unconditional in that God is not conditioning the fulfillment of the covenant on the behavior of any individual. 

This kind of covenant is a permanent covenant. I’ve kind of grown to like the contrast between permanent and temporary because of the way it is expressed. When you get to Hebrews 8, the fact that it is called the old covenant, the writer says, indicates that it was temporary. It wasn’t perceived as being perfect. And that’s why it is replaced by a new covenant.

If you start with something called the new covenant, what should you be asking? What was the old covenant? You only have two options here. It’s not rocket science. If you have a new covenant, it presupposes the existence of an old covenant. The old covenant is temporary and it’s conditional. It was not designed to be in place forever and ever.

I like the idea of temporary, that word, permanent versus temporary better than conditional and unconditional because there are certain conditions that are still in the others. For example, in the Abrahamic Covenant, God gave them the land. The condition is that if they’re not obedient, they really can’t enjoy the land because God will bring discipline upon them. That really plays out and is developed more in the Mosaic Covenant.

The first covenant is the Noahic Covenant and the parties of the covenant are God on the one hand who makes a covenant with mankind and the animals. In the Abrahamic Covenant, the covenant is narrower. It’s not with all mankind. It’s with Abraham and his descendants through Isaac and Jacob and then the twelve sons.

Then you get to the Mosaic Covenant, and it is with God and the 12 tribes of Israel, the sons of Jacob. When you look at the promises in the covenant with Noah, it’s with all mankind and the animals and the promises that God will not destroy the earth. He will not judge the earth by water again. There will be no more worldwide floods.

In the Abrahamic Covenant, there are three promises. There’s a promise of land or real estate. There is a promise of descendants. The key word in the Hebrew is seed. I like to use that because it’s a word that can mean one or many. You miss some things in the text when it’s translated “descendants” and “descendant”. The translators messed things up in a couple of passages because they miss the shift in the use of seed as plural or singular.

Then in the Mosaic Covenant, there are blessings for obeying all the laws and there are cursings. Now, this isn’t the use of the word “curse” as we way we may think of it. It’s not like we would think of in black magic or juju magic or some kind of witchcraft or something like that. We’re going to put a hex on somebody and a curse on somebody. It’s the idea of God’s judgment, God’s negative discipline on an individual or on a people because of their disobedience to God. It really relates to judgment.

In the terms of the signatories, those who signed the covenant, in the Noahic Covenant, God alone signs the covenant. We saw that, and the sign of that is He put His bow in the clouds, His rainbow.

In the Abrahamic Covenant, God alone passed between the animal halves, and there’s nothing for Abraham to do. In fact, he puts Abraham to sleep, so that it’s very clear that God alone is binding Himself to the terms of the covenant. Then in the Mosaic Covenant, God establishes the covenant with the sign of the Sabbath. That is the picture of the signature.

The founding sacrifice is described in Genesis 8:20–22 as the clean animals, taking one of the clean, each of the clean animals that came off the ark and sacrificing them. With Abraham, he took various animals that God told him, and he cut them in half. And then God alone is symbolized by a torch passed between the halves. In the Mosaic Covenant, Exodus 24:4–8, you have the sacrifice there.

You have the type of covenant, Noahic is unconditional/permanent. The Abrahamic Covenant is unconditional/permanent. The Mosaic Covenant is conditional/temporary. 

Slide 16

Now, in looking at these covenants, you see that each of them gets a little more narrow. The Noahic Covenant went into effect at the end of the Flood when God made the covenant with Noah and there were sacrifices.

What is it that inaugurates a covenant? You need to know this because this gets real confusing when Jesus holds up the cup and says, “This is the new covenant of My blood” and He’s indicating He’s the sacrifice. The sacrifice does not inaugurate a covenant. How do you know that?

What’s the sacrifice for the covenant with David? There isn’t one. There’s also another covenant that God makes with Phineas, who is the high priest at the time of that episode with Balaam and Balak, when Balaam comes up with this great idea that if you just let all your women run into the crowd of the Israelite men, then they’ll all intermarry with these Moabite women, and then that’s going to destroy the Jews.

Phineas calls for everybody to rally around him and he executes everybody who had relations with the Moabite women to keep the line pure. God made a covenant with him that his line would always be the line of the high priest. There’s no sacrifice.

So what inaugurates a covenant? God makes an oath. And that becomes clear. I’m just talking off the top of my head here, but it’s in, I believe it’s in Jeremiah. It’s either in Jeremiah or Ezekiel, where at the time that Christ returns and establishes His Kingdom, the Lord swears an oath. That’s what inaugurates the New Covenant, in my opinion.

It is not inaugurated at the Cross. We’re not in the New Covenant now. There’s a lot of people who think that we are. They would use the term, we’re already there, but not fully there. So, the term is “already, but not yet”. This leads to all kinds of problems. This is what undergirds the view of progressive dispensationalism.

Progressive dispensationalism indicates that the Kingdom is coming progressively in through the Church Age, and it’s inaugurated there on the day of Pentecost, and then it will come in. We just read in my pastor’s group one of the books that Chosen People Ministries has put out, or was it there? It may have been another book. It may have been something else I read.

About 30-something years ago, when I was in a doctoral program at Dallas Seminary, I was in a seminar course on dispensationalism. This was in 1988. And Craig Blaising was the professor. Blaising and Darrell Bock were the two of the three main theologians who were the architects of progressive dispensationalism.

One day I was doing a lot of research at that time on this whole aberration called the Vineyard Movement, Power Evangelism, John Wimber Movement, Wimber Wagner Movement, whatever you want to call it. One of their arguments was this theological idea, of “already not yet” came out of the writings of a theologian at Fuller Seminary named George Ladd. They took that idea, and they said, well, because of that the kingdom is partially here, but not fully here so the sign gifts continue.

I’m in the library one day at Dallas Seminary and ran into Darrell Bock. I’ve known Darrell Bock since we were in master’s program together. I said, “Darrell, what’s keeping you, if you’re going to hold to an already not yet view of the Kingdom, what’s keeping you from validating the John Wimber position that therefore that validates the presence of these miraculous gifts of tongues in the Church Age?” 

He said it’s a non sequitur. It just doesn’t logically follow.

I said, “I disagree with you. It does. It logically follows. How can you validate the Dallas Seminary doctrinal statement on charismatic gifts when you hold to an already not yet view?”

He said, “Because it just doesn’t, it’s not necessary.” Well, I guess he woke up because I read an article by him within the last couple of months where he said that leads to the possibility because the Kingdom is already here in some partial form, it’s already not yet view, that the sign gifts could be present today. So, he changed his mind.

This is one of the problems that happened at Dallas Seminary in the late 80s as their theological department shifted from traditional dispensationalism to progressive dispensationalism, because they had to invent their own new hermeneutic called the complementary hermeneutic, and they adopted the view of a post-Trib theologian by the name of George Ladd, with this already not yet view of the Kingdom, which is absurd. This is just a basic problem that we have, and that’s just one of several problems that developed coming out of the 1980s at Dallas Seminary.

What we have here is the Noahic Covenant that is still in effect today. We have the Abrahamic Covenant that was for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the 12 tribes. Then you have the Mosaic Covenant, which is just for the 12 tribes. So, you see a narrowing of the focus on the parties involved in each one of these covenants.

Slide 17

In the Noahic and Abrahamic Covenants, the focus is on God’s promises and His sovereign assurance that He would fulfill them. They are eternal covenants, everlasting covenants. Then in the Mosaic Covenant, the focus is on God’s righteous expectations of His people. First of all, what does it mean to be God’s son? Second, now that they are God’s son, what are the family responsibilities and house rules? How are they supposed to relate to God as the father? That is what the law is describing.

Lastly, how are they supposed to relate to each other as siblings within the family of Israel?

Slide 18

Another way of looking at this is you have the Noahic Covenant and the Abrahamic Covenant. These tell us what Yahweh is going to do for mankind. In the Mosaic Covenant, it is telling us what God expects of His people.

Slide 19

When you get to this point, Moses wrote out God’s law, God wrote out the 10 Commandments. Then within the covenant, there are stipulations, there are binding promises by God as to what He will do if the nation is obedient and what He will do if the nation is disobedient.

Slide 20

This is very important because God is bound by what was in that covenant to bring upon the Jewish nation, the Israelite nation, the consequences when they fail to make the right responsible choices, Divine Institution number one.

Over here on the left, you have the blessings for keeping the covenant. Notice it’s pretty short. In Leviticus 26, it’s all covered in 13 verses, and it just summarizes things because God is going to basically make everything very prosperous.

It’s an agricultural culture and He’s going to make it very, very fertile. They’re going to have lots of produce. The fields are going to be good. They’re going to have economic prosperity. I mean, when you have an increase of produce from your fields, then you’re going to have economic prosperity. You have to have good weather because the weather and nature have to cooperate together.

This isn’t something that man can accomplish. Only God can do that. There is going to be a direct correlation between their obedience to God and a good economy. I would bet that you can read 10,000 books on economics and not one of them will include a spiritual focus on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the means of having a prosperous economy.

They look at all of the internal cause and effect things that if you do this or do that, everything is within a closed system. It ignores the realities of what is happening in the spiritual realm. What God is saying is not only are you going to have an abundance in your crops, but you’re also going to have military success. “10 will put 10,000 to flight”. It doesn’t have to do just with economics.

It doesn’t have to do with technology. It doesn’t have to do with superior strategy or any of those things. It has to do with the fact that God is going to bless you, and God is going to give the victory to the Israelites. There’s evidence of that in various places as you go forward through the Old Testament. In Joshua the Israelites do not have superior numbers. They don’t have superior experience in military. They do not have superior technology.

What were the three things that the spies came back with? Remember at Kadesh Barnea, in Numbers 13, they send in the 12 spies. Now the mission was to just come back and give a report of what the land was like. They’re doing a reconnaissance. The purpose of the reconnaissance was to get an understanding of what this land was like that God was giving them.

They misinterpreted the mission. That’s why hermeneutics is so important. They thought they were going in to see if they could have victory over the inhabitants of the land. That wasn’t the mission. God had already told them, you’re going to have victory over the inhabitants of the land. I’m going to strengthen you and I’m going before you.

10 spies came back and said they couldn’t have victory. Why? There’s too many of them. We’re outnumbered. Their population is like grasshoppers. Number two, they have strong walls around their cities. And number three, there are giants in the land. We can’t do it.

And Caleb and Joshua said, God told us we can do it and we can do it. And so Israelites went with the ten instead of the two. And the result was they spent the next 40 years wandering around in the desert.

After forty years God gave them military success when they went into the land. Whoever thought of defeating a city, a walled city, by marching around it in silence for six days, and on the seventh day, marching around it seven times, and then shouting and blowing their trumpets, and then the walls fell down. Didn’t have anything to do with military know-how or technology or skill. It had to do with the right relationship with the Lord.

Next you get to these cursings. There are five stages. This is an example of God’s long suffering. He’s not just going to lower the boom on them when they’re disobedient. There’s this increase of the seriousness of the discipline. In stage one, there’s disease and sickness. So they’re going to have some epidemics and they’re going to have some diseases that come, both physical as well as psychological, they will be defeated on the battlefield, and they will have some economic crises. 

In stage two, God’s going to bring famine. In stage three, they will experience the death of their children in these pandemics, and they will see the death of their livestock and a population decrease. In stage four, there’s going to be more starvation, more epidemics, and a crushing military defeat.

That’s what happened when the Assyrians came down into the Southern Kingdom. They were defeated, God sent them back, but they pretty much wiped out most of the cities except for Jerusalem. Then finally, when Nebuchadnezzar came, he had to invade three times before he finally destroyed them. The first two are fourth stage divine discipline.

What’s important here is this is part of a covenant that God made with Israel in the land. He said, I’m giving you this land. If you’re obedient, I’m going to bless you this way. If you’re disobedient, I’m going to turn up the intensity of the discipline in five different stages. This did not apply to any other nation, because it was a contract between the House of Israel, the House of Judah, and God. It wasn’t a contract with France, or with Nigeria, or with the Soviet Union, or the Russian Empire, or the United States, or the British Empire, or anyone else.

There may be similarities, but they’re not the same thing. It is not biblically correct to refer to anything going on in our history as related to the fourth or fifth cycle of discipline, because that is technically and contractually only related to Israel. We have to recognize that this is God’s plan for Israel, not the Gentiles. Last time I looked, we were mostly a Gentile nation. We’re not in the Promised Land. 

Slide 21

Exodus 34:6, “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious—see, God is willing to be long-suffering in our disobedience—The Lord is gracious, long-suffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.” So, the first verse and the first part of the second verse deal with God’s grace. Finally God has to bring judgment.

Slide 22

The question then comes that some people claim that history can be explained by human actions. They say that history has no connection to any “god”. So, is this true? Now this is the box question that starts on page six in the notes. The reason I bring this up is that when I was working on my doctorate in church history, one of the courses that I had to take was historiography. Historiography is the study of how people analyze history.

In just anybody’s view of history, whether you’re talking about somebody like Arnold Toynbee or Spengler or Victor Davis Hanson or anyone, Marx, Karl Marx, anyone, they have no idea of what is it that is the causative factors in history. None of them talk about God or spiritual things. 

What I’ve pointed out from the blessings and the curses of Leviticus 26 is the ultimate cause from God is always going to be related to spiritual truth. He is outside of the realm of His creation. It’s that Creator-creature distinction once again. It’s very important to understand that.

That does not mean that in the power of observation and under the rules of empiricism, there aren’t certain sub-causes. Often those sub-causes are related to spiritual causes. It’s not as simple as what you read in post-enlightenment analysis of anything, because that always excludes the Creator from the analysis of what’s going on.

Slide 23

In this chart, you have how the pagan world approaches and analyzes history. You have event A, and it’s cause and effect to event B. The historians will say it’s political, or they’ll find economic causes, or now we have social justice movements, or it’s all related to social justice or social injustice. They combine some of these together, the social, the economic, and the other. 

Some people will say it’s geographic, and there are certainly geographic factors. But ultimately, it’s always spiritual. Fernand Braudel is an example of looking at the geographic features. When I was a senior in high school, I had an English history teacher that argued for geographic factors. And there are others that come up with other human reasons, or they go with fate and karma.

The truth is we have a God who is a Creator God who oversees all of history. Scripture tells us that God is the sovereign God of all things, including history. He is actively directing the history of the world. Within that history, there is a certain level of freedom, responsible choice, so that things can go one way or another in, perhaps, in a minor stage, but in the broader path, God oversees the ultimate direction. 

Slide 24

So various questions could be asked. Why did Israel suffer losses in its wars? Why did Israel suffer storms? Why did their crops fail? Why did so many Israelites get killed by terrible diseases? Why did the people of Israel lose their land and get exiled into another land?

It didn’t have anything to do with education. It didn’t have to do with environment. It didn’t have to do with global warming or global cooling. It didn’t have to do with any other factor other than their obedience or disobedience to God. The answer is that God’s enforcement of the Mosaic Covenant with Israel is what shaped history.

I have taught for a long time that the key to understanding all of human history is the Abrahamic Covenant, that everything revolves around Israel. If you think about this in a broader context that God said, if you’re obedient, you will have an abundance of crops and you will have success militarily.

How do you think that impacted the nations around Israel? If Israel is going to get the right amount of rain for their crops at the right time, don’t you think that’s going to impact Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and the other countries around. They get blessed by association. Works the other way, too. So if Israel’s disobedient and God’s going to bring the Assyrians down on the Northern Kingdom to take them out, that’s going to mean they’re going to capture Syria, they’re going to capture the area of Lebanon and Phoenicia, and they’re going to capture the Northern Kingdom. All these people are going to be negatively impacted by Israel’s bad decisions.

God’s plan centers around Israel and having the Jewish people in the land. Take a look at what’s happening right now. Israel is in a war that is not like any war they have been in before. I was listening to a podcast the other day. They were bringing out some things that I hadn’t quite put together, and that is that on the very day of the Hamas attack on October 7^th, all over the world, not just in New York, not just in Los Angeles, not just in Chicago, but in London, in Paris, all throughout the world, there were groups that had been put on standby.

They didn’t know when it was going to happen, but they were put on standby and immediately they have the placards and the posters and they’re out on the streets immediately in their anti-Semitic tirades against the Jewish people around the world. This was a worldwide assault on Israel and the Jewish people.

We come back to this biblical viewpoint that Israel is at the center of history. As we move closer to the end times, to the period of the Tribulation, the world seems to be against Israel right now. You have some governments that are standouts, but they’re getting a lot of pressure from Arabs that have come legally or illegally into their nations.

Take Germany for an example or go to Belgium or go to France or go to England, and they can never recover from this onslaught of Moslems that have entered into their countries, that are putting serious pressure on them. I read one report of at least one member of parliament in England that because of all  the intimidation directed toward him, and he was pro-Israel, that he resigned his seat in the parliament, that it was too much for him and his family.

If we’re close to the Rapture … That is a third-class condition. We don’t know whether we’re close or not. It kind of looks that way, but we’re not sure how close is close. When you see what is happening around the world, that’s the picture that you have of the scenario leading up to the beginning of the Tribulation. The whole world is against Israel.

God chose to make Israel His mouthpiece to the world. Through them they were to give the gospel in the Old Testament to the world. Israel is situated there on the east end of the Mediterranean Sea so that all trade routes went through Israel. People would come see what a wonderful thing was happening, how God was blessing this nation, and then they would take that back to their home countries. 

Slide 25 

Israel failed in that. Isaiah 43:10, “ ’You are my witnesses,’ says the Lord, ‘and My servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe Me, and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, nor shall there be after Me. I, even I, am the Lord, and beside Me there is no savior. I have declared and saved, I have proclaimed, and there was no foreign god among you; Therefore you are My witnesses,’ says the Lord, ‘that I am God.’ ” 

Slide 26  

God directs history through His providence. If Israel obeys, they would be blessed, and it has an impact on other nations. When Israel rebels, they are brought under judgment, and it has an impact on other nations.

Slide 27

So, Israel is God’s mouthpiece to the world.

Slide 28 

God called out Abraham. He was developing a counterculture, and God taught Abraham and his descendants about Himself. And Abraham’s descendants were commanded to be a blessing to the world. They would do that as these pagans came and traded and came through Israel, and it would have an impact. Sadly, they did not do that.

Slide 29 

In Exodus 19:3–5, Moses goes up to God and the Lord talks to him and says, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be—that’s a condition there—if you’re obedient, you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people for all the earth is Mine. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

Priests are the intermediaries. Within Israel, you had one tribe. That’s the intermediary. That’s the mediator. That’s the priest. He’s the mediator between God and Israel. Israel was supposed to be the mediator between God and the rest of mankind. They will be restored to that in the Millennial Kingdom. The Kingdom will be in Jerusalem. The Lord Jesus Christ will be ruling and reigning as the Greater Son of David from the throne of David, literal throne of David in literal Jerusalem. The whole world will be blessed because they will be at that time an obedient nation

Slide 30

Amos 3:7, “Surely the Lord God does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.” 

Slide 31

That brings us to the next category. We didn’t make it all the way through, but I’m going to stop here because we’re out of time. The signatories. The signatories we see in Exodus 31:12, “The Lord spoke to Moses saying, ‘Speak also to the children of Israel saying: “Surely my Sabbaths you shall keep, for it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations.” ’ ” 

The signature on the Mosaic Covenant is the Sabbath. It’s observing the Sabbath. “It’s a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.” In the ancient world, they developed international treaties, and it was common practice for the kings to put their seal, or their signature, in the middle of a treaty document.

Slide 32

That’s essentially what you have in the middle of the Ten Commandments. You have this one commandment that is longer than any of the others. It comprises four verses, two of which are fairly long. And we talk about the 10 words.

The Jews have it right. These are 10 words. They’re not 10 commandments. If you look at the one related to the Sabbath, there are one, two, three, four, five commandments. Yeah, I think I’ve counted five, four or five commandments. Remember the Sabbath day, that’s a commandment. Six days you shall work. That’s a commandment. They’re commanded to work for six days, not three days. You shall labor and do all your work. That’s another commandment. That’s your third commandment.

“But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work:”—that’s your fourth commandment—you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.” So this applies to travelers, tourists. They aren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath either. “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and the sea, and all that is in them.”

Slide 33

So what you have is the first three commandments, then you have the seal, the Sabbath, and then you have the six commandments that come after that. That would be what you have there.

Slide 34

Here’s another way of looking at it, another diagram. You shall have no three negatives, remember the Sabbath, and then the remainder of your commands.

Slide 35

In terms of the work week, you would work for six days, rest on the seventh.

I’ll come back and say a couple more things about the Sabbath next week, and then we will go on and pick up the rest of the lesson and try to finish it all up next time.

Closing Prayer 

“Father, thank You for this time that we have had to look at this, to understand how You work in history and that the centerpiece of history is Israel. It’s still Israel, even though they’ve returned to the land, but not in belief. Nevertheless, You are still working out Your plan to bring about the circumstances for the beginning of that horrible future period known as the time of Jacob’s wrath.

“Father, we pray that as we all have friends who are Jewish we can give them the gospel, that You’ll give us open doors, because the more that we can save now, the fewer will be going through this horrible time. Father, we pray for them. And we pray that we would have a greater understanding of how You work in history as a result of this. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”