After God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt, His people spent the next eleven months on the other side of the Red Sea at Mount Sinai. Moses went up the mountain to speak with God, and He said to Moses, “This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob” (Exodus 19:3 NIV). He was reminding the Israelites that they were part of the promise He had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for their descendants.
On Mount Sinai, God gave Moses a covenant – a binding agreement – for His people. He promised, “If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6 NIV).
God didn’t give the Israelites rules to follow so they could become His people; God gave them His commandments because they already were his people. It was like a family relationship with them; parents give rules to their children. God was giving His people guidelines so they could learn to live as His people
This is important to understand, because God wasn’t speaking to everybody. God was only speaking to Israel. These were not our commandments, our rituals, our feasts. This was not our covenant. Some of the commandments seem strange to our modern minds. God gave them 613 rules to keep – rules about how to dress, how to conduct sexual relationships, what you could and could not eat, how to plant your crops, how to parent your children.
There were also rules that are hard to wrestle with, like how to treat your slaves properly. God wasn’t condoning slavery, though. He gave the Israelites guidelines to live a life that was more moral than the rest of the people around them. They weren’t perfect rules for a perfect society; they were rules to live better in the society they had. God met His people where they were, but He did not want them to stay where they were.
Here’s the important thing to remember: these laws were not intended to be permanent. God was working on something better and something new.
1400 years later, a carpenter from Nazareth was that new thing. Jesus came because it was time for a new covenant. He said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17 NIV). The Mosaic Covenant wasn’t a bad thing that had to be abolished, but it had been a good thing whose purpose was now completed.
Jesus taught this with an illustration, as He often did. Jesus said, “Don’t take an old piece of clothing and combine it with a new piece of clothing, and don’t put new wine in an old wine wineskin.” The old and the new are incompatible. You cannot hold onto both at the same time.
He was rebuking the religious establishment of the day. God had told them since the days of the Old Testament that He would send a Messiah, but they refused to believe that’s who Jesus was. God was doing a new work in their midst, and they refused to embrace it.
When Jesus gave them the wine, he said, “this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Luke 22:20 NIV). Jesus had not stepped onto the pages of history to improve the old. The old garment, the old wineskin – those were Judaism. Jesus was the new garment, the new wineskin, and the two were not compatible. He came to introduce us to something new.
The new covenant Jesus offered had only two commandments: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:38-40 NIV). In other words: love God and love people.
This Advent season, be thankful that Jesus came to show us a new and better way. He calls to us, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest ... For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30 NIV).
