law and gospel:continuum or contrast… a compendium (1)

The relationship between Law and Gospel, or, perhaps more accurately, between the Mosaic Covenant and the New Covenant, is of continual interest to me.  Not least, I confess, because it seems to me a lot of people get it badly wrong.  Now I am presumptuous enough to think I have got at least the big questions about the relationship pretty well right, though the detail can throw up some knotty problems.

This is the first of an intermittent series of blogs that will focus on aspects of this relationship (perhaps especially contrasts) as from time to time I reflect on them.  Below is the first.

A foundational distinction between the OC and the NC is that members of the OC are not presumed regenerate whereas members of the NC are.  This goes against the tide of all who claim the OC is simply a divine call for obedience by a redeemed people much like the NC.  It is not.  The OC says, ‘Do this and live’ (Lev 18:5).  It offers life, it does not assume it.  The NC by contrast is ‘the law written on the heart’; life is intrinsic to NC people.

This contrast is implicit in the words of Jeremiah,

Jer 31:31-34 (ESV)

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

The people of God under the OC needed to hear and respond to the gospel proclamation (know the Lord) for they did not all believe.  Jeremiah recognises their history is a story of unbelief.  Conversely, the NC people of God are those who ‘know the Lord from the greatest to the least’.  The OC consists of those who profess to be God’s people: the new covenant consists of those who are God’s people.  The implications for ‘one covenant’ folks and paedobaptism should be obvious.