Believe!

Let us join once again with the Israelites.  The Jewish kingdom became divided. By the end of the Old Testament, more than half of it (ten of the twelve tribes of Israel) literally disappear from history.  The story of the Jewish nation includes cycles of revival and disaster, the latter was always brought about by disobedience to God. They are again removed from the promise land and placed among unbelievers in Babylon; this time their exile lasted for just seventy years.  They may then return to their land, but this time, on the condition that they pay taxes to Persia. By the end of the Old Testament, they are trickling back to Jerusalem but, as a nation, they were still stubbornly inclined to turn away from God. 

The Old Testament then, is a history of that small subset of the ancient population who chose to follow the God of their creation.   In the Old Testament, God gives the Jewish nation the ten commandments and instructions for operating a fair and just court system.  In fact, while it is now in vogue to remove the ten commandments from our courthouse, our modern legal system is largely based on this Judeo-Christian legacy.

This is a good time to address the rest of the Jewish law. God did not stop with the ten commandments, in fact, He dedicated rules for every aspect of Jewish life and worship. The Jewish law was, in essence, God’s first agreement, or covenant, with His chosen people and that “first covenant” is where we get the idea of the Old Testament. The Old Testament describes life under God’s “legal” agreement with the Jews.

“The law” was demanding, and it was all but impossible to follow in exactitude. As a result, man was prone to disobey God, or to “sin,” and Jewish law required that atonement be made for sin (some form of reparation). God’s specific requirement for that was that a blood sacrifice should be made. Now, the Jews were an agrarian nation and their wealth lay in their livestock. Sacrifices then, were made from among their flock. Further, any animal sacrificed to God had to be flawless; it had to be from the very best of the flock and, as a result, have the greatest value to the individual offering the sacrifice; sin had to cost its perpetrator something. The idea of animal sacrifice seems both messy and cruel to our modern minds, but it fit well to the Old Testament time period. Most importantly, this sacrificial process became the template for God’s ultimate rescue plan; a final, once-and-for-all, blood sacrifice. The idea of this ultimate sacrifice is that, through his free will, man could choose to accept this once-and-for-all sacrifice, be freed from his sin, and once again stand pure in God’s sight. That sacrifice, of course, involves Jesus Christ, as rescuer and savior. This new agreement with man, one that includes salvation through God’s grace and a one time sacrifice made by our God himself (in the personage of Jesus), is God’s “new covenant” with man and is the basis for what we now call the New Testament.

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