These additional expectations were put in place because, hearkening back to His covenant with Abraham, God desired to bless all peoples through His covenant people. This would be accomplished because He was going to bless His covenant people if they fulfilled their end of the covenant, which would mean that they were “justified” before God. All peoples would then see the blessings upon God’s covenant people and be drawn to those same people. God’s people, in turn, would point to their covenant God as the source of all blessing, bringing Him glory, and causing them to desire the blessings of His covenant as well. These blessings would be had by submitting to the requirements of the covenant. This submission to and adherence to the requirements of covenant would confer a positive covenant status. Therefore, they would be justified. They would be looked upon, by God, as being righteous. They would have received their justification.
What were the additional requirements that were put upon God’s covenant people in association with the law that was given to them? The requirements are summed up quite nicely and succinctly in Leviticus. God says, “You must not make for yourselves idols, so you must not set up for yourselves a carved image or a pillar, and you must not place a sculpted stone in your land to bow down before it, for I am the Lord your God. You must keep My Sabbaths and reverence My sanctuary. I am the Lord” (26:1-2). So basically, God’s covenant people are instructed to avoid idolatry, to keep the Sabbaths (feasts/set times), and to reverence His sanctuary (tabernacle and temple). Following that, for the remainder of the chapter, God outlines curses and blessings to be experienced for either obedience or disobedience to these basic principles. We see this again in the later chapters of Deuteronomy, although far more extensively, and without a repetition of the three fundamental issues. There, God simply speaks of following His commandments that had been given.
Truly, it must be said that, in each instance, the covenant that is set forth by God is based upon a belief in God, in His power, and in His faithfulness to carry out these covenants. This belief, naturally, is set within a trust in God. Belief sprung from faith. Adam did not believe. He was faithless in regards to the first covenant. One is left only to wonder at Adam’s response to the second covenant. However, as Adam would begin to experience the corruption of his physical body as it moved towards the inevitable and promised death, along with the labor and toil with which he had to deal throughout his life because of the curse placed upon the ground, we can imagine that he was moved to a position of trusting belief. Noah believed God before the promised flood, so it is reasonable to presume that he believed God, and took Him at His word, after the promise had come to pass. It is said that Abraham believed God, and that this was counted for him as “righteousness” or “justification.” It was his belief that brought Abraham into a positive covenant standing. This can basically be said to be true of Isaac and Jacob as well.
While it is true that Jacob’s descendants (Israel) were given a set of requirements to go along with the circumcision that had been established with Abraham, and that the overall history of those descendants that is presented in the Scriptures is one in which the predominant theme is a violation of those requirements, it can be said that their covenant was also based on a trusting belief. Regardless of the fact that there were required actions associated with receiving the blessings of the covenant, their performance of those actions, or avoidance of those actions, would still be based on a belief in their God, in His power, and in His faithfulness to carry out the associated promises.
Ultimately, their justification (righteousness) was going to be based upon a belief in God’s righteousness (covenant faithfulness). What we see in the Scriptures is that Israel did not believe in their God or His promises. There was no faith. This would result in the division of Israel into northern and southern kingdoms (Israel and Judah), and the destruction and captivity and dispersion of the northern kingdom (Israel) by Assyria, the destruction and captivity of the southern kingdom (Judah) by Babylon. When Judah, under the Persians, under the leadership of Ezra, returned to the land of Judah, they would so with the clear understanding that all of the destruction that had come upon them was the fulfillment of God’s promised curses for disobedience to His law. They no longer needed to be convinced of God’s power and righteousness. They no longer lacked understanding of what it would take for them to be justified. From that point, with direction from both Ezra and Nehemiah, there would be an enthusiastic effort to uphold the covenantal requirements, so that God would provide His people with blessings.
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