In turn, the people
of the Creator God would point to their covenant-making-and-keeping God as the
source of all blessing, bringing Him glory through reflecting His glory into
the world, and causing all peoples and all of creation to desire the blessings
of His covenant as well. It would be communicated and understood that these
blessings could be had by submitting to the requirements of the covenant and
thereby joining with the covenant people. This submission to and
adherence to the requirements of covenant would confer a positive covenant
status. Therefore, a person would be justified. That person would
be looked upon, by the Creator God, as being righteous. That person would
have received his or her justification.
What were the
additional requirements that were put upon the Creator God’s covenant people in
association with the law that was delivered to them with a charge to keep?
The requirements are summed up quite nicely and succinctly in the twenty-sixth
chapter of Leviticus. There the covenant 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 to break it down
to basics, and realizing that the requirements of the law were expected to be
kept (and probably could be met), the covenant people of the Creator God (reiterating
here) 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 same chapter, their God outlines curses and
blessings to be experienced for either obedience or disobedience to these basic
principles. This can be observed again in the later chapters of
Deuteronomy. This repetition is far more
extensive, though it comes without a repetition of the three fundamental issues
that prefaced the Levitical presentation. There, the Creator God simply
speaks of following His commandments that He had delivered to those that had
been charged to carry out His will in and for the world.
It must be said that,
in each instance, the covenant that is set forth by the Creator God is based
upon a belief in that God, in His power to perform, and in His faithfulness to
carry out these covenants. This belief, naturally, is set within a trust
in that God. Adam is presented as one that did not believe. He is
shown to be one that was faithless in regards to the first covenant. With
the Scriptural record as it is, 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 that was said to be placed upon the ground, it can be
imagined that he was moved to a position of trusting belief in the God of covenants.
Noah, in contrast to
Adam, is said to have been righteous, somehow believing in the word of the
Creator God before the promised flood would come, so it is reasonable to
presume that he believed his God and took Him at His word, with this being
especially so 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.” As it would ultimately be the case for Israel and
renewed Israel post-Christ, it was his belief that brought Abraham into a
positive covenant standing, as this was the mark of the Creator God’s covenant
with Him (though circumcision would be added). This can basically be said
to be true of Isaac and Jacob as well.
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