Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

The Sealing of the Covenant

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Sealing of the Covenant

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 86

Dictation Name: RR171AU86

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. The hour cometh and now is when the true worshiper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Let us pray.

O Lord, our God, who of thy grace and mercy hast made all things for thy purpose and thy glory. We give thanks unto thee that thou hast included us in thy purpose and in thy victory. Grant, O Lord that, day by day, we open our eyes and see thy hand in all things around us, knowing that even the wrath of man shall praise thee, that if the righteous flourish it is that they be destroyed, that thy will shalt be done, thy kingdom shall come, for thou hast so ordained it. Lift our eyes, O Lord, up out of ourselves into the things that of thee, and grant that we behold wondrous things out of thy law. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 24:1-8. The Sealing of the Covenant. Exodus 24:1-8. The Sealing of the Covenant. “And he said unto Moses, Come up unto the LORD, thou, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and worship ye afar off. And Moses alone shall come near the LORD: but they shall not come nigh; neither shall the people go up with him. And Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD, and all the judgments: and all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words which the LORD hath said will we do. And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD, and rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the LORD. And Moses took half of the blood, and put it in basins; and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar. And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient. And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you concerning all these words.”

The sealing of the covenant or its ratification is described in these verses. A covenant is a treaty of law between two parties. Where one party is greater than the other, the covenant of law is also a covenant of grace, so our covenant is at one in the same time a covenant of law and of grace. You cannot dispense with either without destroying the covenant. The penalty for breaking the covenant and the covenant law is death; hence, to make or cut a covenant meant and means the invocation of the death penalty on whichever party breaks the covenant law. It is, of course, impossible for God, whose nature is expressed in the covenant law, to break that law. Whereas for man, lawbreaking was a possibility before the fall and afterwards. As a result, when Israel entered into covenant with God, it opened the door to great blessings and also to certain death. A covenant is, therefore, a blood covenant.

In Leviticus 17:11, we are told, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” Again, in Hebrews 9:22, we have a summation of the biblical doctrine of the covenant and of atonement, “Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” Because the covenant is a blood covenant, life flows from God to His covenant people in so far as they are faithful to the covenant law. Departure from that covenant faith and its law, cuts us off from the life-giving blood and leads to our death. The meaning of communion must be understood in terms of this covenant doctrine. Where the law is not taught there is no grace, and where the law is not taught, there is no communion. There is blasphemy instead. Because of our covenant-breaking, we are under the sentence of death. However, because God the Son assumes the death penalty for us, we are restored to life and the privilege of life to the bread and the wine, to the body and blood of Christ, the God-man.

As preparation is made for the ratification of the covenant, Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu , and the seventy elders are called to the mountain. Nadab and Abihu are Aaron’s two eldest sons and Moses’ nephew. Because of their later pride and arrogance, their presumption, they perished. Moses alone went to the place of revelation. To Moses was given the terms of the covenant. This is the whole of the law. Of course, it is here summarized to mean obedience to every law word that God gives to His people. This is apparent from verse 3, where the people declare, “all the words which the Lord hath said we will do.” This affirmation came after Moses set forth the blessings as well as the judgments of the covenant.

Moses wrote the words given by God and prepared for the ratification of the covenant. An altar was then erected of field stones with twelve pillars. Again, these were simply piles of rock to make small pillars to represent each of the twelve tribes. Two kinds of sacrifices were then offered. First, there were burnt offerings, or holocausts, offerings entirely consumed upon the altar. Then second, there were peace offerings to signify that by God’s atoning work and grace, there was covenant peace between God and His people. Then followed the key act of the covenant after the people’s assent to it. The blood of the burnt offerings had been caught up in basins. Half of this was sprinkled on the altar and half on the people. This blood signified the sharing of life by God and man, and also the promise of death for disobedience to the covenant. McGregor wrote, and I quote, “The sacrifice on this occasion of constituting the covenant relationship is the one sacrifice which, under the Old Testament, was not required to be repeated. It was the foundation of all, the blood and sacrifice representing life offered for sin is immediately for the altar, as the offering is unto God. But in this case, He, the primary covenanter, here appears as bringing men into most vitally close relation to Himself, making them one with Himself in the essential transaction. In heathen lands, men employed bleeding sacrificed and the sealing of compacts with various shades of meaning. There was always, in that form, the substance of meaning: The highest conceivable degree of sacredness in binding parties to the covenant or contract. Here, the living God, as the most sacred mystery of revealed religion, namely propitiation through bleeding sacrifice, and men accepting this His covenant, set their seal to what springs to man from the most sacred fountain of new life. Namely, obligation to obey the revealed will of God. The expression is literally ‘upon all these words, on the footing of them all.’ The sprinkling on the people is, in Hebrews 9:19, made the reach the book and all the people, and there are details given of the process which are not specified in Exodus.”

This covenantal act of ratification is very similar to the ancient rite of blood brotherhood. In such covenance, two men mingled their bloods, often the wrist was cut and the two wrists placed together to indicate the new relationship, the covenant in blood. There is a difference between such covenants and God’s covenant. The same requirement of death for faithlessness to the covenant is present, but in God’s covenant, both here and at Golgotha, the blood comes from an innocent and unblemished animal. All the same, this sacrificial blood represented both parties. Jesus Christ as the lamb of God is God incarnate, and thus, as very man of very man assumes the death penalty for the violation of the covenant for all members of His new humanity as our new Adam.

In verse 7, we are told that the book of the covenant was read to all the people. The law was given to Israel as the terms of the covenant: life for faithfulness, death for unfaithfulness. In Jesus Christ, the law is perfectly kept by this last Adam, our federal head, and for us, the law is the way of holiness for the new humanity in Christ.

The book of the covenant met the legal terms of the treaty law. In verse 8, we have a reference to the blood of the covenant. In Matthew 26:28, our Lord cites this phrase, declaring that His blood is the blood of the new or renewed covenant or testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. Now this was a startling phrase to be used by someone for himself. It tells us of how blinded the disciples were at that time, by all priest’s conceptions, and the priest’s suppositions they brought from their Judaic faith, that they did not fully grasp what he was saying, and it tells us how blind we all can be when we of not choose not to hear, when it goes against the grain of our expectations as it did with the disciples.

In verse 6, we see that half the blood was sprinkled upon the altar. The reason is that here the altar is a representative of God, as the first and principle party to the covenant, and the twelve pillars represent the twelve tribes of the people as the other party, and between these two covenanting parties, Moses acted as real and also as the typical mediator, representing Christ.

In Christian terminology, blood has become a metaphor for salvation, and this very clearly has biblical roots. For example, in 1 Peter 1:18-19 we are told, “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” Because the covenant and the blood are separated in modern though, which is not covenantal, the meaning of salvation is diminished and it begins to wane. Where people talk about the blood of Jesus saving us without talking about the covenant, they drift steadily away from the faith. When the covenant is neglected or forgotten, the law is also forgotten and the result is antinomianism. Antinomianism is individualistic, it is not covenantal.

These verses and Exodus 24 as a whole, militate strongly against a temper which arose later in Israel, a belief in democracy with God and a rejection of hierarchy. In Numbers 16:1-40, we have an account of the rebellion of Korah, Dathan, Abirum and their followers. They wanted equality in the modern sense. Because all were members of the covenant, these men claimed that all were equally holy and hence, rejected all human authority in religious matters. Every man was as good in his opinions as anyone else.

But Exodus 24, the whole chapter, gives us various concentric circles of the approach to God. First, we have the people as a whole. Of them, it is said, “They shall not come nigh,” verse 2. The fact that they were the covenant people did not give them a release from authority or station, they had to stay on the plain. Second, another circle was of the seventy elders, Aaron and his two sons. They were told in verse 1, “Worship ye from afar,” so they went up the mountain only so far. Third, Joshua, as Moses’ minister and aid, was able to go further but not as far as Moses, and then, fourth, Moses alone was in the final circle with God. By the grace of God, Israel was a privileged people, but as Chadwick observed a long time ago, and I quote, “In privilege itself, there are degrees.”

There is a very subtle but also important point in this ratification of the covenant to which Lange{?} called attention more than a century ago. He said, and I quote, “It is quite in accordance with the legal standpoint that Moses at first pours out the blood designed for God at the altar of God, thereby he symbolically effects a general and complete surrender of the people to God, but not till after he has read the book of the covenant and the people have given their fullest assent does he sprinkle the people with the other half of the blood of the offering, which till then was kept in the basin while he calls the blood of the covenant, which he calls the blood of the covenant that has been completed. The covenant cannot be separated from the law. The covenant establishes fellowship with God, and there is no fellowship apart from the blood of the covenant and the covenant law. The covenant was and is a legal act, a contract. Covenant, compact, contract, treaty, they are all the same meaning. The covenant is not only a legal act, it is an act of grace on God’s part. Israel was thus a privileged people, and its judgment came because it chose to regard its privilege as a natural right to all born of Abraham.

Today, the churches in the various nations of the western world see themselves as having a similar natural right and superiority. Unless they repent, they too shall perish. One more interesting sidelight: Covenant breaking between nations, in Antiquity, was an act of war, and it normally brought swift and often total vengeance. It could mean the obliteration of a people, and some would thereupon remove the population from the land and scatter them among other peoples, because to have violated a treaty was the ultimate act of lawlessness.

Modern treaties or covenants are thus pale relics of what their names imply. They are made now adays between nations for strategic purposes and to be broken at will. Over the centuries, the decline of the permanence of treaties has gone hand-in-hand with a rise of humanistic premises. Today, it is not only nations which rallied contracts or covenants, treaties at will, but people and corporations as well. Almost thirty years ago, a lawyer told me that, while he did not say this to clients normally, coming to a lawyer to have a contract written out and signed and solemnly affirmed by one and all, was a waste of time, because neither individuals, nor corporations, nor the courts, nor the federal government regarded contracts as binding, and they could be set aside so easily.

A man’s word now, nor a nation’s word, nor a corporation’s, nor a union’s has a binding power, nor a written covenant or contract. Thus indeed, in terms of what was once regarded as the most important fact of any relationship among men, groups of men and nations, the covenant or contract, or treaty, or compact, is today regarded as nothing. It tells us how far gone the world is, and how a return to covenantalism is urgent, and the sad fact is the church, which is a covenant organization, today has little awareness of the very meaning of the name they sometimes carry as their church’s name. Let us pray.

Our Father, they have made void thy law, and the nations now set themselves up as above their word, as above any obligation, any binding power, and men and groups of men are faithless to their word also. O revive us again, make us again a godly people, a people who believe and obey thy word, who stand behind their own word under thee, who are a righteous, a just people. Cleanse us as individuals, as groups, and as nations of our manifold iniquities, and by thy grace, make us a holy covenanted people. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] It’s interesting that although the courts will set aside contracts, they expect their own orders to be {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, and that’s tyranny. God Himself lives by His covenant with man, but the courts feel they are above anything, and their word must be obeyed, but they set aside all other contracts and covenants. That indicates the extent to which the courts are playing God. Playing God in a blasphemous way and they are antinomian gods. They recognize no law except their will at the moment, and they change their mind at will. We are really in a frightful state when even the courts of law that are supposed to uphold the law, and law is an aspect of the covenant, it is inseparable from the covenant, the law IS a covenant, when even the courts despise the validity of the law, as it binds men to men. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Is there a connection between the method that God used to seal the covenant here in this passage and the method He used with Abraham to seal the covenant in Genesis 15, the dividing of the animals . . .

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] . . . and if so, wouldn’t this show a connection between law and grace?

[Rushdoony] Yes. The divided animals were to signify death that would befall both parties, and Moses walked between the two to indicate that he was, at the time, as it were, a type of Christ, a mediator, so that he was both one party to the covenant and also used by God to effectuate it. So, that covenant as every covenant was an aspect of one and the same covenant. The covenant with Abraham is the one which is renewed in Moses, and then renewed in Christ. The one covenant from the beginning of time. Going back, of course, to the covenant of God with man, in the garden. Any other questions or comments? You can see how, when the covenant goes out of the church, it goes out of every day life. We have made religion individualistic, and it centers entirely on the individual and his salvation which is, of course, important, but when you strip it of everything else, when you separate it from the covenant, the whole system in time erodes, and society breaks down because there is no longer the covenantal aspect that binds man to man, and man to God. Without covenant, there is soon no law, and this is our situation today. This is why we are a lawless people. Yes?

[Audience] At what point in church history did the church start talking about the Old Testament and the New Testament, and that seems to be a big point today in terms of we’re no longer under that covenant or under this covenant.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the first usage of Old and New came with Marcion, who felt the Old was irrelevant and it belonged to a God of law; whereas, the New Testament, according to him, was no longer law and justice, but Christ and grace, and of course, the Abbet Joachim Fiore, in the Middle Ages, carried that a step further and said the third age, which of course, since Hegel and especially in the twentieth century, has become very common. We are now supposedly, in the third age, beyond law and beyond grace, in the realm of the spirit and of love, and this kind of heretical thinking has predominated. Well, with Marcion’s thinking, the terminology “Old” and “New” was established and lingered. I’ve indicated some of the examples of how it came to the fore and commanded various groups. The spiritual Franciscans were Joachimites and the Medieval church suppressed them as dangerous because they were going to dissolve everything. They were going to dissolve various aspects of society, they were going to dissolve property, and so on, to have a purely spiritual and loving fraternity of all men. Such groups, including the Adamites, who believed they were going to be in this garden of eden era by professing to live exclusively in the spirit, became very prevalent at the time of the Reformation. This kind of thinking, in many but not all Anabaptist circles, began to predominate. Within the English tradition, the Quakers represented this. They believed that the inner light replaced the Bible, and some of the extremists felt that they were a walking Bible. So, this kind of thinking has been very, very prevalent.

An example of it in the early church was the Montanists, and they sucked in some very important people for a time, including Tertullian, one of the great of the early church fathers. So, it has had a long history, it has been building up, and whenever it wells up, you have a radical lawlessness. Yes?

[Audience] When the Catholics celebrated the Tridentain{?} Mass, they read at each service parallel passages from the Old and the New Testaments.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and in many of the Protestant services of communion, the service has to be prefaced with a reading of the Ten Commandments, either by the pastor or responsively, congregation and people, to indicate that this is the covenant. Unfortunately, that practice is beginning to disappear in many churches. Yes?

[Audience] One of the things that I’ve noticed is that when people come to the Lord, a lot of times if there’s not an emotional response they’ll tend to doubt their salvation, and I just realized that, as a man, if I understand the covenant and I understand the contract I have with God, that I don’t have any problem with my faith because that’s something that I can understand. I’ve got a concrete document, if you will, that I can understand and understand my relationship with the Lord, and I think not teaching the covenant has done a great disservice to a lot of people who will respond that way.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They feel then it depends upon their emotional response and feelings, rather than the fact that it’s done, it’s a legal fact, that their salvation was legally accomplished in Christ, and their emotional variations have nothing to do with our salvation. Yes? Tim?

[Audience] Yeah, about what century was it that this particular heresy {?} became a minority opinion?

[Rushdoony] This has triumphed especially in this century, and it began its sway early in the last century. In this country, it was with the Cambellites, or the Church or Christ, or the Disciples of Christ that it took hold. The famous sermon by Alexander Cambell against law, and all the churches at that time, in the first half of the last century, viewed it with horror, but by mid-century, even though they were anti-Cambellite, the doctrine had seeped in to all of them, and the last stronghold was in the southern Presbyterian church, but in 1869, the general assembly of the southern church specifically denied the covenantal legal aspect of their faith. So, since then it has regressed steadily and we see its full flowering today. This is, of course, one reason why there is such an antipathy to theonomic thinking, and we are so heavily under attack, but it’s also one reason for our success also, because it has created such a void. It has created a situation where immorality is no longer considered a problem where there are actually people who quietly believe that we are not under such laws as “thou shalt not commit adultery,” and this is shocking some people into awakening to this. I know because various pastors have told me so. Any further questions? Yes?

[Audience] In light of your comments about the Marcionism, could you briefly comment on Jeremiah 31:31-32’s meaning? “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel,” {?} like the old one?

[Rushdoony] Yes. All he says is, verse 33, “After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” What He says is, that with the coming of Christ, the covenant will be renewed, and now that because the people in the covenant are justified in Christ and made a new creation, it will now be a part of their new nature, so the covenant is written in our hearts. It is a part now of our being, and as Christians, we do not desire to break the law, but any urge we may have towards law breaking distresses us and troubles us because we are the people of the law. Not perfectly sanctified, but moving in that direction. This was seen as fulfilled by Christ in the early church. Well, if there are no further questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee for the covenant made and remade with thy saints of old, and renewed unto us in Jesus Christ, our redeemer. We thank thee that He is our next of kin, assumed the death penalty for us, destroyed the power of sin and death for His new humanity, and sits now at thy right hand as king over all creation. Make us mindful that we are citizens of no mean city, the City of God, and that we are the people of victory, and that we have a calling to overcome all things in Christ and to be more than conquerors. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.