The Covenant with Moses & the Passover
After the covenant with Abraham, we don’t have a disastrous fall like we did with Adam or Noah. Instead, the story of Scripture proceeds to fulfill in stages these promises that were given to Abraham. Of course, that first promise given to Abraham was that he would become a great nation. In the latter half of the Book of Genesis and the Book of Exodus, we see this being fulfilled.
God arranges for Abraham’s descendants to go down to Egypt, a land where they have peace and safety. There, they become very numerous, numerous enough to be a great nation but then they just need a few other things in order to really be that great body, that great nation that God is calling them to be. They need law, and they need land. Law makes a difference between a mob of related peoples and a civil society. Land makes the difference between nomads and an actual nation.
God’s people are numerous but they need law and land. God sends Moses to take them out of Egypt. We know the story of the plagues, which were judgments on Egypt’s gods really, if we had time to go into it. After all Egypt’s gods are defeated, the people of Israel are about to leave and Moses leads them in a very important covenant meal which we call the Passover. A meal and a blood ritual which marks their transition from slavery to freedom.
The Passover is so important for us, of course, because it is a premonition, a type, ultimately of the Eucharist which is the meal and the blood ritual that we participate in, that marks our transition from a life of sin to a life of freedom as a part of the glorious family of God. Moses leads the people through the first Passover, that meal marks their moment of freedom and then they leave the land of Egypt, they go out into the desert and God brings them through Moses as their leader to Mt. Sinai, where Moses gives them law (the Ten Commandments) in the context of renewing a covenant with them. In Exodus 24, Moses sprinkles blood on the people of Israel as a covenant sign that they are becoming blood-kin to God, becoming part of the divine family.
Moses would have led them immediately into the promised land so that they could be that great nation, but unfortunately, the people of Israel sinned through rejecting God and turning back to Egyptian idolatry which was the golden calf. That story, of course, is recorded in Exodus 32. They get impatient with Moses and, oh so quickly, they go back to Egyptian bull-worship which is the kind of idolatry that they were family with in their previous home. The ancient rabbis said, “What the apple was to Adam, the bull was to Israel.”
Israel falls into sin. That creates many negative ramifications or results. One of the results of the fall of Israel into sin is that many, many more laws are added into the covenant that they have with God. We see all these additional laws in the latter half of Exodus, the Book of Leviticus, the Books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. All those laws are added into the covenant relationship after the sin with the calf. These laws have a penitential purpose, or they’re given for the purpose of reparation.
If we had time to go into this a little bit more, we’d see how these different laws were meant to address the problem of sin and to give the people of Israel a way of making reparation to God for these sins. Unfortunately, the covenant with Moses had a lot of potential, but as a result of [the Israelites’] sin, it becomes burdened down with these laws that are very difficult for the people of Israel to follow perfectly. That is going to set up the dynamic for the rest of Israel’s history as we move forward.
Let’s talk about the relevance to evangelism of the Mosaic covenant. In a lot of evangelistic situations, we are not going to intentionally bring up the covenant with Moses. It may arise because oftentimes, what are perceived to be the harsh laws of the Old Testament are hard for people to understand and they become a stumbling block. We may be trying to share the Gospel with somebody and they’ll raise this issue of “what about all those commands not to eat fruit bats in the Old Testament or all these sacrifices that the people had to offer for their sins? What was going on, that seems stupid and nonsensical to me, so why was this in the Bible?”
It’s important that we understand that those laws and those rituals that were given to the people of Israel really were symbolic, first of all, and also, they were given for penance. It was a result of their sin with the calf that they received the large body of those laws which sometimes don’t seem to make a lot of sense to us. If we had an opportunity to go into all those laws, we see that they really did make psychological and religious sense for the people of Israel to perform in the situation that they were in.
For example, the animal sacrifices that God commands for the people of Israel to perform after the sin with the golden calf were kind of symbolic sacrifices of the gods of Egypt because these different animals that were offered, for example, the ram, the ram was the sacred animal of the Egyptian sun god. When the people of Israel sacrificed rams to the Lord God, they were sacrificing the symbol of Egypt’s chief god to their own Deity. That was a way of tearing the people of Israel away from the Egyptian idolatry that they had been so involved in. There is that kind of dynamic with most of the laws of Moses, if we had an opportunity to go through them one-by-one.
To recap, the laws were given as penances and they were given to help the people of Israel to break away from the paganism that they had been associated with. That is, in a nutshell, the purpose of that great body of law. It’s helpful to know that in case we have to address that in a discussion that we’re involved in when we’re trying to share the good news with somebody who knows a little bit about the Bible and is troubled how to understand the Old Testament laws.