The Laws of Israel

Israel was constituted a THEOCRACY, the Lord spoke continually about His relationship with them, - “I am the LORD your God.” Israel was a nation with a comprehensive system of worship which embraced every part of their lives, based on the tabernacle and later the temple. Leviticus shows to us this comprehensive system of sacrifices, feasts and the recurring weekly sabbath day. Their personal lives were prescribed/governed by the Laws of God and the sacrifices were in place to deal with their sin.

One immediately asks the question – did it work? Were lives lived according to God’s holy laws? However, we have to ask the primary question which profoundly affects everything else – did they believe in the LORD and did they honour him as their God. This is spirituality which determines their morality and their ethical living. The biggest obstacle to believing God was their strong rebellion and their refusal to believe God, which I believe resulted from their awful years of slavery. However, sin is endemic in the human race as we know from Scripture, the old Puritans called it “inbred sin” and roots in the sin of our first parents. The whole issue of their rebellion, their anger, their refusal of Moses’ authority comes to a head in the book of Numbers, but it continually erupts throughout their history – from Egypt onwards throughout the Old Testament.

Repentance means that I acknowledge/confess my sinfulness and come to God, acknowledging that I have sinned against my God – as an Israelite the LORD is my God due to my birth and my ethnicity! As a non-Jew I really cannot get my head inside that of an Israelite. I don’t know how to think, to act, or to live under the laws of God. I have a book entitled, “Thinking Black” by Dan Crawford a Brethren missionary to Africa, the subtitle is “22 Years in the African bush without a break”

– Dan had lived exclusively with his African brothers so long and so intimately that he believed that he could think their thoughts with them – he had got inside their thinking by living among them.

Imagine, yourself as a Gentile convert from paganism and meeting your Jewish brother for the first time in your new house church. You would have been so different in your thinking, your values, and your lifestyle. The only real picture we gain of a practising Jew in the context of the New Testament is from the apostle Paul, who described his former thinking, his values and his lifestyle in Philippians and there he describes that when he became a Christian, he counted everything to do with his past life in Judaism as dung that he might know Christ!

What I am saying is that the entire system of law, sacrifice, feasts, history, and teaching all combined to produce a certain type of person, but without God the whole system was a catastrophe. Loving God, living a righteous life as the people of God in the context of home, community and temple would have prepared the nations of the world for the coming of Jesus Christ to the earth. Instead, He came to an occupied nation which was confined and exclusive in their religion, Christ’s own Jewish people disbelieved in Him, scorned Him, rejected Him, crucified Him, and blasphemed Him by crying His blood upon them as a curse. The same deep-seated rebellion against God characterises all the races of men.