This is messed up Dannii. By Isaiah we have the idea of a faithful remnant of true believers, those who have hearts that are faithful to Israel.
I don’t understand your point here. Can you explain what you mean, and what you think is wrong with what I said?
You try to present Covenant Theology as incomplete and not addressing certain previous covenants, but when push comes to shove you can’t distinguish what that actually means and how your view is actually any different to Covenant theology.
I thought I’ve been doing that very clearly: no Covenant of Grace! No monolithic amorphous homogeneous people of God. Instead there are the people who share Abraham’s faith, each of whom God has made some specific promises to and bound himself to keep them in specific covenants. The Christ’s bride is one very important subset of those who share Abraham’s faith, but there are others, and some promises God made to the others he didn’t make to the Christ’s bride.
You argue tooth and nail for Phineas’s covenant still being intact, but when the rubber hits the road he’s smuggled in not as a priest but as a teacher. You argue for Israel still being God’s special bride, but when it comes down to it they only have an invite, just like everyone else on the planet.
I care about details. In Numbers 25 God says that he makes a covenant of peace with Phinehas and gave him and his descendants a permanent right to the priesthood. When looking at the rest of the Torah we can see that the priests had a wide range of responsibilities. Numbers 25 does not say that Phinehas’ descendants will always perform sacrifices, and so if such a situation arose where sacrifices were no longer needed, nothing in the covenant suggests their priesthood would be diminished in any way because that responsibility was no longer relevant.
In Exodus 19 God says that if Israel obeys him then “out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” He does not promise that Israel will be a spiritual nation. He doesn’t promise that every individual Israelite will be reconciled to him. He doesn’t promise that every Israelite will be indwelt by his spirit, or that every Israelite will be brought into the Godhead. In fact he doesn’t promise that those last two will happen for any Israelite. The specific promises of the Sinai covenant was that God would make Israel is own special political nation. And it is in that context that we must understand what it meant to be Yahweh’s bride: it meant the nation was wedded to Yahweh. Israel couldn’t join itself to another nation’s god, whether Baal, Marduk or Caesar.
The specific promises of the new covenant are that we will be reconciled to God, that his spirit will live in us, that we’ll become one with him. It is in this context that we must understand what it means for the church to be Jesus’ bride: that we’ll become one with him in the deepest way possible. The union between spouses is a shadowy picture of what it is like between Jesus and the church.
In some ways the nature of the relationship is clearest when you consider what would damage it most. What’s the worst that Israel could do? Whore themselves with another nation’s god. What’s the worst the Church (i.e., the true church of those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, not the whole church which includes nonbelievers) can do? You could say it would be to spurn that unity - whether by being divisive without cause, or by abusing that relationship by taking God for granted, ignoring his word etc. It’s not the same. Israel was split in two but what really made God angry was when the nation as a whole, lead by its kings, turned to other Gods. Whereas I don’t think that many spirit-indwelt Christians are ever strongly tempted to start worshiping Allah or Buddha.
The specific content of the covenants is more conclusive than looking at what damages the relationship, but I think it still helps me understand a bit. So I think it is legitimate to say that although both the old covenant and the new covenant talk of God’s people as being his bride they mean very different things.
So I don’t know where that leaves us. I was going to link to a video series on Dispensationalism that shows how it was just a weird set of doctrines introduced to the church by a particularly nasty minister in the 1830’s — but when it comes down to it, you’re not a Dispensationalist at all.
I don’t know what differences we are actually discussing now because although you claim there are OT covenants still in place, when pushed everything falls into place around the cross and the New Covenant?
Of course I’m not a dispie ;)
The difference is that I believe that among those who share Abraham’s faith there are distinct subsets with whom God has made distinct promises and covenants. If you truly believe in the CoG then the concept of subsets is invalid and all of these promises and covenants must have been made to the whole group of those who share Abraham’s faith, even if the way in which they are expressed and fulfilled has been transformed a few times.
The cross and the new covenant is the means by which God can be faithful and do everything he has promised - it makes it possible for him to be faithful. But the cross and the new covenant is not in and of itself the way in which God did everything he promised, although it is the fulfillment for a great number of his promises. It is a direct fulfillment of Gen 3:15. It’s the direct fulfillment of Gen 12:3. Of 2 Sam 7:16 and of Jer 31:31-34. But not, I would argue, of Gen 9:11. God has promised to use fire to destroy the earth in the final judgement, but if it wasn’t for this promise I see no reason why he couldn’t use water.
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