The old covenant

Welcome back! It’s great to see you again! We last learned about how God needs to make a covenant because He was forced to separate Himself from His people due to their sins.

Now, let's look at the Old Testament’s main covenant, which we refer to now as the old covenant. We’ll first start with the promise God made to Abraham that God fulfilled through Moses. After using Moses to lead Abraham’s descendants the Israelites out of Egypt, God spoke through Moses to make a covenant with them. He told them that if they obeyed His voice and kept His covenant, then they would become His kingdom, priests, and holy nation.

These blessings may seem confusing. What do they mean? We each have our possessions we care for, things we always fix when they are broken or search for when they are lost. That is what God is promising these people. He also promises they will be His ‘kingdom of priests.’ As seen in 1 Timothy 2:4, God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. God didn’t want only the Israelites. They were just the people who knew Him so He could use them to testify His word. They could have been the instruments who shared God with others.

As we read through the Bible, we see that they struggled to keep the covenant, for example when they built the golden calf in Exodus 32. But in many ways, God was patient with them and they migrated into the Promised Land of Canaan to conquer many Gentile nations and prosper. And God essentially remained with them until the time of Solomon.

When he was young, Solomon, who was the son of King David, prayed to God for the wisdom to guide God’s people. What a precious heart, right? God blessed Solomon greatly with wisdom, power, and riches. Solomon built a temple for God and God used him to write several books of the Bible. But God’s number one commandment was that His people have no other gods before Him. He warned King Solomon not to intermarry with the Gentiles for fear that Solomon’s heart would be turned away from God. Unfortunately, Solomon did not heed God’s warnings. King Solomon ended up marrying 700 wives, many of whom were Gentiles. He also had 300 concubines. All of these Gentile women did influence Solomon and he joined them in worshiping foreign gods and building temples to their false gods in Jerusalem. In doing so, Solomon led the entire kingdom of Israel into worshiping gentile gods.

As we saw on day 2, the book of Hosea tells us that Israel broke their covenant with God just like Adam did. Now, if you were in God’s shoes, what would you do? Would you give up on these people? We’ll see tomorrow how God responded.