“Moses came and told the people all the commands of the Lord and all the ordinances. Then all the people responded with a single voice, ‘We will do everything that the Lord has commanded.’ And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early the next morning and set up an altar and twelve pillars for the twelve tribes of Israel at the base of the mountain. Then he sent out young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed bulls as fellowship offerings to the Lord. Moses took half the blood and set it in basins; the other half of the blood he splattered on the altar. He then took the covenant scroll and read it aloud to the people. They responded, ‘We will do and obey all that the Lord has commanded.’ Moses took the blood, splattered it on the people, and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)
One of the things I always talk about with couples when doing their premarital counseling is that marriage is supposed to be a covenant, not a contract. We don’t distinguish very well between those two ideas today, and often think about marriage in contract terms rather than covenantal ones much to the detriment of our marriage relationships. In the ancient world, people were more accustomed to the idea of covenants and better understood just how serious they really were. After having heard the basic contours of the covenant God wanted to make with them, the people agreed to His terms and went forward with the covenant. Let’s take a look here at part of how this process unfolded.
Thinking about marriage contractually is so easy to do. It’s natural, really. If we agree to something with someone else, then if they stop doing their part, we naturally feel entitled to stop doing our part. After all, that’s only fair, right? Why should I be expected to keep carrying the whole load when she’s not doing her part? When all he ever really cares about is himself? For all of our celebrating marriage as an arrangement of love and commitment, we much more frequently treat it as an arrangement of convenience. That is, when it’s not convenient anymore, we get out of it. Or, as is more common these days, we don’t even bother getting into it in the first place. We can get all the sex we want and have all the kids we want without it, so what’s the point?
Of course, none of that kind of thinking finds any traction in the Scriptures, but we’ll have to explore that in more detail another time. What the Scriptures offer is lots of clear teachings on what marriage is (or should be), and lots of bad examples of people getting it wrong.
Covenant thinking is different from contract thinking. In a covenant, I commit to doing my part whether or not I think you have adequately or successfully done yours. And, I’m going to keep doing my part until I can’t do it any longer for some reason (usually death, thus the whole “until death do us part” thing).
For better or worse, one of the most recognizable examples of a working covenant we have today is a home owner’s association. While HOA’s have a pretty bad name – and often for very good reason – they are covenants. I’ve even occasionally seen neighborhoods advertised on their signs on the main thoroughfare as a “covenant controlled community.” The HOA is an agreement that all the people living in a certain neighborhood will operate by a certain set of rules and receive a certain set of benefits. In order to provide these benefits there is, of course, a fee associated with living in the neighborhood. What makes the whole thing a covenant instead of a contract is that the agreement exists whether you live in the neighborhood or not. It exists whether you abide by the rules of the HOA or not. The neighborhood association can sue you for not keeping the rules, but they can’t make you sell your house and leave the neighborhood. You can sue the HOA for not sufficiently providing the benefits, but the neighborhood isn’t going to go anywhere either. The agreement, the covenant exists whether or not either party does their part. And, even if you do leave, the agreement is still in place.
This kind of an agreement was what God was inviting the people to enter into with Him. Culturally speaking, this kind of an agreement with a king or even with a god was something that was pretty common in the ancient world. We actually have several archaeological examples of covenants like this one. They were called suzerain covenants, or suzerain vassal treaties. In this kind of a covenant, a greater power (in this case, God) would enter into a permanent agreement with a lesser power (in this case, Israel). Both parties would agree to do certain things for or on behalf of the other that were ultimately beneficial to both of them. A king might agree to provide military protection and financial assistance to a small village, while the villagers might agree to pay some taxes and serve in the king’s army. For the village, if they didn’t make the agreement, the king and his army might just wipe them out. For the king, maintaining a kingdom requires resources and soldiers. The king was understood as having the greater power, but the village had something the king needed as well.
The covenant God was making with the people of Israel was like this, but also had some important differences. For starters, the people didn’t have anything God needed. He was going to be God whether or not they entered into a covenant with Him. His position was absolutely secure. But God was playing a long game of establishing a genetic line that would ultimately result in the birth of His Son as well as a cultural context in which the things He was going to reveal to the world through His Son would make sense. On the people’s part, God wasn’t forcing them into this. At every point in this process including this one, they were perfectly free to walk away and live their life on their own just like all the other nations around them. God wasn’t forcing them into something for which the alternative was extinction. This was an invitation. This is why we see them agreeing to it. Twice. They would voice such agreement and acceptance several more times yet in the future.
The other thing that stands out here as hard to understand was the blood. Why all the blood? We have talked about before the fact that God always communicates with us in ways we can understand because He wants to be understood. And, as I just said, this kind of agreement was common in the ancient world. Covenants in the ancient world were always sealed with blood. They always involved sacrifices. Had God made this kind of a covenant today, it would probably look very different because we think differently than they did. (Although if He were making this kind of covenant today for the first time, that would probably mean Christianity didn’t exist. And if Christianity didn’t exist the world wouldn’t have any of the scientific and cultural advancements that it has relative to the ancient world, so maybe we would still be offering sacrifices and sealing covenants with blood.)
What all this means is that we need to see things through the lens of how they might have understood them or else they aren’t going to make any kind of positive sense to us. The sacrifices used to solemnize a covenant were intended to send a message. The two parties entering into the covenant were communicating something like this, “May our lives be like the life of this sacrificed animal if we should violate the terms of this agreement.” It was a way of expressing just how seriously they were taking things. We see this same kind of thing earlier in the Scriptures when God makes His covenant with Abraham. He appeared to Abraham in a dream and passed between the split carcasses of several animals Abraham had prepared. Interestingly, in that instance, God did not require Abraham himself to pass between them. God was basically promising to do all of the things He was promising to do and He really wasn’t expecting much from Abraham beyond His willingness to go along with it.
The other lens for understanding the blood here comes from the author of Hebrews. Writing about the superiority of the new covenant we have in Christ to the old covenant God made with Israel through Moses he says this: “Therefore, he [Jesus] is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called might receive the promise of the eternal inheritance, because a death has taken place for redemption from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. Where a will exists, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will is valid only when people died, since it is never in effect while the one who made it is living. That is why even the first covenant was inaugurated with blood. For when every command had been proclaimed by Moses to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, along with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled the scroll itself and all the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for you.'”
Make more sense now? The parties involved in this earlier covenant couldn’t die themselves because then they wouldn’t be able to participate in the covenant. So instead, animals were sacrificed on their behalf. What makes the new covenant we have in Christ so much greater than the old is that He sacrificed Himself. He did die to enact the will. But then He rose again to oversee its execution and to make sure that we have all the help we need in abiding by the terms of the covenant if we choose to enter into it. This means the choice is indeed ours. God still doesn’t force Himself on us. He woos and invites. He invites us to be a part of His plans for His world. We certainly don’t have to do it, but His plans are better than whatever ours are. Like Israel before us, we are wisest to accept His offer and follow Him into life and blessing.
The Nexus 
If Yahweh was there at the beginning as Christisns claim he could have outlawed blood sacrifice as barbaric and unnecessary right from the word go.
But he didn’t, even going so far to instruct Abraham to sacrifice his own child merely to rest his faith.
How revolting can one get?
Your assertion that covenants through blood was what people understood back then implies that Yahweh was a Johnny-come-lately who believed the only way to get his message across was to deal with people on their terms because this – blood – was what they understood.
It is a similar argument made by apologists to justify slavery and when one examines such behaviour critically it simply makes Yahweh come across as the invented deity that he really is.
A man made deity makes perfect sense to anyone prepared to open their eyes and see.
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People chose what was barbaric. He met us where we were, redeemed what we made barbaric and turned it into something good and life-giving. He did the same thing with a Roman cross. That was a symbol of horror and terror until He redeemed it into one of the greatest, most recognizable symbols of hope and life the world has ever known.
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“People chose what was barbaric ” What a load of dishonest apologetic waffle!
The sign of the well and truly indoctrinated.
You’re just making up shit as you go along.
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There was nothing dishonest about my response in the least. That perspective on the human origins of sin and God’s efforts to redeem what is broken by entering into it and fixing it from the inside out is consistent with what followers of Jesus have been saying going all the way back to the Scriptures themselves. I didn’t make up a single bit of that. And more of your “indoctrinated” silliness. I’m no more indoctrinated in the Christian worldview than you are into atheism. You and I don’t share the same understanding of God. You weren’t going to like whatever answer I gave. That you seem to keep being surprised that I keep providing answers that are consistent with the last 2,000 years’ worth of thinking and theology after all our time together is funny to me, though.
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What the followers of Jesus believe is simply because they have been schooled to believe such nonsense.
Indoctrination comes in several forms.
Again, if Yahweh was there at the beginning as you claim it would have been no big thing for him… Sorry.. Him to have outlawed blood sacrifice right from the off.
But he didn’t and Christians worship a human sacrifice to this day pandering to the disgusting belief that salvation can only come via the spilled blood of said human sacrifice.
That is barbaric.
I am not surprised by your answers in the least.
They represent the essence of indoctrination, wilfull ignorance and your refusal or inability to exercise genuine critical thinking.
This is why you remain tied to the skirts of your Christian worldview and those who deconvert have managed to free themselves from such an awful and harmful delusion.
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It really is sad to me how jaded and cynical your perspective is that you aren’t apparently even capable of imagining that someone could come to a different conclusion than you have formed because they’ve honestly examined it and arrived at the conclusion of its truthfulness based on that examination. Oh well. I don’t suppose I can do much to change that.
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I have the utmost respect for those who devote their careers to establishing facts, especially when up against those with a theologically based agenda that has no basis in fact or evidence.
And this applies to all religion.
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And I have the utmost respect for those who devote their careers to establishing facts too, especially when up against those with a secularly biased agenda that has no basis in reality and can only interpret the available evidence through its limited lens. We’re like opposite sides of a mirror ;~)
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You have yet to present a single piece of evidence that unequivocally refutes anything I have ever posted regarding your faith based worldview.
All you do is assert I am wrong and this is because of my secular worldview.
There is a perfectly valid reason why secular societies separate state and church and your insistance that secularism falls short of the mark illustrates why such societies as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are regarded as oppressive and misogynist.
Christians cannot even determine what is the correct Christian Worldview, one reason why there are so many denominations/ sects and it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to find a bunch of Christians denouncing each other over various aspects of doctrine and summarily condemning each other, a scenario that has been front and centre since Christisnity came on the scene.
The fact that when challenged you resort to apologetics without directly responding with evidence to a single issue illustrates the point, thus further cementing the assertion you have nothing but faith(sic) and whether you like it or not have succumbed to a degree of indoctrination.
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That you continue to do things like conflate religions with wildly different beliefs and truth claims painting with the same brush things that simply are not the same just makes my point that when it comes to religion, you just don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. You know enough to think you do, but then you make statements that are likely giant neon signs proclaiming that, as it turns out, you have no idea. You’re running on the same, old atheist tropes that have been so long since discredited that it’s hard to see that it’s worth trying to engage with them. I don’t have enough time in my day for that.
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I don’t need to conflate different religions and I have already pointed out the divergent views and doctrines that have kept Christians at each other’s throats from day one.
I used Saudi and Pakistan to illustrate why church and state are kept separate in a secular society. Yet you see me conflating different religions. Perhaps you should read with a little more care?
As a religion you can’t even present a unified Christian Worldview, so disparate are the views of many Christian sects/ denominations which now number in the tens of thousands!
Not once have you discredited a single “atheist trope” in the time we have been communicating and I challenge you to find a single instance of such a claim.
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Then I’ll seek your pardon. Your raising the issue of those two nations whose policies are, I agree with you, barbaric struck me as so wildly irrelevant that I misread your point. The separation of church and state is something my nation prototyped for the world on large scale and is something my own denomination has been one of the primary backers of since its founding. The separation of church and state is a fundamentally Christian idea. It didn’t exist anywhere in the world until Christians introduced it. Citing an idea borne out of the Christian worldview in order to show why secularism as a worldview is somehow better doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You may want to try that one again.
And you are once again overplaying the divergence and underplaying the larger unity of the church as a whole. I have a whole book of denominations. Theologically speaking, there’s really very little significant differences among them. Yes, there are some key points that are debated, but the points of agreement are broader.
And we’ve been at this long enough that I’m fairly confident any efforts to discredit your arguments are going to be met by more arguments and telling me why I’m wrong. I’m not interested in taking the time to try any longer.
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Although Wiki identifies a Baptist minister wasn’t Jefferson the first to pioneer the idea of separation of church and state in a secular society?
There is a degree of irony that while the idea may have begun with your Baptist minister especially when you consider how much better secular as society is and the harm and damage done in the name of religion in societies that are theocratic by nature.
Again you are hand waving away the almost innumerable number of sects/ denominations in a weak attempt to mask the disunity.
One only has to consider something like the Thirty Year war in which millions of Christians lost their lives over nothing more than doctrinal disputes.
There are enough conflicts between Christian sects to illustrate there is no genuine unity.
And as is the pattern when asked to provide examples or evidence you simply offer a condescending reply and hand wave away each and every challenge or request which, rather than suggest credibility on your part, adds credence to the assertion you have no defense and are merely toeing the apologetic line.
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It still makes me chuckle how triggered you always seem to be by the discipline of apologetics.
I didn’t say the idea was introduced by a Baptist minister. I said that Baptists have long been some of the most committed champions of the idea. The idea didn’t originate with Jefferson. It was around already – especially because of its being championed by colonial Baptists – and he was part of incorporating it into the U.S. founding documents. My point was that the very idea of religious liberty and the separation of church and state is a fundamentally Christian idea. We gave that to the world. You’re welcome.
And I’m not handwaving away anything. You’re chasing a point where there really isn’t a good one to be made. As I said before, you’re overplaying your hand because you think it somehow scores you a point in the debate. The amount of significant differences among all those denominations is smaller relative to the points of agreement. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a significant number of theological debates, but the number of debates of salvation-determining issues is small by comparison. You can keep beating this drum, but all you’re doing is making noise.
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I didn’t say you did assert it was a Baptist minister. I said Wiki identifies him. Again you really need to read with more care before firing off yet another asinine reply.
If what you consider is simply “making noise” then you would have been right at home in Northern Ireland during the seventies.
The IRA would have chewed you up and spat you out without blinking.
And it would have been a similar story in Bosnia.
Abd tthere are quite a few modern examples in Africa.
The disunity is very real, but as a rule the different sects tend to be insular and thus there is generally no actual conflict. But when the midden hits the windmill…
Aah, well, history is chock full of how loving ( sic) Christians are towards each other isn’t it?
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Unfortunately not. But it’s also chock full of Christian introducing ideas and movements to the world that have irrevocably changed it for the better. On the balance, I think the good far outweighs the places and times people claiming to follow Jesus have gotten wildly off track with His teachings. And, of course, you’ll disagree, but that’s part of why you’re where you are and I’m not. We interpret and weight the facts of history differently because of our respective worldview commitments. Oh well.
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Oh, and apologetics is, to be blunt, little more than Lying fir Jesus.
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That is undoubtedly how you view it. I have no question on that much. You’re wrong, of course, and fall into the same trap as the other guy (although not nearly so frequently) of sometimes not distinguishing well between statements you disagree with on worldview grounds and statements that are dishonest willfully or otherwise. But again, that’s a worldview problem.
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