24 January 2024
While there are broader meanings in the words themselves, here I'll use "grace" to refer to eternal election and redemption. The word "mercy" will emphasize God's tolerance for our fallen human nature through the Covenant.
God granting the Covenant of Moses to Israel was an act of mercy, but not a conduit of grace.
When you collate the doctrinal teaching across the letters of Paul, you realize this is what he was saying. The Law was mercy granted to notify us that we were fallen and in need of grace. The Law can awaken conviction; it can touch your heart. But there are two primary reasons it might not: (1) you willfully turn away from your convictions or (2) you are spiritually dead and unable to receive grace.
This is not abstract theology, but a simple restatement of Biblical doctrine. The term "peace with God" refers to two different things on two different levels. One is peace with God that brings His blessings on earth (mercy). The other is peace with God that means eternal identity (grace). Most of the time, Scripture refers to the former. Only the context can tell you whether it refers to the latter or both.
The whole point of the Covenant of Moses was to put Israel in the place of representing God's agenda on the earth. It did not provide grace, only earthly peace with God. It demonstrated what a higher peace with God looked like. The nation of Israel was a proof of concept, as it were, but a complex one.
On the one hand, the Covenant put Israel in a place where they could reap the blessings God offered for life in our fallen condition (mercy). Those blessings were not the thing; they merely represented what God was really wanted to offer. The real deal was personal redemption and restoration of our eternal natures (grace). The earthly blessings symbolized grace. So, the Law (mercy) and grace were two different things on different levels. Law was earthly; grace was heavenly.
But it's more complicated than that. The Covenant was presented as an ideal, a moral statement of God's priorities for our fallen existence. It was not presented as hard and fast rules. If you read it as hard and fast rules, you will miss the point. It was not possible to simply obey the rules; there are unavoidable conflicts on our level. There are requirements that overlap and you have to gain a sense of what really matters. That was how people became judges in Israel: They contemplated things mystically until they got a firm image in their minds of who God is. Contemplation is spending time with the heart teaching the brain.
Jesus demonstrated this when He made comments about how the Sabbath was meant to protect the powerless, not restrict humans getting what they needed to live. If you understand the whole point of the Sabbath code, then you should not have a problem with healing on the Sabbath, or grazing (legally) while passing through a grain field on the Sabbath.
The actual performance was not in the Covenant Code. Rather, the Code was advice on how to establish a set of priorities for the eventual collisions inherent in the interpretive rules. The Covenant was a lifestyle, a frame of reference, not legislation. It was entirely possible to perform satisfactorily without being spiritually born -- that's the primary meaning of mercy. It was possible to portray God's character as part of a community without His personal divine Presence in one's individual soul. All it required was a heart in feudal submission to God as King; that was the nature of the Covenants of Moses and Noah. Humans can do that without spiritual birth. At no point in Moses did God require spiritual birth to reap the blessings of the Covenant, to be accepted as His People on earth.
But make no mistake: The Covenant was designed to be a call from God for personal spiritual redemption. To be more precise, the Law of Moses was meant to be a beacon to those God had already granted Election. You could fulfill the ostensible moral requirements in community without election, but you could not fulfill the underlying purpose of the Law for yourself.
The Law of Moses was never just law in our sense of the word. It was always a deeper moral obligation to God Himself, a personal duty. Under the cultural assault of Hellenism, the common concept of the Law was reduced to mere performance. You would find rabbis asserting the Law was a deeper moral obligation, but the net result of Pharisaical teaching reduced it to mechanical compliance. The concept of "works of the law" arose from this Pharisaical perversion, but was a very obvious moral failure in ancient Hebrew culture, which was quite mystical in nature. The existence of the Talmud, both oral and later written, merely enforced the mechanical view.
To summarize the distinctions: (1) eternal spiritual birth (grace) was always available to the Elect since before Creation; (2) the higher moral obligation of personal feudal submission was inherent in the Flaming Sword (mercy) and all the rest of God's revelation. Feudal submission did not in itself make you Elect, but it is the path the Elect must take to return to Eden.
Eden is not precisely defined in Hebrew thinking as either only eternal election or just mercy in this world. It's fuzzy on purpose because the actual nature of the connection between feudal submission and eternal election is beyond human comprehension. But the mechanical "works of the law" has always been a perversion. It was always a human temptation from the start, yet became a major issue sometime before the Babylonian invasion, because it was becoming institutionalized into Judean government. It got far worse during the Restoration (consider Malachi's prophecy), and became the trademark of Judaism in the New Testament. The arrival of Hellenism simply locked it in place, giving it the force of moral reasoning and civil code enforcement.
This is only halfway where we are going.
This document is public domain; spread the message.