“Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. And this I say, that the covenant that was confirmed before of God, in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect” (Gal. 3:16, 17).
We have seen that Israel made the mistake of putting in the place of God’s covenant the things which the Lord gave to them to aid them in arriving at the full light and blessing of the covenant. There is another great mistake that Israel made, and the same mistake is made today by thousands of persons concerning Israel; and that is that the things which God gave to them were for them alone, not for the people of the world in general.
Israel, thinking thus, naturally shut herself away from the nations, and made all these things specially her own. Thus she separated herself from all the nations, and held herself aloof from, and above, the nations, as being holier than they, and because of this special holiness, as more highly regarded by God than were the other nations. Yet this whole conception of things was an utter mistake, and was a perversion of the intent of the things that God had given.
Everything that the Lord gave to Israel was for the benefit of the whole world. Israel was to be the missionary people who should extend to all nations the light and blessing given to her, in order that all nations might enjoy the light and blessing of God, as revealed in the Abrahamic covenant, to the full knowledge of which all these things that were given were to lead Israel, and all people.
We again set down here, for study, the passage from “Patriarch and Prophets,” which was quoted in last week’s article:
“If man had kept the law of God, as given to Adam after his fall, preserved by Noah, and observed by Abraham, there could have been no necessity for the ordinance of circumcision. And if the descendants of Abraham had kept the covenant, of which circumcision was a sign, they would never have been seduced into idolatry, nor would it have been necessary for them to suffer a life of bondage in Egypt. They would have kept God’s law in mind, and there would have been no necessity for it to be proclaimed from Sinai, or engraved upon the tables of stone. And had the people practiced the principles of the Ten Commandments, there would have been no need of the additional directions given to Moses.