A Kingdom of Priests: The Mosaic Covenant
After God made his covenant with Abraham, he renews the same covenant with Abraham’s son Isaac, and then again with Isaac’s son Jacob. God gives Jacob the name Israel, meaning one who wrestles with God or one who strives with God. Jacob’s descendants end up in Egypt for several hundred years where they eventually become slaves. The beginning of the book of Exodus tells of how God uses Moses to lead Jacob’s descendants out of Egypt towards the land that he promised to give Abraham and his descendants in the Abrahamic covenant. After bringing them out of Egypt, God makes them into the nation of Israel. He makes a covenant with Israel through Moses as their representative, which is what we call the Mosaic covenant. The Noahic covenant and the Abrahamic covenant were made with Noah and Abraham respectively, but the Mosaic covenant is not a covenant between God and Moses, it is between God and the nation of Israel.
Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.
Exodus 19:5-6 ESV
The Mosaic covenant is most neatly summarized in Exodus 19:5-6. The Mosaic covenant is different from the previous two covenants that we have looked at because it is not unconditional. The Noahic covenant and the Abrahamic covenant were both unconditional promises that God made to Noah and to Abraham. Noah and Abraham did not need to meet any conditions so that God would fulfill his promise. However in Exodus 19:5 we see that this covenant is conditional because God is making a promise to do something only if the nation of Israel fulfills a certain condition.
The condition is that Israel will obey God’s voice and keep God’s covenant. Directly following this passage in Exodus 19 God begins giving them laws, starting with the Ten Commandments. This collection of laws that God gave to the nation of Israel after leading them out of Egypt are sometimes called the Levitical law, the Law of Moses, or even just simply the Law. It is these that God is referring to when he tells Israel to obey his voice and keep his covenant. For Israel to secure God’s promises to them, they must follow these laws that God has given them.
If Israel does follow these laws, God has promised to do three things. The first is that they will be God’s treasured possession among all peoples. God acknowledges here that the whole world already belongs to him, including every nation. The nation of Israel already belonged to God as much as Egypt and Canaan both belonged to God. But what God is talking about here is an even greater relationship with Israel, an intimate relationship in which God treasures the people of Israel above all other people. God has already done something unique in picking Abraham to make his covenant promise with, and now he has singled out Abraham’s descendants, the nation of Israel, to be his treasured possession.
The second promise is that Israel will be a kingdom of priests. To understand this, we must understand the role of a priest. In the laws that God gives to Israel, he instructs the tribe of Levi to serve as priests. The priests would handle the sacrificial offerings that were brought by the people and tend to the tabernacle, which was where God would dwell. The primary purpose of the priest was to be a mediator between God and men. You could not make a sacrificial offering directly to God. You could only bring the animal to the priests and they would sacrifice the offering to God on your behalf. The priests dealt directly with God and followed strict regulations, while the remainder of the people interacted with God through the priests.
Israel being a kingdom of priests means that all of the people would deal directly with God and not have to go through someone else as a mediator. It also means that Israel would become the mediators to God for every other nation on earth. This is deeply connected with the first promise that Israel would be God’s treasured possession. God would have a more intimate and deeper relationship with Israel as his priests when compared to his relationship with any other nation. The other nations would only have access to God through Israel’s mediation as a kingdom of priests.
The third promise is that Israel would be a holy nation. We often use the word holy to mean righteous, but it actually means set apart, just as God is set apart. So this third promise also connects back to the first two promises as well. The nation of Israel would be set apart because they would be treasured by God above all the other nations and because they would be priests through whom all the other nations would have access to God. This holiness also links back to the law itself. Both the moral laws that God gave to Israel as well as the ceremonial laws served to set Israel apart from all the other nations.
That’s the entire covenant. If Israel follows God, then God will make them his treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. But Israel fails to follow God’s laws again and again. The first thing that happens after God gives the law to Israel is they make a golden calf to worship against his commandment. The reason that Israel is made to wander in the wilderness for forty years before they can enter the promised land is due to disobedience. The entire book of Judges is a cycle of Israel turning away from God, then repenting, and then turning away again. When Israel had kings, they continued to lead the nation further and further from God, even splitting the nation into two separate kingdoms. The northern kingdom became so disobedient that God used Assyria to destroy them and send them into exile. Later he also sent the southern kingdom of Judah into exile in Babylon but allowed them to come back when they turned back towards God. Those that remained continued on this cycle of disobedience until the first century, during the time of Jesus that we bear witness to in the gospels.
Needless to say, Israel did not keep their side of the covenant. They were disobedient from the very beginning. Does that mean the covenant also ended at the very beginning? God could have chosen to end the covenant, but he didn’t. He continued to give Israel second and third chances to be obedient to the covenant, chances that they did not deserve. God treated Israel as his treasured possession and set them apart from the other nations, even though they were not faithfully obedient to him. But Israel never became a kingdom of priests, and the Mosaic covenant did eventually come to an end due to their continued disobedience.
During the final week before Jesus’s crucifixion, he was in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast. Jesus tells a parable to the chief priests and the elders found in Matthew 21:33-46, called the Parable of the Tenants. In the parable, Jesus tells of tenants who are managing a vineyard for the vineyard owner. The owner sends servants to collect his fruit from the tenants, but the tenants beat and kill all the servants that he sends. The owner finally sends his son to collect the fruit and they kill the son as well. The chief priests and the Pharisees realize that Jesus is speaking about them, and he tells them that the kingdom of God will be taken away from them.
This parable is speaking about Jesus’s own death at the hands of the Jewish leaders. The coming of Jesus was the last opportunity that God gave to Israel to turn towards him in obedience and so fulfill their side of the Mosaic covenant. But instead Jesus’s death was the final act of disobedience that ended the Mosaic covenant for good. However, with the abolition of that covenant came a new covenant in Jesus’s blood.