Page 41 - Biblical Ethics Course

The Covenant and the Law

The covenant God made with Israel through Moses (Ex. 24) had direct and
far-reaching ethical significance. In particular, the keynote of grace, first
struck in the Lord’s choice of covenant partner (Dt. 7:7; 9:4), sets the theme
for the whole of the OT‘s moral teaching. God’s grace supplies the chief
motive for obedience to his commandments. Appeals to godly fear are by no
means absent from the OT (Ex. 22:22.), but far more often grace provides the
main stimulus to good behavior. Men, as God’s covenant partners, are invited to respond gratefully to his prior
acts of undeserved love; they are summoned to do his will in gratitude for his grace, rather than submit in terror
to threats of punishment.

The covenant also encouraged an intense awareness of corporate solidarity in Israel. Its effect was not only to
unite the individual to God, but also to bind all covenant members into a single community ( the language Paul
uses to describe the effect of the new covenant in Eph. 2:1).

Hence the very strong emphasis the OT lays on social ethics. Corporate solidarity led straight to neighbor-concern.
In the one close community unit, every individual was important. The poor had the same rights as the rich because
they both came under the one covenant umbrella. Weaker members of society were specially protected (of Ex.
22 and 23, with their safeguards for the widow, the orphan, the stranger and the poor).

The covenant provided the context for God’s law-giving. Consequently, a distinctive feature of OT law was its
stress on the maintenance of right relationships. Its main concern was not to set a fence round abstract ethical
ideals, but to cement good relationships between people, and between people and God. So the majority of its
specific precepts are couched in the second person rather than the third. Hence, too, the strongly positive and
warm attitude adopted by those under the law towards law-keeping (Palms 19:7; 119:33, 72); and the recognition
that the most serious consequence of law-breaking was not any material punishment but the resulting breakdown
in relationships (Ho. 1:2). At the heart of the law lie the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:3, Dt. 5:7), concerned as they
are with the most fundamental of relationships.

Man’s fall into sin did nothing to abrogate these ordinances. we must be careful not to confuse God’s tolerance
with his approval; just as we must always clearly distinguish between the biblical ethic and some of the equivocal
behavior of God’s people recorded in the Bible.

The covenant relationship between Israel and God entailed obedience to his laws, statutes, and ordinances.
Ethics certainly involved rules based on divine authority. But the OT’s deontology was as theistic as its
consequentialism. The authority of the law was not that of abstract ethical absolutes but the authority of the
personal God whom they knew as Creator and Redeemer. Obedience to the law was thus not just conformity to
the rules per se but personal loyalty to the God who gave them.

Motivated obedience. For that reason the law itself contains a large number of “motive clauses,” giving reasons
why particular laws should be obeyed. These fall into several categories (Wright, Living, 21–32).

Gratitude. The Decalogue itself begins with a statement of redemption in order to underline that obedience to
the following laws is a matter of grateful response (Exodus 20:2). The sermonic form of Deuteronomy 4–11
reinforces this point. The God who loved Israel’s ancestors enough to rescue their descendants from slavery is a
God to be loved in return, with a covenant love expressed in obedience. Significantly, the area of law where this
motive of gratitude for historical deliverance is most pressed is that which concerned the poor, the stranger, the
debtor, the slave—the very conditions from which God had rescued Israel ( Exodus 22:21; 23:9; Lev 19:33–36;

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