Faith and Justification in the Old Testament

The following is in response to comments 3-5 from John Thomson to my post entitled “Justification by the Works of the Law in Pauline Perspective.” Because of the length of the response, it is placed here as a post.

Thanks, John. You are definitely thinking a lot about his. Keep up the good work to honor God in your understanding of Scripture, and thank you for your challenge for me to do the same.

Maybe where we differ is that you seem to limit faith to belief in promise. You do so on the basis of a certain understanding of Paul, but my suggestion has been that Paul’s faith/promise distinction is not a linguistic or literary generic distinction, but primarily a salvation-historical one. We need to explore that further over time.

I feel strongly that the evidence from the Old Testament itself leads to the conclusion that the Old Testament concept of faith is not limited merely to promise. It is directed to the totality of whatever it is that God reveals. Faith is not a matter of picking and choosing what part of God’s revelation that you will accept; it is accepting the whole counsel of God. This is a key point. This means that the faith of the Old Testament saints was not directed solely to the Messiah as if he stood independent of the rest of old covenant revelation. How did Israel know about the Messiah? He was revealed to them through Moses and the prophets, and with greater clarity over time. The prophecies concerning the Messiah and the new covenant that are present in the Old Testament are part of the torah of Moses and prophets. In other words, the gospel was revealed to Israel through the law and the prophets. Therefore, the gospel in prophetic form was actually a subset of old covenant law. Deuteronomy 18:15-19 and 30:1-14 are classic examples of this. This means that Israel’s faith in torah included faith in the gospel. Faith in the Old Testament cannot be limited solely to faith in the gospel. Consider the author of Ps 119. He says in v. 66: “I believe in your commandments.” His faith was clearly directed to torah. Torah functioned for him as a proleptic gospel as he responded to it in faith, and this faith in torah also included faith in the full substance of the gospel that would come in Christ as revealed to him through torah by way of prophecy.

This seems to be consistent with Paul's understanding when he says: "But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it" (Rom 3:21; note also 1:16-17). The gospel was mediated to old covenant Israel through torah (i.e., Old Testament torah testified to the saving righteousness of God in Christ); but once the Messiah has come, law and gospel can be spoken of as being distinct revelations (i.e., the saving righteousness of God in Christ is revealed apart from the law of Moses).

I agree that we need to have an Old Testament study on the nature of faith. That will help to solve this issue. My doctorate is concerned with this, so hopefully I’ll be able to contribute more to this in the future, but I’ll seek to post things every so often as they are relevant and as I have time. The key, I believe, is studying the idea of faith in the Abraham narrative.

You also keep saying that no one back then could keep covenant with God. This is not consistent with the Old Testament presentation of the matter. We can explore this further in my next post on Ps 119.

I would argue that Rom 9:33, which is a quotation of Isa 28:16 merged with Isa 8:14, is an eschatological text. You are taking it as if it were applicable throughout salvation history. But Isa 28:16 occurs in an eschatological context, and I would argue that this is exactly how Paul has taken it, as a prophecy of his own day and the Gentile period of the new covenant age. The laying of the stumbling stone in Zion is a prophecy about how the Israelites would reject the Messiah when he came to them in person.

In suggesting that Paul was talking about the fullness of justification, I am not saying that justification by the works of the law was less than 100% justification as far as being a judgment that an individual Israelite had met his or her covenant obligation before God. But justification under the Mosaic covenant was not full justification in the sense that full vindication and blessing could not come for the Old Testament saints during the old covenant age. In the end, the eschatological justification of the individual goes together with the justification of the whole people of God. The finger cannot be fully justified in a realized eschatological sense without the justification of the whole body of which it is a part. Furthermore, being limited to Israel, justification by the works of the law was not a justification that all flesh could participate in. As individual believers we are justified in Christ, who is the body. Maybe I need to talk of old covenant justification by the works of the law as being non-eschatological, and Paul’s concept of justification by faith as being primarily eschatological. I do admit that finding language to describe these things is difficult at times.

Having the law in the heart is not solely a new covenant privilege. I believe it is wrong to interpret Jer 31:33 as if it were saying that. The Holy Spirit was also at work in the old covenant age, but his work was limited to the faithful remnant. What Jeremiah is saying (when read in the context of the rest of the Old Testament) is that this work which was limited during the Mosaic age will become much more comprehensive under the new covenant as the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh.

I agree with the perspective of Heb 7:18, looking at the law of Moses from the vantage point of the new covenant; but Heb 7:18 still needs to read in such a way that it is consistent with Ps 119. The author of Ps 119 viewed the law of Moses (the “former commandment”) as primarily positive. The question is: How do we reconcile Ps 119 with Hebrews? Keep an eye out for my next post on Ps 119.