Paul’s Argument in Galatians and Romans Is Salvation-Historical, Not General in Nature

It is a big statement to make, but I believe that the vast majority of Christian interpreters of Paul’s teaching in Galatians and Romans have failed to understand Paul’s argument in the historical context of his day. The major theological issue for the early church (as the calling of the Council of Jerusalem proves) was the Judaizing issue. The issue was basically: Can Gentiles be saved as Gentiles, or do they have to come under the framework of the Mosaic covenant to be justified?

The key to understanding Paul’s argument in Galatians and Romans lies in realizing that his argument is a salvation-historical argument. That is, Paul was attempting to answer the question: How are people saved now that the new covenant in Christ has come? Reflecting the covenantal particularism of the orthodox Judaism of the day, the Christian Judaizers believed that, even though the new covenant had come in Jesus Christ, the new covenant fit neatly into the framework of the Mosaic covenant, leaving the law of Moses fully intact, and thereby restricting faith participation to those who were members of Israel. This is why they put pressure on Gentile Christians to be circumcised (if male) and to follow the law of Moses (Acts 15:1, 5). Paul’s argument is that the new covenant in Christ is actually co-extensive with the still yet earlier Abrahamic covenant, under which a gentilic faith response to God was possible (as proved by the faith of uncircumcised, gentilic Abraham himself).

In Galatians and Romans, Paul was concerned to contrast the requirement of faith under old covenant with the requirement of faith under the new covenant. The term law was Pauline and Jewish code for the Mosaic covenant, and the expression the works of the law was the standard Jewish way of referring to the covenant faithfulness that God required of Israel under the terms of the Mosaic covenant as per Ps 119:30, where the writer speaks of faith in terms of setting his heart on torah. Paul was primarily contrasting the old way of covenant faithfulness under the Mosaic covenant (which was required as the proper response under the old covenant, but had recently been superseded with the coming of Christ) with new (Abrahamic-type) way of covenant faithfulness to Jesus as revealed in the gospel, which Gentiles could participate in.

Paul sought to prove that the new covenant is more Abrahamic in nature than Mosaic. His main proof at this point was the evidence of word association in the Scriptures that linked the new covenant with the Abrahamic covenant. Employing a common rabbinic method of exegesis, Paul noted (as we see in Rom 1:16–17; 4:3, 9, 22; Gal 3:6, 11) that the word והאמן and he believed is used of Abraham in Gen 15:6, and the related word אמונה faith is used of the new covenant in Hab 2:4 (which is part of an eschatological prophecy). That common terminology allows us to link the Abrahamic and new covenants together, the implication being that, if Abraham could believe in God and be justified as a Gentile (i.e., before he was circumcised), then the same thing applies under the new covenant: Gentiles can be justified under the new covenant apart from submission to the law of Moses. Paul also argued that the Sinaitic covenant was just a temporary, intervening covenant (a kind of narrowing down of the Abrahamic covenant for the purpose of regulating the singular nation of Israel until the coming of Christ). Therefore, with the coming of Christ, the old covenant has been subsumed by the new covenant, thus allowing Gentiles to participate in salvation through faith in the Messiah. The new covenant is not just a continuation of the old covenant. The new covenant actually eclipses and supersedes the old, allowing righteousness to be opened up to the nations, in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham (Gen 12:3).

Paul’s argument in Galatians and Romans is a salvation-historical argument that deals specifically with the major historical issue for the church in his day: the Judaizing problem. It is not a general argument about believing versus doing (as many Christian interpreters have traditionally taken it). We need to read and understand Paul’s argument in the historical context of his day, which also requires that we appreciate the Hebraic background of the key (Greek) terms that Paul employed. A greater sensitivity to the orthodox Hebraic concepts underpining Paul’s terminology, and a greater understanding of how the Mosaic covenant actually functioned, would greatly aid the Christian church in understanding the genius of this great apostle of faith.

Understanding the Old and New Covenants in Biblical Covenant Theology

A biblical theology that is truly biblical must necessarily deal with the biblical concept of covenant. This means that a biblical theology that is truly biblical will necessarily be a kind of covenant theology. This is necessarily so because of the way in which God has used covenants to structure his relationship with Israel and indeed all of humanity.

When thinking of covenant theology, a question arises concerning the legitimacy of the system of theology involving the covenant of works and the covenant of grace that is taught in the Westminster Confession. My opinion is that the distinction between a covenant of works in the garden of Eden and a postlapsarian covenant of grace that is taught in the Westminster Confession is helpful provided it is understood and applied in a manner consistent with the biblical description of God’s prelapsarian and postlapsarian dealings with humanity. For example, it is not correct to assume that the human obligation of obedience (i.e., works) in the garden means that there was no such thing as non-redemptive grace in the garden. Furthermore, given that the Old Testament establishes the framework of the covenant theology of the Bible, any covenant theology that is truly biblical must be consistent with the Old Testament teaching on the covenants as revealed in various key texts such as the book of Deuteronomy.

If by a covenant of works we understand that there could be no blessing in the garden of Eden without perfect obedience to the word of God, then the term covenant of works can be a helpful concept. And if by the covenant of grace we understand that blessing in the postlapsarian world is conditional upon a positive but imperfect response to the word of God in the context of atoning grace (what the Westminster Confession calls faith), then this can also be a helpful term.

But there is more to the covenant theology of the Bible than just a distinction between a so-called covenant of works and a covenant of grace. As the advocates of new covenant theology assert, it should be recognized that the primary covenantal distinction in the Bible and in Paul is not the distinction between the so-called covenant of works and the covenant of grace, but the distinction between the old covenant in Moses and the new covenant in Christ. Yet the advocates of new covenant theology are also mistaken when they deny that the old covenant was a covenant of grace.

The old covenant versus new covenant distinction that is present in the Bible is ultimately a distinction between different administrations of God’s singular gracious dealings with his people. The old covenant is a covenant of grace because the offer of the forgiveness of sins in Christ was proleptically communicated to the righteous within Israel through the Mosaic sacrificial system. Because atonement was offered to Israel as part of the Mosaic sacrificial system, the old covenant must be distinguished from the Adamic administration under which there was no system of atonement but only the punishment of death in the case of sin. It is important to recognize, therefore, that the personal covenantal obligation of the people of Israel was not perfect obedience. Although it is true that no one can live in the presence of God without moral perfection, the grace of the old covenant is seen in the fact that this need for moral perfection was not required of the nation or of the individual members of the covenant per se, but graciously provided by God through the sacrificial system, which functioned as a means by which the perfect righteousness of Christ could be imputed proleptically to the old covenant saints.

But even though the old covenant was a covenant of grace, it is important to understand that God laid down a condition for the people of Israel that to benefit from the grace offered as part of the covenant the people were required to exhibit faith on both a national and an individual level, where faith is understood to mean a holistic commitment to the whole word of God as revealed through Moses and the prophets. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand that, because God’s old covenant revelation is characteristically described in the Old Testament as law, the proper holistic response of faith is frequently spoken of in the Old Testament (as it has been in orthodox Judaism throughout the centuries) as doing the law. This means that the old covenant is described in the Bible as being a gracious covenant that requires the works of covenant obedience (i.e., holistic covenant faith) on the part of Israel. In the context of the grace of atonement offered through the Mosaic sacrificial system, these works of covenant obedience consisted of a persevering commitment to the covenant with God and its stipulations. In other words, the old covenant was a conditional covenant of grace. The condition of the Mosaic covenant was faith; but this faith was understood in holistic terms, and primarily expressed using the language of hearing and doing, i.e., covenant obedience.

Despite the fact that the old covenant was a covenant of grace, it is also important to understand that the conditional nature of the old covenant meant that Israel’s lack of commitment to the Mosaic covenant on a national level resulted in the old covenant becoming a covenant of condemnation, with the law of Moses functioning primarily as a “law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2). Even those who had kept faith with God under the old covenant were caught up in the condemnation of the nation as a whole. They were unable to experience eschatological justification and the fullness of covenant blessing because of the covenant rebellion of the majority. In this way, the old covenant ironically but providentially proved to be a replication of the so-called (Adamic) covenant of works, even though it was a covenant of grace. Hence, Paul’s teaching that “the law [of Moses] was added to increase the trespass [of Adam]” (Rom 5:20), and that “by the works of the law all flesh will not be justified” (Rom 3:20). That is to say, because of Israel’s failure as a nation in keeping covenant faith with God (i.e, because of their failure to keep the law of Moses), the old covenant was unable to bring eschatological justification and the fullness of salvation and blessing to humanity.

But this failure of the old covenant to achieve the fullness of covenant blessing for humanity was part of God’s plan. The so-called pedagogical function of the law is properly to be found in the idea that the failure of Israel under the law of Moses highlights the need for the new covenant in Christ as the solution to the problem of human sin that is described in the Old Testament. There was grace present in the old covenant, but a greater work of God’s grace was necessary for the fullness of salvation to be achieved. This new work of grace through the new covenant in Christ was clearly prophesied in the Old Testament, where it is taught that God would establish a new covenant by sending Christ, his suffering but Spirit-filled Servant, to make atonement for God’s people, and to break the power of sin on the cross, who thereupon would pour out the Holy Spirit to effect the circumcision of the hearts of not only the people of Israel but Gentiles as well, so that many people of many nations might be brought to faith in Christ, and experience the grace of forgiveness from God, so that God’s promise of the blessing of the nations in Abraham might be fulfilled.

Because Old Testament prophecy speaks of the new covenant as effecting the proper response that was required of Israel but lacking under the old covenant, and because the new covenant is portrayed as being the fulfillment of the old covenant, the new covenant in Christ exhibits the same covenant dynamics as the old covenant. Thus, the condition for benefiting from the grace of God offered in Christ likewise is faith, but in the new covenant age this is to be understood as a holistic commitment to the whole new word of God as revealed through Christ and his apostles. This contrasts with the holistic commitment to God’s word in the law of Moses under the old covenant. In the transition from the old covenant to the new, there is, therefore, a change in the mediators and content of covenant law; but this is not to be understood as if Moses and Christ are opposed to each other. Old covenant law commanded that when the Messiah appeared, Israel and the nations must submit to his authority and obey his word (Deut 18:15, 19; Ps 2:10–12). With the coming of the new covenant in Christ, therefore, the old covenant has been superseded. Indeed, the old covenant has now become more comprehensively a covenant of condemnation than what it proved to be for old covenant Israel previously, because maintaining a primary allegiance to Moses even though the Messiah has come is to deny the lordship of Christ and constitutes rebellion against God. Hence, Paul’s teaching that justification is by faith in Christ and no longer by the works of the Mosaic law (Rom 10:5–6).

The new covenant, therefore, like the old covenant, is a conditional covenant of grace; but the new covenant will succeed where the old covenant failed precisely because Christ will work through the power of the Holy Spirit to ensure that the new covenant community (as a whole) will fulfill the covenant condition of holistic faith. Those individuals who exhibit the right response of faith under the new covenant experience the grace of justification in the present, and will (on condition on perseverance in faith) be justified by God on the day of judgment, and thereby qualified to live eternally in God’s holy presence, experiencing the fullness of salvation and covenant blessing forever more.

What is the New Covenant? The Concept of the Covenant of Peace in Ezekiel 34

Disoriented, distressed, and perhaps even depressed. Exiled to Babylon, Ezekiel and his countrymen would have been wondering: How did this happen to us? What’s gone wrong? Why have we lost our land? Why have we been exiled?

When things go wrong, when tragedy strikes, it’s natural to ask the question why. But often when we ask that question, sadly there isn’t a clear or satisfactory answer. Like when a child is born with some kind of defect, or when people lose their lives in accidents. The scientists or the police can often explain how, but the question of why still remains. Why? Sometimes we don’t know why. But for Israel, the situation was different. For them, the why of their situation was very clear … because God wanted it to be clear. God sent prophets to the people to clearly point out why. And the answer that the Old Testament prophets gave was crystal clear. Israel was in exile because Israel hadn’t been living in accordance with her obligations under the covenant.

Ezekiel 34 explores an important aspect of this covenant failure. Israel is pictured in this chapter as a flock of sheep. Her leaders are pictured as shepherds. Shepherds are supposed to look after the sheep, but that is not how the majority of the leaders of Israel had acted. Instead of taking care of the sheep, the leaders of Israel had been using the sheep for their own benefit. Instead of feeding the sheep, they had been feeding off them.

In Ezek 34:3–5 God indicts the shepherds of Israel:

You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they becme food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.

That is, except for God. The kings of Israel might have led the people astray; but if an important part of the failure of Israel could be linked to ungodly shepherds, then the solution was for God himself to be Israel’s shepherd. This solution is found in Ezek 34:11–15 where God says:

I, I myself will search for my sheep, and I will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered … And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land. And I will feed them on the mountains of Israel … I will feed them with good pasture, and on the mountain heights of Israel shall be their grazing land. There they shall lie down in good grazing land, and on rich pasture they shall feed on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep.

Here we have God promising that he personally would come to take over the role of leadership in Israel. And this is connected in Ezek 34:23 with God establishing over Israel “one shepherd, [his] servant David,” who would feed the sheep, and be their shepherd.

In the light of Ezek 34:23 it is clear that when Jesus came proclaiming himself as the Good Shepherd, he wasn’t just picturing himself as a shepherd because he liked sheep, or because he thought that it was a good metaphor. Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd” because he wanted his opponents and the Jewish people to understand that he was the fulfillment of Ezek 34. He was the shepherd king, of the line of King David, who has come to bring God’s people back.

And it is significant that this time of God himself coming to seek and to save his lost sheep is connected in Ezek 34:25 with the idea of “a covenant of peace.”

Covenant is a concept that is very important for an understanding of our relationship with God, and for understanding the overall message of the Bible; but sadly the idea of covenant isn’t heard very often in churches today. In fact, the word covenant isn’t used much at all in the whole of the English language these days, except perhaps in the fields of law and theology. But when we read the Bible and want to understand God’s plan for the world, we have to deal with the term covenant. The word occurs some 301 times in the ESV translation. The Hebrew word for covenant (ברית) occurs 286 times in the Old Testament. So if you’re reading the Bible, you’re bound to encounter the idea of covenant.

But what is a covenant? The history of this word in English goes back to the Old French word convenant which means coming together. In biblical usage, a covenant is basically an arrangement between two parties wherein one or both of the parties solemnly bind themselves to act in a certain way within a relationship. The word translated as covenant in our Bibles can also be translated as treaty, alliance, pact, or compact. In the ancient world covenants were often legally-binding, written agreements that spelled out the privileges and obligations of each party in the relationship. And usually, as part of such an agreement, the parties committed themselves to faithfully keep their obligations to each other by placing themselves under the threat of a penalty, in the form of an oath or curse, and this would often be symbolized by the slaughter and cutting up of a sacrificial animal.

And this is exactly the kind of relationship that Israel had with God. God and Israel had entered into an agreement with each other about the nature of their relationship at Mount Sinai, after God had rescued Israel out of slavery in Egypt. God and Israel entered into a covenant with each other. The ceremony that took place at that time is recorded in Exod 24. This covenant was renewed on the plains of Moab before Israel entered the promised land after the forty years wandering in the wilderness. This renewal and expansion of the covenant on the plains of Moab is recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

This covenant, which the New Testament calls the old covenant (2 Cor 3:14), was a legally-binding written agreement between God and Israel in which God promised to bless Israel on condition of Israel’s obedience and to punish her on condition of disobedience. Moses makes this clear in the book of Deuteronomy. At the conclusion of the final sermon that he ever preached, Moses called out to the people:

Look, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of Yahweh your God that I am commanding you today, by loving Yahweh your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and Yahweh your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish (Deut 30:15–18).

The book of Deuteronomy testifies that obedience would lead to life and blessing, but disobedience would lead to the fulfilment of the curses of exile and death. If Israel kept God’s commandments, that is, if they were committed to following God’s word in their life, then they would experience the blessing of being God’s people living in the Holy Land.

Now some Christians think that it was impossible for Israel to keep this covenant with God, but this is to forget how God provided a means for the forgiveness of sin as part of the covenant itself. The different animal sacrifices that could be offered at the temple (the burnt offering, the sin offering, and the guilt offering) all had atonement or reconciliation as a significant part of their function. The old covenant made provision for the forgiveness of sin. It was a covenant of grace. But despite this, the old covenant still proved to be a catastrophic failure on a national level. Because of Israel’s lack of commitment to God and his way, being led astray (as we see in Ezek 34) by ungodly leaders, the curses of the covenant came down upon Israel, the climax of which was exile to a foreign land. Because Israel was not holy as God is holy, they lost the privilege of living in the Holy Land.

The consequences were tragic. Famine, death, destruction, exile. Yet, in the midst of this awful tragedy, God never gave up on his people. In a quite wonderful way, at the lowest ebb of Israel’s relationship with God, God continued to send prophets to his people to announce a period in the future when Israel would be restored to life in a perfect and permanent relationship of obedience to God. God would not abandon his people to the punishment they deserved. He would come to bring them back. This time of restoration of the old covenant relationship between God and Israel is what the Old Testament calls the new covenant.

The phrase new covenant only occurs once in the Old Testament, in Jer 31:31; but both Ezekiel and Isaiah speak of the new covenant three times as a covenant of peace (Isa 54:10; Ezek 34:25; 37:26). Even more popular than covenant of peace is the phrase everlasting covenant, which occurs six times altogether as a reference to the new covenant (see Isa 55:3; 61:8; Jer 32:40; 50:5; Ezek 16:60; 37:26).

It is difficult to understand God’s purposes for the world without understanding the concept of covenant, and perhaps the best illustration for us today about what a covenant is all about is the concept of marriage.

Marriage is a covenant, and God’s relationship with Israel is like a marriage. The wedding ceremony took place at Mount Sinai. There both parties promised to love each other exclusively. Sadly, however, from when the honeymoon was not yet even finished and for over 600 years onwards, the marriage between God and Israel was on the rocks. Like many bad marriages, it ended up in separation, when the northern kingdom of Israel was exiled by the Assyrians, and then over 100 years later when the southern kingdom of Judah was defeated by the Babylonians. But in the midst of this period of separation, God kept sending letters to his sweetheart, Israel, saying that he wanted her back. Indeed, he promised that he would arrange things so that Israel would come back. The problem that led to the breakdown of the marriage was Israel’s unwillingness to obey God, but God promised that he would act to make Israel willing to obey him, so that in the end Israel would experience wonderful blessing in a restored relationship with God.

This new stage in the marriage, this time of blessing and peace within the relationship, is what the Bible calls the new covenant. And this is why the New Testament is called the New Testament, where testament is just an alternate word for covenant. The New Testament is simply the collection of books and letters that proclaims and explains the arrival of the new covenant. The New Testament is the historical record of the beginning of this wonderful, new stage in God’s marriage not just with Israel, but with all the nations of the world.

The new covenant is the fulfillment of God’s positive purposes for his creation. This is indicated in Ezek 34:25–31, where various positive consequences of the new covenant are delineated. The result of the covenant of peace is security, prosperity, blessing, and intimacy with God:

I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild beasts from the land, so that they may dwell securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods. And I will make them and the places all around my hill a blessing, and I will send down the showers in their season; they shall be showers of blessing. And the trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase, and they shall be secure in their land. And they shall know that I am Yahweh, when I break the bars of their yoke, and deliver them from the hand of those who enslaved them. They shall no more be a prey to the nations, nor shall the beasts of the land devour them. They shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid. And I will provide for them renowned plantations so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land, and no longer suffer the reproach of the nations. And they shall know that I am Yahweh their God with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, declares Lord Yahweh. And you are my sheep, human sheep of my pasture, and I am your God, declares Lord Yahweh.

When you think about it, the Bible, with this movement from the old covenant to the new covenant, is telling us that the history of the world is basically one big, fantastic love story! It’s a story that moves from love rejected to love rekindled. And the exciting thing for Christians is that we, like Israel, are in this covenant relationship with God. We are part of this love story!

The New Testament teaches that Christians are in a covenant relationship with God; but we relate to God no longer on the basis of the old covenant, but on the basis of the new covenant. There has been a change from the old relationship characterized by unfaithfulness and disobedience on the part of Israel to a new relationship where the church has the power of Christ’s new life working in us to lead us back to God and to love him. Jesus is the one who has made the difference. He’s the one who’s saved the marriage, so that God’s original promise of blessing might be fulfilled. The overarching purpose of what God is doing in the world is breathtaking in its scope. It is something for which we ought always to thank God.

But, at the same time, understanding the concept of covenant can also help us better understand, not only the place of Jesus in God’s plan, but also the nature of our relationship with God, and what God desires to see in us. Think about it. If the church is like the wife in the divine marriage covenant, then what is our role in this relationship? What is required of us, and how are we to live? Well, like a wife loves her husband (or at least is supposed to), the job of each individual Christian is to love God, to be faithful to him, and (like women used to pledge as part of their marriage vows in earlier times) to be obedient.

Jesus picks up this idea in John 15 when he said to his disciples: “as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love ... These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:9–11).

At the heart of the new covenant for the believer is the constant discipline of striving to love Jesus and to live in obedience to him. As we love God, we experience more of his love for us, and we have joy in our hearts. But the key on our part, as always, is faithfully following the Lord Jesus and his way of life in the context of the grace of the cross.

This is a key part of what the new covenant is all about: God’s people loving and obeying God as he has revealed himself to the world in the person of Jesus, and the resultant benefit of experiencing great blessing in intimate relationship with God. Jesus is the one who has saved the marriage. He died on the cross to atone for our rebellion, and through his resurrection he has brought new life into this relationship. But to benefit from this, we need to be participating in the new covenant in a positive way. If you’re not a follower of Jesus yet, you need to become one. And if you’re a follower already, you need to keep on following. Christians need to be committed to the covenant with God, and to find joy in being faith-full rather than faith-less, in being covenant keepers rather than covenant breakers. This is our responsibility and privilege within the new covenant of peace and blessing that Jesus died to achieve. Christians, honor Jesus’ death on your behalf by honoring him as your Shepherd King. This is what Jesus has come to achieve.

A Summary of the New Covenant Paradigm

My current doctoral thesis is concerned to develop something of the bigger biblical-theological flow of salvation history in the Bible under the rubric of justification. I have called the resulting model the new covenant paradigm. The model can be summarized under 15 main theses as follows:

1) The condition of justification inside the garden of Eden was perfect (holistic) faith;

2) The condition of justification outside the garden of Eden is imperfect (holistic) faith;

3) The primary dispensational distinction in the Bible is that between the old covenant and the new covenant;

4) The condition of justification for Israel under the old covenant was not perfect faith but imperfect faith, as the presence of a system of sacrificial atonement within the law proves;

5) Under the old covenant, the condition of faith, being holistic, was characteristically described in terms of doing torah;

6) Hence, a legitimate doctrine of justification by the works of the law existed under the old covenant;

7) The old covenant is, therefore, a covenant of grace; but Israel's continuation in grace was conditional upon Israel continuing in imperfect (holistic) faith (i.e., doing torah);

8) But Israel as a nation broke the covenant by not doing torah;

9) Therefore, the Mosaic covenant of grace functioned historically primarily as a covenant of condemnation and death, compounding the original transgression of Adam;

10) The failure of the old covenant was part of God’s plan to highlight the supreme expression of the grace of God to be revealed under the new covenant in Christ;

11) Because the new covenant solves the problem of the failure of the old covenant, and is the fulfillment of the old covenant, the new covenant exhibits the same relational dynamics as the old covenant;

12) Therefore, justification under the new covenant is also justification by imperfect faith;

13) But with the coming of a new revelation in Christ, the content of faith has been redefined in terms of this new revelation (the gospel), which can be contrasted with the previous revelation that came via Moses (the law);

14) The new covenant definition of faith can be contrasted, therefore, with the definition of faith that was understood to apply under the old covenant, hence the covenantal distinction between justification by faith in Christ under the new covenant and justification by the works of the law (i.e., Mosaic faith) under the old;

15) Under the new covenant (like under the old), perseverance in faith is necessary in order to experience the fullness of salvation at the time of the consummation of the new covenant.

In other words, what I am suggesting is that, outside of the garden, justification has always been by (imperfect) faith. But because faith is typically viewed in the Old Testament in a holistic manner, justification by faith under the old covenant was typically thought of as being by way of obedience to the stipulations of the Mosaic covenant in the context of grace, what came to be known in Jewish parlance as justification by the works of the law. The New Testament works of the law versus faith in Christ distinction, therefore, is primarily a terminological distinction that expresses pragmatically the element of discontinuity between the covenants on the level of the mediator and content of revelation. In sum, if you wanted to be right with God under the old covenant, you had to follow the revelation that had been given to Israel via Moses (Deut 6:25; Rom 10:5); but if you want to be right with God under the new covenant, you need to follow the revelation that has been given to the world in Christ (John 8:31–32; Rom 10:8–13).

The Link between Righteousness and Eschatological Torah in Romans 9:30-33

A friend of mine has recently drawn my attention to Rom 9:30-32. The fact that ἔθνη (Gentiles) is anarthrous suggests to me that Paul has in mind either Gentiles viewed generally or an indefinite group of Gentiles. The characterization of these Gentiles in a classically Jewish “derogatory” way as being those who “do not pursue righteousness” (v. 30) is something that was true from the Jewish perspective of Gentiles generally. At the same time, however, Paul’s interest is mainly upon the subset of all of those ungodly Gentiles who “have attained righteousness” (v. 30). The righteousness that the Gentiles were not pursuing is not moral righteousness in a general sense, but the righteousness of a right standing before God on the basis of a commitment to his word, i.e., a righteousness akin to the righteousness that the orthodox Jews of Paul’s day were zealous to pursue through their commitment to torah. Historically how many Gentiles were keen to study the law of Moses with a view to keeping it? Not many. So this Jewish characterization of the Gentiles was generally true. But, with the coming of the new covenant, things had changed. The new covenant “surprise” (from the Jewish perspective) is that morally-lax torah-non-compliant Gentiles have attained the righteous standing before God which the orthodox Jews of the time were so zealous to attain. This right standing has come, however, not on the basis of torah-keeping but rather gospel-keeping (i.e., through faith in Christ as revealed in the gospel).

In Rom 9:31, Paul describes the flip-side of this new covenant surprise: Israel’s legitimate pursuit of righteousness by way of obedience to Mosaic torah proved in the end to be a failure, not because pursuing righteousness through the law of Moses was misguided, but simply because the people of Israel (considered as a whole) “did not attain to the law.” Israel’s not attaining the law has two elements to it. Historically, as the Old Testament is concerned to prove, Israel (as a nation) did not keep or obey the law. Israel’s lack of covenant obedience meant that justification on the basis of such obedience was non-existent. The phrase νόμον δικαιοσύνης (the law of righteousness) in v. 31 is to be understood through the prism of Deut 6:25. Moses taught Israel that “it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us.” In other words, if Israel kept covenant with God, then this would be the right response on the level of her covenant obligations before God, and this right response would result in Israel enjoying the status of covenant righteousness before God. During the old covenant age, following the law (in the context of grace) was the way to be right with God and to experience blessing as a consequence (as per God’s promise to bless the righteous and to punish the wicked; see Exod 19:5; 20:5-6). But Paul has in mind more than this historical failure of Israel to attain covenant righteousness. He primarily has in mind the specific situation of his day, namely, the failure on the part of the majority of the Jews at the time to notice the change in the way in which covenant righteousness was to be defined: the old covenant doctrine of justification by the works of the law was superseded by the new covenant doctrine of justification by faith in Christ. This can be seen from Paul’s reasoning in v. 32.

In Rom 9:32, Paul clearly states the reason why the Jews of his day failed to attain such a righteous status before God. It was because they pursued such righteousness through works (where works is shorthand in the context for the works of the [Mosaic] law), and not through faith in Christ. It is important to note here that the concept of faith in view in Rom 9:30-32 (as is common in Paul) is not historically general but specifically eschatological and thoroughly christological. Faith here is specifically an acceptance of the “offensive” Messianic stone of stumbling (Isa 8:14), Jesus of Nazareth, as being (in reality) the tested, precious cornerstone, the sure foundation of salvation, for anyone who believes (Isa 28:16). In other words, Yahweh’s laying of the Messianic stone in Zion (Rom 9:32) is nothing other than the revelation of eschatological torah in Jesus, and faith (which in general is a submissive acceptance of the word of God) is specifically in this context the proper response to this supreme revelation in Jesus. By submitting to the gospel, the Gentiles had attained covenant righteousness. Submission to the gospel is the right response to eschatological torah. But for the majority of the Jews of Paul’s day, tragically, their devotion to the Mosaic way of righteousness prevented them from accepting the gospel. In sum, their “zeal” for the torah of Moses prevented them from recognizing eschatological Torah when he was revealed to Israel.