When God’s Promise Overcomes Our Problem

Paul said that the old covenant mediated by Moses bore a “ministry of condemnation” (2 Corinthians 3:9). What does this mean, and would Moses have agreed?

The Book of Deuteronomy clarifies three things: 1) Moses’s old covenant plea, 2) the people’s old covenant problem, and 3) God’s new covenant promise.

Moses called for the right things: “Love the L??? your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5), and “love the sojourner” (Deuteronomy 10:19; see Leviticus 18:5). Jesus said that these are the first and second most important commands (Mark 12:29–31). Moses even urged, “These words that I command you today shall be on your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6). This command sounds just like what is promised in the new covenant (Jeremiah 31:33).

Nevertheless, as loud or as long as Moses talked, the Israelites didn’t listen, for at the core of their being was hardness –– a spiritual disability in need of heart surgery (Deuteronomy 10:16).

The three words Moses uses throughout this book to describe Israel’s state are “stubborn” (Deuteronomy 9:6, 13; 10:16; 31:27), “unbelieving” (Deuteronomy 1:32; 9:23; 28:66), and “rebellious” (Deuteronomy 1:26, 43; 9:7, 23–24; 21:18, 20; 31:27). They occur together in Deuteronomy 9:6, 23–24.

Moses’s old covenant plea was for love-saturated hearts filled with faith in God that overflowed in obedience. But Israel would have none of it. Indeed, they couldn’t, and Moses knew this. Deuteronomy 29:2–4 reads,

You have seen all that the L??? did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders. But to this day the L??? has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.

Dull and Condemned

Though Israel knew a lot about God, they didn’t really know him. Though they had seen God at one level, at a deeper level they remained blind. They had heard God’s voice, but in reality, they were deaf. Their hearts were hard, their senses dull, resulting in no passion, no fire, no love. They remained stubborn, unbelieving, and rebellious; they were undisciplined, impure, and condemned.

And they couldn’t change it.

The Gift of Seeing

That is what’s amazing. Deuteronomy 29:4 says that a knowing heart, seeing eyes, and hearing ears are all gifts of God. According to his purposes, in order to show us our need for Jesus, God created a covenant where he called for the right things but did not overcome the rebel spirit of the majority (Romans 11:7–8). The people were hardened, and the old covenant would ultimately bring about their death.

At the end of Deuteronomy, both Yahweh and Moses stress how the old covenant relationship, weakened as it was by the fleshly, hardheartedness of the people, would result in their ruin. Yahweh explicitly proclaimed that Israel’s sin would climax in exile (Deuteronomy 31:16–17), and Moses predicted,

I know how rebellious and stubborn you are. Behold, even today while I am yet alive with you, you have been rebellious against the L???. How much more after my death! . . . I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly and turn aside from the way that I have commanded you. And in the days to come evil will befall you, because you will do what is evil in the sight of the L???. (Deuteronomy 31:27, 29)

Old Means Temporary

Both Yahweh and Moses knew that the old covenant was temporary, bearing a ministry of condemnation. Thus Paul, speaking of God’s ultimate, sovereign purpose for the old covenant, could say in Romans 5:20–21: “Now the law came in to increase the trespass.” That is why God gave the law –– to multiply sin.

But Paul continues, “But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Moses was not only convinced of the death-dealing nature of the old covenant. He also anticipated a life-giving new covenant that would replace the old –– a covenant that would include divine enablement, allowing the world to read the law in human lives.

Moses states that after the curse has been paid, “The L??? your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the L??? your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:6).

In the age that we know of as the new covenant, God’s call for us to love him with our everything would be matched by his empowerment. God would enable what he commands, so that the new covenant will not be broken. We are now in the age of fulfillment. The condemning role of the old covenant has been superseded by the righteousness-bringing new covenant. God is inscribing his law on new hearts, and his own Spirit is empowering obedience (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:26–27).

Moses himself knew that the old covenant bore a ministry of condemnation, and he anticipated the day when God’s mercy would bring fresh repentance and transformation in the latter days: “When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the L??? your God and obey his voice. For the L??? your God is a merciful God” (Deuteronomy 4:30–31).

Thanks be to God for new-covenant grace.

Failure to Live on Mission Is a Worship Problem

Sometimes we think the way to engage people in mission is to make sure we get the right information to them.

If we just preach the Bible, people will evangelize.

If we show people the commands in Scripture to care for the poor, people will develop a heart for mercy ministry.

If we make people aware of our need for more volunteers, people will sign up.

In other words, we perceive a knowledge problem. People need to know how to apply the Scriptures better, and once they know what they need to do, they’ll do it.

But this isn’t the way long-term change takes place. Most of the time, when we are marked by missional apathy, it’s not that we don’t know what we ought to be doing; it’s that we don’t want to be doing what we ought to be doing.

In our efforts to increase missional fervor, we can get so focused on giving people more information, or better application, that we forget that our main task is to lead people to exultation. That’s a fancy word for “worship.” We exult, we delight in the Savior, we revel in him. Exaltation of the Savior leads to exultation of the saints.

Lack of mission is rarely a knowledge problem; it’s a worship problem. We don’t have any trouble talking about the things we love most. Whenever we find something worthy of attention, we talk about it.

The same is true of our relationship with Christ. The more we are in awe of his worthiness, the more likely we are to speak of him to others and serve others in his name.

Sometimes people worry that the rough edges of Christianity will lead us to avoid serving our neighbor and sharing the gospel. So we play down some of the harder truths of the gospel, not denying them of course, but not giving them their proper weight.

The reality of hell is an example. There are all sorts of ways to downplay the truth of one’s eternal destiny; the most common is simply to not speak of it, or to recast salvation as dealing more with this life than the next.

But what happens when the reality of hell is no longer grounding our talk about salvation and the gospel? We miss out on a moment of worship.

Consider this scenario. You’re walking with a friend, not paying much attention to where you are headed. Suddenly, your friend grabs your arm and yanks you backwards. At first, you are annoyed that you’ve been stopped so suddenly. But then your friend points in front of you. Sure enough, he had a reason. You were about to step off into a ditch, where you might have broken your foot or sprained your ankle. Your annoyance turns to gratitude for his “saving you” from possible harm. You thank your friend and move on.

Consider the same scenario, except this time your friend doesn’t pull you back from a ditch, but a cliff. You were about to fall to your death, hundreds of feet below. What would your reaction be in this situation? Not just a word of “thanks.” You’d be crying and hugging your friend, overflowing with gratitude for the way he just saved your life.

In the same way, when we minimize the severity of God’s judgment for sin, we are less inclined to stand in awe of the marvelous salvation Christ has provided for us. We think we’re pushing aside an obstacle when we neglect the reality of judgment. But what we’re actually doing is pushing away one of the truths that most leads us to worship. The reality of God’s grace is all the more amazing the more we see our sin and what it deserves.

A gospel-centered teacher isn’t satisfied to see his people learn truths about God. A gospel-centered leader wants them to feel those truths. To feel the full weight of God’s provision for us in Christ. To have the heart’s affections stirred to worship the loving God who has saved us by his grace and incorporated us into his family.

Biblical Womanhood and the Problem of the Old Testament

As explained in my review of A Year of Biblical Womanhood, much of Rachel Held Evans’ book could be summed up, sadly, as an attempt to discount the validity of Scripture. I am hopeful that she does not intend for this to happen, but it is unfortunately what happens when she repeatedly speaks of the Bible as being outdated, useless in parts, and at times downright horrific — including at one point describing having a terrifying nightmare as she contemplated the texts (62). Tragically, that is her claim.

Evans is troubled by many things in the Old Testament, but especially by the harsh consequences in the law that follow from sexual sin — consequences that often required the death of men and women. In explaining why these same codes do not apply today — why adulterers are not stoned to death — she can only say, “Most Jews and Christians have long abandoned the practices associated with hard patriarchy” (51). But is it that simple — and that shallow?

She suggests this is because Jesus ignored certain Old Testament laws. He was a revolutionary who used “selective literalism” and who broke these anti-adultery laws when he urged compassion on the adulterous woman (53). But before we charge Jesus with breaking the law, we should give this question some serious thought.

Actually, we are faced with two questions. First, how should we handle the abuse of women recorded in the Old Testament? And second, how should we properly evaluate the ongoing value of the Old Testament law?

In one chapter, Evans sets out to find groups “committed to preserving as much of the patriarchal structure of Old Testament law as possible,” including polygamists. In polygamy, “the man’s consequent procreative prowess is listed by writers of Scripture as one of his most worthy virtues” (51, 58). That is a bold claim, but she provides no biblical citations to back it up.

In her thoughts on polygamy, Evans claims the Bible never condemns it. Yet monogamous marriage seems to be the norm in the Old Testament (Genesis 2:24, Malachi 2:13–15), and especially so in the New Testament (1 Timothy 3:12; Titus 1:6). Nowhere do we read the Bible sanctioning polygamy.

The abuse of women recorded in the Old Testament is one reason Evans reevaluated biblical womanhood and rejected complementary roles in marriage today. She notes that at one point she had confidence in the biblical view of submission. “When Dan and I got married back in 2003, we began our marriage with the assumption that I would submit to him because the Bible told me to, that while I had a voice in our decisions as a couple, Dan held the reins,” he writes. “Dan would bring home the bacon, and I would fry it” (204).

But during the early years of her marriage, Evans and her husband found that they needed to run two businesses, and as she put it “tasks tend to get assigned based on efficiency rather than gender” (204). As life continued to get busier, they realized that they functioned “best as a team of equal partners” (204). Why complementarian marriage cannot be defined as a team of equal partners (with differing roles), is not clear. In fact her chapter on submission (pages 201–220) leaves me with many unanswered questions. I’m sure other reviews will ask many of the same questions in the coming weeks.

Chillingly, Evans now claims that what she reads in the Bible is a nightmare of oppression for women. She calls upon Christian women to remember the dark stories.

Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David's house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth. We may not have a ceremony through which to grieve them, but it is our responsibility as women of faith to guard the dark stories for our own daughters, and when they are old enough, to hold their faces between our hands and make them promise to remember. (66)

The sinful abuse of women in the Old Testament is troubling, but as troubling as it is, those sins are not determinative of new-covenant ethics for the church today, and they do not dismiss male headship either.

In writing this post, Tony Reinke passed along some helpful research suggestions as I processed what I was reading. On this point he sent the following quote from Margaret Köstenberger's book Jesus and the Feminists, where she writes:

It is true that the historical narrative books of the Hebrew Scriptures witness to numerous abuses of this abiding principle of male headship in the Old Testament period, such as arbitrary divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1–2), the intermittent practice of polygamy, adultery, rape, incest, and so on. Scripture does not condone these behaviors and attitudes. At the same time, the New Testament does not abrogate the principle of male headship even subsequent to redemption in Christ. Thus, Paul still can call Christian wives to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22–24), and Peter similarly enjoins wives even of unbelieving husbands to submit to them (1 Peter 3:1–6). (34)

In fact, for all of her concerns about the Old Testament laws and polygamy and rape and abuse towards women in old-covenant times, Evans ultimately misses a fundamental truth. For Jesus and Paul and for the Church, sexual and marriage ethics (and biblical womanhood) are not based on the historical sins against women that are recorded in the Old Testament, but from the pre-fall monogamous union of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. From reading Evans’ book, you would think this was not the case.

In the first marriage, in this pre-fall union, we find the norm for all human sexual ethics, for marriage, for male and female equality, and for the distinctives to biblical manhood and biblical womanhood. When Evans addresses Eve in particular (which is very early in the book, pages xx–xxii), she fails to notice that Eve was taken out of Adam and created, not to be a helper like him, but to be Adam’s perfectly adapted helper for him (Genesis 2:18, 1 Corinthians 11:8–10). By missing this foundational point — by missing the very genesis of biblical womanhood — the remainder of the book was certain to be unclear.

Which brings me to my second point. On top of polygamy, there is female slavery, the presence of concubines, death prescribed for sexual sins, separation from the community during a monthly cycle, widows forced to marry the brother of their late husbands, arranged marriages, pagan women slaughtered in battles, and so on (48–51). Without distinction, Evans blends what is prescribed in the law and what is described in narratives, making it all normative for “biblical womanhood.”

In her view, for womanhood to be considered biblical, everything in the Bible must be followed, what is prescribed and what is described. That isn’t possible, she says, therefore biblical womanhood is a myth (294). So we must select what we want to obey and what we don’t want to obey (a troubling theme of the book that I addressed in my original review).

Evans claims that this is what Jesus did, after all, when he refused to stone the adulterous woman (John 8:3–11). According to the law, adulterous women are to be stoned (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22). Jesus refused to.

Evans writes:

Jesus once said that his mission was not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. And in this instance, fulfilling the law meant letting it go. It may serve as little comfort to those who have suffered abuse at the hand of Bible-wielding literalists, but the disturbing laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy lose just a bit of their potency when God himself breaks them. (54)

Evans’ language for why Jesus did not stone the adulterous woman is confusing and misleading.

Jesus is sinless (Hebrews 4:15). It’s doubtful that breaking the law would be the best way to describe it. Ignoring the uncomfortable parts of the law certainly does not seem accurate either. Jesus does not abolish the law, not one little comma in it (Matthew 5:17).

The religious leaders sought to corner and discount Jesus’ entire mission (John 8:5–6). If Jesus would not stone the adulterer, then he must be a law-breaker — and Evans comes right out and says it.

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, D. A. Carson suggests that when Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7), he was specifically referencing the sin of adultery in the accusing men themselves! The men bringing the accusation were also adulterers. “When it comes to sexual sins, the woman was much more likely to be in legal and social jeopardy than her paramour,” Carson writes. “The man could lead a ‘respectable’ life while masking the same sexual sins with a knowing wink. Jesus’ simple condition, without calling into question the Mosaic code, cuts through the double standard and drives hard to reach the conscience.”

In this story Jesus is not breaking the law or shrugging off the Old Testament law. Rather, Jesus is calling these men out on their double-standard, thinking the law applied more to adulterous woman than to adulterous men.

It is through the high standards of the Old Testament law that we see the beauty of our Savior shine, not in his ignoring of the law, but in his fulfillment of it, not in lessening of the holy demands of God, but in seeing them in all their divine righteousness.

Take these few examples:

In Leviticus 1:9, the offering of a whole sacrifice to God prefigures Christ’s giving of his whole self (Hebrews 10:5–14).
In Leviticus 6:13, the unceasing flame of the altar reveals the insufficiency of repeated sacrifices in contrast to the sufficiency of Christ’s once for all sacrifice (Hebrews 10:1–10).
In Leviticus 11:45, separation from uncleanness symbolizes separation from sin in order to be intimate with God. It prefigures Christ’s work bringing holiness (Hebrews 7:26, 10:16).
In Leviticus 18:5, we read that God requires perfect obedience that can only be found in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21). Sinners like us cannot keep the law (Romans 10:5, Galatians 3:12–14).

These few brief references barely scratch the surface for the number of references and parallels to Christ’s coming and sacrifice found in the Old Testament.

And so, yes, women can look to the Old Testament law passages to be reminded of God's holiness in texts like Leviticus 15:19–33. These texts may make women uneasy, but they also remind us that God is holy and majestic. He is separate from all sin — male and female. His ways are not our ways; they are perfect in every way, and we are hopeless without a perfect Substitute.

In passages like Leviticus 15:19–33, women today are reminded that “regulations for the body” were imposed only “until the time of reformation” (Hebrews 9:10). That is, the Old Testament purification codes point to the arrival of Christ, the “high priest of the good things that have come” (Hebrews 9:11).

Any woman who practices purity regulations with her body is revealing her theology. It is a sad missing of how our Savior fulfills these specific regulations in his substitutionary death. It is tragically easy for all of us to minimize the significance of our sinless Savior’s life, death and resurrection from the dead.

The gospel reminds us that the world is fallen and sinful. Men sin against women. Women sin against men. Women sin against women. Women are not innocent, but sinners. Male and female, we all are each part of the problem. When we read of sin in the Old Testament, we are reminded of the sin that resides in our own hearts.

But the gospel reminds us that we can look at the Old Testament law without horror or terror. There in the purity codes we see a glimpse of the beauty and sufficiency of our Savior. We see the law that he came to fulfill. And in him we are saved from the greatest terror of all — an eternity separated from God.

And yet when the gospel is clouded, things go terribly wrong in our theology. Unless the veil is lifted (2 Corinthians 3:12–18), we cannot make sense of the Old Testament law in God’s redemptive plan. We cannot understand the hope and joy of biblical womanhood. And biblical womanhood, divorced from the gospel, becomes a very dangerous thing.