The Mosaic Covenant

In the Exodus sermon series so far, we have seen the continuity of God's saving work. God saves his people from Egypt based on the gospel promise foreshadowed in the garden (Gen. 3:15) and made more clear in the covenant with Abraham (Gen. 15). The Mosaic covenant, like the Abrahamic and New Covenants, belongs in substance to the covenant of grace, yet the covenant of grace is "differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel" (WCF 7.4). In the last two sermons, we have begun to see shadows of this discontinuity at the level of administration, and so we want to explore it further as preparation for the rest of the series. Israel was redeemed by grace and through faith participated in the benefits of Christ, experiencing the blessings of salvation through the types and shadows of the Mosaic administration. The Mosaic covenant was given to Israel as an immature, "underage" church, with temporal, earthly blessings promised for obedience and temporal, earthly curses threatened for disobedience. This Friday, we will consider this unity and diversity by asking in what sense the Mosaic covenant recapitulates the covenant of works made with Adam while remaining fundamentally the covenant of grace. In Israel, God's typological son, we see echoes, and even a reenactment, of Adam's obedience, failure, and exile. The history of Israel is then recapitulated in Christ, the true Son of God, who fulfills what Israel could not and in whom the substance of the covenant of grace is revealed.