Kindle Notes & Highlights
It brought home to Josiah and the religious leadership that they had been living in a fool’s paradise in their assumption that Yahweh had irrevocably committed Himself to preserve the nation in the Davidic-Abrahamic covenant.
nobody in Jesus’s day doubted that Israel was in exile as a direct consequence of their corporate disobedience to the terms of the Sinai pact.
emphasizing the satisfaction of law as a necessary prerequisite for everlasting life.22
not because it was flawed, but because those who answered with one voice, “We will do all these things,” in fact did not.
No one in the Old Testament obtained the inheritance by works, but only by promise. Yet Israel’s national status in God’s land depended on fulfillment of the
treaty’s terms.
So we cannot say that the new covenant replaces obligations of law with those of love, since the law had always been regarded as the specification of love’s duties. We have been set free from the personal obligation of fulfilling the law as a condition for eternal life so that, freed from its curse, we can be liberated for the first time to truly love and serve others, which is to obey the law in its deepest intent.
