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Commentary on "Planning Ahead"
Day 3: Monday, November 2, 2009
This day introduces us to the rules established by God regarding the behavior of the strangers who lived together with the people of Israel.
Positive aspects
God’s fairness with which He treated these strangers is emphasizsed. He established as a clear rule the necessity of having a single law for them just as for the Israelites. There was no discrimination. The necessity is clearly spelled out that they had to be circumcised and had to keep all the particular points of Israel’s covenant law. Also, in this lesson, the author makes a parallel between the SDA Church’s peculiar doctrines and Israel’s specific commandments, mentioning the necessity to proclaim these doctrines without an attitude of superiority.
Negative aspects
While quoting Galatians 3:26-29 and Colossians 3:11 which clearly establish that in the New Covenant, in Christ, there is no difference between Jew and gentile, but all are one in Christ, it fails to pay due attention to the different way in which this non-discriminatory principle is present today in contrast with the way in which this principle was present in the Mosaic, or the Old Covenant. In the Old Covenant the same law established the equality; in the New Covenant, faith in Christ establishes the equality. The new equality is accomplished precisely because the gentile is no longer under the obligation to be circumcised keep the specific Old Covenant laws. It’s the exact opposite of the way in which equality was established in the Old Covenant: by becoming circumcised and keeping the specific laws of Israel.
This confusion is at the basis of the Galatian heresy which the Apostle Paul fought by writing the epistle to the Galatians. He made clear that gentiles share in the same blessings with the Jews because they are united by faith alone with Christ (Gal. 3:26-29) and it is a negation of the truth of the gospel (Gal. 1:6,7) to believe that the blessing God promised to Abraham comes by becoming an Israelite through the adoption of the mosaic law. The parallel with the Adventist’s doctrine just makes evident the fact that the message of Adventism fits the paradigm of the Old Covenant’s practice and not the New Covenant faith. While the gospel is no different in the Old Covenant time than in the New Covenant, there is no reason to confuse these two covenants to the degree that the typological nature of the former is confused with the substantial nature of the latter. Jesus kept the law perfectly, and we are counted as righteous because of his accomplishments, as if we were Jews who perfectly kept the law. The community of today is composed of people who put their complete trust in Jesus Christ and who become Abraham’s children in this way, sharing in the blessings promised to Abraham, not by becoming Jews through the adoption of peculiar laws. It is not by becoming Adventists and adopting the Adventist lifestyle that people enjoy God’s blessings. It’s not by works, but by faith.
GO TO DAY 4
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