Colleen and Nikki discuss the covenant that God made with Israel before they moved into the land that God had promised them. Adventism’s most revered commandment is included. Podcast was published March 31, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: Welcome to our continuing study of the covenants. Today we are going to begin looking at the covenant that probably feels the most familiar to most of us who’ve been Adventist. We’re looking at the Mosaic covenant. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yeah, the collective giggle, like “here we go.” [Laughter.]
Nikki: Um-hmm. [Laughter.]
Colleen: So, Nikki, talk to me about the Mosaic covenant from your past. How did you see it? What was it to you? Who were you in relationship to it?
Nikki: Ohhh, that’s a loaded question, huh?
Colleen: It is.
Nikki: So I was thinking about this before we did the podcast. What did I think about the Mosaic covenant? Um, the picture came to my mind of if I thought of the Mosaic covenant as a heart, then Jesus was the blood, and the two cannot function without each other. The entire purpose of Christ was to make the law functional in our lives, useful to us. It was just – it was so connected, you couldn’t separate the Mosaic Law from the life of a Christian.
Colleen: That’s interesting.
Nikki: So they were inseparable, they were necessary, and they needed each other. It was the whole point, to vindicate God’s law to the universe. We had to prove that He was fair in giving us this law, and Jesus showed us how to do it, and so it was very much connected. And because of that, I had to spiritualize a lot of what I read about the law being forIsrael. I had to become Israel now.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: I had to read myself into the passage, so it was hard to know how to apply it to my life fully. It felt bigger than I could wrap my mind around because we had the sanctuary doctrine that somehow was foreshadowed by the Mosaic Law –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and I just thought greater minds than mine understand this.
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: But it almost felt like – I was talking to Richard before we did this, and it was almost like the Mosaic Law had just – it could chew you up and swallow you, and you can’t find –
Colleen: Your identity?
Nikki: You’re so much a part of it. If you’re a Christian, you have to be fully integrated into the Mosaic Law in order to be a good Christian.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: I don’t know, it just was inseparable. I couldn’t –
Colleen: From an Adventist perspective.
Nikki: From an Adventist perspective. And so when I became a Christian, it was really important for me to know how this Mosaic Law applies to the life of a believer, and in order to do that I had to pull myself out of all the places I was reading myself into the passage –
Colleen: Oh, interesting.
Nikki: – and I had to know, “Who was this for? Was this really for me?”
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: I had to understand that I was a Gentile. It took a lot of work to pull myself out of that.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I don’t know if I’m making sense.
Colleen: Well, yes!
Nikki: It was just so confusing and hard to explain.
Colleen: It makes sense to me. I think that metaphor of the Mosaic covenant, which I’m hearing you say – and from my background I would agree – the Mosaic covenant was represented by the law –
Nikki: Yeah. Well, the Decalogue, sorry.
Colleen: There we go.
Nikki: That’s important to say, huh?
Colleen: The Decalogue, yeah.
Nikki: Yeah. When you say “law” or “Mosaic covenant” –
Colleen: Decalogue.
Nikki: – you think Decalogue, as a former Adventist or as an Adventist.
Colleen: Right. Yeah.
Nikki: The ten.
Colleen: That was so true for me. The Ten Commandments was the heart of the Mosaic covenant, in my mind –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – and if, using your metaphor, that is the “beating heart” of the covenant, and then Jesus comes along as the blood, the beating heart pumps Jesus through itself –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – to make the law make sense and to illustrate the law. You know what that reminds me of? When we went to Andrews, do you remember the prayer garden –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – outside of the church?
Nikki: Yeah. Yeah.
Colleen: And the way you walk through the garden, according to the legend that was actually printed and posted beside the garden as you walk down the steps, the seven steps of creation, to the cross, you look at the cross. You don’t see any words like, “It is finished,” but what you see are the words, “I will come again.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And then the direction is you turn your back on the cross and walk to the other end of the garden, where there is a large Ten Commandments, and that is representing the heart of God.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So in the Adventist view of how Jesus and the law relate, we come to Him so we can get to the law.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s exactly backwards from what the Bible tells us.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: It’s upside down. Oh, that kind of makes me mad.
Nikki: Well, it’s in their art too.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There are pictures of people in heaven. Jesus has His arm around them, and He’s pointing to the Ten Commandments.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: So it was this symbiotic relationship between Jesus and the Ten Commandments.
Colleen: And how do we fit into that? It was never clear.
Nikki: You have to identify with parts of Scripture that weren’t written to you –
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: – in order to make it work, and that’s just not –
Colleen: That’s true. And you also had to identify with things the Scripture doesn’t even say. The whole idea that Jesus points to the law instead of the law pointing to Jesus –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – is heresy.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: Oh, my goodness!
Nikki: And you know what, it’s sad to say, this isn’t only done in Adventism.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: I don’t know where Ellen White and the early founders of Adventism got all of their foundational beliefs from.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: I mean, they would have been able to try to find support for that kind of a worldview.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But it’s just when you study the covenants and when you read Scripture in its context, that’s not what it’s teaching.
Colleen: Not even close. Well, shall we try walking through the Mosaic covenant and how it began? Because we left last week at the end of talking about the Abrahamic covenant and how it was unconditional, that God gave it to Abraham and for his descendants, who were children of promise. We come to this unique place in the Book of Exodus where we find the Mosaic covenant is given, and it’s different from the Abrahamic covenant. It’s neither added to it nor taken from it. It’s a new covenant that operates simultaneously with the Abrahamic covenant, but they don’t become blended or merged. I did not understand that as an Adventist.
Nikki: Well, we had the Mosaic covenant in eternity past.
Colleen: That’s true, we did.
Nikki: We had the Ten Commandments all the way back there. We talked about that with the Noahic covenant: Did they have the food laws already?
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: Well, we’re going to see here that they didn’t.
Colleen: That’s a really good point. So when the Book of Exodus opens, it basically opens with Abraham’s descendants nearing the end of that prophetic period that God had told Abraham about, that his people would be in bondage for 400 years. Exodus opens near the end of that period of time, when Abraham’s descendants have grown from a band of about 75. And we know that because at the end of Genesis when Joseph meets his brothers and there’s a famine in the land, Joseph invites his brothers and his father to come to Egypt, where they will have food and they can be near him, and the Pharaoh gives them a place to live, there are about 75 people who come into Egypt, and that’s Joseph’s family. And then time passes, and the Book of Exodus opens, and those people have grown to probably close to two million. So there we have Abraham’s descendants flourishing in Egypt, but they are slaves, and they’re being mistreated, and the Pharaoh is starting to get nervous because there are so many of them. I think it’s really interesting that he had a little meeting at the beginning of Exodus with the Israelite midwives and asked them to kill the male babies as they were born, and do you remember what the midwives said? It was pretty interesting. It’s a little shocking. But they actually said to him, “We can’t kill them. Those Israelite women are so hardy they’re giving birth before we get there. We can’t stop it.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] So they preserved the lives of their sisters’ babies, but he did demand the death of the babies. Does that remind you of anything?
Nikki: It makes me think of Herod killing all of the babies after Jesus was born.
Colleen: I don’t think I’d actually thought about the significance of that before thinking about this. When Moses is born, there is a law that people have to kill the Israelite babies, and Moses is the one who’s going to grow up to be the giver of the covenant that defines Israel.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: When Jesus is born, there is a law that the babies two years and younger must be killed, and Jesus is the one who is the promised seed who is going to introduce the covenant that defines the people of God forever.
Nikki: That is so cool.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting?
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: So that’s how Exodus opens. There’s a death decree for the babies. And we all know how Moses’ parents saw he was a beautiful child, and they hid him on the River Nile in a little basket and set his sister to be in charge. And we all know the story. How was he rescued?
Nikki: Pharaoh’s daughter found him, and she wanted to keep him.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And so Moses’ sister played the go-between. She said, “Oh, I have a wet nurse for you.” Moses was taken back to his own mom, and he was allowed to grow up for probably 4 to 5 years. It’s a little unclear how long, but until he was weaned, and then pharaoh’s daughter took him and Moses grew up in the palace of the pharaoh.
Nikki: You know, as you tell this story, I have all the pictures in my head from those books. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Oh, my goodness! You’re right. Oh, my.
Nikki: Sorry.
Colleen: That little basket, the bulrushes –
Nikki: Yeah. Yeah.
Colleen: – the princess with her Egyptian hair.
Nikki: And her pretty dress.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Yeah. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] That’s really interesting. Well, there’s silence about those first years of Moses’ life, but we know from the Bible, from the biblical accounts, that Moses’ life can be roughly divided into three groups of 40 years. He had 40 years in the palace, and then he had 40 years in the wilderness, and then he had 40 years leading the children of Israel. So why did Moses flee? Why did he leave Egypt?
Nikki: Well, that’s in Exodus chapter 2 verse 11, “Now it came about in those days, when Moses had grown up, that he went out to his brethren and looked on their hard labors; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. So he looked this way and that, and when he saw there was no one around, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. He went out the next day, and behold, two Hebrews were fighting with each other; and he said to the offender, ‘Why are you striking your companion?’ But he said, ‘Who made you a prince or a judge over us? Are you intending to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?’ Then Moses was afraid and said, ‘Surely the matter has become known.’ When Pharaoh heard of this matter, he tried to kill Moses. But Moses fled from the presence of Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well.”
Colleen: Well, I can sort of see even how the Hebrews would have felt when Moses comes along, and they know he’s the Pharaoh’s adopted grandson.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And they know he’s one of them.
Nikki: Yeah, and here they are slaves.
Colleen: And he’s got the life of privilege.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I can see that. A little jealousy, a little resentment, and he thinks he’s helping.
Nikki: Yeah, he’s identifying with his people.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: He has a heart for his people, and they’re not going to take him into the fold as one of them.
Colleen: No. So God takes him out of the palace, puts him down in the land of Midian, in the desert where several things happen. He becomes a shepherd, and he marries Zipporah, the daughter of a priest of Midian. And then we have another set of nearly 40 years of relative silence, where he goes from being a prince to being a shepherd, and shepherds are really lowly in the social strata. What training for leading all those Israelites later; right?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We’re going to skip over most of that middle life of Moses because the covenant is what we’re really talking about, but it’s really important for us to understand that God picked Moses to lead Israel, and He picked Moses to be the one who mediated between Him and Israel and let Moses be the one who brought the covenant from Him to them. He’s the mediator between them.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s also interesting that before he was sent into the wilderness to learn submission to the Lord and the hard work of leading stubborn, unruly creatures, that he had had 40 years receiving the best education the world had to offer. Egypt was the top of the game in the world at that time. He had all the training in literature, arts, science, math that the best of the world had to offer. He was well educated, and I think it’s so interesting that God prepared him that way before leading these people out of that same land.
Nikki: It’s interesting to me how often God uses Egypt to provide for His people.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: I mean, we see that all over. Even with Abraham didn’t He?
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: He used Egypt to provide for Abraham. He left with riches.
Colleen: He did.
Nikki: And Jesus, after Herod went after the babies – well, before he did, the angel came to Joseph, and Joseph took Him, and he fled to Egypt, and Egypt protected Jesus there, and then that fulfilled the prophecy that said, “Out of Egypt I have called my Son.”
Colleen: That is so significant, and it happened over and over.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Abraham, then Moses, then Jesus, all of these successive covenant leaders, the people who brought in or to whom God made covenant promises or fulfilled promises through them. They were protected by Egypt and nurtured. It’s fascinating, actually. So we come to Exodus 3, where Moses is out in the desert, and all of a sudden he sees a bush burning. The story is familiar to most Adventists. It’s another picture in the Bible Story books.
Nikki: Yeah, I’ve got that in my head. [Laughter.] That’s funny.
Colleen: [Laughter.] So Moses walks over to see that bush burning because the bush is not being consumed, and what is he told to do?
Nikki: Take off his shoes.
Colleen: Because he’s on –
Nikki: Holy ground.
Colleen: Oh, my goodness. So once again we have this imagery of fire representing the presence of God.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Just like Abraham had experienced during his deep sleep as he witnessed in a way that God let him witness, God Himself, represented by forms of fire, making the covenant. And here’s Moses, the fire again. So we all know the story. God tells him that he is being selected to go back to Pharaoh. Can you imagine how terrifying that would be?
Nikki: Oh, no. No, that would be awful.
Colleen: To go back there?
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: And then he has to deal with pharaoh, and he’s going to lead all of those thousands or millions of people out of Egypt.
Nikki: Those same people who said, “Who do you think you are?” Who didn’t embrace him as theirs.
Colleen: And the pharaoh, if it’s not the same one, and I’m not sure if that original one was dead yet or not, but it’s the same throne, and the people would have known about Moses, the Hebrew prince. They would have known. So he has to go back, confront the pharaoh, and God is going to give him special power to out-miracle the soothsayers of pharaoh and oversee and predict the ten plagues that will end with “the plague” where the death angel goes over Egypt and strikes down the firstborn of every one of pharaoh’s household, everyone in the land who’s not inside a house covered with the blood of the Passover lamb. It’s a fascinating story, and I think we all know it, but one thing we were talking about, Nikki, before we started the podcast was the significance of the fact that God is the one who gave Moses the instructions for the Passover. This was before the law was given.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The Passover was not originally part of the law. Just like circumcision was not a part of the law.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And so what was the deal with the Passover? What were they supposed to do?
Nikki: Well, they were supposed to take a lamb into their home, a perfect, flawless lamb, and it was going to live there with them for a little while, wasn’t it?
Colleen: Fourteen days.
Nikki: And then they had to kill it and eat it, and they had to take the blood of the lamb on a certain night and put it on their doorpost, and if they did, then the Angel of Death would pass over them, and if they didn’t, then he would enter in and take the life of the firstborn.
Colleen: You know, think of the significance of all the children, all the people in the household, becoming attached to that lamb.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s a pet. It’s sweet, and they have to kill and eat.
Nikki: _____
Colleen: And it’s blood will save them.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The foreshadowing is kind of overwhelming.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it also says in Exodus that any Egyptians who wanted to side with the Israelites, who wanted to leave with them, if they were in their homes, they too could save their children, if they were under the blood of that Passover lamb. So we all know that that actually did happen after pharaoh hardened his heart nine times, after the first nine plagues. But then on the tenth, when the great cry arose from Egypt – and it was not just the firstborn of the children, it was the firstborn of all animals too. Every firstborn in Egypt was killed if it was not under the blood. Moses had them all ready. They had their unleavened bread baked. They were packed. They had the jewelry that they had already asked the Egyptians to give them, by God’s command, just as God had promised Abraham, that his people would leave the land of oppression with great riches.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: They were ready to go, and he led them out. What I didn’t understand from the Adventist Bible stories was the passage of time. From the night they left, on the night of the Passover, until they got the law was only a period of two months. I didn’t know how long any of that had taken them, but it was a period of two months. Now, in those two months, several things happened. Within the first week, within the first days, pharaoh figured out what had happened, and he got mad, and what did he do to try to get them back?
Nikki: He sent his soldiers after them.
Colleen: How did they die?
Nikki: At the bottom of the Red Sea. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] I mean, I think of that sometimes. Again, I see the picture –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – in the Bible story book where they’re walking through the dry land, the Israelites are walking through the dry land, and they’re seeing fish swimming –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – just past that wall of water. [Laughter.] It’s an artist’s idea, but it was a pretty impacting one. And then, of course, those chariots come, and the water covers them over. They flounder, the wheels come off, and they die. Just as God had promised Abraham, He delivered Abraham’s descendants from slavery and from an oppressive people right on schedule. And then they’re out there in the desert, and one month later something interesting happens. God gives Moses instructions for Israel. Now, this is not the law yet, but this is found in Exodus 16, and two things happen, and Adventists have used this to try to make a case for the fact that they had the law and that they had the Sabbath from eternity past, but that’s not what the Bible says, but two very interesting things happen in Exodus 16. It’s interesting that the manna comes after they become grumpy. They complain. They have bitter water, which Moses prays and corrects for them, and then they complain about missing the fleshpots of Egypt. I’ve heard – many times I’ve heard Adventists refer to the fleshpots of Egypt as a derisive term for Adventists who want to eat meat.
Nikki: Oh. [Laughter.]
Colleen: “You’re just longing after the fleshpots of Egypt.” Well, no. But they did complain about losing the leeks, the meat – they’re forgetting how oppressed they were, and they’re saying, “Oh, you brought us out here to die.” So then, because they had grumbled so much and Moses was trying to help them understand how God was providing for them, God provides for them this amazing thing called manna, with a condition. What’s your take on this, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, I just want to say really quickly that in chapter 15 verse 26 – so they’re, like you said, they’re complaining, “Did we come out here to die?” You know, they’re looking back, wishing they could go back. They’re not feeling secure.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And God tells them, “If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God and do that which is right in His eyes and give ear to His commandments and keep all His statues, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord your healer.”
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: So He’s correcting their fears by telling them who He is and that He’s going to take care of them.
Colleen: Interesting.
Nikki: But He does have that expectation, that they’re going to obey Him.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And then He goes on, and He gives them this manna, and He tells them exactly what the conditions are for it.
Colleen: And what are those conditions? It’s going to come at night. They aren’t going to know what it is. In fact, I believe the word “manna” means “what is it?”
Nikki: Oh, how funny.
Colleen: And it falls every night, and they find it on the ground in the morning. What are the conditions for the manna?
Nikki: They are to gather each day only what they are to eat for that day.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: If they gather any more than that, it’s going to rot.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Except for on the sixth day.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting?
Nikki: They’re supposed to take a double portion and then not gather on the seventh day, and the Lord keeps that double portion fresh.
Colleen: Yes. And it’s fascinating because on the seventh day, there will be no manna, which is a really interesting thing. So for six days a week, this manna appears on the ground, and on the seventh day, it doesn’t. But on the sixth day, they gather double, and it doesn’t rot. You know, we learn in Exodus that people tried to gather extra, or they tried to gather on the seventh, and just as God said, they had to do it the way He said or they didn’t have manna.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This is the first hint we have of Sabbath in the Old Testament. Now, God rested on the seventh day of creation, but it was not called Sabbath, and Adam and Eve were not commanded to keep a Sabbath. This is the first command to keep a Sabbath, and yes, it precedes the Ten Commandments, but it’s foreshadowing the Ten Commandments and what God is doing to save His people. The significant thing about the manna, in my opinion, is that the manna represents bread from heaven. It represents the Bread of Life. In the book of John, Jesus identifies Himself as the Bread from Heaven, the Bread of Life. He calls Himself that. And the Bread of Life, the Bread from Heaven, was given to Israel concurrently in conjunction – in a combination that could not be broken, with the foreshadowing of rest in Christ.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So Bread of Life, foreshadowing of rest in Christ, come together as an indivisible whole that Israel is to honor and be sustained by. And I remember not long ago, just a couple of years maybe, I saw, like for the first time – even though I know I’d read it – Israel wandering out there in the desert from one month after they left Egypt, from that day until the next generation went into the land and harvested their first crop about 40 years later, they received manna. When they harvested their first crop, the manna no longer fell. The first crop in the Promised Land. And it’s interesting, when you think about the people that were out there and the generation that was born in the desert –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – there were children that were born who never knew manna wasn’t just a natural part of the world.
Nikki: [Laughter.] Yeah, yeah.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting? So you grow up eating the manna, gathering it, every sixth day double for the seventh, and then you have your first promised harvest in the Promised Land, and there is no more manna. It was truly a provision of God.
Nikki: Um-hmm. I was always shown this passage about the Jews getting the manna, a double portion on Friday, I was shown that this was evidence that they had the Sabbath beforehand.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And it’s almost like it was just assumed that the Sabbath belonged to the Decalogue, it belonged to the Mosaic covenant.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And so any evidence of it anywhere else is proof that the Mosaic covenant had to be there –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – because it was all contained inside of the Decalogue. The reality is, the Sabbath doesn’t belong to the Decalogue.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: It doesn’t belong to this covenant. It belongs to God.
Colleen: I never thought of it quite like that before, Nikki. That’s interesting.
Nikki: So it’s something entirely separate that we obviously see in the Decalogue.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But we also see it outside of the Decalogue, both before the covenant and after, in Hebrews.
Colleen: And like circumcision, which God gave to Abraham before the law, it became a sign of belonging to God, of being a child of the promise and being a child of the one to whom the covenant had been made. Just like that, God is giving Sabbath to the Israelites at the very beginning of their journey out of slavery, and He’s saying to them, in effect, you are not going to take care of yourselves. You are not happy with hunting for the food and losing your leeks. I’m going to provide you food. It’ll be the same food, but it’ll be the food you’re going to eat in your desert wandering. You’re not going to collect it on the seventh day because I am providing, and I’m not going to let you forget that I am the one who provides for you. Their entire journey through the wilderness now is going to be dependent on trusting God to do the work of keeping them alive and of keeping His promises. This is not a Sabbath that stems from the law.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: This becomes, as we will see, the sign of the covenant God is going to make with them.
Nikki: And I want to say too, because I mentioned that we see it again in Hebrews, I’m not saying that Christians are supposed to keep a Jewish Sabbath. That’s –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Anyone who’s read Hebrews will understand that, but for our listeners who haven’t, we see Sabbath functioning differently in all of these places. He doesn’t tell them here, “If you collect manna on the Sabbath, you will die.”
Colleen: No.
Nikki: He says there won’t be manna there.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: You collect a double portion on Friday. Under the Mosaic covenant, if you work on the Sabbath, you will die.
Colleen: That’s a good point.
Nikki: And then in Hebrews, we’re already dead if we’re not resting in Christ in that Sabbath.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: He’s saying that you have never even entered this rest until you cease from your works for salvation and you accept that Christ is Sabbath. “As long as it is called today, do not harden your hearts.”
Colleen: That’s a great point.
Nikki: So we see it throughout, but its purpose and its function is different.
Colleen: That is such a good point. I never thought of it quite like that. So this precedes the law. It doesn’t belong to the law. It is the evidence that Israel has to trust God for their life and provision, and it changes in its application through the years, and it becomes the sign of the covenant that’s coming. It’s something that’s given by God. It’s a provision of God, not something derived from law.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That’s a really interesting point. The Adventist argument that the fact that the manna was given before the law is proof that there was a law is a fallacious argument.
Nikki: Well, and it’s the same thing too with them saying Noah had the law –
Colleen: Oh, right.
Nikki: – because he knew what the clean and unclean animals were. Well, we see when he gets off the ark that God says, “Before, I gave you every green thing for food; but now I give you the animals.” If he had the law, he would have known which animals he could and couldn’t eat.
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: Well, God clearly says they weren’t eating animals yet.
Colleen: That is a great point. It is a perfect parallel, yeah.
Nikki: So they see these shadows, and they just assume that the law is above everything.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: And everything belongs to the law. No, that’s Christ.
Colleen: That’s right. In fact, that whole prayer garden at the Andrews University churchyard is an evidence that from an Adventist perspective the law is over everything, because it guides you to the cross. You turn your back on the cross, you walk into the law, supposedly to find the heart of God. That is backwards.
Nikki: Yeah. Christ died for nothing then. That’s the Galatian heresy.
Colleen: That’s right. That’s right. So the Sabbath is not evidence of law. It’s evidence of God’s provision.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So we’re going to move into where God gave the covenant to Israel. A month after this episode with the manna and the reception of Sabbath, we find in Exodus 19 that God is telling Moses how to prepare the people to receive His covenant with them. They have to purify themselves, they have to build a barricade around Mt. Sinai because no one can touch the mountain or they will die, because God’s presence is going to be on the mountain. And when He does show up and call Moses up the mountain, He manifests Himself in a cloud of fire and smoke, thunder and lightning and shaking, and it’s terrifying. And the people are terrified, and God calls Moses up that mountain, and He presents to him the actual words of the covenant, which is the Ten Commandments. We will see from Exodus that the Ten Commandments are not separate from the rest of the law. The fact is that God first of all gives the Ten Commandments before the explanations and all the rest of the 613 laws are given. These are the famed words that are written on tablets of stone. Now, Nikki, what did you learn was the first commandment? How did the Ten Commandments begin? “Thou shalt have…”
Nikki: “…no other gods before me.”
Colleen: I remember my surprise a few years ago when I heard Gary Inrig preaching, and he said, “The Ten Commandments do not begin with the first commandment, which is ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.'” He said, “The Ten Commandments begin a verse before that, Exodus 20 verse 2.” He says what?
Nikki: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting? The Ten Commandments begin with the prologue, which is God identifying Himself and giving the historical context of His giving this covenant to Israel.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He identifies Himself as the Lord God, He identifies Himself as the one who delivered them from Egypt and slavery, and then He gives the terms that He’s asking them to live by, and significantly, scholars all agree that the terms of the Mosaic covenant mirror the pattern of the ancient Near East suzerain vassal treaties. In other words, when a conquering king would conquer a people and he would make a treaty with them, so they would know how they were going to live as his subjects, this was the pattern that they followed in their treaties. The Mosaic covenant perfectly reflects what was common in that day among the nations, except it’s not being made between men. It’s being made between God the Lord and the people He is claiming as His own, and He’s giving out the terms of how they’re going to relate to Him. We all know these Ten Commandments, and we know the fourth especially well because, of course, Ellen White said that she saw the Ten Commandments in heaven with a golden halo around the fourth.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That is so much bunk when you look at this in context.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: One of the things about the fourth commandment that is borne out when you look at other suzerain vassal treaties, this is the sign of the covenant. The Israelites were commanded to remember the Sabbath and to keep it as the sign of the covenant. Every suzerain vassal treaty had, written into the middle of its terms, the sign that the vassals would observe to show their loyalty to the suzerain, and that’s what this is. The Sabbath is the sign Israelites were going to keep to show their loyalty to God. Now, of course, we all know how Adventism explained that to us as Adventists, but that’s not the purpose of the Sabbath, even to Israel. It was a sign of the covenant, but it was not a testof whether they were His people or not. Were you taught that Sabbath was a test, Nikki?
Nikki: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that it would be the mark between those who actually are saved and those who are worshipping the beast.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s not there anywhere.
Nikki: No, and I was thinking too, here at the very beginning when He identifies who He is, this would have been a great opportunity to say, “I’m the one who created this Decalogue that I’m going to give you back in eternity past –”
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: “– and it was the whole reason that war started in heaven, and this is really serious, guys.”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: He doesn’t give any kind of indication of any of that, and that is foundational to the Great Controversy worldview.
Colleen: So true! He doesn’t say a thing about it.
Nikki: Which again, I just have to slip in here, this is one of the reasons I thought as an Adventist that God is just tricky. He keeps information from people and expects them to do stuff they would maybe do if they had the information, but –
Colleen: He’s grounding this in His own identity and His own history with them. He’s not asking them to say, “Oh, because I did such and such in times past before you were even created, I made this plan, I had this law, now I’m giving it to you.” No. He’s giving it to them, at that moment, because of who He is and because He’s chosen them.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s quite interesting. In the succeeding chapters in Exodus, God gives further explanation of how to keepthose Ten Commandments and of what He expects from Israel. It’s really interesting and significant, because this identifies the kind of covenant this is, that in chapter 24 of Exodus the people of Israel ratify the covenant with God. Now, just by way of comparison, how was the Abrahamic covenant ratified?
Nikki: Through the cutting of the animals, and God walked between them.
Colleen: And where was Abraham?
Nikki: In a dark sleep, but God was speaking to him in that condition –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – and telling him what was going on.
Colleen: And Abraham was not allowed to participate in the ratification.
Nikki: Uh-uh.
Colleen: That was different because in a suzerain vassal treaty, both parties would walk through the animals or would participate in the blood sacrifice, but in the Abrahamic, God ratifies it unilaterally while Abraham is taken out and given a vision of what’s going on. But in Exodus 24, we find that the people are given a chance to respond, and God has said, “This is what I’m promising,” and the people said, “All that you have said –”
Nikki and Colleen: “– we will do.”
Colleen: Well, there you go. Have you ever known a human being who ever kept his promises perfectly?
Nikki: No. Jesus.
Colleen: Jesus. [Laughter.] Yes, that’s true.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: The only one.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Yeah. And then, in Exodus 24, we see that, just as covenants in that day and age were ratified, besides the promises between the parties, Moses ratified this covenant with blood. He killed sacrificial animals, he sprinkled part of the blood on the altar of sacrifice where those sacrificial animals were sacrificed, and then he took hyssop branches, and he sprinkled the blood of those animals on the people. So this covenant was ratified with blood of sacrifice and with bilateral promises between God and man. God said, “If you obey me, I will bless you,” and man said, “All that you have said we will do.”
Nikki: It’s interesting to me that Moses sprinkled the people with the blood in verse 8, “So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” It makes me think – we take communion every Sunday at our church.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: It makes me think of the words, you know, “This is the cup of the New Covenant, my blood given for you.” And here you have in this Old Covenant it’s sprinkled on the people. But in the New Covenant, we drink it and take this thing that represents the blood of Christ into us, into ourselves.
Colleen: Oh. That’s so significant. It goes from being an external thing based on promises –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – to an internal thing based on God’s unfailing word to us and our new birth in Him. After Moses sprinkles the blood on the people, and they say, “All that you have said we will do,” God asks Moses to come back up the mountain, and He gives him the rest of the instructions for the covenant. He gives him instructions for building the tabernacle, for furnishing it, for the priesthood, for how they are to live out the terms of the covenant with Him. It’s interesting that Moses is on that mountain with God for 40 days and nights.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We find that in more places than one in the Bible. I mean, we have the rain of the flood being 40 days and nights; we have Moses on that mountain with God 40 days and nights; we have Elijah later, running to Mt. Horeb, which is Mt. Sinai, when he’s fleeing Jezebel, and he’s there for 40 days and nights; and then we have Jesus, the perfect Israel way down in history, spending 40 days in the wilderness being tempted. This pattern repeats, and we see foreshadowing going on. But Moses is there on the mountain with God for 40 days and nights, and He gives him, during that time, the tables of the covenant, which God wrote, the Decalogue, the actual words of the covenant. Now, it’s important to notice, before we go down to what happened next, that it actually identifies these Ten Commandments in Exodus 34:27 and 28 as the actual words of the covenant. There are a lot of people who say, “Oh, the Ten Commandments are separated from the other laws, there’s civil, there’s moral, there’s sacrificial, there are ceremonial laws. The ten are not part of that.” They are part of that. Exodus 34:27 and 28 actually says, “He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments,” and that’s just important to remember. But before we got to chapter 34, we have chapter 32, where Moses comes down the mountain with the tables of the covenant in his hand, and he sees the most devastating, horrifying, angering thing he probably had seen to that point. He sees the Children of Israel and his brother Aaron dancing around –
Nikki: – a golden calf.
Colleen: Oh, my goodness! And Aaron has made this golden calf because Israel has clamored – they say, “We’ll never see Moses again. He’s been up on that mountain with God. Give us a god.” And Aaron, who should have known better, does a golden calf for them! And they’re dancing around it. Moses is enraged. And what does he do when he sees it?
Nikki: He throws those tablets of stone on the ground and breaks them.
Colleen: He broke the Ten Commandments. Just like that. There’s so much we could say about that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But he didn’t even think twice. In a fit of anger, and I might even say righteous anger –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – he broke the covenant God had made with Israel, right in front of Israel. What did Moses do with that golden calf?
Nikki: “He took the calf which they had made and burned it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel drink it.”
Colleen: “So there’s your god. Drink the powder of your god.” Oh, he was so angry with Aaron, but then he made a call to the people of Israel, and we find this down in verse 25 and 26. “When he saw the people were out of control,” because, it says, “Aaron let them get of control,” Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said –”
Nikki: “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me!”
Colleen: And who gathered?
Nikki: The sons of Levi.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting?
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The tribe that was to become the priests –
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: – that mediated between God and men.
Nikki: Weren’t those Aaron’s people?
Colleen: They were Aaron’s people. Moses and Aaron were of the tribe of Levi. Aaron had led them into this sin, Moses had been up getting the covenant, both of them from the tribe of Levi. And it’s the people of Levi who respond when Moses asks, “Who is for the Lord?” And what does he tell them to do in verse 27?
Nikki: “He said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Every man of you put his sword upon his thigh, and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother, and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor.”‘” Wow.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: This right here is just further evidence that loyalty to God is more important to Him than loyalty to our brotherhood.
Colleen: At least to our genetic brotherhood, because, you know, loving the brothers in the New Covenant is based on a different bloodline.
Nikki: Yeah. I guess what I had in mind there as I said that, I can’t tell you how many times I had conversations with people who would say, “Oh, I don’t agree with all of that. I don’t agree with everything Ellen said, but these are mypeople. I would never leave my people.” And, boy, loyalty to God –
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: – is far more important. That’s why He says, “Anyone who loves mother or brother or father or sister, son, or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
Colleen: And in verse 28 we find another detail. “The sons of Levi did as Moses instructed, and about three thousand men of the people fell that day.” It’s interesting and just worth noting, 3,000 men died because of disobedience.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Fast forward to the Book of Acts in chapter 2, when Peter preaches on the Day of Pentecost and 3,000 Jews are born again and baptized.
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Isn’t that so interesting?
Nikki: It’s amazing.
Colleen: A different covenant, a different outcome. Moses goes back up the mountain. God actually gives him another table of stone, but here’s something I did not know as an Adventist. It’s back in the place that identifies the Ten Commandments as the words of the covenant. It’s Exodus 34:27 and 28, and look at actually how those tables of stone come to be written.
Nikki: It says, “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.’ So he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.”
Colleen: It’s Moses who wrote that final set of tablets.
Nikki: Um-hmm. I didn’t know that as an Adventist.
Colleen: I didn’t either.
Nikki: I always heard God wrote with His own finger on tablets of stone, so therefore –
Colleen: Um-hmm. They’re permanent.
Nikki: – they’re binding forever.
Colleen: Yes. And it’s so ironic, because the Bible is full of the imagery of “I will remove your heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s not stone that’s eternal. So it’s not even God who wrote the words on the surviving tables of the covenant, it was Moses. And it’s also interesting that while he’s up there receiving these from the Lord, he’s there 40 days and nights without eating or drinking, just as when Jesus was in the wilderness –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – contending with Satan and declaring that the word of God was more powerful and stopping Satan in his own game. We have a lot more detail in the rest of the Book of Exodus, and then we have some silence about exactly what happened with Israel during the intervening years that they wandered in the wilderness, but we do know that in the book of Leviticus the laws of the covenant are explained in detail. So the law is given at Sinai two months after they left Egypt. They have that law with them. The whole time they’re wandering in the wilderness, they’re keeping the Sabbath, they’re receiving the manna, they’re bringing sacrifices, they’re operating out of the tabernacle with a priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, mediating. They are observing the Day of Atonement every year. The entire Law of Moses is being practiced by the wandering Israelites in the desert before they get to the Promised Land, while they’re being punished for their unbelief and their grumbling. The generation that is going to take the land is being born and being brought up under the law. So then we fast forward to the Book of Deuteronomy, which is surprisingly interesting to me, and I did not know as an Adventist that the Book of Deuteronomy explains and gives the account of Moses, a very old man by this point, reiterating the covenant with the generation who is going to go into the land. In Exodus we have the covenant given on Sinai to Israel for the first time. Before the second generation is taken out of the wilderness into the Promised Land, Moses stands up and gives the covenant again. Now, he knows he is not going to go into the land. He has sinned, and God is not going to allow him to enter, which is really interesting to me, that the lawgiver of the Old Covenant, the one who mediated between God and Israel, the one who delivered the law, the one in charge, if you want to put it that way, of the Mosaic covenant in front of Israel is not allowed into the Promised Land. Now, God takes him to Himself, but he can’t enter the land, the Old Covenant mediator. He reiterates the covenant, and in Deuteronomy 5 we see where he identifies what he’s doing. And Nikki, you’ve had a really interesting observation about this. Could you walk us through that from Deuteronomy 5?
Nikki: Yeah. So, I kind of keep hounding on this issue of the law not being eternal because that was the big argument that I got from my Adventist father-in-law – he was a pastor – he would constantly talk to me about how the law was eternal. When I was reading the Bible after being saved and trying to figure out, “How do I explain this? How do I talk about this?” I went to Deuteronomy 5, and I read here where he says, right at the beginning, in verse 1, “Then Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: ‘Hear, O Israel, the statues and the ordinances which I am speaking today in your hearing, that you may learn them and observe them carefully. The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. The Lord did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, with all those of us alive here today.'” He makes a point –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – to say that this covenant was not made with our fathers. So Abraham, Isaac, Jacob –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – they didn’t have this.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: This is new. This is for them. God’s doing something new. I was really happy to read that –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – because if this wasn’t an eternal law and this was given to Israel, I was better able to understand that I was a Gentile –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and that this isn’t something that is a mark of eternal loyalty to God. This was for a time, for a people group, and for a specific purpose.
Colleen: That’s a really good point.
Nikki: This might sound silly, but as I started to understand that, it made more and more sense to me that this Decalogue could not have been eternal because you have commands in there that would not apply in heaven –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – like “don’t commit adultery –”
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: “– honor your parents so that it will go well for you in the land.”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: There are things in there that don’t even make sense –
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: – if you have this Decalogue in eternity past.
Colleen: Isn’t it interesting that with our Adventist skew the only thing we saw in the Decalogue was the Sabbath, and we had to have the Sabbath being eternal.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Something to which even God bowed down. If you think about it, that makes Sabbath eternal like God. It’s actually kind of like Sabbath is part of God, it has to be treated like God.
Nikki: It’s breaking the first commandment.
Colleen: Yes. God did make a covenant with the fathers. He did make that Abrahamic covenant with Abraham, and He renewed that covenant with Isaac and with Jacob. It’s very clear here that the Mosaic covenant was not added to the Abrahamic covenant. So the argument that the Mosaic covenant was given as an addition to the Abrahamic covenant that we now add to it for further clarification and we keep both together is false.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Moses is being very, very clear that it’s not the same. The fathers did not have it. This is unique for Israel. But the promises to the fathers remain.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Now, it’s interesting to me that one of the ways we know the promises to the fathers remain is when God gives Moses the explanation of the covenant, and we learn in the Book of Deuteronomy, in Deuteronomy 28, and also we see these things in Leviticus, we see them in 2 Chronicles 36, that one of the things God does through Moses is He foretells the fact that they will apostatize, and they will be carried into exile by nations that are enemies to them. It’s so fascinating to me. In Leviticus 26:32-35, for example, He’s telling them that when they disobey Him, if they apostatize and go into idolatry – and He’s basically saying, you will do this – He says, “I will lay waste your cities as well and will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your soothing aromas,” meaning the sacrifices. “I will make the land desolate so that your enemies who settle in it will be appalled over it. You, however, I will scatter among the nations and will draw out a sword after you, as your land becomes desolate and your cities become waste. Then,” in verse 34, “the land will enjoy its sabbaths all the days of the desolation, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths.” Part of the law that God gave Moses for Israel was that there would be sabbaths for the land every seven years and jubilee sabbaths every 49 years, when the land would not be plowed, when land that had been perhaps given to other people in repayments for debts would be returned to the original owners. He wrote into the law rules for the land having sabbath rest, and Israel never kept those. And it’s so fascinating that when they finally went into exile, they were in exile for 70 years in the land of Babylon, the number of jubilee sabbaths they never observed in the land, and God is telling them here, when He gives Moses the law, that that’s going to happen.
Nikki: Wow.
Colleen: This is something separate from the covenant He made with Abraham, and yet, because of His covenant with Abraham, He also has a promise for Israel. This is found in Leviticus 26:40-42. Listen to what it says about God’s promises to Abraham here, as He’s giving commands in the Mosaic covenant.
Nikki: “If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against me, and also in their acting with hostility against me – I also was acting with hostility against them to bring them into the land of their enemies – or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humbled so that they can make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and I will remember also my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land.”
Colleen: And He promises that ultimately, because of His promises to Abraham and to his seed and to the land and to the promise of blessing, He will remember those promises He made to Abraham long before the law, and He will redeem Israel, and He will redeem Israel to its land, and He will redeem the land from the hand of enemies. It’s fascinating that the Mosaic covenant is not part of the Abrahamic covenant. It is subject to it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Promises to Abraham overarch the curses and blessings of the Mosaic covenant, which were made between God and man. Given the fact that God and Israel exchanged promises, blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience, and Israel said, “All that you have said we will do,” what kind of covenant is the Mosaic covenant?
Nikki: Oh, it’s a conditional covenant.
Colleen: It’s conditional, and it has a beginning, and it has an ending.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And the ending, we learn, is when the seed comes. Now, where do you go, Nikki, to find the proof that there is an end to the Mosaic covenant.
Nikki: That’s Galatians 3:17-19. “What I am saying is this: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years later, does not invalidate a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to nullify the promise. For if the inheritance is based on law, it is no longer based on a promise; but God has granted it to Abraham by means of a promise. Why the law then? It was added because of transgressions, having been ordained through angels by the agency of a mediator, untilthe seed would come to whom the promise had been made.”
Colleen: It’s very clear. There’s a beginning, 430 years after God made His covenant with Abraham, until –
Nikki: Until the seed would come.
Colleen: And the seed was?
Nikki: Jesus.
Colleen: Jesus.
Nikki: It’s interesting that the one covenant that was temporal and subject to all the other promises and covenants God made, in Adventism it’s the ruling one.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s the one that stands over everything else. It’s the exact opposite.
Colleen: Just like that prayer garden takes you to the cross, you turn your back on the cross and walk into the law, every single bit of biblical explanation of the covenants has been interpreted upside down and inside out.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s horrifying, really. And yet we used the same words, generally, that most Christians used when we talked about it, but we had no idea that we were seeing things upside down and backwards.
Nikki: And we were kept contained in that worldview through fear, and yet we proclaimed to have a God who had no wrath, He was a God of love. It was all very deceptive.
Colleen: It was. And when you think about the fact that part of the Mosaic covenant was confirming that God would punish Israel for idolatry, and we could say, “This is our covenant, but God has no wrath.” Even inside our paradigm, it was a crazy confusion. And I just want to say, as we end this, we will talk more about how we know the Mosaic covenant came to an end and how the New Covenant was given and ways we can know specifically, with specific texts that this is so, but I want to say, Jesus is the answer to all of this. And if you have never understood the gospel, that Jesus came fully God, without giving up any of His God attributes, took the flesh of a human, had two natures simultaneously, identified with us in our fallen estate without ever being fallen, He was spiritually alive and never had to be born again, and yet He died the death that all of us deserved, took the wrath of God, His own command of death for sin He took on Himself. He was buried, and He rose again on the third day because His sacrifice was sufficient and satisfied the demands of God, if you have never understood that, if you have never understood that He took your sin and nailed it to the cross in His flesh and rose again to give you new life, we want to encourage you to investigate this. Read the Book of Galatians. See what Jesus did. See what His death has meant, and trust Him with your life. Trust Him with your sin and with your life, and you will experience being born again. So thank you for hanging with us through another episode in our journey through the covenants. We will talk again about this another time. If you have questions or comments or suggestions, we encourage you to write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You may subscribe to Proclamation!, to our weekly emails, at proclamationmagazine.com. Reviews on iTunes help our podcast, and we thank those of you who have already done that. We’ll see you again next week when we continue this talk about how the Mosaic covenant was fulfilled by Jesus. And we thank you for being with us.
Nikki: Until next time.
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