Law and the Covenants
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has He given to the sons of men more open manifestations of His
power and glory than when He alone was acknowledged as Israel’s
ruler, and gave the law to His people. Here was a scepter swayed by
no human hand; and the stately goings forth of Israel’s invisible King
were unspeakably grand and awful.
In all these revelations of the divine presence the glory of God
was manifested through Christ. Not alone at the Saviour’s advent, but
through all the ages after the Fall and the promise of redemption, “God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.”
2 Corinthians 5:19
.
Christ was the foundation and center of the sacrificial system in both
the patriarchal and the Jewish age. Since the sin of our first parents
there has been no direct communication between God and man. The
Father has given the world into the hands of Christ, that through His
mediatorial work He may redeem man and vindicate the authority and
holiness of the law of God. All the communion between heaven and
the fallen race has been through Christ. It was the Son of God that gave
to our first parents the promise of redemption. It was He who revealed
Himself to the patriarchs. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and
Moses understood the gospel. They looked for salvation through man’s
Substitute and Surety. These holy men of old held communion with
the Saviour who was to come to our world in human flesh; and some
of them talked with Christ and heavenly angels face to face.
Christ was not only the leader of the Hebrews in the wilderness—
the Angel in whom was the name of Jehovah, and who, veiled in the
cloudy pillar, went before the host—but it was He who gave the law to
Israel. [
See Appendix, Note 7.
] Amid the awful glory of Sinai, Christ
declared in the hearing of all the people the ten precepts of His Father’s
law. It was He who gave to Moses the law engraved upon the tables of
stone.
It was Christ that spoke to His people through the prophets. The
apostle Peter, writing to the Christian church, says that the prophets
[367]
“prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: searching what,
or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did
signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the
glory that should follow.”
1 Peter 1:10, 11
. It is the voice of Christ that
speaks to us through the Old Testament. “The testimony of Jesus is
the spirit of prophecy.”
Revelation 19:10
.