The Mosaic Covenant Was Conditional

We find undeniable proof that the Mosaic Covenant was a covenant of works in Exodus 19:5-6, when the Mosaic Covenant was established with the nation of Israel. At the inauguration of the Mosaic Covenant, God clearly based His relationship with the Israelites upon a condition. He told them in the clearest terms, “If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” According to this passage, the promise was conditional (quid pro quo).

The Israelites would be God’s people and God would be their God, if they would obey and keep the conditions of the covenant. According to Moses, the condition was, ‘If you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be my people.’ In Deuteronomy, when Moses goes back over the law, he re-explains the conditional nature of the old covenant. “Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them. Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant, and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers” (Deut. 7:11-12).

Several years later, Jeremiah echoes Moses by teaching on the true nature of the old covenant. Jeremiah speaks on behalf of God, when he says, “This thing commanded I them, saying, ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people: and walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you’” (Jer. 7:23). Again he says, “Hear ye the words of this covenant and do them” (Jer. 11:6). Nevertheless, after the children of Abraham heard the terms of the covenant at the base of Mt. Sinai, they all replied back to God in one accord by saying, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Ex. 19:8). Thus, Meredith Kline is right when he claims that the Sinaitic Covenant “made inheritance to be by law, not by promise—not by faith, but by works.’

Adapted from The Fatal Flaw: The Fatal Flaw of the Theology Behind Infant Baptism by Jeffrey Johnson