From Prison To Promise: The Journey of Faith

Through the ages from Noah to Abraham to Moses, the Jews – now in captivity in Egypt for 400 years – lost their distinction as a people of God. They lost their separateness, their ‘called apartness.'

Through hundreds of years of Egyptian subjugation, exposure and immersion in their culture, the Jews had become simply a lower caste Egyptian slave people who lost their own identity as God's chosen people.

It became necessary for God to bring/introduce the Law into the stream of humanity at a point when sin had become a way of life and consciences were seared through generations of neglecting God and His call on the lives of His people.

Bringing the Law to mankind; introducing it into the polluted stream of our thinking was therefore, a tremendous act of God's grace.

But the Law of Moses does not contain within it a way of salvation. Nor was it ever intended to be permanent.

Once mankind had become that wicked, that unruly, that lost from who we were intended to be, God brought the Law to serve as interment (‘the act of burying the dead'); and internment (‘the act of confinement'). But now that faith in the Promised Seed, Messiah has come, strict adherence to the Law has been made obsolete.

“We are now prepared to feel the force of the apostle's reasoning. ‘Now that the gospel revelation has been made, and believed by us, we stand no more in need of such an elementary, restrictive, external dispensation as the law; for through this gospel believed we are introduced into a state, and formed to a character, to which such an introductory institution, however well fitted to serve its own purposes, is utterly unsuited.'” (John Brown; Comm.; 178-9).