Theopedia

Mosaic Covenant

“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”

— Exodus 19:5-6 (ESV)

Definition

The Mosaic Covenant (also called the Sinai Covenant or Old Covenant) is the covenant God made with Israel at Mount Sinai through Moses, recorded in Exodus 19 through 24. God renewed there the covenant he had earlier made with Abraham, promising to give Abraham’s descendants the land of Canaan and to bless them in it, now on the express condition that they kept the law delivered through Moses.1 Israel ratified the covenant at Sinai with blood, pledging obedience to “all that the LORD has spoken” (Ex. 24:7-8).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 states its own doctrine of the covenant of grace as a history of stages, and Sinai is not one of them. The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession says the covenant of grace was “revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.”2 Moses and Sinai go unnamed in that history, and the confession’s covenant chapter never calls the Mosaic law an administration of the covenant of grace.3

Westminster fills that same history in with an additional stage. Where the 1689 moves straight from Adam’s promise to the New Testament, the Westminster Confession names what comes between: the covenant of grace was “differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the gospel,” one covenant of grace, Sinai included, under two successive forms.4

Two of the Baptist confession’s own framers supplied the reasoning behind its silence. John Owen argued that the Old and New Covenants differ in substance, not merely administration, and Nehemiah Coxe made the same case in his own treatise on the covenants God made with men before the law.56 Their reading, on which Sinai never became an administration of the covenant of grace in the first place, is what the 1689’s own chapter reflects, and modern scholarship now names it “1689 Federalism” after the confession itself.7

Biblical Basis

At Sinai God proposed a national covenant to Israel conditioned on obedience: “if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples… a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:5-6). Israel accepted these terms before hearing them in full, “all that the LORD has spoken we will do” (Ex. 19:8), and again after Moses read “the Book of the Covenant,” answering “all that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Ex. 24:3, 7), at which point Moses sealed the covenant with blood (Ex. 24:8).

Paul distinguishes this covenant from the earlier promise made to Abraham. The law given at Sinai, “which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void” (Gal. 3:17); it was “added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made” (Gal. 3:19), serving as “our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith” (Gal. 3:24). Paul elsewhere contrasts the Mosaic covenant’s own character with the new covenant in Christ: its “ministry of death, carved in letters on stone,” gave way to a greater glory, “the ministry of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:7-8), and its sentence was one of “condemnation” rather than “righteousness” (2 Cor. 3:9). Hebrews states the same conclusion from the fact that God promised a replacement: “if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second,” and by speaking of a new covenant, God “makes the first one obsolete” (Heb. 8:7, 13).

Historical Development

Puritan theologians debated the Mosaic covenant’s exact relation to the covenant of grace well before the question became a distinctly Baptist one. Thomas Goodwin, an Independent divine at the Westminster Assembly, held that the covenant given at Sinai “was fedus subserviens to the gospel, as learned Cameron calls it”: in substance “the promulgation of the covenant of nature made with Adam in paradise,” a law delivered again “covenant-wise” (“do this, and thou shalt live”), given “with evangelical purposes to drive men to Christ” rather than as the covenant of grace itself.8 Working from the same Reformed tradition but for a Baptist congregation, John Gill likewise treated the law given at Sinai as itself a covenant, on the same pattern as the covenant God made with Adam: “the law given to the people of Israel from mount Sinai, is also called a covenant” (Ex. 24:7; Deut. 5:1-3).9 Gill did not thereby deny that the covenant of grace was displayed throughout the Mosaic era: an entire chapter of his own systematic theology traces how Moses, Aaron, the passover, and the ceremonial law all typologically “exhibited” Christ and his grace to Old Testament believers, even while, as covenant proper, Sinai’s own terms remained law-shaped.10

John Owen made the case at length in his exposition of Hebrews 8, that the Old and New Covenants differ in substance, not merely administration, “though the way of reconciliation and salvation was the same under both.”5 Nehemiah Coxe, a Particular Baptist minister who helped prepare the Second London Baptist Confession, argued the same case in his own treatise on the covenants God made with men before the law, distinguishing Sinai’s covenant from the Abrahamic promise it did not annul.6

Opposing Views

Most Presbyterian and Reformed covenant theologians hold that the Sinai covenant was itself an administration of the one covenant of grace, differing from the New Covenant only in outward form. Bavinck writes: “The covenant on Mount Sinai is and remains a covenant of grace… The covenant with Israel was essentially no other than that with Abraham,” reading the Ten Commandments’ own preface, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 20:2), as gospel indicative rather than legal condition, and Israel’s covenantal benefits, forgiveness, sonship, and God’s own dwelling among them, as spiritual gifts of grace rather than wages of obedience.11 On the Owen-Coxe view held by the Baptist framers, Sinai instead belongs to redemptive history’s outworking of the covenant of works: it typified and pointed to the covenant of grace without itself being an administration of it, so that the New Covenant, not the Mosaic, is the covenant of grace’s own proper form.

Objections and Responses

If Sinai were a covenant of works, wouldn’t it contradict Paul’s statement that the law, coming later, “does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God” (Gal. 3:17)? Goodwin’s answer is that the law given at Sinai served the earlier promise rather than replacing it: it was given “with evangelical purposes to drive men to Christ,” a covenant “subservient to the gospel” rather than a rival to it.8 On this reading Sinai’s works-shaped terms operated alongside, not instead of, the ongoing Abrahamic promise, exposing Israel’s inability to keep the law (“Oh that there were an heart within them!” Deut. 5:29, quoted by Goodwin) so as to drive them back to the promise rather than annulling it.8

Doesn’t Israel’s own sacrificial system, offering real forgiveness under the Mosaic economy, show that Sinai must already be the covenant of grace rather than a covenant of works? Gill’s answer distinguishes the covenant’s own terms from what God typologically exhibited within its administration: the ceremonial law “was nothing else than a shadowy exhibition” of Christ’s grace, “the gospel of the Israelites,” even though the covenant proper, considered as law, remained a law-shaped compact rather than the covenant of grace in its own substance.10

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIX. The Law,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 275-276: “The special covenant which God formed with Abraham, and which was solemnly renewed at Mount Sinai, was that He would give to the children of Abraham the land of Palestine as their possession and bless them in that inheritance on condition that they kept the laws delivered to them by his servant Moses.” ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3, text as reproduced by The 1689 Confession. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” paras. 1-3. ↩

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 6. ↩

  5. John Owen, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 23 (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), commentary on Heb. 8:6-13. ↩ ↩2

  6. Nehemiah Coxe, A Discourse of the Covenants that God Made with Men Before the Law (London, 1681). ↩ ↩2

  7. Daniel David Scheiderer, “Conclusion: Eternity Summarized, or a Cumulative Case for the Eternal Covenant,” in “Eternal Covenant: The Trinitarian Shape of an Historic Baptist Doctrine” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2022), 207-208. ↩

  8. Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), 354: “This covenant, which was fedus subserviens to the gospel (as learned Cameron calls it)… was truly the promulgation of the covenant of nature made with Adam in paradise… delivered … covenant-wise… ‘Do this, and thou shalt live’… with evangelical purposes to drive men to Christ.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book III, chap. 7, “Of the Law Given to Adam, and the Covenant Made with Him.” ↩

  10. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book IV, chap. 3, “Of the Exhibitions of the Covenant of Grace Under the Mosaic Dispensation.” ↩ ↩2

  11. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩