What is exactly and specifically "wrong" with operating under the Old Covenant...?
What's the "harm" in it...?
And is it scripturally "wrong"...?
And, if it is, "why" (is that)...? (please provide scriptures if you like)... (or IYOW's if you like)...
And, what about people who might think they are operating under the NC, but are not totally, but are attempting some kind of "mix" or mixture of the two...?
Is there any "harm" in that...? And if so, how or why...?
And, lastly, are they really "Christians" if they are doing this, or not...?
Comments...?
God Bless!
This is what's wrong with it. Please follow the logical steps, then it will be clear.
(1) Jesus said that not a letter of a penstroke ("not a jot nor a tittle") of the Old Covenant could change until the end of the world. YHWH said in Deuteronomy that to break any of it was to break all of it.
So: you have to take it entire and complete, and you cannot change any of it.
(2) It says on its face over and over again that it's for the Hebrews in Israel. So it tells you that it's not for you if you're not a Hebrew in Israel.
(3) Aspects of it are simply impossible to follow: the entire Arctic and Antarctic would have to be permanently abandoned by mankind if the Sabbath rest - defined as sunset to sunset on the Seventh Day - were to apply there. Note, please, that one of the things that you cannot change is the sunset-to-sunset definition of the day. NOTHING can be changed. NOTHING. You can't say "Well, we can't do this part, because the Long Night of no sunrise is 60 days long, and the Long Day of no sunset is 90 days long in the Arctic and Antarctic. Therefore, we must simply abandon a sixth of the world's land area forever if we actually follow the Old Convenant, because we CANNOT CHANGE IT to account for impossibly long nights and days in those regions. The Mosaic law was given in the Sinai to people whose destined Promised Land was centered at 31 degrees North Latitude. God did not even CONSIDER the environmental conditions in the rest of the world when the Covenant was given at Sinai, because IT SAYS RIGHT ON ITS FACE that that Covenant is only FOR those people at Sinai, heading into that particular Promised Land. The Covenant doesn't even apply to JEWS, as written, if they are not in the Promised Land. Consider: all Jews are required to travel three times per year to Jerusalem for the feasts. This was written before air travel. It was physically impossible for a Jew living in San Francisco to travel to and from Jerusalem three times a year before trans-Atlantic air travel. The effect of that law was (if interpreted at applying to all Jews everywhere) to confine the regions of the Earth where a Jew could live for most of history to short travel range of Jerusalem OR (if interpreted correctly) only ever applied to Jews living in Israel. In any case, this law never applied to anybody but Hebrews, it is unworkable, and you cannot delete the requirement to travel to Jerusalem three times per year for feasts. You cannot change one word of it.
(4) Remember, please you cannot change the requirements or the Law just because something is impossible. God promised that he would uphold the covenant, so if something is impossible, that means God MADE it impossible - specifically so that nobody could follow the covenant anymore.
I refer here to the fact that the Temple was destroyed and the Aaronic priesthood was completely exterminated by the Romans. The Old Covenant MANDATES that sacrifices be made on the altar of the Temple, or the Tabernacle, every single day. Those sacrifices can ONLY be made by the hands of priests who are in linear biological descent from Aaron. Remember: the Northern Kingdom, when it split away, did not have the Temple, and so it set up its own altars, and it did not have the Aaronic priests, so it chose its own priests - and remember - even though they FOLLOWED the ritual law, God destroyed them BECAUSE they were performing those rituals with non-Aaronic priests, on altars that were not THE altar. The prophets that went to the Northern Kingdom, and the Books of Kings relate over and over and over God's dire warning to the north about those priests and those altars. The Northern Kingdom was FOLLOWING THE TORAH in the other respects...except that their altars were not THE altar - because Jerusalem was not in the Northern Kingdom, and their priests were not descendants of Aaron - because the Aaronic priests were at Jerusalem. So just for that reason ALONE: wrong altar, wrong priests, 10 of the Twelve Tribes were UTTERLY EXTERMINATED as organized tribes, their people enslaved, tortured, killed and shattered FOREVER, with the only survivors being refugees who went into Judah. God did NOT permit the Northern Kingdom to change ANY aspect of his very explicit and specific commandments regarding the daily sacrifice at ONE SPECIFIC ALTAR, in ONE SPECIFIC PLACE, EXCLUSIVELY at the hands of men directly descended from ONE SPECIFIC MAN. He destroyed 80% of the Chosen People FOREVER chiefly for those two "minor departures" from the Law. Moral: you cannot change the Law AT ALL. You cannot decide that "this is ceremonial", but "this is moral". God exterminated 80% of the Hebrews, brutally, because they violated two CEREMONIAL provisions of the law - wrong altar, wrong priests. THAT is what God meant when he said NOT A DOT of the law can change. if you cannot do the entire thing, and you try to do some of it because "It's the Law", you are inviting the same fate upon yourself that the Northern Kingdom did. THEY were Hebrews. THEY followed the Law, except for the altar and the priests - which they COULD NOT follow. So, what were they supposed to do? Give up completely the idea of having their own sect of the religion, continue to go to Jerusalem, in a foreign kingdom, and basically accept that, eventually, their political independence would be extinguished. They did something different, so God physically annihilated them, at the hands of one of the most brutal conquerors in the Middle East: the Assyrians.
Now consider: Jesus foretold the utter destruction of the Temple. There IS NO ALTAR, and all of the priests were wiped out. THERE IS NO AARONIC PRIESTHOOD. God HIMSELF removed these things from the world, and Jesus foretold that, in that very generation. God did this to REMOVE ANY POSSIBLE COMPETITION with the New Covenant. During Jesus' life and much of the Apostles' lives, Jews had a choice between the Old and New Covenants, but GOD HIMSELF completely erased the possibility of keeping the Old Law, forever, by extinguishing the Aaronic priesthood. Paul could write about "The Law" as something one could try to keep, because the Temple was still up. But today, the Aaronic priesthood is gone. It was exterminated in 69 AD. Even if you rebuilt a Temple, God has removed the possibility of performing the sacrifice with the right Aaronic hands. THEREFORE you DEFY and BLASPHEME GOD TO HIS FACE if you put up a Temple and choose a priesthood to perform the rites. He destroyed Israel for that, and he will not look with any favor on you doing it either, expecially not after HE removed the Aaronic priesthood and the Temple from the world HIMSELF.
To try to reconstitute that would be to commit the very sin that the Northern Kingdom committed.
You CAN'T follow the Law, because God made it impossible - and part of the Law is that you have to follow ALL of it, and if you don't follow ALL of it, God hates you and will destroy you. By removing the very POSSIBILITY of performing all of it, God VERY CLEARLY DEMONSTRATED that IT's OVER. There IS no possibility of gaining divine favor by practicing PARTS of the Old Covenant. It was not for you in the first place, you don't have the priesthood you require, and GOD REMOVED THAT PRIESTHOOD FROM THE EARTH. Jesus SAID God was going to do it, and he did. Jesus gave a NEW covenant, and that is the ONLY covenant it is now possible to actually KEEP, because GOD removed the means by which the Old could still be kept.
AND Jesus and YHWH both categorically and absolutely FORBADE any change to the Law. YHWH explicitly DAMNED anybody who changed anything. You HAVE TO DO the daily sacrifice, and it HAS TO BE AARONIC priests. God killed ALL of them. God has told you right there not to even ATTEMPT to keep the Old Covenant. YHWH tells you that you're DAMNED if you modify the Old Covenant to be able to keep part of it, and God left the example of the Northern Kingdom - it's UTTER destruction and the torture and enslavement and massacre of 80% of the "Chosen People" JUST FOR the crime of setting up an alternate altar and performing sacrifices with Non-Aaronic priests.
This barrier is insuperable, and it was imposed by God. You CANNOT make up things like "this is MERELY ceremonial" - GOD never made that distinction, but GOD DID wipe out 80% of the Chosen People, with gruesome torture and slaughter, I might add, JUST FOR changing a ceremonial rule, for performing MANDATORY ceremonies using THE WRONG priests.
God killed all the priests. That's God telling you that you CANNOT GO BACK. No matter how much you WANT to, it is wrong for you to try to reconstruct the Old Covenant. You can only keep part of it, and it SAYS that to keep part of it is to break part of it, and you're damned.
This is a fundamental realization: YOU CANNOT KEEP IT EVEN IF YOU WANT TO. EVEN JESUS could not keep the Old Covenant today, because it DEMANDED daily sacrifice at the altar by Aaronic Priests, and GOD slaughtered all of those priests. I really don't know what else God could do to make it more crystal clear that the Old Covenant was crystallized in the Desert, cannot be changed, and cannot be followed anymore. GOD HIMSELF removed the necessary means to follow it. God is telling the Jews to abandon it and follow the New Covenant, because they CAN'T keep the old - No Aaronic priests - and to abandon it and follow Jesus is better than to follow PART of the Old Covenant - break one part, break it all. And as a Gentile, you're not allowed to do it in the first place, so stop trying to undo what God has done! It's wrongheaded and, actually, evil, because it pretends there is still another convenant you COULD follow, that of Sinai. But you CAN'T keep it, because God made that impossible. ACCEPT his final judgment and don't try to resurrect what God himself killed in 69 AD. God did that for a reason. Jesus said that NOTHING could change in the Law until the end of the world for a reason. God then killed all of the Aaronic priests for a reason: to leave ONLY the New Covenant as the ONLY viable covenant for man. This isn't so clear from the Scripture because most of that was written when the Temple was still up. So Peter, Paul, James, etc., had the OPTION of trying to keep the Old Covenant. It CANNOT BE DONE anymore - the Temple and the priests are gone, and the daily sacrifice at Aaronic hands is NOT OPTIONAL.
(5) You should not WANT to keep the Old Covenant. Remember, you cannot strike ANY of the laws of it. Do you really want to execute all people who practice witchcraft? Do you really want to burn alive any priest's daughter who commits sexual immorality? Do you really want to stone adulterers and adulteresses to death? Do you REALLY want to execute all homosexuals? Well, you cannot kill any of those people under the New Covenant, but you MUST kill all of them, in those explicitly barbaric ways, if you resurrect the Old Covenant. You cannot strike out the requirement to burn to death every sexually immoral daughter of every priest. You cannot let her go. You cannot change the penalty. You must burn her alive.
You must round up and kill all Wiccan and all homosexuals. All of them. Adulterers - remember, that means all those who are divorced and remarried - Jesus said they are adulterers - all of them must be rounded up and stoned to death.
To follow the Old Covenant today, in a world in which we are not Jews living with the altar, the Aaronic priests, and have no Urim and Thummim by which to consult God to determine ultimate guilt, would require you to become a brutal, barbaric, evil mass murderer, and it would actually damn you to the Lake of Fire at final judgment, because you would have to kill so many people, and believe it righteous, and thus go unrepentant to final judgment: "Lord, I followed SOME of the Old Law. I executed witches and sodomites and adulterers and adulteresses! I could not follow the requirement to sacrifice daily, because you took all of the priests away, but I did not suffer a witch to live!"
'So, you attempted to follow a law that I said had to be ENTIRELY followed, even though you KNEW that it could not be followed, because I, even I, removed the priests of Aaron from the world. Yet you arrogantly killed my people by asserting your power to impose a law that did not belong to you, and in doing so you defied Jesus' commandments to forgive, to love, to turn the other cheek. Get out of my sight into the Lake of Fire, you defiant murderers!' That's the outcome, if you actually FOLLOW the Old Covenant. You will become a homicidal maniac trying to cleanse the world of remarried people (adulterers), and homosexuals, and people who style themselves witches.
It is not your place. You're not a Hebrew. God took away your priests. You have no RIGHT to try to keep the Old Covenant. It's dead. And it can't be revived by CHANGING even one word of it. It cannot CHANGE until the end of time.
So, if you're keeping ANY of the Old Law BECAUSE it's the Old Law, you are defying God. Jesus made all foods clean. If YOU are keeping kosher, you are trying to overrule Jesus and partially keeping the Old Law, which YHWH warned you was a sin. You've added yourself the Chosen People, but you're not one of them.
In short, if you're keeping any of the Old Law, you are doing evil and you are deluded and a fool, and should stop at once. It's dead. It's dead, and the ink is dry. You can't revive part of it - it can't be changed. God killed it. Leave it dead and follow Jesus. That's better, and harder in many ways, easier in others. Learn THAT law better, so that you do THAT right. It IS possible to do that right. It's IMPOSSIBLE to keep the Old Law, because God made it so. To assert that you can is to defy God - and that's bone stupid.
