I gotta have my orange juice.

In his 1992 essay Pig Out? 25 Reasons Why Christians May Eat Pork, James Jordan definitively refutes the notions that the Sinaitic food laws have any continuing applicability to the church, or that they ever had any intended health value. While he focuses on the food laws and their symbolism, his comments are also applicable to other can-do-no-wrong fads that search for some basis elsewhere in the ceremonial law, such as essential oils.

Jordan concludes:

The Sinaitic dietary laws were not given for reasons of health or hygiene, but were symbolic. They applied only to Israelites during the period between Moses and Christ. Noah and Abraham were not under these laws, Gentile God-fearers were not under these laws, and New Covenant Christians are not under them either. Deciding how much meat to eat, how often, and what kinds is a matter for Christians to determine for themselves in terms of sanctified common sense and the evidence of dietetic science.

Making these dietary rules a matter of faith in the New Covenant is demonic. Unquestionably this is not the intention of earnest Christians who believe that they have uncovered health secrets in the book of Leviticus. We have to remember, however, that Satan is a great deceiver, and he will mislead the very elect of God. By focusing attention on the Sinaitic dietary laws, Satan diverts attention from the one God-given food law of the New Covenant, which is to fellowship with Him at His table. God invites us to come to His house on His day and bring along some bread and wine. How many Churches serve His meal on His day (not monthly, not quarterly)? How many use bread (not wafers, not crackers, not doughnuts)? How many use wine (not grape juice, not soft drinks)? How many include the children, whom God invited in the Old Covenant, and who are surely invited today (1 Cor. 10: 1-4)? How many Churches see this meal as a covenant renewal, a time of restoring our relationship with our God? How many Churches proclaim that there is health in this covenant renewal, and sickness in abusing it (1 Cor. 11:30)?

Too many pork-haters have a low view of the Church. They replace the sacramental interpretation of the Sinaitic dietary laws with an interpretation that is little more than “medicine man religion. ” They overlook the real health giving meal, the New Covenant sacrament. As a result, they mislead the people of God.

You can order a copy of this paper from Biblical Horizons; refer to their catalog.

For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. — Ephesians 3:1-6

Paul speaks here of a mystery, and states clearly what it is: the Gentiles are fellow heirs with the Jews in Jesus. He has been sent to proclaim this good news to the Gentiles.

Mystery

In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the same word for mystery appears in only one place: Daniel 2, 4. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is spoken of as a mystery. This mystery is revealed to Daniel, and its interpretation is this: including Nebuchadnezzar, four earthly kingdoms would arise in succession. Following these, a stone uncut by hands “became a great mountain and filled the whole earth,” meaning that it would “break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.”

God had previously promised a seed to destroy the serpent and undo the curse (Gen. 3). His heel would be bruised, and he would even die and be resurrected, as Abraham expected of Isaac (Gen. 22) and as every offering testified. God had further promised David that this seed would be a son of his, and that his throne would be established forever (2 Sam. 7). The mystery of the old covenant revealed to Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel is that the promised seed would not just be king of Israel, leading the many nations in righteousness, but that he would be emperor of one kingdom that would fill the earth. So we see that in this phase of Israel’s history, even the world emperors became types of the Messiah (Isa. 44-45).

This gives us added insight into Paul’s mystery. Paul further reveals that the Messiah would not establish this world-wide kingdom either by leading Israel in victory over the nations, or by bringing the nations to be incorporated into Israel. Instead, the Messiah establishes a new kingdom that is forged equally out of Israel and the nations. Israel as much as any other nation must submit to this king and kingdom. Thus, Jesus is not only a new Isaac, David, and Cyrus, but he is even pre-Abrahamic: a new Adam, a new Noah, a new Melchizedek. He is the firstborn of an entirely new creation.

This is not entirely unexpected; with each new covenant, Israel had to die to the past and submit themselves to God’s plan for the future. So, for example, when God created a new Israel in David, it took Israel seven and a half years to repudiate Saul and accept David (2 Sam. 2-5). Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years because of their refusal to repudiate Egypt and Egypt’s gods. This is repeated in the forty years between Jesus’s ascension and the destruction of Jerusalem.

Pentecost

We can also understand Paul’s mystery in terms of Babel (Gen. 11). Jesus will ultimately overcome all of the effects of sin and the curse, so that Babel will progressively be undone. But the way in which this happens is a mystery, a great surprise. The kingdom of Jesus does not return to a single language, either by dominating or destroying all other languages (sorry, Esperanto). Instead, Jesus subverts Babel by welcoming every language into his kingdom, causing every nation and language to confess his lordship. The confusion and cacophony of tongues becomes a harmony and symphony of tongues.

Pentecost, then, is a gospel event, the beginning of the accomplishment of Paul’s mystery, the good news that all nations are brought in to Jesus. We all stand on equal footing before the king of kings.

And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. — Hebrews 11:39-40

In my previous post I wrote that Paul’s argument in Ephesians 2 is both more subtle and more profound than it seems at first glance. We’ve established that Paul was not saying that either Gentile or Jew had no possibility of salvation before Jesus. So what was Paul saying? I suggest that there are two main categories for understanding what Paul is saying Jesus accomplished in the new covenant: the quality and quantity of salvation.

Quality

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. — 1 Corinthians 15:23-26

Jesus is presently reigning as king over the whole earth (Rev. 1:5). Everything is presently in subjection to him though we do not yet see it fully realized (Heb. 2:8). Thus, theologians speak of the “already” and the “not yet” of Jesus’s kingdom. In this framework, we may speak of the old covenants as being a time of essential “not-yet-ness,” a time of promise and not fulfillment. Equally, we may speak of the new covenant as a time of essential “already-ness.” We are not now waiting for the promises to be fulfilled, only for them to be experienced in their fullness. We have presently “come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Heb. 12:22). We are presently seated with Jesus in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). There are certainly ways in which this characterization does not capture everything perfectly — Israel truly tasted God’s goodness (Ps. 34:8), and even today we see in a mirror dimly compared to what we anticipate in the resurrection (1 Cor. 13:12). Yet this does capture the essential difference between the old covenants and the new.

This is the culmination of a pattern that God repeated in each new covenant. Adam seized the promised judicial authority before his time, but God freely gave this authority to Noah (Gen. 9:1-7). Abraham is promised that kings will come from him (Gen. 17:6), and this is fulfilled in God’s covenant with David. Ezekiel and Jeremiah promise the exiles that the Spirit will be poured out on them in more powerful ways when they return from exile (Ezek. 37, Jer. 31). In one sense these promises were fulfilled in each new covenant, but in another sense they are not truly fulfilled until Jesus establishes his church. Perhaps the best way to understand this is that the old covenants were powerless in themselves to accomplish anything. What power they had was borrowed against the hope of the new covenant, so that all blessings enjoyed before Jesus were enjoyed in Jesus, foretastes of future life breaking through the chinks of time into the distant past. It is only through Jesus the promised seed that Adam and Eve were preserved.

In terms of Jew and Gentile, Paul is emphasizing two things: first, that both Jew and Gentile now have the same access to God, and second, that Jew and Gentile have a degree of access to God that far exceeds anything available in the old covenant.

Again this is a matter of degrees. We have seen that Gentiles did have access to God before Jesus. God heard the prayers of all old-covenant believers. And yet, by comparison, Gentiles were largely kept farther away from God’s house. In order to approach God’s house to offer a sacrifice, a Gentile had to follow the laws of cleanness and thus in a small symbolic way repudiate his Gentile-ness. Jews themselves were kept apart from God by degrees — most Jews could not enter the tabernacle or temple, only priests could enter the holy of holies, and only the high priest could enter God’s earthly throne room once a year on the day of atonement. We, too, have direct access to God at any time in prayer. But by contrast, in our weekly worship, we do not stand outside God’s house to offer our sacrifices, but rather enter all the way in to stand before his throne.

Peter Leithart points out that “the movement [between covenants] . . . is from rituals and signs of distance and exclusion . . . to signs and rituals of inclusion and incorporation.” You might even say that, while the old covenant was a time in which uncleanness and death were contagious, in the new covenant it is holiness and life that is contagious (consider Matt. 9:20-22). What this means is that we are all made priests, we are all made clean once and for all by our baptisms. Salvation and priesthood are collapsed into one in the new covenant, and there are no longer any degrees of holiness and separation in God’s house.

It should have been no surprise to Israel that Gentiles would be saved. This is pointed to in so many ways — by the inclusion of unclean animals on the ark, by the seventy representative elders who ate with God on the mountain (Ex. 24), by the seventy weeks of Daniel’s vision (Dan. 9). What was less clear, the “mystery” that Paul refers to in Eph. 3, is that the Gentiles would receive salvation by being made priests, but not by being made Jews. Jesus’s circumcision counts for all, so that we only need to be baptized into Jesus but not circumcised into Israel (Col. 2:11-12). While the seventy elders could not go all the way up the mountain, the seventy nations may now stand face to face with Jesus. While Gentiles could not partake of Passover without first becoming Jews, all Gentiles may now freely partake of the church’s weekly Passover feast.

Both Gentiles and Jews are now fully priests, kings and prophets. The new Adam has brought us into everything the first Adam should have attained, and more. He is a priest after the order of Melchizedek.

Quantity

But there is an additional dimension here. Paul is not saying that some small number of Jews and Gentiles will now truly experience God’s nearness. He is saying that the Jews and the Gentiles — the nations — as such, will experience this. So while David spoke of the nations opposing God (Ps. 2), we may now speak of the nations themselves being discipled (Matt. 28:19-20), and of the nations themselves becoming “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3:6). At present, we do not yet see it, but Jesus intends to save Jew and Gentile wholesale, and that by bringing them into one united body, his church. Now we are all priests, ministering to the remaining strongholds of unbelief.

The one who was born king of the Jews (Matt. 2:2) died and ascended to become king of the nations (Rev. 1:4, 15:3-4). He passed the test of Adam, being unwilling to seize his inheritance (Matt. 4:8-10) but waiting for it in patient faith.

God is not content to save a few.

He says:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” — Isaiah 49:6