Keep Covenant Without Guile

The thread running through these readings is plain: God hates bloodguilt, false freedom, and burdens men invent in His name. In the law, when a slain man was found, the people were not permitted to shrug and go on. The land had to be cleansed; guilt had to be confessed; innocence could not be pretended. In Jeremiah, the rulers spoke liberty to their Hebrew slaves, then drew them back into bondage when danger seemed to pass. They used holy words for a moment, but would not keep them when obedience became costly. Therefore the covenant they broke became witness against them, and the city that would not keep faith was given over to sword and famine.

In Acts, the apostles would not allow another kind of bondage: they refused to lay on the nations a yoke God had not laid. Yet their liberty was not license. They commanded abstinence from idolatry, fornication, and blood. So the church walks a narrow road: we do not add the traditions of men as if they save, and we do not cast off the commandments of God as if obedience were needless.

The same Lord judges deceit in both directions. He condemns the man who loosens what God bound, and the man who binds what God did not command. Therefore let your word be steadfast, your repentance plain, and your dealings with the weak without fraud. As Jeremiah says, “and their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven and the wild beasts of the earth;” Judgment is no empty threat. But where the brethren keep the apostolic rule in humility, there is peace for the churches.