The Story of the Covenant Family

Paul's basic vision is that he's reading the story of the Bible. He says God choosing one of these broken, fragmented families out of all the nations through whom he's going to bring salvation and redemption into human history. And so how did Israel do at fulfilling their end of the covenant relationship? Okay, really, really bad. Because they're just as screwed up as we are. They fail that. But what they also do, and you can just read this throughout the story, they take these cultural boundary markers of Sabbath and circumcision and dietary laws. It's a way of kind of asserting our identity; if you don't do these things, you know everybody else sucks. That's