Messiah Matters #497 – Old Testament New Covenant Members

Today we look at the question of how a person before the coming of Christ was saved. Were they saved in the same way as people after Christ? If so, does this mean that people like Abraham, Moses, and David were actually new covenant believers? We think that is exactly what it means and we discuss how the Bible teaches this. We attempt to show that faith in the Messiah Yeshua, whether before or after the coming of our Lord were brought into the New Covenant through faith in the “Seed” (Genesis 3:16). It was and still is faith in the seed (that is Yeshua) to deal with the sin problem that brings us into the New Covenant.

We also discuss the idea of clean and unclean food in both Old and New Testaments. Was Mark 7 more about whether or not food could make you ritually unclean or is there more going on? We argue that Mark 7 is about man-made rules concerning ritual purity instead of the laws God gave in the Torah. Beyond this, we believe that the dietary laws found in the Torah were not always attached to the temple and ritual purity, but were given for covenant members in their every day life as can be seen in Deuteronomy 14.