Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia.

God didn't change between the old covenant and the New Covenant, the Old Testament, the Old Testament, the New Testament.

Same God. Right. Same God. And what St. Paul says about the old covenant about the Torah,

is that it was a pedagogue, meaning it's like a school teacher.

Meaning God was teaching his people something,

i.e., what should the correct response have been? Or what was the correct response? Because there were saints in the old covenant, right? There are saints from the old covenant. What is the correct

response to attempting to do, keep the Torah under your own power and failing.

It's right there in the Torah.

The whole sacrificial system of sin offerings, of guilt offerings, right?

All of that was there for repentance.

It was all there to cause the people to turn to God in repentance and say, I can't do this under my own power.

I'm striving to do it. I'm struggling to do it, but I can't do it under my own power.

Right. I need the help of God. And so in the new covenant,

right, we're blessed, we're given more,

and so are more accountable,

given more, so we're more accountable.

And we've entered a new era where we've been given more. But that doesn't mean that

the saints of the old covenant are somehow second-class saints or, right? As like we talked about

with forgiveness, right, God can forgive sins however he likes, right?

You can do it however he wants to. He could do it through sacrifices of the old covenant.

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