Welcome to another edition of Things Unseen.

It's amazing, really, if you think about it, that our Christian scriptures contain the Old Testament or Covenant

and the New Testament or Co covenant of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And yet the idea that the Bible is a covenant book about a covenant God who makes and keeps His covenant of grace is often a new idea to many Christians.

And that's why on things unseen we've been reflecting on how important God's covenant is.

His covenant of grace inaugurated in Genesis 315, and as we've seen already, developed

in the covenant with Noah and later on in the covenant with Abraham.

But it's the next big covenant God makes that people sometimes struggle to understand.

I mean the covenant with Moses, the covenant made at Sinai.

Why the misunderstanding?

I suspect it's because this is the covenant that has the Ten Commandments and then all the laws that govern the life of God's people, so many detailed regulations.

And I think the biggest misunderstanding amounts to this, and you're almost bound to have encountered

it at some time, is thinking that the Old Testament or covenant, and especially the covenant that we find with Moses, that that

covenant teaches us that we are saved by what we do, by obeying the law.

Whereas by contrast, the New Testament or covenant teaches that we are saved by grace, not by

what we do, but by what God has done for us in Christ. I hope I'm not the

first person you've heard saying that that's a disastrous misunderstanding. It turns the

teaching of the Bible upside down, and it couldn't really be further from the truth.

Now, how can we be sure of that? Well, let me explain. First, if you read the book of Exodus

that contains the law, I'm thinking of the law in chapter 20, if you read Exodus from the beginning,

you'll see that the giving of the law is set within the context of the covenant of grace that God had made. And then that covenant is more fully

expressed in the covenant that God was now making with Moses. Remember what God said to Moses when he met him at the Burning Bush and gave

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