The common assumption seems to be that God put out the Ten Commandments and susidiary laws and gave them to Israel as a huge, millennia-long object lesson. “See, you can’t keep them no matter how hard you try.”

But that simply doesn’t do justice to all that Romans says, nor to the Gospels themselves which make the sin of Israel an essential part of the story.

A result of this mistake entails that people articulate a theology of the person and work of Christ in which Jesus could just have easily done the job if he had been born to any other culture at any other time and died in any other way.

But the Bible teaches that Jesus came in the fullness of time when sin had become utterly sinful. It was at the height of Israel’s continued apostasy that God condemned sin in the flesh so that there is now no condemnation for sinners in Christ Jesus (Romans 8.1-3).

Not every day is Judgment Day. The Law was given to a particular people to work within history to provoke Judgment Day so that Jesus could take the bullet.

Israel’s history in the Bible is essential to our salvation and the person and work of Jesus our Lord. He died for the ungodly “at the right time” (Romans 5.7).