Salvation is accomplished by God Himself, primarily by teaching His ways to the spirits of elect men and elect women, so that each one will joyfully live one’s appointed destiny on earth, freed from all the manipulating, binding, oppressing delusions and lies of Satan’s world order. And God explicitly promised, in the words of the Old Covenant Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, that He Himself would do this teaching of each individual's heart. This teaching by God is Christ’s Gospel of salvation proclaimed by the New Covenant Scriptures, which we call the New Testament.
The New Covenant is God's promise for our salvation worked through the Messiah, who is Jesus, the One whom God promised to send to Israel and Judah. For God said, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt” (Jer. 31:31-32, ESV). So God's salvation is only for Israel and Judah. God only promised the New Covenant salvation for those He took out of Egypt, for the same people with whom He made the Old Covenant—with the people of Israel and the people of the tribe of Jesus, which is Judah in Israel. So there is no salvation for anyone not belonging to Israel or Judah.
Yet Israel is a nation God Himself created through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham” (Rom. 9:6-7, ESV). Of course, many descendants from the flesh of Abraham, Isaac and Israel are the true, elect Israel. In fact, there is even a greater portion of God's true elect within the race of Israel than we find in other races of people. Still, the only real Israel in Israel consists of the elect alone, none but those who are chosen by God. For God's people, God's true Israel, only includes those who are the spiritual sons of Abraham, those being saved through faith in God's words and power, just as Abraham was saved.
Only those growing true faith and righteousness from God, inside their hearts, are the true Israel (see Rom. 9:6-11; 4:11-12,16-18). Therefore, God does not grant salvation simply because one is a physical descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Israel. Rather, God grants salvation because one is born with a spirit that can trust in God. Now, since many Gentiles were also born with spirits that can trust in God, just as Abraham was born as a Gentile who was able to trust in God, they too are one with Abraham. In reality, the true Israel includes all those with elect spirits who are able to trust in God, all who are created with spirits that are made able to learn God's ways from God, like Abraham did.
It was before God revealed His law and before circumcision that “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Rom. 4:3, ESV). Abraham was one of many Gentiles in the world while he was becoming truly, subjectively righteous in God's eyes, and he was being made that way through the Spirit of Jesus teaching and training his elect human spirit, like all elect Gentiles are to this day. Thus, all elect Gentiles, whom God joins to His true Israel, are true sons of Abraham, joined to God's true Israel. And the Father of all elect spirits seems to bring the elect Gentiles into one tribe of Israel in particular, into the tribe of Judah, since this is the tribe of Jesus. Of course, God is now hardening the hearts of most physical descendants of Israel, preventing their spirits from recognizing Jesus' Spirit. And God will continue to do this hardening until all the elect Gentiles enter into Jesus' tribe of Judah, in Israel. For Jesus Himself must be the Head of all, not Abraham. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the twelve sons of Israel, all the prophets, all the apostles and all the elect shall lovingly serve Jesus in heaven, by serving all the elect who go there, and all the creatures in heaven. But Jesus is the firstborn. He walked in Eden before Adam was formed. So He shall be preeminent, the Head.
Still, at the end of the last days, after the full number of elect Gentiles have been grafted into Israel, a remnant of Jacob’s physical descendants, the remainder of the true Israel within Israel at that time, will be saved together with all those Gentiles brought into Israel, as Jesus returns (Rom. 11:25-29).
Thus, it is also evident that God intends His New Covenant to completely replace the Old Covenant in the very end, for the salvation of all the elect through the promised Messiah, Jesus. The Old Covenant and its law are in the process of passing away even now. And most elect descendants of Jacob may not know it but, after death, they will be saved through the New Covenant salvation of Jesus, by the works He began in their hearts at birth, while on earth. For they cannot be saved by the Old Covenant law. And, in a prophecy about the Messiah's second advent, God said, “I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on Me, on Him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for Him” (Zech. 12:10, ESV). Notice here, and in other Old Testament Scriptures, how Yahweh God used the pronouns “Me” and “Him” while referring to the Messiah. Both are one and the same Being. Several of the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah do this. Whenever Yahweh God commands a prophet to utter His words about the Messiah while using a first person pronoun, it means Yahweh God is the Messiah. Jesus is that Messiah and Jesus is the whole of Yahweh God dwelling in a body. And, at the return of Jesus, our Messiah and God, Israel will repent with “pleas for mercy” to Jesus, whose body they pierced on the cross, and mourn for Him with godly sorrow. Thus, they will believe in Jesus and enter the New Covenant relationship with their God through Him. So the Old Covenant will become obsolete when Jesus returns. Only the fulfilled law of Jesus, through His Holy Spirit, will then exist.
God said the New Covenant was “not like” the covenant He made with Israel when He took them out of Egypt, that is, not like the Old Covenant (see Jer. 31:32). In fact, the Old and New Covenants are nothing like each other. For God never called the Old Covenant an eternal covenant and it is thoroughly conditional. Nor did the Old Covenant contain the promises of God’s covenant with Abraham. But compare the Abrahamic Covenant described in Gen. 17:7-8 with New Covenant described in Jer. 32:38-40. Then look at Isaiah 55:3-4, which also refers to the New Covenant salvation through the Messiah, Jesus. Clearly, the New Covenant holds the same promises of God contained in God's original covenant with Abraham, to be Israel’s God and to cause Israel to worship Him. And both are eternal, unconditional, irrevocable covenants. Therefore, it is obvious that God placed the temporary Old Covenant between the permanent Abrahamic and New Covenants. And God intended to fulfil the Abrahamic Covenant through the New Covenant, through the works of Jesus, the Messiah. For nothing in the Old Covenant could ever fulfil the Abrahamic Covenant.
It is very clear that the conditional Old Covenant—especially the way it tells Israel to keep its laws through their own interpretations of it, through their minds of flesh—would actually nullify God's promises to Abraham, the eternal and unconditional promises that He Himself made to Abraham's descendants, if salvation was to be through obedience to the Old Covenant law. If Israel had to cause God to be their God by obeying the Old Covenant law, then it would not be by a promise of God that God would become their God. If each individual in Israel had to force himself or herself to worship God, then it would not be God who would cause them to worship Him. Likewise, if a state-run police force coerced the people into worshipping God, it would not be God who caused their very spirits to truly worship Him. And God must be worshipped in spirit and truth, not by the coercion of the flesh and through the contradicting doctrines invented by men. So we must admit, if salvation is to be through obedience to the laws and demands of the Old Covenant, the two main promises of the eternal Abrahamic Covenant would indeed become null and void. And it would make God into a liar.
God promised Abraham that He would serve as the God of Abraham’s descendants, doing for them all that a God should do for His beloved people and priesthood. And God can only do this of His own truly free will. None can force God to take a people for Himself and serve them as their God. Then God also promised that Abraham’s descendants would worship Him. Now, clearly, God was speaking of a true worship from their spirits and in truth, not fake worship through the mind and body of flesh alone. Furthermore, since God promised that Abraham’s descendants would worship Him, God was saying that their worship would be caused by Him, by His power worked according to His own will. For God did not say that He would allow them to worship Him, nor that He hoped they would worship Him. Rather, God Himself promised that they would indeed worship Him. So this true worship of the real God was to come by His power and His will alone, not by man’s will.
Therefore, if God Himself must fulfil these two promises, they cannot be fulfilled by men, especially not through anything done by the minds and hands of man's flesh. And, since relying on the Old Covenant for salvation would nullify God’s unconditional and eternal promises of the Abrahamic Covenant, it would also nullify these same promises made in the New Covenant too. Only the New Covenant can fulfil the Abrahamic Covenant. For Paul taught that “the law [i.e., the Old Covenant made during the days of Moses], which came 430 years afterward [i.e., after the Abrahamic Covenant], does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance [i.e., of the salvation granted to God's people] comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise” (Gal. 3:17-18, ESV). Thus, we are forced to conclude that it is the conditional Old Covenant, focusing on deeds of the flesh, that will be nullified, because it was never called an eternal covenant and it is utterly impossible to be saved through it. For salvation requires the real God to choose to be your God, and also requires God to cause your spirit to truly worship Him in real truth, in the kind of truth that is interpreted according to His opinions, not according to any man’s opinions. Obviously, the Old Covenant is not able to nullify the prior, eternal Abrahamic Covenant, nor the eternal, spiritual, unconditional New Covenant God made after the Old Covenant.
God merely intended the temporary Old Covenant to be a tutor, an instrument used to prepare His people for the New Covenant, teaching that man's will cannot fulfil the intent of God's Old Covenant law. Only God can fulfil His law in and through His people. So the old law was just a shadow of the general shape of what the new Messianic salvation writes upon our hearts, what Jesus works in and through His people. Only God's New Covenant, worked by the Messiah Jesus, fulfils all that the Old Covenant law and teachings summarily describe. The New Covenant was needed because no man could ever cause himself to fulfil the Old Covenant law through his own will and strength. Thus, the New Covenant, with the Messiah fulfilling God's true intent for the entire Old Covenant law, entirely replaces and does away with the Old Covenant (e.g., see Jer. 31:31-34; Heb. 7:12,18-19,22,24-26; 8:5-13). Since Jesus' New Covenant works all the righteous requirements of the “law,” all the precepts taught in the Old Covenant Scriptures, all the conditions and threats of the Old Covenant are obsolete and nullified. We are, in no way, obligated to obey the Mosaic law through our flesh.
Without knowing the Old Covenant “law” (all God's authoritative teachings in the whole of the Old Testament), we would not fully comprehend the New Covenant, nor recognize our great need for it. We need that “tutor.” And, when we see the failure of Israel and mankind, how man's will abused and twisted God's Old Covenant law to cause more evil than good, we understand that we need God Himself to write His law inside us, to teach our spirits the loving and just intentions of His old law, to create new hearts inside us, to make us right and whole enough to do some real good, to truly and justly love our brothers and sisters. Jesus uses the Old Covenant teachings and “laws” to teach us the very basic principles of love. We need God’s power to reach all the way into our hearts and teach our very spirits about His words. Otherwise, God’s law can do nothing, since our minds of flesh dirty it.
That is, Jesus fulfils that Old Covenant law in us and through us. So He completely replaces it with His fuller law, with all that He intended His old law to represent to our spirits in our hearts. Then Jesus, our God, also creates a new priesthood to administer this new law (Heb. 7:12). The Messiah does not nullify the true meaning of any of the Old Covenant laws, but fulfils all those laws, down to the very smallest details (Mat. 5:17), even the real meaning of all the ceremonial laws. Therefore, Jesus uses those old precepts when He teaches us His ways, since His law is a “shadow” revealing the general shape of God's fuller ways. And God never changes. So whatever God called true in the Old Covenant law shall always remain true. Jesus did not come to edit the law, to cast out some laws and add different laws, to make what was formerly wrong into right and make what was formerly right into wrong. Jesus came because our minds of flesh, which interpreted His old law, were never able to rightly apply the spiritual principles of God's righteous love silhouetted by that shadow of the full law. The Old Covenant law is just the dark outline of the shape of the full law. The full law is the very inner nature of God Himself, represented by Christ’s body. It is not a mere shadow of His body.
Our minds of flesh resist what God's law commanded for our spirits. But, when Jesus teaches us the Old Covenant precepts and laws directly to the minds of our spirits, our whole beings (both the minds of our spirits and our minds of flesh) begin to realize just what God was truly intending to say through His old law, and our spirits grow strong enough to govern our flesh. Then we can actually begin to truly do the real works of God, in just ways that truly please God. With Jesus' Holy Spirit teaching, training, counselling and empowering our spirits, our spirits can begin to know enough to determine whether something is right or wrong, whenever our flesh wants to say or do that thing. As Jesus teaches our spirits, our spirits begin to control of our lives, instead of letting our flesh take control. And the Old Covenant Scriptures confirm what Jesus teaches to our spirits. Still, a shadow of a person is not the real person. And God's old law is a shadow. But our salvation is the teaching of God's precepts and ways by a real Person, by Jesus, our God. The shadow has no mind or power. But the reality that makes the shadow, our Lord Jesus, has a mind and power, with authority to save us.
God's first and foremost promise of the New Covenant for our salvation in Jesus the Messiah is this: “I will put My law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33, ESV). In other words, God will serve us as our God and cause us to worship Him in our spirits and in His real truth. God declared that He Himself, through the Messiah, who is God Himself, would do this work. We will not do this work for ourselves. Nor will any human being or angel do this work. For no man can possibly do it. Thus, by doing this work for our salvation, God fulfils His promise to make Himself to be our God, and to make us into His real people. Salvation is where God personally teaches His ways (laws or precepts) to our spirits. And these ways are the ways described by the “laws” of the Old Covenant. Of course, another very important promise for our salvation is that God will forgive all our sins (Jer. 31:34). But that certainly is not the only thing God does for our salvation in Christ’s New Covenant. Furthermore, God also made many other promises in His New Covenant, pertaining to the last days and the chosen remnant of the physical descendants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. All these promises shall be fulfilled by God by the end of the judgement day. In conclusion, the Old Covenant is indeed temporary and will be done away with, but only because it shall become totally redundant and unnecessary through the fulfilling of all its laws and precepts by the New Covenant.