God, the Lord of Hosts, Creator and Sustainer of all that is, is following a program He's put in place that is still running. It's the same program from Adam and Eve down to today. This is crucially important. The Lord doesn't run about changing things to fit the circumstances of the day. He's Christ the King, the Lord of History and He is in control. That's important to remember -- and believe -- after a horror such as the purely evil, vile, and obscene Pittsburgh Massacre.
So:
The first Covenant the Lord made with all Creation when He "rested" on the Seventh Day. The next Covenant He made with Adam and Eve, that through Eve's seed He would raise up a Savior who would crush the serpent's head, even though the serpent (Satan) would bit the heel of the seed -- Christians of all stripes take that to be a prophecy of the Passion and Crucifixion. The second Covenant He made with Noah, and so on. Seven Covenants in all, the last being the New Covenant (here Christians deviate from Judaism, obviously).
To be "saved" one needs to have this inheritance, to be in the inheritance of blessing, THE blessing God gave to Abraham (the red-haired "Great Father", to whom God granted this via a close series of three special Abrahamic covenants), and as was then passed down through Isaac ("Laughter") to Isaac's second son, Jacob ("Heel") whom the Lord renamed "Israel" ("He who struggles with El", or God). To be "saved", this long-running program has it, one indeed has to be of the People Israel, through whom salvation is solely available.
What Jesus, (Yeshu'a, Joshua, meaning: "Yahweh is salvation") did was to arrange for the adoption into the divine Sonship of non-Jews, into this Abrahamic Covenant. Through His Incarnation, and then Crucifixion and Resurrection, Our Lord Christ made this adoption into the Abrahamic Covenant possible through changing our nature. This is the belief of the Christian Orthodoxies (Western Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism, the various Eastern Orthodoxies, and then the "Oriental" Orthodox -- Armenian, Coptic), all of whom have the same system of Apostolic Succession and the Seven Sacraments. (Ahem, some of the Churches get along with each other better than with others, but their actual theological differences are minor compared with Protestantism.)
What they have in common is that they're the Churches of the Real Presence, i.e., that God is truly present in the consecrated bread and wine. Being baptized allows one to partake of the other Sacraments, esp that of the Holy Eucharist. It is the Most Holy Eucharist that is the New Covenant, the New Testament (and not the 27 books of the Christian Bible -- they only contain the story of the New Testament. And when we have taken the Holy Eucharist, we are changed in our nature because we receive the Incarnate God. And we not only have the Body and Blood of God in our arteries, but His Human Nature too. Jesus got His Human Nature from his Mother, as all Jews inherit the blessings Israel received from his father Isaac, through their mothers, from Sarah on down.
Thus, the Blessed Virgin Mary is truly our Mother, literally, because Our Lord is Incarnate through her and via the Holy Eucharist, we take on His Nature. We're "new creations in Christ" as St. Paul says so often, and in so many ways. In other words, all Christians who are "Orthodox" and participate in the Holy Eucharist are adopted into Israel, and all thus receive the Covenant blessing and salvation inherent in that. It's the same program it has always been, in other words.
Now, traditionally, Catholicism has taught that the fourth Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant (fourth from Adam and Eve, fifth from the Seventh Day Covenant with Creation), was cancelled, or abrogated, or made defunct, and that it was replaced by the New Covenant. That would change the number of the Seven Covenants, of course, and also it is not necessary, because each Covenant is transformed by the Covenant made after it. Expanded, uplifted, transfigured. We understand Noah's Covenant in a new light via the Abrahamic Covenant, and we see the Mosaic Covenant transformed and heightened by the Davidic Covenant (that the Kingship of Israel would never pass from David's House). Just as Our Lord was Transfigured on the Mount, and for the first time, Peter, James, and John -- who thought they knew him -- beheld Him as He is, so the Mosaic Covenant was transfigured from eating a lamb without blemish or broken bones into the Lamb of God Himself.
Now, as these transformations and uplifts in Covenants occur, one does have to keep up. Think of all of Noah's descendants who weren't descended from Abraham through Sarah. Or think of all those Israelites who rejected the Davidic kings and started their own "Kingdom of Israel" in Samaria and Galilee -- the famous "Lost Tribes of Israel". All cut off from the Covenants after inheriting them directly. Similarly, those Jews who didn't come to believe in Jesus of Nazareth cut themselves off from the fulfilled Covenants. I personally think "God will sort it" in His own way, because so many Jews have been faithful to Him (as they understood it) throughout the millennia, and I think so because God is always faithful -- always -- and because the Lord God is the Reader of Hearts. He is Judge, too, the Absolute Judge, an essential part of His Divine Kingship. But the true and certain road of Salvation comes through the Church He set up, which is the New Israel, the Synagogue of God.
N.B. When looked at this way, one can immediately see the cause for conflict between Jews and Christians. Jews resented the idea that non-Jews could suddenly be incorporated into the Jewish people, while not "going all the way" with Temple Worship and Kosher laws, and so on -- not to mention all these non-Jews being, well, not descended from Abraham! Christians resented the Jews saying, "Whoa! You're not part of the ancient Covenant!" So the fight began. In contrast to the Churches of the Real Presence, Protestantism, is the "Churches of the Real Absence" (i.e., all Protestant Churches deny -- in their founding documents -- the ancient Real Presence teaching), have a very different understanding of how Salvation works, and 500 years of that have driven this teaching I've just outlined out of the popular imagination, knowledge, etc,.
An Préachán
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