When it comes to what we usually call the Old Testament, many readers of the Bible have a completely natural question: how can one speak here of an agreement, of conscious relations with God, of some kind of covenant, if a person essentially has no choice?
The covenant with Christ, or the covenant with the God of Noah, is another matter: in both cases the issue is the person's own choice, his decision, the path on which he consciously sets out. People are not born Christians; they become Christians, and a person decides for himself whether to be a Christian or not. The same applies to any relations with God covered by the covenant with Noah: each person has his own, in every case they are unique, and in every case the person decides for himself whether he needs them or not. God is not intrusive. He will not break into the life of a person who is not waiting for Him and does not want Him, so a person is free in his choice here. With the people of God it is not so. Here, according to Moses' word, the covenant is made not only with those who now stand before God, but also with their descendants, who have not even been born yet.
It turns out that those who enter the covenant enter it not only for themselves, but also for all their descendants. And if a person happens to be born as such, if he comes into the world as a Jew, the obligations taken on by those whom Moses now addresses extend to him as well, automatically.
Where, then, is freedom? Considering time and history in the linear perspective familiar to us, we will not find an answer to this question. It can be found only in the eternity of the Kingdom, where time is not stretched out as an endless ribbon but exists in fullness under God's gaze, in a single moment, in the eternal present. Here the spiritual space of the Covenant exists as a single whole, as an unbroken spiritual process into which everyone who has relations with God is included in his own measure. The people of God exists here simultaneously in fullness, as a spiritual reality, and in becoming, which turns out to be the task for the Jewish people living in history. The covenant that Moses enters into with his contemporaries is connected with this fullness. It is neither old nor new; it is eternal. Birth into the world as a Jew is God's call to share in the fullness of the eternal covenant, and therefore in the fullness of the Kingdom.
