What does it mean that all the Israelites are members of the covenant? God has proclaimed a covenant that can be kept by faith, not by works. All those people who are joined with the people of Israel, every man woman and child, partakes of this covenant. Yet we see that everyone is perfectly able to depart from the covenant. It is altogether possible to walk away from God's grace and try to be saved by works, by obedience to the Law. Of course, we are not able to keep the Law perfectly with all our hearts all the time. We will fail every time.
So in the New Testament we see that people are saved by grace through faith, not of their works, but by God who saves them. This salvation is the gift of God, it is not something we can do. In some ways, salvation is a matter of non-doing rather than doing. We fight the urge to depend on our goodness for salvation. We fight the desire to trust in ourselves. Yet all the while we are concerned with doing good. The works of righteousness which God has ordained are things we are to do, things which delight God, things which serve our neighbors. We are certainly to do lots of good works. But those are not what save us. Salvation is rather a non-done work, as it is already done by Christ on our behalf.
We partakers of the covenant have the privilege of clinging to Christ and His righteousness as our hope. This is the belief in the covenant the Lord has delivered to his people. It is the very same covenant he made at the beginning of time.
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