The Law-Giving Of The Covenant; Its Twofold χεσις
In the covenant that God made with the people of Israel from Mount Sinai, God stipulated the law from the people, first immediately in the ten words promulgated (Ex. 20:1–8), then mediately, from the darkness of the mountain and from the constructed tabernacle, through Moses as a go-between (Ex. 20:21, etc.). This law was distinct from the mere law of faith and is called law, because it had something legal mixed, which flowing from the covenant of works, led to Christ. The χεσις of that law was twofold, legal in open, first in the approach and the skin of the words, which was by itself nothing except the letter, and evangelical in secret, in a hidden and interior sense and kernel of the thing, which was also the promise and Christ, “the end of the law” (Rom. 10:4). For the Decalogue both had strictures of grace and the whole laws in the terms agreed upon were “shadows of things to come, but the body belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17). (VI–XI).
Johann Heinrich Heidegger | The Concise Marrow of Christian Theology (1697), trans. Casey Carmichael. Locus 13.3.
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