The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat: Amos 5:25, and the Harmony of Grace and Obedience
Fellowship Essay | 10 May 2026
The daily Berean email this morning carried an excerpt from the late John W. Ritenbaugh, drawn from a longer essay he co-authored with his son Richard T. Ritenbaugh, titled Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness. The excerpt is short — perhaps eight paragraphs — and it is anchored on a single rhetorical question from the prophet Amos:
Did you offer Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? — Amos 5:25
Ritenbaugh’s answer to the rhetorical question is the right one: yes, the people did sacrifice in the wilderness; but sacrifice was not the whole of what God had asked of them, and a sacrificial life detached from an obedient life is not what God wants from a redeemed people. From this answer, he develops one of the more important theological points in the Forerunner archive — that grace and obedience are not in tension, that the law and the blood are not alternatives, that Mount Sinai is not the cancellation of Passover but its proper sequel.
I want to commend this point to the fellowship, deepen it from a few angles Ritenbaugh’s brief excerpt does not have space to develop, and bring it back to how we are trying to live as a community. There is more substantive agreement between the Christos framework and Ritenbaugh’s position on this question than there is on some others, and I want to honor that.
The order of events in the wilderness
The chronological structure of the Exodus narrative is itself the argument Ritenbaugh is making. The sequence God established was:
A lamb is killed; the blood is placed on the doorposts; the destroyer passes over (Exodus 12).
The people are led out of Egypt across the Red Sea; the pursuing army is destroyed; Israel is, in the most concrete sense possible, freed (Exodus 14-15).
Then — only then, after the redemption is finished — does the column of cloud and fire bring them to Sinai, where the law is given (Exodus 19-20).
The people who hear the Ten Words from the smoking mountain are not slaves earning their way out of bondage. They are former slaves who have already been delivered, listening to the One who delivered them describe the shape of the life He intends for them now that they are free. The law arrives as a pattern, not as a price. The redemption is complete before a single commandment is uttered. Whatever else the law is for, it is not for purchasing a freedom that has already been given.
This is the structural fact Ritenbaugh leans on, and it is the fact the New Testament repeatedly draws back to. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1) precedes, in Paul’s letter, the long discussion of how the redeemed should walk that follows in chapters 6 through 8. The justification is finished. The walking comes after. The walking is not the ground of the justification. It is the visible shape of a life that justification has already changed.
This ordering matters because both of the great distortions of Christian teaching get this ordering wrong, in opposite directions. Legalism treats the law as something the believer obeys in order to earn standing with God. Antinomianism treats the law as something the believer no longer needs to bother with because grace has settled the matter. The first reverses the Exodus sequence by putting Sinai before the Red Sea. The second deletes Sinai from the sequence altogether and pretends only the Red Sea matters. Both misread the text. Ritenbaugh’s reading — Sinai follows Passover, and therefore the obedient life follows the redeemed life — is the right reading, and it is the reading the broader catholic Christian witness has held in its better moments across two thousand years.
What sat inside the ark, and what sat above it
Ritenbaugh draws particular attention to a piece of furniture that I want to draw out further. The Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost room of the Tabernacle and later of the Temple, was a wooden chest overlaid in gold. Inside the chest, eventually, were three things: a portion of manna, Aaron’s rod that had budded, and the two stone tablets on which the Decalogue had been written by the finger of God (Hebrews 9:4). On top of the chest sat a separate, smaller piece, beaten from a single sheet of pure gold, with two cherubim of one piece extending their wings forward over it. This piece was called, in Hebrew, the kapporet. It is the same noun-root from which the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, takes its name. The verb form means to cover, to wipe, to atone for. The piece itself is, etymologically, the cover. The cover. The covering thing. It is what is over the law.
This is what English Bibles call the Mercy Seat.
The image, taken in its full geometric sense, is theologically dense. God’s localized presence sat above it, between the wings of the cherubim. The blood of the atonement sacrifice, on one day a year, was sprinkled on it by the high priest. And underneath it, inside the box it covered, were the stone tablets of God’s holy demand on His people. The arrangement was deliberate. The mercy was over the law, sprinkled with blood, with God’s presence brooding above. It was not that mercy replaced the law or eliminated it. The law was still there, intact, in the same chamber, contained in the same chest. What was different was that mercy covered it. Atonement was the lid that allowed the holy God to dwell in the same room as a people who could not, on any given day, claim to have kept what was written on the stones underneath.
The New Testament does not let this image go. When the writer to the Hebrews describes the Tabernacle furniture, he uses the Greek noun hilasterion to translate the kapporet (Hebrews 9:5). When Paul reaches for the deepest possible single image of what Christ has done at the cross, he uses the same word: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation — hilasterion — through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past (Romans 3:25). Christ Himself, in Paul’s argument, is the Mercy Seat. The cover of the Ark, the place where the blood is sprinkled and the presence dwells, the lid over the law. That image lands at the cross. The blood underneath the brooding presence, the law preserved beneath, the mercy that covers without canceling, the presence that draws near because the covering is in place — all of it converges on the body broken at Golgotha and the blood that ran from it.
And then, three verses after using hilasterion of Christ, Paul asks the question that the antinomian distortion has been answering wrongly ever since:
Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law. — Romans 3:31
The ordinary translation of katargoumen is abolish or render inoperative. Paul is asking, after the longest argument for justification by faith ever written: have we abolished the law by what we have just said? His answer is the strongest negative the Greek language can carry: me genoito — let it not be. God forbid. The faith that grasps the hilasterion does not abolish the law; it establishes it. Paul’s word for establish, histanomen, is the same word used elsewhere of confirming or making firm. Faith makes the law firm. Grace gives the law its standing in the believer’s life.
This is the same point Ritenbaugh is pressing toward in the Forerunner essay, and it is the point at the heart of the broad New Testament witness. Grace does not retire the law. Grace is what makes the law livable.
Where Paul takes it next
Romans is not done with the question after chapter three. Paul comes back to it in chapter six, where he names directly the antinomian distortion of his own argument:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? — Romans 6:1-2
Some hearer of Paul’s preaching had evidently drawn the conclusion that if grace covers sin, then the more sin, the more grace, and therefore the more sin, the better. Paul does not hedge in his rebuttal. The same me genoito — God forbid — that protects the establishment of the law in chapter three protects the moral seriousness of the redeemed life in chapter six. The redeemed have died to sin. The grammar of redemption is not now I can sin freely; it is now I have been crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth I should not serve sin (Romans 6:6).
By the time Paul reaches chapter eight, the picture has fully emerged. The law was holy, just, good (7:12). The problem was never the law; the problem was the flesh that could not keep it (7:14-25). The solution was not the abolition of the law but the sending of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit:
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. — Romans 8:3-4
Read that sentence carefully. The righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us. Not abolished. Not suspended. Not made optional. Fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit. The grace that gives the Spirit is the grace that makes the law’s requirement realizable in the redeemed life. The law and the Spirit are not opposed. The Spirit is what makes the law a description of how the believer actually lives, rather than an indictment of how the believer continually fails to live.
This is what Ritenbaugh’s two-halves framing is reaching for. The blood covers; the Spirit empowers; the redeemed life is one in which the law’s righteousness is increasingly visible. Sanctification is the name for this. The believer, growing under grace, comes to look more and more like the holy God whose pattern of life the law was always describing.
The application question, briefly
I do not want to leave a question unanswered that the careful reader will already be asking. Which law are we talking about? The Decalogue? The dietary laws of Leviticus 11? The civil penalties for theft and adultery? The festival calendar with its new moons and seventh days?
The wider Christian tradition has worked through this question in different ways. The Reformed branch has historically distinguished between moral law (the Decalogue, summed up in Christ’s two great commandments — love of God and love of neighbor), ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary code, the festival calendar), and civil law (the penalties of the Israelite theocracy). On this division, the moral law is eternally binding, the ceremonial law has been fulfilled in Christ in the sense that what it foreshadowed has now arrived, and the civil law was given to a particular people in a particular polity and does not bind Christians as such. The Lutheran branch has worked the question through the law-gospel distinction. The Catholic tradition has worked it through the natural-law and divine-positive-law framework. The Wesleyan branch has emphasized progressive sanctification more than the threefold partition.
Ritenbaugh’s tradition — the Church of the Great God lineage, descended from Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God — has historically rejected the threefold-division and applied the law more uniformly to Christians, including the seventh-day Sabbath and the Mosaic festival calendar. This is a real difference between Ritenbaugh’s tradition and the Christos framework, which broadly inhabits the Reformed-influenced threefold-division view. The difference is not nothing, and it bears on how a fellowship community structures its weekly and annual life.
But it is not the difference I want to dwell on in this essay. The disagreement on which law is binding presupposes the agreement on which Ritenbaugh and the broader catholic Christian witness stand together: that the redeemed are called to obedience, that grace is not license, that Mount Sinai followed Passover for a reason, that the Mercy Seat sat above the law and did not replace it. On the underlying point — that grace and obedience are inseparable, that sanctification is real, that a Christianity which has dropped the law has dropped half of itself — Ritenbaugh and we are on the same side. The application question is a fellowship-level discernment, not a fellowship-dividing one.
Where the contemporary church needs this
The American evangelical landscape has, for a generation now, been pulled toward a kind of grace-only preaching that has retired the law in practice if not in confession. Phrases circulate that are almost designed to soften the moral seriousness of the redeemed life: grace is unmerited favor (true, as far as it goes, but spoken in a way that implies the favor never asks anything of the favored); we are saved by grace, not by works (true, as Paul says, but spoken in a way that makes works invisible afterward); don’t let anyone put you under the law (true in some senses, dangerous in others). What gets lost is precisely the structure Ritenbaugh is recovering — that grace and obedience are not adversaries, that the redeemed life is a life, that the saved person is being made into someone whose life looks more and more like the One who saved them.
The other distortion, legalism, exists too — particularly in some immigrant church communities, in some conservative-Reformed contexts, and in some sectarian movements that Christianize their own preferred set of cultural rules and call them God’s law. Both distortions miss what Ritenbaugh is naming. The legalist reverses the Exodus order and puts the law before the redemption. The antinomian deletes the law from the sequence and pretends only the redemption matters. Neither honors the actual structure of the biblical narrative, the actual furniture in the Holy of Holies, the actual argument of Romans, or the actual life Christ called His followers to live.
For our fellowship — and for me as I write this — the call is the same one Amos was bringing to the northern kingdom in 760 BC. Are we sacrificing without obeying? Are we attending the gathering without changing how we conduct our business? Are we showing up to the feasts without examining whether we have left the feast different from how we arrived? Ritenbaugh’s reading of Amos applies. The question presses the same way now as then. Sacrifice that is not joined to obedience is sacrifice God will not have.
The Ideomotion charter we have spent the past several days revising is, if it works as intended, a small and concrete instance of grace-and-obedience working together. The ministry character of the work is not earned by the obedience; the obedience flows from the ministry character. The §7 ethical commitments — non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, truthful claims — are not legalisms tacked onto a Christian-branded business. They are the visible shape of a redeemed posture toward the customer. The grace gives the disposition; the obedience is what the disposition looks like in practice. To attempt the obedience without the grace would be to reverse the Exodus order. To claim the grace without the obedience would be to delete Sinai from the sequence. We are trying to keep them in the right relationship — Mount Sinai after the Red Sea, the law beneath the Mercy Seat, the redeemed life that obeys because it has first been freed.
Crescendo
The verse I want to close on is not from Romans this time. It is from the first letter of John, a letter written, we believe, by the apostle who lay closest to Jesus at the last supper and who outlived all the others to see the end of the apostolic age. John has watched a generation come and go. He has watched the gospel survive Nero’s fires and Domitian’s exiles. And in his old age he writes — pastorally, and with the bluntness of an old man who has earned the right to say what he means:
And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk, even as he walked. — 1 John 2:3-6
This is the apostolic verdict on the question Ritenbaugh is engaging. The test of whether we know Christ is whether we keep His commandments. Not because keeping them earns the knowledge, but because the knowing of Christ produces the keeping. A person who claims to know Him without keeping is, in John’s plain word, a liar. The Greek term is pseustes, the same word used elsewhere of those who are constitutionally untruthful. John is not soft-pedaling. The Christianity that brackets out obedience is, on the apostolic reading, not Christianity at all. It is a self-deception that has borrowed the vocabulary.
The opposite is also true. The one who keeps the word — the one whose life shows the visible shape of obedience — is the one in whom the love of God is perfected. The Greek for perfected is teteleiōtai, from telos: brought to its end, brought to maturity, brought to its intended completion. The keeping of the commandments is what brings the love of God to its full stature in the believer. Not a substitute for grace. A consummation of grace.
That is what Ritenbaugh is naming, and that is what I commend to the fellowship for our discussion. The grace and the obedience are not adversaries. They are the front and back of the same coin, the redemption-then-Sinai sequence, the Mercy-Seat-above-the-law geometry, the Spirit-fulfilling-the-law-in-us in Romans 8 and the keeping-his-commandments in 1 John 2. We will disagree at the edges with Ritenbaugh’s tradition on which specific commandments are in view in our practical application — that is a real and not-trivial disagreement and we should not pretend it isn’t. But on the central matter, on the structural point that the redeemed are called to obey and that obedience is the visible fruit of grace, we and Ritenbaugh stand together.
There is a famine of this teaching in much of the contemporary church. There is a famine of the truthful word that Amos warned would come and that John warned would come and that we are, perhaps, watching arrive. The remedy is not legalism, and it is not antinomian sentimentalism. It is the recovery of the actual gospel — the gospel in which a holy God has made a way, through the blood of His Son, for an unholy people to dwell with Him; and in which that same God expects, of the people He has made His own, that they will increasingly look like Him. The Mercy Seat above the law. The blood that covers. The Spirit that fulfills. The life that shows.
That is the religion God will have. May we, by His mercy, increasingly become the people He calls us to be.
Sources
John W. Ritenbaugh and Richard T. Ritenbaugh, Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness, Forerunner, October 29, 2025. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1941. The excerpt engaged in this essay is the section titled “Grace and Law,” received via cgg.org daily Berean email distribution, May 8, 2026.
Internal Renaissance Ministries references: `CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md` (companion essay engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism, also from the cgg.org Forerunner archive); `IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md` v0.3 §7 (the ethics-and-non-coercion section referenced in the application paragraph above).
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Exodus 12; Exodus 14-15; Exodus 19-20; Hebrews 9:4-5; Romans 3:25, 31; Romans 5:1; Romans 6:1-2, 6; Romans 7:12, 14-25; Romans 8:3-4; 1 John 2:3-6; Amos 5:25.
Hebrew lexical references: kapporet (Strong’s H3727), root kaphar (H3722); related: Yom Kippur, kippurim. Greek lexical references: hilasterion (Strong’s G2435), katargoumen (G2673), histanomen (G2476), me genoito (G3361 + G1096), teteleiōtai (G5048).
Theological-tradition references for the threefold-division of the law mentioned in the application section: Westminster Confession of Faith XIX (Reformed); Lutheran Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration VI (law-gospel distinction); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II Q.99 (Catholic). These are not engaged in detail above but are the tradition the application discussion draws from.