And, finally, to have a nation, one needs some form of a constitution or political manifesto. That will come in detail in the next book of Moses with the giving of the Law at Sinai. Up to this point, that constitution is God s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the extent it had been revealed. It was that covenant that bound this now greatly extended family together in common cause and in a sense of common origin. That origin, of course, was the election of God, and that imparted to Israel s national life a sacred character in the same way, though in a much less significant way our Revolution imparted to the American nation a sense of divine calling and high purpose.
Nations are like that.
There is a sense of sacred origin and common cause that binds a people together under a single government ruling according to a particular ideal. But this nation, Israel, had an origin far more sacred and an ideal far more pure and a government that came from God himself. And that is why the Israel of God the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is still in the world today and will be to the end of the age, while all other nations have come and gone. In one sense we can divide the OT according to this understanding of Israel as a nation. Judges through Chronicles concern themselves with kingship and the government of the Israelite nation.