NOTES for Exo 19:5-6
What is the meaning of the existence of the people of God? God Himself answers to this question quite clearly: to be "a kingdom of priests and an holy nation". Sometimes these words were literally, historically understood. So, the ecclesiastical version of the history of the people of God, reflected in the Book of Chronicles, supposed that the main sense of the existence of the Jewish nation was the establishment of their own State, and the main sense of the existence of the State and its leaders was the building, and then the maintenance of the Temple of Jerusalem and connected with it the ecclesiastical corporation. But is it only in that the problem? Of course, the existence of the Temple, particularly after there was only one place on earth, where were possible the yahvistes sacrifices, was very important. But is it of this that God speaks, calling His nation “a kingdom of priests”? And what means in this case "an holy nation "? The people, who come to the Temple for the fulfillment of the sacrifices necessary in order to be sanctified? And the others?
Those who in the era of the Second Temple, lived for example in the communities of the Diaspora, without having the possibility of visiting Jerusalem once a year? Did all these people cease being part of God’s people only because they had no physical possibility of coming to the Temple? No, of course. For, in those days there was already in the Synagogue an understanding of the fact that all Jewish people, as people of God, are a single spiritual entity, which is sanctified thanks to the Temple and saves this sanctification thanks to the Torah. And from the people of God, all is sanctified the whole remaining world: that’s why exists in the world one nation sanctified by God, so that the whole world is sanctified through this nation.
This is how the problem with the sanctification of the people of God and all the rest of the world in the pre-Christian era was solved. And with the coming of Christ there is a new nation of God, the borders of which coincide only partially with the borders of the former pre- Christian nation: because, this new nation is sanctified by the very Messiah, by opening to this nation the Kingdom, which He brought into the world. However the former people disappear of course nowhere: the covenant is concluded, what is sanctified, is sanctified. And how to connect the two nations into one, knows, probably, only the One who sanctified them. We are probably going to know about it only at the end of time, when the world will be transformed completely, and the Kingdom will be revealed in its entirety.